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PROSE by CATE SANDILANDS

2/21/2022

FIFTEEN MINUTES

I have in my hand a small, tin box. It is dull, drab-green, and a little bit larger than my palm, extending from the fleshy part at the bottom to my first knuckles. It is not so big that I can’t grasp it tightly, but it holds much more than its size suggests.

It is July 2, 2021, and I am calculating.

On its top, hinged lid, the box announces CHURCHMAN’S Nº 1 CIGARETTES in large gold and red letters both outside and in. The letters are festive, from the days when smoking was an occasion rather than a furtive habit for back alleys and doorways. I am sure there are still thousands of boxes like this one: you can get one on eBay for $20. On the bottom, the embossed words DUTY FREE H.M. SHIPS ONLY are only clear when you hold the box in a certain way, aslant to the light. Apparently, these few words might make it more valuable.

When I cleared out my parents’ house in Victoria after my father died in 2019, I was faced with an almost insurmountable number of things. They had saved everything for decades. Scores of: cracked plates that could be useful for something, ill-fitting shoes that someone might wear someday, 78s from the 1950s, household receipts from the 1970s, and hundreds of slightly moldy books. Also: every birthday card I ever made them as a child and all the potentially reusable wrapping paper from at least fifty-two Christmases.

I was calculated. As I winnowed the piles down to manageable numbers I only wanted to hold on to things that were meaningful to me, that summoned our lives together, that made me smile with recognition. I kept the box, even though it didn’t meet most of those criteria.

On June 29, the town of Lytton, BC, boasted the highest temperature
ever recorded in Canadian history: 49.6C.
According to calculations this record even beats Las Vegas.
It was only a few degrees short of Death Valley’s hottest day ever:
the hottest day ever recorded on the planet.

On the outside of the box lid, there are also several hand-scratched letters. I can decipher the words Ermyntrude’s Box. The writing is unmistakably my father’s. His cursive was perfect and invariable, a skill he developed while writing neat, tiny place names, longitudes, latitudes, and depth soundings on the hundreds of hydrographic charts that were his life’s work. I am fairly sure Ermyntrude is one of those very British private jokes, the kind he used to make with my mother and that I, Canadian-born, never fully understood. It is a euphemism for something, likely something sexual. I wonder if the box, emptied of its twenty cigarettes, might have once housed condoms.

I found the box in the attic while I was purging the house, in a steamer trunk underneath my father’s dress uniform from the 1940s, when he was still in the Royal Navy. I remember when I was about eleven secretly trying on the uniform’s wool jacket and formal cap, knowing enough not to ask to wear it for Hallowe’en. I also remember asking myself why he would bring so very many heavy things with him all the way to the west coast of Canada.

Between June 25 and July 1, the BC Coroner’s Service calculated
777 sudden deaths.
That’s 579 more deaths in the same period than the five-year average in the province.
They won’t confirm the deaths are heat-related, but we all know they are
.

The other part of the writing on the box I can make out – and there is more I can’t, possibly because it is in a second person’s hand – is the date. 1949. My parents were married in 1953.

Their wedding happened on a cold, late January day in London. There is one old black and white photo – that I love and that both my parents disliked intensely – taken in front of the church, showing my tall father in a dapper suit and my mother, nearly a foot shorter, in a fashionable jacket, skirt, and hat. They must have felt a bit stunned and I imagine I can see it in their faces in the picture: they married with two weeks’ notice, occasioned by my father’s sudden decision to take up a post in the Canadian Hydrographic Service in Victoria, one whole ocean and one whole continent away from home.

In 1949, my father was serving in the Mediterranean Sea, learning how to make those many nautical charts: ocean depths, textures of seabeds, features of coastlines, multiple navigational aids and obstructions. He never talked a lot about those eight years between the war and his and my mother’s emigration. Maybe it was because he knew what I might say about how those dozens of charts were mostly created to make the world safe for another century of British imperialism: for shipping and for laying thousands more miles of cable and pipelines. We disagreed, often, about that sort of thing, especially once I started to put two and two together about the afterlives of war technologies.

Or maybe it was something more personal. In one album with a tiny, elegant M at the bottom right corner of the inside cover, a photo shows my father as a lean, handsome man on board a ship in very bright sunlight. It doesn’t show much else: he appears to be alone, surrounded by the ocean.

I have always known he spent time on Malta and in Monaco. Now I know he also spent time with a Margaret because I looked and found one signed square of paper hidden behind this photo: All the best for a Happy Birthday, xx.

The box, the note, the M, and the xx add up to something I have wondered about for more than forty years.

Galiano Island, where I am living,
was also under the persistent heat dome, as they are calling it,
in which a strong ridge of high pressure traps the warm air underneath it.
The cause of the dome was complicated
(everything about climate change is complicated)
but what is clear is that the ocean was ten degrees hotter when I swam in it to cool down.
They calculate that, on Galiano,
one million mussels boiled alive in a patch of sand the size of a tennis court.

When I tried on the heavy uniform at age eleven, it smelled comfortingly of smoke, like my father’s pipe. I discovered one shiny, stylish steel cigarette case in the jacket pocket. It had my father’s initials engraved on the front: RWS. The inside read To Sandy, With All My Love.

Galiano is also tinder because
we have just experienced the driest spring in recorded history.
Normal spring rainfall is about 150 millimeters;
this year they calculated 53.

Shortly after finding it, I made the mistake of showing the cigarette case to my mother. Imagining romance, I asked her when she had given it to him. Her mouth hardened. She said, “I didn’t.” I never mentioned it again. I put the case on my bedroom dresser, and one day it disappeared.

On June 30, a wildfire swept through Lytton, BC, obliterating
90 percent of the town.
They had fifteen minutes to get out, to decide
what they could save of their lives
and what they had to abandon.

The green, tin box now lives on my bedside table on top of our passports, which don’t quite fit. Inside, I have put our birth certificates, our newly-completed COVID immunization cards, a lucky coin, and three small pieces of jewelry that I would hate to lose. We can only take one or two things, but I have it calculated.

In that fifteen minutes, I can trap one frightened cat and pack her in her carrier. I can get my daughter to the car, where the five photo albums are already stashed, among the emergency supplies, beside one box of letters, one small soapstone sculpture from my father’s time charting the Beaufort Sea for federal government oil and gas exploration, and six crystal glasses that remind me of my parents’ many happy dinner parties together.

And then I can grab the tin box. When we are forced to get out, my father’s secret will come with us.

The rest of his legacy has already arrived.

Cate Sandilands is a professor of Environmental Arts and Justice in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University. In addition to her academic writing in the environmental humanities, she recently published an edited volume of small stories and poems, Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times (Caitlin Press, 2019), and is working on a collection of her own stories. Her other work can be found at
http://www.catesandilands.ca/.

POETRY: DAVE MONTURE

11/20/2021

THE LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Good intentions aside,

Nations’ names mispronounced

plough depth patronization

Indigenous and foreign students

invited into their halls

of subtle intellectual

and academic racism

a patriarchy

These are the rules of

engagement:

Marking rubrics

for the administrative

convenience

of tenured procurers

feeding student wood fibre

into their Colonizing breakdown mill

Minds

sawn, baked and kiln dried

to be sorted into

standardized dimensions

graded, degreed and certified

suited up in priestly robes

to satisfy today’s

commodities market.

Land acknowledgement acknowledged.

(To the memory of the Kamloops 215 little ones)

THE MUSH HOLE RUBRIC

Having been administered

a psychological caning

and made to feel among

“The Other,”

in our own homeland.

Citations not quite in order

Not fitting into the paint

by number

linear boxes

Regurgitating the same old

same old

This is how you will

surely lose marks

boy…

Such are the metrics

of compliance

and obedience

"Mush Hole Rubric" previously published in Mad Canada

Dave Monture, Bear Clan Mohawk, is a retired part-time student who grew up on the Six Nations Reserve. He is a fourth year student in Honours Creative Writing, his second degree at Western. He has participated in readings with Writers-in-residence Margaret Christakos and Alicia Elliot. He has opened for a guest reading of Poetry London. He has contributed to recordings of the Indigenous Writers’ Circle for Radio Western. In 2019 he was a recipient of the Dr. Valio Markkanen Undergraduate Student Award of Excellence and a Head and Heart Fellowship. Most recently, he has contributed to Mad in Canada, Science, Psychiatry and Social Justice.

He is a member of the Indigenous Writers’ Circle, an independent Indigenous creative voice, at Western. He is working on a novel, poetry and flash fiction. He recently returned to painting.

POETRY: YVONNE ADALIAN

11/19/2021

A CITY STREET

I swim thru the tunnel
of stately maples
on old Barclay Street

where smart cars fart
beneath protective leaves.
A luminous green sky

that forms a canopy
over the grey green river
of a shape shifting street.

Even here their instinct
is to protect.
To give and give and give.

Born in England Yvonne has spent the majority of her life being an actor coast to coast in Canada. She now lives in Vancouver B.C . A passionate activist since her days on the front lines of protest against logging in the Carmanah Valley on Vancouver Island in the eighties, one of the first of such successes , she believes that climate change is the most urgent issue on the planet and mourns the loss of every tree .

POETRY: MONI BRAR

9/17/2021

si'ulq, pāni

she takes me deep
into her people’s land
this stranger turned neighbour turned friend
points out antelope brush and grey sage
unwavering in summer heat
spear grass clings to our skin
as we wade through Lamb’s Quarter
pulsing the want of seeds
through Tufted Vetch and Shepherd’s Purse
capped with rounded clusters
while red-tailed hawks scratch the clouds above

into the valley marked by bloodlines
where dreams were swallowed whole
we skirt ponds that give life
to horned grebes, wigeons, and buffleheads
spot a lone merganser and a common loon
too early for blue heron to break
the glazed surface
we revel in the silent miracle of Water
            si'ulq, her mother would say
                        pāṇī, my mother would say

up the notched hills
to watch wild horses roam free
careless and cared for from a distance
I learn palomino, bay, pinto, appaloosa
they twitch not for us, but for the Sun
            xai'ałax, her mother would pray
                        sūraj, my mother would cry
and for the Moon
            sokemm, her mother would ebb
                        chand, my mother would flow

she takes me deep
onto forest floors I’ve not known
a cathedral of soft light
we count the birds
            naks, usil, kałis, her mother would sing
                        ik, dō, theen, my mother would recite
walk beneath the watchful gaze
of red-winged blackbirds and evening grosbeak
there are no willows weeping nearby
just the sound of a black-capped chickadee
making its way home.

Originally published in Prairie Fire Literary Magazine, vol. 42, no. 1, April 2021.

UNDER THE BANYAN

Nani-ji told us stories,
long stories and made up stories,
and maybe true stories
of everything she knew
of everything she’s gathered and named
squatting under the banyan tree
great-grandfather planted by the pond
where the water buffalo bathed.
She was shrivelled as an overripe mango,
but once smooth as a clay pot.
Her hands were caked with stories,
her body brimming with stories upon stories
seeded from the women
and women-shaped absences before her.
She told stories of a mouse who was mocked
for hoarding rice in a hole,
a wise mouse who knew the floods were coming,
the rupture and decay looming.
I wonder if she was that mouse.

Nani-ji: maternal grandmother in the Punjabi family

Originally published in Marias at Sampaguita Magazine, May 2021.

Born in rural India, Moni Brar now divides her time between the unsurrendered territories of the Treaty 7 Region and the Syilx Okanagan Nation. Her writing explores the immigrant experience, diasporic guilt, and the legacy of trauma resulting from colonization. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and she is the winner of the 2021 SAAG Art’s Writing Prize, runner-up in PRISM international’s 2021 Grouse Grind Prize, shortlisted for Arc’s 2021 Poem of the Year, and a finalist in the 2021 Alberta Magazine Awards. Her writing can be found in The Literary Review of Canada, Prairie Fire, Passages North, and Hobart, among others.

SHORT FICTION: ANN CAVLOVIC

9/16/2021

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

STAN'S HOUSE

Sohki stood beside the several metres of water she needed to cross and regretted signing up for this. She turned toward her colleague in the jeep; he'd tried last week and failed, and so now the Environment Ministry was sending her in hopes a female might soften the old curmudgeon. Her colleague tipped his hand to his mouth, reminding Sohki he’d promised one beer if she got through to him, two if she didn’t.

The puddle, as Sohki called it, was actually the former side street leading to Stan Novak’s house, now a brown and stagnant expanse. She waded through in tall boots, poking a walking stick before each step. Stan’s house stood upon an incline, so that, if you could ignore the boards nailed over the windows and doors of neighbouring houses, it looked almost as if nothing had happened. His flagstone walkway had recently been weeded and swept clean. But his shed, lower down and closer to the river, was ripped open at the back, wood and tools spilling out like an exit wound.

When she reached the dry part of his lawn she stomped her heel in the soil, predicting it would be dry enough for bulldozers in two weeks. Rechecking that her mask was in her bag, she knocked on the door. Lights were on, but nothing happened. She knocked again, and Stan swung the door open abruptly, his heavy frame suddenly close. “Oy, they sent a girl. How cunning.”

“May I come in, Mr. Novak?”

He scratched his grey beard, as if weighing his appetite for amusement, then motioned her in. As she took a step her boots sunk slightly into the carpet. The air was moist but not as oppressive as she’d feared, although she knew the worst moulds were scentless. The whole effect was earthy but not unpleasant, like the peat moss bogs she once bounced upon in Australia, with the added aroma of toast.

“Your boots, madam.” He stood straight, eyebrows raised, left eyelid drooping, dressed in a polo shirt and thick-soled sandals. He motioned toward a tray tucked against the wall, on which boots and an umbrella stood tidily.

Sohki glanced inside. Some of the carpet had been removed, exposing bare concrete, but remaining patches had black smears and darker sections near corners. Out of diplomacy, she removed her boots. Stan directed her toward the living room, where the drywall and insulation had been ripped out of the bottom third of the walls. A jug of bleach stood in one cavity.

She chose the chair with the least upholstery. If she could have ignored everything lower than her kneecaps, and the abandoned houses out the window, it would have been a perfectly normal place to entertain guests. The moisture in her socks climbed up around her ankles.

“Well, coffee?” Stan said. “Or do you suppose my kitchen’s condemned?”

“Mr. Novak, I know you’re aware that – ”

“Ah, but are you aware?” He pulled a folder from the bookshelf and handed it to her. “Everything the town needs to rebuild. Pro bono.”

“So you’re not worried about another flood?”

“You’re welcome.”

She was moving too fast. “Yes, you’ve put a lot of work into this.”

“Good. So offer me something reasonable for my repairs.” He glared.

Sohki, aware of her browner skin and how often she was mistaken for someone much younger, abandoned her strategy of appearing disarming. She stood up while keeping her gaze fixed on Stan, having learned recently how to hold herself unapologetically as a tall woman. His eyes, which came up to the level of her chin, softened and retreated. She then quickly spread the plans out on the dining table, feigning careful consideration. “I see you’re planning another flood barrier.”

“The last two were just shoddily made.”

“It’d have to be forty metres high, cost three-hundred million, and would still cause erosion downstream.”

“Don’t bungle it this time.” He tapped a pen on her shoulder.

Sohki jerked her shoulder away and glared at Stan. “You’d be safer and financially better off by accepting the buy-out package.” She spoke slowly, deliberately. But she regretted not better concealing her disdain.

He approached within six inches of her face, as she’d been warned was his tendency. “My house,” he said, flashing his yellow teeth, “is worth twice what it was in 2022. Not the pittance you’re offering. I nearly gutted the place after the last flood.” He motioned toward the kitchen. A tall faucet gleamed atop a large island with stainless steel countertops, clean and sleek, straight out of a design magazine, if it weren’t for the darkened and buckling cabinet doors near the floor. “Everything I worked for, you want to dismantle.”

“But with the package you could rebuild fully, on higher ground.”

“What do you know about building?” He stomped to the back door and whistled. Sohki heard distant barking. A black dog, wet and scrawny, barrelled inside. Stan stroked the dog as it leapt around him. He opened a pantry filled with neatly organized mason jars containing food Sohki couldn’t recognize, and fed the dog from one jar. He then pulled something out of another jar and nibbled, looking toward the sunroom in the back, long enough for her to wonder if he’d forgotten she was there. Casually, she walked toward the island. A creak in the tile floor panicked Sohki, momentarily flashing visions of the floor collapsing beneath her, before she remembered that Stan’s house didn’t have a basement.

Stan tossed a biscuit out the back door, and the dog followed with the same disorganized movements. “Nothing wrong with how I live my life, missy.”

On the wall, a family photo from the early 1900s hung in a large frame. About a dozen people sat or stood together, looking severe and unhappy in the way of most family photos of the era.

“Wouldn’t it be good to live where you didn’t have to worry about the next flood?”

“There may never be one like that again!”

Sohki couldn’t tell if he actually believed this. There had been three major floods in the past ten years, the kind formerly called once-in-a-hundred year floods. Then she saw Stan’s expression harden.

“Know your facts. 1938, ‘47, ’59, ’72, ’99, even the 2010s. All manageable.”

“But the past ten years?”

His arms tensed and vibrated. “No more stupidly built levees!”

Her mind flashed with rainfall projections, trends in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, things no trained mind could witness and conclude that rebuilding in this floodplain made sense. Building in the first place had been near-sighted, but you could almost forgive that. Yet she knew that talking about a changing climate worsening the natural tendency for floods would only derail the conversation with a former oil executive. “I know this house means a lot to you.”

Stan narrowed his eyes and grinned. “There go the feminine wiles.”

Sohki wanted to smack him. Maybe even to leave a mark on the oily plains of his impish face, a tiny mark compared to those left by men like him on her ancestral lands. She breathed in deeply, resisting, yet remaining professional at this point seemed futile. “You’d rather be expropriated, then? At the current value of this place?”

“Don’t you dare swindle me. I never swindled anybody. I came here with two suitcases. Barely spoke English. I worked for my money. Nothing wrong with that. The Premier himself toured my biggest wells.”

“Right. A self-made man deserves a bigger government handout?”

Stan’s jaw twitched. Sohki sensed he was concealing the same impulses she’d had a moment earlier. She thought of her phone. In her pocket. Her husband often complained his headstrong wife would land herself in trouble one day. She had been told the RCMP had removed everyone’s guns.

Stan stomped to the dining room wall, yanked off a frame, and nearly threw it on the countertop beside Sohki. A Business Award of Distinction, from the province for Novak Oil Ltd. He leaned in across the counter, projecting the fermented scent of what he’d eaten.

“Nothing wrong with how I lived my life.”

“Mr. Novak, it’s not about you. We trying to protect the whole town, and to do that this area needs to remain a floodplain.”

The dog barked, and burst through the back door into the sunroom, noisily knocking over a thick metallic tube that had been fastened to a window. Stan hollered and shooed the dog out, then remained there, readjusting the tube and cursing for so long that Sohki again wondered if he’d forgotten about her. The sunroom had windows on three sides, and through them the garden shrubs appeared lush and well-tended.

She moved closer. Stan finished reconnecting one end of the tube to a large fan in the window that hummed quietly. He then moved furtively to reattach the other end to the top of a metal garbage can standing on top of several layers of carpets. The can was filled with a thick grey slurry.

She stepped back. She’d been trained on many hazardous situations but couldn’t gauge how potent, if at all, this could be.

Stan pulled something long and thin out of the garbage can; an electrode, Sohki suspected, connected to a wire running out the window. Stan looked at the tiny calcifications on the bottom, smiled with satisfaction, and glanced at Sohki with eyebrows raised. He reinserted the electrode and stirred the slurry with a spatula.

“Are you trying to make carbon nanofibres?” She asked.

“I already have. I’ll rebuild the town with this. Stronger than steel. Just you wait.”

So maybe he didn’t deny the excess carbon in the air after all. Although she couldn’t guess what he might blame it on. But companies had been trying for decades to extract carbon directly from the air – as if to liposuction away the problem – and so far all had failed. While she watched Stan tending like a gardener to his contraption, wondering if an assessment of his mental capacity to make decisions about property should be conducted, he spoke without looking up from his task: “One day. That phone of yours. They’ll say you should’ve known all along what it was doing to you. Or maybe it’ll be something in your soap. Or your fancy new shoes.”

Sohki became acutely aware of her phone in her pocket, a warm sensation, as if it was radiating through her skin. Not her womb, and could she be…? No, this was just psychological. But she’d intended to carry it in her bag anyway, just to be on the safe side. The precautionary principle. Inverse Square Law. These terms from her degree came back to her, mockingly.

In the garden, birds landed along the cedar hedge, and as a glint of sun caught the blooms of the prickly pear cactuses she found herself grieving his garden. It would soon be bulldozed, on her own instructions. Returned to nature was the phrase in the briefings.

She pulled the buy-out agreement from her bag. The rustling of papers knocked Stan out of his focus and his expression hardened. “Enough of you already. Out!” He pointed toward the door.

“I could just leave these here – ”

“Out!”

She turned, pulled out her phone and strode toward the front door while texting “2” to her colleague – the two-beer salute. She peeled off her socks and shoved them into a specimen bag. Her bare feet slithered against the edges of her boots. Turning the handle felt like unlocking a cage, the blast of fresh air a consolation, a promise of return to her normal duties and sense of life moving forward. Sohki took a few steps out and then looked back at Stan, who stood in the doorway, the hem of his pants coming undone, wicking moisture around the seams.

“I’ve always been a homeowner,” he said, flatly, a quiver in his wrist where he gripped the doorframe. “Nothing wrong with that.”

He appeared to her as shrunken, dwarfed by the two-storey structure around him, and something in Sohki dissolved, lifted, something hard she had been holding, and this struck her as unfair. She resented the part of herself capable of such forgiveness. And she had done what had been asked of her, so the words that she spoke came as a surprise to herself. “Why don’t you come for a walk with me?”

Stan stared, quizzical.

“I’d like you to get some fresh air.”

His wrist still quivered, but his face and posture softened. So it was with an almost childlike obedience that he turned slowly and reached for his boots.

"This story first appeared in Little Bird Stories Vol. VII in 2017"

Based in Quebec, Ann Cavlovic’s fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Canadian Architect, Event, The Fiddlehead, The Globe and Mail, PRISM international, Room, SubTerrain, the anthology This Place a Stranger (Caitlin Press), Today’s Parent, and elsewhere. "Stan's House" won the 2017 Little Bird Writing Contest judged by Esi Edugyan. Her stage play Emissions: A Climate Comedy was the most attended show of the 2013 Ottawa Fringe theatre festival. Please visit her website: www.anncavlovic.com

POETRY: ROB MCLENNAN

8/13/2021

FOUR POEMS FOR TREES

1.

Across this formal pleasure,
horizon contours mountain range:

sawmill, birdsong, lodgepole. Spilled

into my voice. Declarations of heartfelt territory

lost among these splintered branches.

2.

Frank O’Hara’s subway,
and his blade of grass.

3.

Transplanting monkey puzzle. Prolonged,
a coastline errant. Ponderosa. Sechelt, breeze.

This sentence of foliage
reflects our complexities: such clear

and exposed. Abstraction, stripped excess
of tree-stubble. What season

of nouns. Audre Lorde: There is

no separate survival.

4.

Where my limbs meet yours, a poem
as dense

as a brick.

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent poetry titles include A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), with a further poetry title, the book of smaller, forthcoming from University of Calgary Press. An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (periodicityjournal.blogspot.com) and Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com). He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. In spring 2020, he won ‘best pandemic beard’ from Coach House Books via Twitter, of which he is extremely proud (and mentions constantly). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

POET: CALEB NICHOLS

8/13/2021

THIS TITLE DOES WORK

He said

inspiration is like being fucked
by the Gods and if that’s so

then I suppose
it makes sense
that you’d try to decant

what they’ve filled you with,
to bottle its
essence while
the sediment settles.

Ceded ground I guess
but what about getting
free? Form feels like
a workweek:
useful, but to whom?

What’s being
formed— a complex
structure— a vessel
to keep things in,
worlds which want to be
let out. Birds

can be observed in order
to be observed
or collected
to be caged
or killed
to be kept or consumed.
Either way

the point ceases to be
witnessing the wild,
turns toward capture,
possession, display,
moves our attention
away from subject
to frame— how it was
gilded, by whom

it was hung,
what the work is
worth— at which
point the bird’s flown,
the coop empty,
a wheel untrue, thrown off
Apollo’s chariot— dawn’s horses
on fire, now flaming
out towards dusk.

SIM CITY

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
John 1:1 KJV

everything is narrative
nature is a myth.

the ancients knew that
humans were last to the party

and quick to call the cops
when things felt out of hand

(what’s it like to be
bounced from the club

by a flaming sword a
pair of angels?)

but seriously
who’s to say

that the flip wasn’t switched
I mean the swish wasn’t phished

I mean the fish wasn’t dished
I mean the witch wasn’t hitched

I mean the switch
flipped

this morning when I woke up
the fog-laden dawn carried on

till midday. I walked the dog
and wrote this poem on my phone

listening to Ethiopiques on my phone
drinking a blend of Kenyan coffee

paid for with my phone
which is powered by cobalt

mined by Congolese children
en Afrique

and this is how poetry has everything
to do with the deep

violence of colonialism
is complicit innit?

but anyway
as I was saying

who’s to say
that all of this

isn’t due to a toggle tripped
by a demi-god— a light

being, libidinous for pain,
or just bored?

Caleb Nichols (he/they) is a queer writer from California, occupying Tilhini, the Place of the Full Moon, the unceded territory of the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini tribe. His poetry has been featured in Hoax, Redivider, perhappened mag, DEAR Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. His poem “Ken” won an Academy of American Poets University Prize, and their chapbook “Teems///\\\Recedes” is forthcoming from Kelp Books. He tweets @seanickels.

POETRY: PENN KEMP

8/11/2021

TRASH TALK

Litter begets
more litter-
ah, sure when
litter it.
I / it

lit
light
litter
along
the literal
littoral.

The ill litter it
refuse refuse
and garb age.

I utter a light
little iteration
against litter
alluding to
allusion, all
iteration and

assonance off
the road, on
the road and in
to ash, rash,
trash can.

Penn Kemp. Published online.

RIVER REVERY

Water abounds here, with this river

five times normal width for winter,
flooding roads and parks. The swell
carries whole trees along stampeding

currents. Yellow willows drop fifty-year
-old boughs in high winds. Standing
waves cover our usual walking path.

Climate change is certainly upon us,
from eleven below to eleven above in
hours, sinking back below freezing.

Green begins to bury the remnants
of flood, the wall of last fall’s leaves
packed level against the link fence.

Weird how all reverts, reverberates in
spring clarity as old detritus is dredged.

Penn Kemp has participated in Canadian cultural life for over 50 years, writing, editing, and publishing poetry and plays. She has published 30 books of poetry, prose and drama and 10 CDs of spoken word/Sound Opera. Penn is the League of Canadian Poets’ 40th Life Member and Spoken Word Artist (2015). Penn’s latest collection, A Near Memoir: new poems (Beliveau Books), launched on Earth Day. Her lively web presence includes Wordpress, Weebly, Facebook, and SoundCloud.

MUSIC: PATRICK MURRAY

7/28/2021

Only the Sun, 2021
Music by Patrick Murray
Text by Emily Schultz
Used with permission.

Performed by: Juliana Krajcovic Renee Fajardo Sharang Sharma Graham Robinson Patrick Murray

ONLY THE SUN

by Emily Schultz

Who will notice when this leaf is gone?
It is only a leaf,
tiny, trembling, green; tomorrow’s auburn.
No one will know. Only the bird will know.

Who will notice when this love is gone?
It is only a love,
a ghost thing with no edges or shape.
No one will know. Only I will know.

Who will notice when this song is gone?
It is only a song,
one sound set beside another like a pair of shoes.
No one will know. Only we will know.

Who will notice when the sun is gone?
It is only a sun,
a hole of gold burned in an endless sky.
No one will know. Only the dark will know.

"Only the Sun" appeared in the anthology Watch Your Head: Writers & Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2021)

Canadian choral conductor and composer Patrick Murray is Sessional Assistant Professor in Choral Music at Western University (London, Ontario) and director of the University of Toronto Scarborough Concert Choir. As a composer, Murray has been commissioned by ensembles including New York Polyphony, Carmel Bach Festival, and the Grand Philharmonic Choir, recorded by the DaCapo Chamber Choir, and published by Cypress Choral Music. Murray’s research focuses on inter-community collaboration in contemporary choral composition. His work is available at www.patrickmurraymusic.net.

Emily Schultz published her newest novel, Little Threats, with GP Putnam’s Sons. It was named an Apple Books Best of November 2020 pick. Her novel, The Blondes, was released in the U.S. with Picador, in France with Editions Alto and Editions Asphalte, and in Canada with Doubleday. Named a Best Book of 2015 by NPR and Kirkus, it recently became a scripted podcast starring Madeline Zima. Her poems have appeared in Minola Review, rust + moth, Humber Literary Review, and Taddle Creek. Find out more at https://www.emilyschultz.com/

ESSAY: MARY OF THE TOWER

7/19/2021

"WHAT'S THE BEST THING I CAN DO?"

Real-time reflections on land grief
Written November 11, 2020

Last week, when it happened, I said I wanted to sit with the grief eventually. I wanted to feel it, know it, and honour it. The grief that had crushed me earlier in the day, that sent me back to sleep, back to a world of houses full of windows on water where nothing ever floods, was so monumentally gutting that I believed I could study it. Encapsulate it. Extract its contents, its essence, and call upon the memory of grieving my Motherland from un-natural disaster as needed on my path to becoming an ancestor.

But that memory is gone. It went as quickly as it came. So quickly, terrifyingly quickly, I returned to the rest of my life and felt as if nothing had happened by the end of the week. I skipped through the weekend, feeling productive, feeling rested and in control. By Tuesday I recorded a video series in my story celebrating my huge millennial win of debt consolidation and how I’m now on track to be debt-free by my 30th birthday. I spoke of hope, change, and revolution, and I’m still riding that high. I still believe the tide can be turned in my tiny, insular pocket of the universe that is still ravaged by a global pandemic but protected by all my privilege. Today, Remembrance Day/Veterans’ Day, I spent the day inside making a crock pot full of chilli and getting to work on a commissioned project from a friend. The day has been slow and pleasant. My belly is full, body warm, mind and heart are well. And while I was lying in bed at 8pm, pleasantly stuffed with slow-cooked beans and veggies, it happened. Again. Not the event itself, because I’m far, far behind the vibration of time where I’m actually from, but the moment when the news of another typhoon made its way to me, halfway across the world. I suppose I got my wish, after all. Here comes the remembering.

Typhoon Ulysses is the 21st tropical storm to hit the nation currently known as The Philippines, which encompasses both my matrilineal homeland of the Bicol Region and my patrilineal ancestral territory of the Nueva Ecija province of northern Luzon. Last week, the 20th storm, Super Typhoon Rolly ravaged the Bicol Region and was recounted by locals to be the worst typhoon ever. That was the storm which induced my land grief. The colossal, crushing devastation that ruptured every cell in my being, every cell infused with the blood memory of these homelands that my mother left, my grandmother resented, and that all the women in me knew so intimately from sky to soil. In the same way bleeding reminds me of my biological obligation to womanhood, so does land grief remind me of my ancestral obligation to the Matriarchy. It is pain that is unique and unfair; it is pain that is politicized, taboo, and told to hide in the shadows, even though so many like us know exactly what this pain feels like. Land grief is not only a pain I share with my Filipinx kin who observe, and directly experience, the destruction of our homelands. Land grief is a pain that we as colonized peoples share. Land grief is a pain that runs through the bodies of all of us who come from the Land, whether or not we currently occupy that land, or merely remember it. Not all of us can feel this pain and not all of us know that this pain is grief. It is the Matriarchs who speak for, grieve for, and bleed for the Land. In the depth of my body, on the foothills covered in snow, there is screaming. There is suffocation. There is starvation. There is drowning. There is death.

It is in this familiar vein of trauma, and land-based ancestral trauma, that the lateral violence in communities of colour is rendered null. Land grief is trauma, though the fact that I can name it as such speaks to my privilege and my distance. My family who lives on the Motherland today is not grieving the same way. I cannot say they are not grieving, because their classification of what grief is likely differs from mine: primarily, it might involve prayer, and prayer to a deity I do not choose. The grief I know is ceremonial, sacred. It is a sad ceremony I wish I was not so familiar with, and yet the circumstances of my life — my wealthy, privileged, diasporic life — have taught me to equate grieving to breathing. Grieving as more natural than loving, in the physical form. Grieving as more natural than celebrating, blooming, creating, birthing. All of my strength has come from death, loss, and transformation. Grieving is the sad ceremony I have become a master at officiating. Grief as a response to trauma, by extension, is a step commonly skipped for not only discomfort but lack of access. Said lack of access can be the result of a lack of time, a lack of stability, and perhaps most commonly: a lack of tools to support the grieving process in healthy ways. Trauma, without tools, support, and stability can very often manifest into addiction, dependency, obsession. I am certainly not perfect when it comes to these phenomena. Yet learning to use grief as my anchor in the devastating and unpredictable storms of loss in my life, has become my superpower. Grieving has allowed me to save myself.

What has worked for me will not work for my family on the Motherland. They cannot anchor themselves to their grief in order to evade the effects of global warming. They cannot hold ceremony for what is lost when all that is lost is essential. They cannot healthily process emotions while waiting on the roofs of their houses awaiting the uncertain promise of safety. They cannot come to terms with death when they are surrounded by it. This is why I say my grief is a privilege. It is a form of healing that was unavailable to my ancestors and untaught to my grandmother and mother. It is a form of healing still inaccessible to my living kin across the water, because they do not live under, and cannot create, opportune conditions for healing. There is only colonized survival. To be well is a privilege in and of itself. To transcend colonial trauma and heal the generations that came before me is a privilege which comes with great responsibility. I am responsible to the Matriarchy, and to the Land from which she comes, the Motherland. Two typhoons in one week, then, and two typhoons which squarely affected the Bicol Region of my matriline, is certainly devastating. It’s no wonder I’m overcome with land grief. It’s no wonder I feel hopeless, and opt-out of the scary headlines, the disturbing photographs, the GoFundMes and protests. It’s no wonder that instead, I opt into a rest that is not generative, but escapist: it is a rest of impossibles, because what is possible cannot rationally be believed.

I cannot save the Motherland. I cannot save its people. And even if I could, it is that dangerous colonial saviour complex that got us into this mess in the first place; the reason my people have lost everything, even our names, even our memories, even our most solid ground has been bought and sold by the colonizer. It’s truly an awful thought, but to be of Bicolanx descent and alive in 2020 requires me to accept that my Motherland may disappear in my lifetime. The land from whence I came, which birthed my mother and her mother and all the women in me who remain, could be a place I only ever remember in pictures that mysteriously disappeared, whose fertile volcanic soil becomes a legend whose face I can never touch again. A land I can never bring my future children to, for them to experience the heat, the heavy air, the softness of compacted earth beneath their bare feet. I may not have a place to point to when they ask me where I’m from. And that’s heartbreaking. But as I sit here, in my warm and safe home, belly full and clean drinking water within my reach, I can hear my father, my aunties, my Lolos, and my Lolas asking me: “What’s the best thing you can do?” It’s a question without any judgment or layers of manipulation beneath its words. It’s presented to me plainly, in the colonizer language that is now my only, left to my own interpretation and bequeathment of meaning.

I cannot save the Motherland. But I can heal the mothers. Because like land grief, a worldly wound that reverberates in the veins of every colonized human on this dying planet, my body remembers Mythic time. My body runs on a clock that is nonlinear and interconnected, that breathes and moves and laughs and sings with the voices of my Titas, the determination of my Lolos, the charm of my father, the maarte of my Lola, the malakas of my other Lola, the playful ingenuity of all my pamankin, and gifts to be unwrapped by my years from countless ancestors I never got to meet in this lifetime. It does not mean none of my qualities are mine. It means that I have a body and a soul, a sense of humour, and a wealth of talents that are mine and mine alone. With all of that, I have the power to bring my ancestors back to this plane in the flesh, through ceremony, through sleep, through pleasure, through creativity. So upon learning of the second typhoon to hit the Bicol Region, I did the best I could do: I smudged. I prayed. I drank a big glass of water and sat down at my desk, turned on my lamp, and wrote. The best thing I can do is use my gifts. The best thing I can do is use my power for good.

This is not the end. I’m not satisfied with ending it here, but I don’t have anything else to give. Not tonight. Not right now. Not in the forever-on-edge liminal timespace between this typhoon and the next. But this is where I have to end it, because I’ve done the best I could. Now I need to grieve. Now, I need to rest.

Centred photo of the Mayon Volcano, taken in the early morning at a farm in Albay, Bicol Region, Philippines in 2016. There are rice fields at the foot of the dormant volcano and native greenery in the foreground.

Overheard view of Legazpi City, Albay, the capital city of the Philippines’ Bicol Region. It is a bright sunny day with a few clouds. The roofs of homes can be seen down below with native trees and greenery in the foreground. Green mountains and ocean are pictured behind.

Mary of the Tower (she/they) is a settler-born member of the Filipinx diaspora, with roots to the Bicol Region and Nueva Ecija province of Luzon. She is currently living and working on the traditional homelands of the Tsuu T’ina (Sarcee) and Niitsitapi Peoples, also known as Calgary, Alberta/Treaty 7 territory. She is the owner and creator of Studio Kanlungan, a web-based community incubator for intergenerational healing through creativity. She also works as an intuitive, developing her gifts in mediumship, astrology, and Tarot card interpretation. She acknowledges her kinship ties to Treaty 6 territory (Saskatoon and Edmonton), Snuneymuxw and Quw’utsun/Tsawwassen/Hul’qumi'num territories, and Kwantlen/Katzie territory, where she has planted roots in the past and will continue to plant more, once this pandemic is over. Website studiokanlungan.co

POETRY: ROBERT FREDE KENTER

7/18/2021

THE BENDS

Polished cameo    a distilled   mirror
steam skimmed   skin
of water   in the oval cue

The ocean has no perceptible bottom
The detritus of cargo ships strewn,
submerged

No one dives
no strolls to retrieve

Don’t rise too quickly back up to the sky

Animal exhalations hold the wreckage
of your heart    poured into
a white porcelain sink,
angled down

A paint spattered canvas
Still, breathing – oxygenated

There is not enough fresh air.
near, a view, a window
further, distant, the port.

(a churning inland sea,
painted surface of nothingness)
what emerges four-legged
from the shore   a figure-ground
illusion of an ancient-creature
still living, distilled
breath, “Dressed Landscape for
Dry Ice Studies.”

The perspective of a band practice
The tarry instruments, tinny, far away
of amplifiers affixed to stilts

Someday the body will remember
Its genealogy
A generation of flailing limbs
A Flirtation with Rapture

The Skin of Victorian buildings
floating in the after-birth of
rain lakes

Porous Fissures
lattice network

The painting hand thinking
in a network of gestures
of the linked orbital of satellite
communications
layers of the ascension
the numbing epidermal of embodiment
cold metal needle
in the simulacra the metronome
of a shaking hand

the surgeon, hirsute

At the bottom of the painting, hand-written,
The cut ice letters

Here where Holy ghost prophecy carries more weight than science

FREEDOM

Freedom senses all the tears
of a thousand windowsills
The rainbow of men and women
shoulder to shoulder
entering hotels and shelters

Rowboat sailors with buttoned oars
rough coughing from lungs
of a sulfur sheen
Of black coal in lieu of flowers
holding the skirt of the lake.

A thousand monarchs
rose up, lifted
both sides of the sky
exposed exploited roe
Inlaid into monoculture rows

A cascade of waterfalls and memories
accompanied the rain all night
Rattling on about the cusp
as it danced
though never unattended

The flood waters rang out
May the lake take you
under to dream
May the sky rise to meet you
when you awaken.

Exhibit A.

Hunter's Progeny

Robert Frede Kenter is a writer and visual artist, who lives with ME/FM, is widely published and exhibited and is a 2020 Pushcart nominee. Work recently in Black Bough, Burning House Press, Cypress, Talking about Strawberries, Floodlight Ed., Anthropocene, Cough. Robert is publisher of Toronto-based Ice Floe Press www.icefloepress.net & author of a recent hybrid collection, Audacity of Form (Ice Floe Press). A chapbook of VISPO, "EDEN", is forthcoming later in 2021. Robert was a feature reader in 2020 at Cheltenham Poetry Festival. Twitter: @frede_kenter

POETRY: KIM GOLDBERG

7/18/2021

A FEW BEARS

I know of a few bears
bears who seem thinner than normal
they’ll slap your hands
the bears are getting hungry

Bears who seem thinner than normal
these are facts:
the bears are getting hungry
I'm here to show you reality

These are facts:
The bears have been starving
I'm here to show you reality
along the shorelines where grizzlies have been

The bears have been starving
I'm not here to point fingers
along the shorelines where grizzlies have been
winners and losers in climate change

I’m not here to point fingers
without a necropsy
winners and losers in climate change
if you prefer looking at life from the end

Without a necropsy
we’re able to observe an emaciated mother
if you prefer looking at life from the end
in search of berries

We’re able to observe an emaciated mother
they’ll slap your hands
in search of berries
I know of a few bears.

*
(Assembled from recent news articles.)

UNMOORED
(after Hieronymus Bosch’s painting “Ship of Fools”)

It always comes down to what has been lost –
a cat, a mind, a god, a compass. Sometimes
a silver sack of virtue spins away.
Who has not shinnied up the spar pole to carve
a fat drumstick from a roast goose? Or lusted for a
pancake on a string? Or raised a flask to
brain a pickled sinner in a ship as oval as a duck egg
or an office for a head of state? We long for guidance
from the owl above, our avatar of insight
or scandal (depending on the century). We pluck
the cherries, stir the winey sea, let the jester
with an ass’s ears keep watch as we buck and
sway into a melting glacier, its teal horizon
a last reminder of the butterflies and jays.

Kim Goldberg is the author of eight books of poetry and nonfiction. Her latest book is Devolution (Caitlin Press, 2020), surreal poems and fables of ecopocalypse. It was described as a "ferocious collection" in the Vancouver Sun. Kim's poetry has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in North America and abroad including The Capilano Review, Literary Review of Canada, Dark Mountain, subTerrain and Riddle Fence. She chaired the Women's Eco-Poetry panel at the inaugural Cascadia Poetry Festival in Seattle. Kim holds a degree in biology and is an avid birdwatcher in Nanaimo BC. Twitter: @KimPigSquash. https://pigsquash.wordpress.com/

POETRY: E. MARTIN NOLAN

6/27/2021

A LIFE

“What we are engaged in when we do poetry is error,
the wilful creation of error.”
-Anne Carson

1

when we call error what we gain by
does error become idol
we give our last idle guilt
a question overwhelmed by
what error half billion animals
in the bushfires and by
quick overwhelm correction
conservative estimate a billion

2

Condors trace California highways
for coastal roadkill, enough to replace

the megafauna. Our errors of transit
replace an ancient diet. Our error

is nature. Round goby in the middle
of the Great Lakes food web,

like strangers where your family was.
Like a cormorant, you make a life of it.

3

the answer you arrive at impasse
something new constant whiplash

4

Days rain in January,
hardly got my big coat out.

Days rain in January,
ten-foot snowfall, were it cold.

Days rain in January,
sirens chasing, didn’t hold.

Days rain in January,
standing still is a route.

5

The leaves of some mass produced flowering plant
look alive in all the gardens on my block. They are flat
against the half-frozen earth, failing to wilt.

A child calls her mom back to see a wet pile
protected in a hedge’s shadow. “I found snow! Snow!”
She is pointing at it, hopping. In my opinion, it is ugly.
It melts as if rotting, greying from within. Soaked dry
with soot. The child is better at hope than me.

E Martin Nolan is a poet, essayist, editor and teacher. His first book of poems, Still Point, was published with Invisible Publishing in Fall, 2017. He teaches in the Engineering Communication Program at the University of Toronto and is a PhD Candidate in Applied Linguistics at York University. More at emartinnolan.com

POETRY: JENNY BERKEL

6/27/2021

LITTLE GOOSE

Child, what world is this?
A bee thunders past
your ear, velvet. Above,
geese flounder long-necked
against the guillotine of sun.
Emerald beetles burrow out
of ash, flash effulgent.
The beached arm of Ontario
laps blue-green
algae rippling a radiant
siren song. Soft as down,
the nape of your neck
nests into my palm.

Perhaps the end
of the beginning. A gossamer
thread hanging precarious
across the path. Where to walk
with you, somewhere that stays.
The water taps its hammer hands
Into the land and blooms a sinister
cyano crescendo.The bees pull
a magic trick, disappearing
in the span of a hand’s sleight.
The ash, spun in larvae, grow
weak-shadowed, and the geese
have forgotten where to go.

See: we made you
a myth, light
as a feather.

SPECIAL REPORT ON GLOBAL WARMING OF 1.5°C

The day you asked me what I wanted
to be when I grew up and I told you
a dog, did you know then
the world would turn
to bone?

Did you picture me
graduating at thirty-two, childless
in a pilling polyester gown
with years already chewing at my hair,
a cricket in my knee, the world
whipping at catastrophe?

Sweating inside this spectacle,
I tap the years left
on my thigh:
one two three
four five six
seven eight nine
ten eleven twelve
years to save ourselves
from ourselves.

Somebody’s grandfather sobs
as his heart marches across
the stage. Pride quivers
in the jowls of apocalyptic
deadlines. Love can be,
love can be unbearable.

When you asked me,
did you know?

Jenny Berkel is a poet and singer-songwriter from rural Ontario. Her interests include investigating how a poem is a song and a song is a poem. She has released two albums (Here on a Wire and Pale Moon Kid) and has another one forthcoming. Her debut chapbook, Grease Dogs, was published in June 2021 with Baseline Press.

POETRY: MONA'A MALIK

5/22/2021

HOROSCOPE

i.
Dead Sea, Red Earth As far as one can anticipate into the distance

When you set me on fire, I go down like California redwoods When I smother you with my pillow, you
Are a pale haze When you make me cry I am glutted by the deluge, and I will now rush up as an eagre.
You eat cereal in our bed until you fall asleep. Drip milk on my hands. In dreams you come with me,
charting devotion, walking toward the glowing ball of pink in the sky then orange now gold But this is
real— I want to wake you up, to shake you, but it is me who is sleeping with milky
hands while Wildfires tear through the coast Keep triggering aftershocks This landslide is
Looking for answers How dark does the world become before you start calculating stillness

ii.
I tell you I want to move somewhere cold Where my teeth chatter and splinter And you say that will only
slow the end Whether humanity will be able to continue Has not been scientifically proven Whether “you
and i” will make it has not been proven You want to be big like the Universe you pray to something
above us Star-shaped and good I stare down at the grass I eat that grass Goliath and Bayer Own that grass
Monsanto waltzes with the small town farmers Seed prices rise. i touch the empty space of your thigh the
sky in your body you taste like street and dirt and its chaos for you fate is a thing that already happened
like a far off place— sense-making and your love-making have been set adrift

iii.
How do you want the world to end? Slow death
When the dinosaur-killing asteroid collided with Earth more than 65 million years ago it blasted a nearly.
mile-high tsunami through the Gulf of Mexico caused chaos throughout the world's oceans shock waves.
in that delicate crust dust blocking out the sun Did they think all was night? You will be “waves from
ejecta falling back into the water.” the animal Cooked alive by fire Tssst tssssst go the flames flaring.
out all over this orb. would you rather be visited by a wandering star so large— that you blink and it is.
over? You say I am preoccupied with annihilation That the landscape of my mind is ridged with curtains

iv.
My oracle says That was a village before it was wiped away Those morgues were once mosques
A dog cries whenever its people leave Stares through broken windows Barks at the space where there was
once a door In that square of pillars that no longer holds up anything That dog is me too Apocalypse can
mean a revelation or a prophecy Maybe we are nothing but prophecy Maybe we can be snow-capped
mountains And flooding And highway closures Instead of scorched earth

v.
I am drought
I give nothing

vi.
Forests on mountaintops may die out since they cannot Shift to a higher altitude Drought sapped you of
vital juices That would preserve you Safeguard you from the pine beetles laying sweet eggs under your
bark staining blue fungus into your sapwood When you read my palm Can you tell Whether I will help
the pine beetles Or the trees?

vii.
What astrological numerology Will save us now? recite all the stars to me Lay out every card of my life
Backwards and forwards Until I understand They call it slow Violence “gradual Violence of deforestation
and soil erosion” Invisible and quiet decimation Goodbye seeds and whales and the three-tooth caddisfly
Our violence to each other was as slow and gradual As the ending of the world The skeptic’s belief That
the world will stay the same Would grow and grow and grow Would swell like the beanstalk No matter
how many islands cleft apart On our TV

You say I blame other people for everything

Citations

The following quotes were paraphrased from these sources:

“When the dinosaur-killing asteroid collided with Earth more than 65 million years ago it blasted a nearly mile-high tsunami through the Gulf of Mexico caused chaos throughout the world's oceans” Geggel, Laura. “Dinosaur-killing Asteroid Triggered Mile-high Tsunami That Spread Through Earth's Oceans.” LiveScience. 7 Jan. 2019.
“waves from ejecta falling back into the water” Geggel, Laura. “Dinosaur-killing Asteroid Triggered Mile-high Tsunami That Spread Through Earth's Oceans.” LiveScience. 7 Jan. 2019.
“on mountaintops may die out since they cannot Shift to a higher altitude” United States Environmental Protection Agency. “Climate Impacts on Forests.” 19 Jan. 2017.
“Slow Violence, Gender, and the Environmentalism of the Poor.” Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, by Rob Nixon, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England, 2011, p. 128. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jbsgw.8.

Mona'a Malik’s stories have appeared in The Fiddlehead, Joyland, Event, The Puritan, and Ricepaper, among other venues. She received an Arts and Letters NL award for poetry, and placed first in Carve Magazine’s 2020 Prose & Poetry Contest. Her play Sania The Destroyer was produced for Theatre New Brunswick's 50th anniversary season (2018-2019), and was a finalist for the QWF Playwriting Prize. She lives in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal on the unceded land of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation.

FICTION: LIZ HARMER

5/21/2021

THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS

On the morning of the protests, Mal and Lucy were still arguing about what to do. Or, Lucy, at least, was still arguing. Mal, meanwhile, was letting the reeds move languorously around her. Women who’ve known each other for decades have their pet in-jokes, their nearly meaningless teasing. Lucy accused her: “You’re letting the reeds move languorously around you.” Mal, sitting on the raw wood floor of the shack, ignored this.

Lucy had written the phrase years earlier, when she’d been married to a man and bitterly envious of Mal. She had written a long paragraph in imitation of Mal’s prose, of one of her famous tangents: maybe the world was erected on the back of a soft-shelled turtle whose elegance lays in its ability to, like many turtles, lower its heartrate to such a degree that it can survive deep under the water while it sleeps, unbreathing. There was humor in its molelike face and its penile neck, out of which its head withdrew and stretched. So this is what it is to be alive, Lucy wrote, squinting, searching, and ridiculous as a penis. She wanted to tease Mal, she wanted to be a little mean to Mal, but it was the case that actually laboring over the paragraph had given her new respect for her. Mal didn’t laugh then, and she wasn’t laughing now. Sometimes she seemed to be quite humorless in person, though in her writing she loved to overlay elegance with buffoonery. Also, she was exactly the sort of person who might have lowered her own heartrate until she, too, could live for many years in an airless room, having airless dreams as the reeds moved languorously around her.

“Mal, baby,” Lucy said. She couldn’t help the slightly whining tone in her voice. “The world is ending.” She awaited a retort, but none came. “We have to go. It won’t be safe here.”

“I’m not in it,” Mal said. She tilted her head, that elvin face with its pixie cut, woodland creature with wide-set eyes.

“You’re not?”

“I’m not in the airless room,” she said. “See?”

She gestured to the old tea-towel covered in small needles and hollowed out sticks. Dried reeds.

“What’s that?” Lucy said.

“Darts,” she said. “I’m soaking them in strychnine.”

Thoreau had women to bring him meals, women to visit and wash his clothes. These two actually were women. Mal had taken her admiration for the American transcendentalist, her despair at the dying of the planet, and her desire to be self-sufficient and turned all that into a way of life.

“Will that work?” Lucy said.

“I think so.”

Lucy was no elf. Buxom, blonde, and shouldered like a man. When she was young her lips were practically famous for how pillowy they were. She sometimes felt too large for Mal’s shack, and she let the screen door slam as she went outside. She’d been the one to pack two identical bags with freeze-dried foods and a water-filtration device, with binoculars, a compass, first aid. Only Lucy had a gun, a revolver from her second divorce, during which she’d been in a dramatic phase, in a mood to burn everything down. Mal would have her darts. They hadn’t worked out a mode of communication. Her phone had, for days, been as inert as a brick.

Lucy stared at Mal’s creek. Mal had made a million dollars for her observations of that creek, a million dollars she’d been too pure to spend and which now did not exist. Mal had lived for a decade in the shack. No running water, no electricity, just four walls and a woodstove, a bunch of oil lamps, a desk, a hard, small bed. Whenever Lucy visited in those days, it was as a pollutant, or so she loudly liked to remark. “You’re like a houseplant that absorbs toxins,” Lucy said. “It’s like your meditations have actually cleared the air.”

Mal emerged from the hut. “Are you ready?”

Now they were both standing there staring at the creek. Too much had already been written about that creek.

“Can you even see this anymore?” Lucy asked.

But of course she could.

They trudged out together in a poor imitation of a military film. Through the muck and the rotted leaves into town. They left Lucy’s Jeep behind with its full tank of gas because they’d heard that anyone in a vehicle would be a target.

“So we’re just walking towards violence,” Mal said. “Just sauntering over to trauma and evil.”

“Or we’re going to act with those who need our help,” Lucy said. “That’s another way you could look at it.”

“Of course,” Mal said. She was quiet and dubious. It was Lucy who was excited. As charged as a rotten tooth.

For all those years Mal had been trying to see. Once, when Lucy visited from her other, middle-class, stable life, Mal was drunk on some sweet wine she’d made herself from mulberries and confessed that she wished to transcend her own eyeballs. Maybe without eyes she could see. Lucy accused her of being too classical, too Homeric, of being sentimental, of being ableist. Lucy had at that time been traveling from one residency to another, one relationship to another, all the best men and women she could find, desiring only to fuck and in fucking to find an equal who might return her to herself.

“You’re no different than me,” Mal said.

Lucy, who felt that Mal was better than her in every way, and which inferiority was her shame, sipped the tooth-staining wine and stared in the flickering light at her friend. She had written about all the fucking. There had been an appetite for lurid personal essays then, and for hard-won insights. Lucy believed that, while inferior to Mal, she was at the height of her ability and fame. “What do you mean?”

“I want to transcend my eyeballs,” she said. “Or to get past the obstacle of my own mind with its frames and narratives by digging farther into it. And you’re just trying to transcend yourself the old-fashioned way: by using others. The reality of someone else might make you feel real. It’s a false god,” she said.

“I’m not pretending not to be doing that,” Lucy said. Everyone believed that self-awareness was a necessary, ethical position. “But your way is the old-fashioned way.”

“Fine,” Mal said. The wine made her speak openly, to embrace the sagacity others usually projected onto her. It didn’t make her slur. “It’s old-fashioned and hardly any person in history has managed it.”

“A state of unfulfilled longing is the only honest way to live,” Lucy said, who did slur, and who wanted now to weep into her glass.

Mal gave her a regretful look and poured her more. “I want more than mere honesty,” she said. “And I am not interested in longing.”

“I don’t know what’s happening,” Lucy said. Years would pass before she would understand what Mal had meant, and she would doubt her meaning even when it did become clear

They easily found the crowd. A mass of bodies. Thousands of people were in the street just as in the previous protests. Mal had gone into the city for the gossip a few days earlier and knew what the plans were, the routes, the destinations. They’d decided to climb to the roof of a parking structure before joining that crowd, within which no one could move until the mass decided to move. The concrete stairs stank of piss.

The last time people had gathered in the streets there were other people in military gear standing like crows on rooftops. There had been machine-gun fire and the bodily consequence of that gunfire, which had been enough to scare everyone out of protesting. Fish in a barrel.

“They’re gone,” Lucy said, surveying the former outposts of those gunmen. “There’s nobody up there.”

Mal didn’t reply, but this was nothing new. Lucy assumed she was silently assessing. But when she turned again to look for her, to suggest that they join the people in the street who were moving, now, with purpose, she wasn’t there. Everyone’s tall body was a bolt of fabric. Even on the roof, Lucy could hardly squeeze through.

“Mal!” she screamed. “Mal!”

Lucy got to the edge of the roof and looked down to see Mal slipping through the crowd and away. The old spite surged through her. Mal was the only small counterforce in a crowd that was becoming more organism than collection. New atoms were adding to its back edge, rings on a time-lapsed tree, and she felt the people’s fear and excitement like the intuition that it was about to snow. Mal escaped the crowd’s locks and turned to look up. Lucy threw her body against the bodies around her as though they were the plywood sides of a coffin, the stuck doors of a sinking car.

“Fucking cut it out!” someone yelled.

She was already exhausted. This was wrestling. She jabbed her elbow into someone’s rib, sobbing, helpless, and was shoved so hard in return she nearly fell off the edge of the rooftop. How was Mal moving so fast?

The drop into the crowd was fifty feet—could Lucy survive the jump? Mal was the one who crackled with facts. She was the one who would know.

“Mal!” she cried again. This time there was accusation in it, in her name, which was also a cry of sorrow. She had shortened the too-feminine Melanie years earlier and called Mal her French pun of a nom de plume.

She seemed to be going back the way they’d come. It was many miles back to the shack and would take hours.

“But why would she do that?” Lucy said.

A man nearby growled at her to shut up.

When they met in college, they hadn’t known that their dreams depended on something as fragile as an economic system. They had their degrees, their birth control pills, antibiotics, parents who owned their homes. The two of them had many cakes they also ate. Both the sort of girls who had the luxury to hate money. Lucy got her MFA and then her residencies, teaching other people just how important words are. She cringed to think of it now: oh, language, how crucial! Oh stories, how irreplaceable! All those keynotes. Those awful lunches. Prosecco. She thought she knew how arbitrary fame was. Thought she understood how farcical achievement.

Once she had recommended to Mal to turn the shack into an artists’ retreat, though Mal claimed to despise profit. She also claimed to despise art, though it turned out that besides admiring vines and examining nests she’d been writing everything down. A year later came the first betrayal: Mal published that creekside book full of frogs, foxes, vines, and Lucy, Lucy the unnamed villain of vanity and worldliness, charge of attraction and temptation. Later Lucy saw it as a love letter but at the time she had only the youthful sense of having been fooled and caught out. Of having lost her dignity. Mal won the Pulitzer and became as famous as Lucy was. But she was pure. She had typed up a manuscript and sought a publisher, but she pretended to be pure. That’s why Lucy did what she did, telling everything to the trade magazines and then to the Times. Telling them about Mal when Mal wouldn’t talk about herself. After that, they didn’t speak for eight years.

But then she got divorced again, and Lucy changed her mind about everything. It’s as natural a process as any of Mal’s: rot or melt, burn or grow. Lucy returned to the shack where Mal was still living her “dailiness.” Water-fetching, log-chopping, frog-frolicking. Like a child. Like an ancient. The first night, Lucy was exhausted from the labor of her life there, sticky and muddy, and Mal was unchanged. “You look like a sorcerer,” Lucy said, so tired she couldn’t move. It was Mal who came near and took Lucy’s face in her hands, Mal who leaned over to kiss her. All the energy Lucy had been throwing into the world hoping that it would catch somewhere, all the longing and striving, all of it had taken her here, to Mal, to its rightful orientation.

When the dollar started to fall, when the whole system turned itself into a rock and plummeted, turned the country into a sinkhole, they discussed what to do. Mal knew how to live on nothing. So did Lucy by then. But no one was safe, Lucy argued. And it’s immoral not to help. Mal was reluctant. “Isolation is a capitalist privilege,” Lucy said. “It’s only subversive while the system is in place.” Mal, finally, agreed.

Lucy had never fired a gun. But a few hours after Mal’s abandonment, she was holding a loaded rifle and pointing it at one of the hostages. All the CEOs and major bigwigs were long gone, but some of the tech employees who didn’t have the means or the wherewithal to get to a private island via a private jet were squatting in the mansions that became the first targets. Men died. Men and women died in front of Lucy, who held a rifle. She felt it blast open and nearly throw her aside, but all she had hit was a clay vase. Some asshole’s souvenir from an Aztec vacation. The hostage was just a kid, a rich kid, with a shitty beard and half a tattoo—maybe a snake?—on his upper arm. His eyes were wide over his gag, and then they were still, and blood was everywhere. Lucy was holding the rifle, but she hadn’t shot him. She looked at the man next to her, who was drenched with so much sweat—she assumed it was sweat—that his face was rubbery. Melting. He shrugged. What else was he supposed to do but shoot?

If you have to choose, Lucy thought, between being one of the masses or being the king, it’s safer to choose the smaller life. You were rich and powerful and then you were dead. But everyone wants worship and admiration. Everyone wants to be king. There was a commotion of blood and smokesmell around her on the patio, near the dark pool. She had a vision like one of Mal’s, all of it at once: a kind of wheeling machine, desires going always in one direction, towards ambition, towards death, or, no, she couldn’t describe it. There was an awesome feeling of vastness and activity. A zombie horde. All of them climbing each other’s bodies to get where? To get up? Why is up better than down? Only because of the climbing.

Their secured gates and their threats of attack dogs were provocations, almost as if their fear of being overthrown had been the reason the people had wanted to overthrow them. People didn’t have to be obscenely wealthy. It was a lesson they’d be forced to learn.

You never see wars like this anymore,” a fat man said to Lucy near the private tennis courts where they set up camp. Somebody had decided to piss in the infinity pool, and a line of men had their dicks out, dribbling and laughing. Lucy felt that old feeling of being too close to misogyny, a masculinity that didn’t know it hated women. Too many men, she thought, suddenly afraid. She checked for the rifle, and then the revolver.

“I’ve never seen any war,” she said. Was this exhaustion or was it grief?

“Oh, I haven’t either,” he said. “But drones don’t mean anything. Not like this. You can’t feel any of this unless you have contact.”

She supposed he meant the thrill, the taste, of victory. A metallic taste, salty. They were Homeric god-men.

“Maybe we’ll actually win,” he said. “We’ll do this.”

Later they’d hear about children and their bodies. Countrysides so badly bombed they were obliterated. Lucy didn’t feel she’d lost her humanity. She felt more human than she’d ever been.

Was love like peace? Like capitalism? Only an idea, easily destroyed? Mere structure, mere abstraction, some convenience to build a life around?

That thing between Mal and Lucy, which Lucy felt stretching too far and nearly breaking as she’d watched her, her like a little red laserprick of light on a digital map going fast away, that thing was eternal. They would die, Lucy thought, clutching the revolver, checking again and again that it was loaded. They would die and they would reincarnate or rot, but energy could be neither created nor destroyed. She had taken Mal out of her soft shell and into the world. She made Mal weak, and Mal made her strong. Lucy was nothing but a vampire.

Mal had left home with no money, had burned her degree and her prizes, and had disowned her well-meaning parents. Had no ties. But love was stronger than death, Lucy thought, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it stronger than Mal?

She searched for Mal when the tents had been posted and the fires made. She clutched her gun all the way through the empty streets. People were in hiding.

Lucy’s calves ached, her shoulders seemed bloody where the bag rubbed in a perversion of a massage. Still, she walked. At the edge of the woods there was a bit of Mal’s red sweater torn off and attached to a gnarl. Then another bit, and another. Without the sweater, she’d be freezing. It was like Mal had made a trail, though the trail was only leading to the shack, which Lucy would have found anyway. So it wasn’t a trail? Lucy couldn’t think, and maybe Mal, all those hours ago, couldn’t think either. She knelt at a stream—the wrong creek, not yet Mal’s creek—and rinsed in the water that looked like poured metal in the fogged moonlight. Rinsed off the blood and the sooty earth. Lucy flashed her light on roots and moss, on needles and dried leaves, finding more frayed wool here and there. Nowhere was any flash of light returned to her. Lucy croaked out Mal’s name, like a frog, and then she thought: I don’t believe in metaphors anymore. Someone give me the facts. As she neared the shack, she came upon the body of a dead sparrow, brown and plain. Years ago, she’d written a poem on the occasion of a dead bird that resembled Amelia Earhart: exploded eye, decaying like leather in the rain. And then she had written an essay about writing the poem, and several lectures, and now here it was again, her bird, as though she’d never anthologized a thing.

Her heart pounded like bootsteps. No more metaphors, she thought. She had become only body, no spirit. The jeep was gone. The mud had suffered some violence from the tires. The ground was gouged. She left me, Lucy thought. Any alternative was worse than that. Anger might keep a person alive, though even this was more than Lucy could bear to admit. She wanted to raze the shack, that beloved shack. More beloved than Lucy was. She wanted to spit on a grave.

Fine, Lucy thought. See you in another life.

She could have slept in the shack and turned back in the morning but this was not a time for such a reasonable choice. She refused to live as Mal did, with a monk’s abandonments. She wanted to throw herself up against the things that were not herself. To find out if maybe the world is real. The boots were cutting her feet. She took her punishment with her shoulders back, head held high, still clutching the red threads like a wilted bouquet.

Liz Harmer is the award-winning author of The Amateurs, a speculative novel of technological rapture, which was released in 2018 and a finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. Her essays, stories, and poems are published widely, and her second novel, Strange Loops, is forthcoming with Knopf Canada in 2022.

POETRY: ROBERT HOGG

5/21/2021

PRESAGES

        (from a Sixth Floor Apartment

    1

Earth is not easy

to get down to

civilization is all

up in the air

a matter of building

one thing

on top of another

stairways

the stanzas

of this poem

   forms   in   the   air

    as though space

were a convenience to slide on

    as though the mind

were as liquid as this

distance

        down to the earth
               below

    2

In the cities of the damned

the air is so thick

the veins stand red against the eyes

Grey forms of the living

walk about in the fog

dead dreams of investors

hang like a haze in the air

The rest is forced

underground, flushed

into rivers

           as though the mind

did not follow it

to the sea

    3

We have entered a time we cannot believe in

it has come upon us so late and yet so fast

            In any other time

            we might have called this

            the age of the soul

where business is no longer

a matter of property

but of what

properly belongs

            Noli me tangere

            is a necklace the earth wears

O civilized man

take your cold hand

away


    4

flesh

      of the earth

blood

     of the sea

breath of wind

               mind

     of fire

come home

    5

Is it a fish or psyche

flops upon this beach

thinking to drink the air

"Presages" first published in Standing Back. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1971

Robert Hogg was born in Edmonton, Alberta, grew up in the Cariboo and Fraser Valley in British Columbia, and attended UBC during the early Sixties where he was associated with the Vancouver TISH poets and graduated with a BA in English and Creative Writing. In 1964 he hitchhiked east to Toronto, then visited Buffalo NY where Charles Olson was teaching. After spending a few months in NYC, Bob entered the graduate program at the State University of NY at Buffalo, completed a PhD and took a job teaching American and Canadian Poetry at Carleton University in Ottawa for the next 38 years. He currently resides at his farm fifty miles south of Ottawa and is working on four collections: Lamentations; The Cariboo Poems; Postcards, from America; and The Vancouver Work. His publications include: The Connexions, Berkeley: Oyez, 1966; Standing Back, Toronto: Coach House, 1972; Of Light, Toronto: Coach House, 1978; Heat Lightning, Windsor: Black Moss, 1986; There Is No Falling, Toronto: ECW, 1993; and as editor, An English Canadian Poetics, The Confederation Poets – Vol. 1, Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2009; and from Lamentations, Ottawa: above/ground, 2016. Two Cariboo poems, Ranch Days – The McIntosh from hawk/weed press in Kemptville, Ontario, and Ranch Days—for Ed Dorn from battleaxe press in Ottawa have recently been published (2019). He recently edited the April 2019 Canadian poetry issue of the Portland Maine Café Review.

POETRY: CORNELIA HOOGLAND

4/5/2021

WATERY HIGHWAYS HOME

Roll down the car window –
the song
of the winter wren.

The world’s sorrow
is fathoms deep,
is undertow –

it shapes the darkness
that contains us.

What kind of broken are we?

This winking
branch-to-branch

releases into light
above the trees.

Is it wind
passing through
fir needles?

What is sound
when nothing
resists it?

Deafening:
container ships,
cruise liners,
screaming invasion,
sonars, seismic
air guns detonating
shock waves of noise –
obliterating

subaquatic clan-sounds,
a babbling calf
trailing its mother’s
four-click morse-
code, the audio glue
of pods on the move,
on watery highways
home. A wonder
one orca
can hear another.

Where are you?

Where are you?

Cornelia Hoogland’s forthcoming chapbook, titled Dressed in Only a Cardigan, She Picks Up Her Tracks in the Snow, is forthcoming with Baseline Press (2021). Her latest book is Cosmic Bowling (Guernica, 2020), a collaboration with the visual artist Ted Goodden. Trailer Park Elegy and Woods Wolf Girl were finalists for national awards. Hoogland was the 2019 writer-in-residence for the Al Purdy A-Frame and the Whistler Festival. http://www.corneliahoogland.com/

FICTION: ADAM GILES

4/5/2021

OFF THE GRID

The hamsters in Burnaby were assholes. One was on this gluten-free, low-carb diet and even if you bought the right brand of gluten-free, low-carb diet pellets, he’d still crap in your hand if you weren’t cradling him the way he liked to be cradled. Meanwhile, because of the special treatment, the other guy, whom the ad described as “beleaguered but friendly,” squealed and thrashed in the cage. Twice a day with this. All winter. But it was a rent-free place out west. It was a start.

Mom called every day, usually when she was at the nursing home, visiting Dad.

“Any chance we’ll see you for Christmas?” she said.

“These gigs don’t come with vacation time.”

“Well, that’s not very nice.”

“Snowbirds don’t fly home until spring, Mom.”

“Snowbirds? It hasn’t even snowed yet.”

“That’s climate change for you.”

She put Dad on the phone, and I told him about my hamsters: the high-maintenance one and the angry one.

“Rodents?” he said. “I’m on my deathbed and this is what you’re doing with your time?”

Dad had been on his “deathbed” for nine years. The stroke paralyzed his whole left side and while the doctors said—with hope, hard work, and time—there was a chance of recovery, Dad was a pessimist, so hope and hard work were out. Which left only time.

The high-maintenance hamster crapped in the angry one’s bed and I told Dad I had to go.

“You remember when you were a kid?” Dad said. “When you’d ask me what I wanted for Christmas? And I could never think of anything?”

“Yeah.”

“I just thought of something.”

“Okay.”

“A pillow over my face.”

The angry hamster took note of the crap in his bed, looked at me, and started into some lunges and shoulder stretches. Prepping for another squealing/thrashing episode.

In Surrey it was low-chirp budgies. These were normal budgies, genetically modified to chirp a little less. For rich folks. These particular rich folks were the Smuggs, 30-something department store catalogue models who spent half the year in Montreal, modeling.

The guy next door, Steve, lived in an eco-home. Solar, geothermal, rainwater harvesting, the works. A net-zero footprint. Which was great except that it reminded me of what I left behind in Toronto. I gave up my construction job for a non-profit that traded eco-homes for inefficient detached houses. Curbing wastefulness, promoting green lifestyles—luring sheep from the flock essentially. The pay was garbage and even if the dream of being self-sufficient, owning an eco-home myself, seemed impossibly out of reach, I was doing my part to save the planet, building these places for other people. Steady, noble work. Turning 40 though, living at home, earning less than one’s mother, there are existential questions one begins asking oneself.

Steve smoked weed, so I was over there quite a bit. We lounged in his backyard amongst the stray stalks and shoots of the overgrown vegetable garden. I brought over the budgies in their cage. Steve didn’t know the Smuggs even had them.

“They’re low-chirp,” I said, taking a drag.

“So they don’t ruffle anyone’s feathers,” Steve said, throwing his head back, laughing at his own cleverness.

Steve always had his Green Day playlist going, which I thought was maybe a little too on-the-nose given his eco-lifestyle.

“These guys are probably average environmentalists at best,” I said. “They’re more anti-establishment.”

“What do you think environmentalism is?” Steve took the joint from me. He pointed to the Smuggs’s house next door. “You know these pricks have a second monstrosity in Montreal? How’s that for a footprint?”

My high was coming on strong now. The Smuggs: younger than me, set for life with money, and I was taking care of their stupid birds. How did everyone get so far ahead of me?

“It’s all temporary,” Steve said. “Time is borrowed. You give everything back to the Earth when you check out. A house here, a house there—what’s the point? People gotta feel important.”
I closed my eyes, felt myself drifting.

“You know, those budgies really are pretty quiet,” Steve said. “It’s nice.”

The pygmy goat in Coquitlam was a hush-hush job—the municipality frowned upon keeping them as pets—so Mr. Jenkins and I usually stayed home. But his owners had a leash for him and said he liked walks along the mountainside. Which was perfect: after the ocean, the Rockies were the main draw for me out west.

It was surreal, the humbling perspective of seeing the endless range of wave-like peaks up close. Mr. Jenkins led the way, his little bum wiggling along a mountainside trail. He was 15—I read online that these guys live 8 to 18 years. He was just happy to be outside, looking for adventure, oblivious that the clock was ticking.

Mom called. She was at the nursing home visiting Dad.

“Your friend Derek phoned,” she said. “Apparently you cancelled all your social medias? He said you went AWOL. You didn’t give him your cell number out west?”

“Not really looking to be reached.”

“Apparently they’re planning some boys trip to Vegas.”

“Ah, the mid-life crisis tour.”

Mr. Jenkins went off road, bounding through tall grass, westbound toward the setting sun, which somehow, within minutes, turned the sky from blistering orange to an almost artificial pastel pink. I imagined Mom, had she been here, shitting on the moment, warning about the imminent threat of ticks. You’ll get Lyme, she’d have said. That’s what you get for straying from the trail.

“Dad’s going downhill,” Mom said. “I try to keep his spirits up, but he checks out, isolates himself.”

“He’s got stuff to process,” I said. “Things to come to terms with.”

“He shouldn’t be doing it alone.”

“We come into this world alone…”

“Ugh. Please come home,” she said, her voice breaking. “I can’t keep this up by myself.”

I could have moved away from home before 40. Living with one’s parents until one was nearly middle-aged wasn’t exactly the path most travelled, but somehow it was always easier to stay. Comfort, fear, whatever it was, I just went with the flow, let life happen to me.

“I’ve got my own stuff going on now.” It was weird hearing myself speak up, risking ruffled feathers. “I have my own things to process, to come to terms with.”

Mom cried. “Is it selfish that sometimes I wish the stroke killed him?”

It was a Sunday morning. Mom was at the butcher’s for her monthly haul of resource-intensive animal flesh. She came home and found Dad slumped over the living room ottoman. Doctors said he was 20 minutes from being a goner. So close, Dad said.

“You’re allowed to put yourself first,” I said.

She gave Dad the phone. He told me about bingo night at the nursing home.

“Won six dollars in change,” he said. “You know the difference between me and this handful of coins?”

Here we go.

“They’ll still be in circulation next year.”

Mr. Jenkins veered back to the trail and stopped to pee under an enormous tree, a lone Douglas-fir, set apart from a dense patch of other Douglas-firs higher up the mountain. Probably a hundred feet tall, this tree. Been around forever. Pissed on by generation after generation of domesticated animal to walk this trail. Resilient though: growing despite urine-soaked roots.

I was supposed to be a veterinarian. Couldn’t get the squeamishness under control though. I failed Grade 11 Biology because I passed out when they set the scalpel and frog corpse on my desk. This was a disappointment for Dad. He worked at an oil and gas company with the dads of my classmates: he heard about it at work; I heard about it at home. I was the “bleeding heart.” Every family had one, a sheep of a different colour.

In Vancouver, I walked Jericho Beach. The ragdoll at the duplex near the university was a social guy, ran with a gang of neighbourhood cats. Self-sufficient.

This was it: the ocean. I guess not technically. An inlet of the pacific? A connected waterway? A manageable sampling of ocean: to ease sheltered people into the experience, to curb the stupefying awe.

Guys in camping chairs fished off a pier. A lapdog—a Shih-Poo or otherwise genetically-modified animal—curled up in one guy’s lap.
My bare feet sunk into the sand, granules filtering up through my toes. The sands of time. Time slipping. Slipping between the cracks. All those nice clichés we use to process such things. And then of course the surf rolling in, erasing every footprint along the beach, smoothing over all traces. Like no one was ever there. Profound stuff.

One of the camping chair guys reeled in a fish, a huge thing. Out came the camera. Photos of the impressive catch. Then the clever idea for a photo of the thrashing fish next to the Shih-Poo—for scale. The fish, hanging from the line, hook still through its face, and the dog, pink bow on her head, locked eyes. Then posed for the camera. And the guys, they were just happy to be outside, excursioning, oblivious that the fish wasn’t having a good time. Which was fine. Because maybe they’d have strokes one day and forget about happiness altogether.

The entire flight to Toronto I was trying to calculate my share of the emissions, reconciling necessity with hypocrisy. What would Dad have said? Old Bleeding Heart’s polluting the skies.

It was probably selfish to give up the non-profit job, to stop fighting the good fight so I could “find myself” out west. But saving the planet was never about saving the planet anyway. Try self-preservation. Animal instinct. Convincing myself I had a say in avoiding carbon suffocation, heat wave incineration, etc. Because a lone wolf stands a chance against the pack, right? Because creatures of habit are eager to change?

It was shoulder-to-shoulder through the terminal. At the baggage carrousel, I stood amongst fellow cattle. Outside, I waited in line for a taxi. I was back. Back in that pack.

Was it selfish to wish an end to your fear? Or maybe the fearful just weren’t supposed to survive.

Dad died yesterday. Mom was there. She was always there. For everyone. I used to feel guilty for letting her take care of me so long. I thought leaving would unburden her. It never occurred to me that taking care of people wasn’t a burden. It was instinct.

A cab idled at the curb. Spewing exhaust. I could have taken public transit, but I was done wasting time. The sun was going down. There were arrangements to arrange.

Mom would ask me to stay. I had a return ticket. She’d offer to take care of it though—everything.

Adam Giles’ short fiction has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, The Feathertale Review, The Humber Literary Review, Riddle Fence, The Dalhousie Review, and other journals. His story “Corduroy” won the University of Toronto Magazine Short Story Contest in 2013. He lives in Mississauga, Ontario with his family. Find him on the web at www.adamgiles.ca.

POETRY: SAMANTHA JONES

3/24/2021

Samantha Jones lives and writes in Calgary, Alberta on Treaty 7 territory, and is mixed Black Canadian and white settler. Her poetry appears in Blanket Sea, CV2, Grain, MixedMag, New Forum, Room, and elsewhere. She is currently a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of Calgary where she studies carbon dioxide cycling in rivers and the coastal Arctic Ocean. Find her on Twitter: @jones_yyc.

POETRY: MARYAM GOWRALLI

2/28/2021

A DISCUSSION WITH OLD MAN WHO LIVES IN THE FOREST

Old Javanese: urang [person] utan [forest], or “person of the forest”

I
In the treetops, I once saw my grandfather wrap a cigarette filled
with cloves and cardamom. Watched him take a pull and felt
the marrow      thin inside my bones. The aroma, a reminder of
places I intended to go, though they had receded into a room called
extinction. It was odd to see him there. His beaded eyes a reminder
that culture      and the wild-man were             not incongruent like
the translations may say. Arms languid and longer than recalling.
There is no need to split apart my body to search for
            the similarities.             His flapping                 cheeks
are shaped in apocalyptic medallions like my brothers. Ache
unfurls at the vision of smiling red hairs, while I remain at
the precipice    of the street below.      He starts a puff,
did you ever stop to consider that Enkidu represents
the start of the Anthropocene?

II
“I no longer have the four arms essential to semi-terrestrial living.
If we spent eighty percent of our lives in trees, we’d ache less.”
He sees            irony, a corn of          transcendental hypocrisy,
to this fir-framed house liver, but it’s his blood. In the middle
of the night, she wears solitude in the plenty of her veins and
he sews            the bones.       Clotted with     wars and grafts,
cultivations serving a new purpose: pushing nutrition further into
fissures too deep that only plantations exist there. Impenetrable
flat cacophony incurs scarcity and violence    upon
the next generation of everything. She wants to fix forever, but the paws
and fungi that used to cross paths for tea have already been replaced.
He watches      her quivering   aftereffects of stitching,
don’t let the palms take root like the Asphodel Fields,
they make you forget of the habitats that once were.

III
It’s an odd sight, to see him on a mechanical contraption,
peddles elucidating the enormity of his legs. Large V’s
jutting out like wings of a collapsing aircraft,             a spectacle
not meant to be observed. A saffron-cloak and rollup in his jaw
frees his arms for travel. This time, he has come to visit her. Axles and
            wheels              a vortex           to further phenomenological
discussions. She wants to dream of a good place, barren from
complications, but the body is hectic with museums trips and forecasts.
He enters         her cerebrum the way one enters a show,
popcorn and candies in stuffed purses. She’s read up on Heidegger
and Euripides, but the discourse isn’t enough to stop a cynical
critic of a family member. In low coos he        throws the mantle,
every person in your time is Melinoë birthed from inherited madness,
birthed from a river in the underworld. so swim through it in victory.

As a Canadian, Maryam Gowralli draws inspiration from her Trinidadian-Indian and Indonesian heritage. She is an MA student in English Literature at the University of Calgary and is the Creative Nonfiction Editor for filling Station magazine. Her debut poetry collection, Citizenship in Water is forthcoming with That Painted Horse Press in 2021. You can find her works at PRISM International, The Carribean Journal and untethered magazine among others.

FICTION: DAVID HUEBERT

2/21/2021

LIKE AN ICEBERG

“What harm could it do?” Sam says into the frozen waterfall. He holds an ice axe in each hand, a tangle of straps and carabiners jingling on his orange harness. Sam huffs mist into the air. Above us, a hundred metre wall of ice.

Ice climbing was Sam’s idea. The doctors cleared the trip to Banff, but told him not to overdo sports. He’s already weaker than he was, and he doesn’t need undue stress on his immune system. Mum went cross-country skiing on her own and Sam said he was going to the grocery store, came back to the time-share condo with his arms full of rented equipment.

“We can walk there,” he said. Lately his face has started to thin out. He was already going gaunt. But in that moment he was gleaming.

“Sam. It’s not a good idea.”

“Come on you lanky sapling!” He was smiling like a champion, the way he smiled when he talked about his art. “You were born to climb.”

I couldn’t say no.

Now he tightens his crampons and steps into the ice. “Here we go, Long John Silver,” he says over his shoulder. He climbs briskly. Lately, he’s been subtly weakening. But now his face seems to glow, and he moves quickly, even with the heavy gear.

“Like this, right?” He grins down at me, kicking his toe into the ice.

“Toe in the crampons, put the screws in every ten metres, I think.”

“What?” Sam smiles down, pounds his ice axe into the waterfall. He’s only two metres up, so the fat five-foot icicle he releases is relatively harmless. I’m just glad I searched “ice climbing basics” on the walk over, and that we’re staggered.

I wait for him to put the ice screws in and set the anchors. Then I climb up behind him, driving my axe in. On this side, it seems, the freeze is a little more consistent.

The desk clerk at the neighbouring hotel said this is a popular moderate-expert spot, but that it was still a little early and the ice was temperamental this time of year. I guess no one else decided to test a frozen waterfall for the first time on Christmas Eve.
Before long we’ve found a rhythm, grinding the ice axes in, huffing into the cold, blood flowing. The axes are light and powerful. The waterfall could be a little more frozen—the odd large chunk sloughs off when the axe hits. But it feels just solid enough.

We hit a hump in the waterfall and walk flat-footed across a ridge. Who would have thought simply walking on crampons would be the craziest part of all this?

The next bit is the last tongue, a sheer climb of thirty metres. Dig, toe, tug, breathe. After the last screw, Sam climbs impossibly fast. He’s a little crazed, hard to keep up with.

“Is it too late to say this is stupid and crazy?”

Sam grins down at me. “Two choices,” he calls. “Up or down.” I haven’t seen him so happy in weeks, maybe months, maybe ever.

I dig deep. Toe-in, axe, smash, pant. I’m sweaty, tired, hungry, cold. But I’m almost there. Another chop, some ice chunks off. Then I get the axe in, the last one, and I see my brother’s hand reaching out.

“See,” he says, pulling me up the top. “It wasn’t that hard.”

He’s flushed and beaming. I’m thirsty and sweaty.

Sitting on the top, we look out on the snow-cloaked vista, unpacking our sandwiches and cold trail mix. The pines droop with yesterday’s snow. Sam starts talking about water, about ice. “Staring into the ice all the way up,” he says. “It was so intimate. Wasn’t it?” I shrug like “yeah” and he goes typical Sam, saying how crazy it is, how we take it for granted that an entire river can freeze and thaw, liquid becoming solid, then changing back.

“We don’t see it,” he says. “The world’s all around us. All this surging wonder and we don’t see it. We just walk through it like ghosts.”

He pauses, swallows a bite of sandwich. All around us the mountains towering, hunching like great still gods.

“Sometimes,” Sam says. “I think it takes a sickness like this to really live.”

I don’t argue that. I just let the words hang, breathe, dangle. I let my brother feel what he needs to feel.

“Sorry,” he says eventually. “I’m being morbid again.”

In the distance there’s a road cutting through the mountains, sun glinting off the hoods of SUVs. Sam points to a distant peak and we watch an eagle drift down, then rise again, riding a thermal. A wind passes through the mountains, shaking snow off the branches of the smaller trees.

Fishing through the trail mix for an M&M, I gesture around at the vista. “It is beautiful up here. Satisfied?”

“Yeah,” he says, standing up. There’s a strange glint in his face. “Absolutely.”

Carefully, he brushes the snow from his legs. Then he smiles at me, the look in his eyes gone manic. He says, “I love you brother,” and starts to run. Races full speed in his crampons, tearing for the edge, the hundred-metre drop.

I stand up and take a step but it’s useless. He’s already at the brink. Already leaping, spreading his arms like wings. Over the lip of the frozen river my brother hangs, for a moment, and falls.

A friend once told me that grief is like an iceberg: most people only see the tip of the pain while the bulk broods in the hidden depths. I’d like to go see one someday. They don’t come up the bay, wouldn’t make it past the peninsula, especially these days. There are more and more of them now that the glaciers are calving. Some are as big as Jamaica. Ice islands floating in the open sea. I would have liked to go see one with Sam, if he was still here. Maybe one day I’ll go out to sea, and I’ll think of him as I watch one bob and melt, float out to the great Pacific garbage patch.

“And then,” Sam says to the people gathered in the living room. “I jumped. I flew.”

It’s February now, and Sam’s confined to a bed in the kitchen. The palliative care nurse Cass’ mother helped to arrange is more or less living with us. As he waves them, excited, his arms are strangely thin. Around his mouth he has the wrinkles of a forty-year-old smoker. So wrong beside his youthful eyes.

There’s a room full of people—Mum, Cass, Jeremy, even Roger—gathered for my birthday. We’re eating my favourite: grilled cheese with singles and peanut butter ice cream cake. Sam is being as charming as possible, telling the ice-climbing story like this great exploit. Like it’s funny. Which, maybe it could be, in another place and time.

“And then he asks, ‘You satisfied?’” Sam chuckles, takes the plate of cake Cass is handing him. “We’re up there on the side of a mountain looking out over all the pines, the winding frozen river below.”

He starts fumbling for the plate. He’s clearly having trouble, getting frustrated with his fork. He’s getting some weird looks. Everyone’s waiting for him to tell the story or take a bite. He reaches his fork forward and misses, sighs, circles back.

When Sam jumped off the edge of the frozen cliff, I didn’t realize he was still strapped in. Even still it was stupid. He broke two ribs crashing into ice and sprained his hip from the drop. When I walked to the edge and saw him dangling there. “I needed to do it,” was all he’d said. “I needed to feel it. I needed to feel.”

He knocks the cake onto the ground. Everyone is tense, trying not to grasp. No one says anything. Mum watches, stunned. She stands up but can’t seem to move. “Um,” she says.

Sam is glaring at her, then the window. His jaw is set, his face thin, frail, his arms shaking.

Cass stands up. “Okay,” she says to the room. “It’s probably time to go.”

People stand up nervously, gather their things.

Sam grins morosely, perversely. “Happy birthday,” he sings with an awful off-tune melody. “And many more.”

When we were little, maybe eight and ten, Sam and I went swimming alone. There’s this beach at the edge of Sych Harbour, if you follow Hill Street all the way up and back down again. It’s a day’s bike ride there and back. Mum was working the day shift and Sam had just started looking after me on his own and he took me there. We brought sandwiches and a thermos of red juice and biked all day but when we got to the beach we didn’t stop. We biked past the hillocks and the tall grass to a place where a river led out to the sea. “You have to go hard and fast,” he said. “Straight across. There’s an undertow.” I heard “under-toe,” pictured a wire-haired gnarl of a toe that grew up from the floor of the river and tried to grab small children. We waded in and found it strangely cold in the full of summer. It wasn’t wide but it flowed fast. “Come on,” Sam said, and I waded in behind him. He leapt and started swimming and I watched the water twist him. Watched it turn his body and push him diagonal to the sea, the current taking my brother away. Stood there wanting to follow him but shocked still. The rush was taking him, torqueing him, though he was working hard, wailing his arms up and over, pushing and pushing with all his power until finally he reached the other side, crawled wheezing to shore. As soon as he had his breath he turned back to me. He’d gone far, far, down the river, halfway to the open mouth of the sea. But when he cupped his hands and called out, I could still hear him, barely. And I could hear the grin in his voice. “Come on,” he shouted, shivering with cold and joy. “It’s amazing! The river—it’s alive!”

The thing about icebergs is that they melt, and there’s something beautiful in that: ice leaking into water. Because when you zoom out, you see that ice was water all along. Water changes from solid to liquid, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone.

I didn’t follow him that day. I waited and watched as he swam back across to safety, through the living river. I knew, then, that I would never be as alive as he was. I knew that life was both in time and beyond it. And I knew that my brother was a tossed stone rippling the river of me.

David Huebert’s fiction debut, Peninsula Sinking, won a Dartmouth Book Award and was runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. In 2020, David published his second book of poetry, Humanimus. A new story collection, Chemical Valley, will appear in fall 2021. David teaches at The University of King’s College in K’jipuktuk/Halifax, where he lives with his partner and their two children.

SONG: THE UNCOMMITTED

2/21/2021

WE SHIT PLASTIC

Stooling myself to death one pellet at a time,
filling my pants with bakelite scurf and microbeads of phenol-formaldehyde

We shit plastic!

Polymeric slime from my thermoplastic gastric sac
synthesized into my cosmoplastic casket

POETRY: CASSANDRA CERVI

2/20/2021

RESTORATION

the morning sky behind my office building
was a fading orange:
an old painting before restoration,
colors hidden
behind clouds

it was the type of orange
I could almost taste:
the cloudy memory of my Nonna’s knotted knuckles
peeling oranges
in the golden hour glow of
lazy
summertime afternoons

the type of orange
I could almost hear:
the distant creak of my Nonna’s
backyard swing’s
rusting hinges

I walked through the
orange haze
into the office,
where there were no orange tastes or orange sounds
just walls
too white to hold
anything at all

when I left,
the sun was long set,
its morning colour, already a memory
I’ll never
quite
restore.

THE OTHER SIDE

we fell in love
outside

legs
swinging
out of tree branches
whispering wonderings about the ancient history of its bark,
about the long-lit office building windows on the

other side

of the river
that carried ducks and swans and geese
and tissues and
plastic bags and
empty vodka bottles and
fast food trash

our first date
we snuck onto the city
train tracks
one side overlooking the
sunlight-adorned stream, the
autumn leaves falling like slow tears the

other side

overlooking
a parking lot

we walked through
a forest with no path
beside ourselves
with our discovery
chattering about how more people should
fall in love
outside

until
we came upon
a deer
eyes wild with panic,
limbs entangled in
plastic Halloween decorations

Cassandra is a Strategist at a marketing agency in Toronto, having graduated with an Honors Specialization in Creative Writing and a Master of Media from the University of Western Ontario. She has been published with eMpower Magazine, The Feminine Collective, Beautiful Losers Magazine, Pip Magazine, The Impressment Gang and Synaerisis Press. While studying at Western, she published a literary and arts zine to raise money to support the International Planned Parenthood Federation. She currently serves on the editorial board for Room Magazine and is always looking for new ways to connect with and serve her community through the arts. Twitter and Instagram: @cassandracervi

POETRY: RONNA BLOOM

2/20/2021

THE FUTURE

I saw the icons of my generation trashed, pounded, run over.
Sunlight, Madge, we were soaking in it. That box that held our Kisses
was flat. Lifestyle came undone so that life was hanging on by the grate
and style underfoot. What happened is everywhere.
"The future is in plastics," said the man in The Graduate, and it is.

One night last century, I dreamt I sat on a high wall, an open book
on the ground and the sea rose. Be careful the book! I called.
The water came anyway. What is precious and who cares and how much?
To each her own footwear in the apocalypse. It’s not just the litter, it’s the latter.
But some people notice. Someone took these pictures.

In Australia, fire eats the houses.
In Venice, someone's couch was swept into high water.
Tourists looted the Vuitton store and swam away with the goods.
Since Tom Waits isn't dead I call out. What am I seeing?
Misery’s the river of the soul, he says. Everybody row.

The young are out mopping, because there's no school when
there's no school. And the old, well, it doesn’t matter how tired and dazed you are
when you’re up to your knees. All you can do is wait. The tide will turn.
Sunlight. The real thing. Until the next siren. Fire and water and fire and so on.
Sisyphus that old trooper. Sisyphus is us.

I SAID TO THE SUN,

"Good morning, I love you. But please can you also go to Venice?"
They are drowned from exhaustion, mopping up.
'We are down on our knees', their mayor said. And as if too much
feeling added 'but only when praying.'

The sun was not political. She said, "I’ve been here
since the beginning but I’m not alone.
The sky is my company and the ocean is riled
and there is unholy steam from the ground.

I should stop my breathing in California,
Australia, across the Amazon they don’t want me.
The earth is my mirror. Cracked and dark. Or soaked.
Wherever I go, I am too much, and not enough."

And the sun shone weakly. Which was not enough.
Didn’t know if she was coming or going
and she was both.

A voice said, "remember, when your Republic really gets into trouble
there is only one way out: SAY YOU'RE SORRY
THEN BUILD A SPECTACULAR CHURCH, GRAND
ENOUGH TO CATCH THE EYE OF THE MADONNA! It works!"

I looked at the watercolor of Salute Cathedral built by plague survivors
in 1631. That floor I'd stood on with its mesmeric tiles.
Today, locals stream in for Festa della Madonna,
light candles.

If I were down to my last pennies of hope, would I fling one into a flood
and make a wish? Throw a coin and see which side faces up? Look there?
My eyes are open and on the sky. What we love cannot save us.

The sun is down now and searing the other side.
And I am writing from the present to say,
"Goodnight, dear friend. I hope you find some
peace tonight, though you turn and turn."

THE NIGHT THE RHINOS CAME

The night the rhinos came we had nowhere else to look.
They were not accusatory, but trotted towards us like big dogs.
One turned her face left to show us her profile,
batted one eye at ours and fluttered there. To watch
a three-thousand-pound animal flutter makes a great gape of awe.

The children shrieked: He's looking at me!
For size is often male,
and scares or flatters us with its attention.
But she has nothing to do with that.
And trots away.

If this were a dance, a dream meeting,
we might bow and leave her.
But someone among us here is dreaming
power, will buy a rifle,
run out and begin the killing,
is already having nightmares, planning
an illustrious future.

It's still possible to love
how small we are
in the face of her face
and our fragility.

Acknowledgements

"The Future” was published in “The Litter I See Project” in February 2020.

The voice quoted in stanza 5 of “I Said to the Sun” is Cat Bauer’s from her blog "Venetian Cat, The Venice Blog: Venice, The Veneto and Beyond”
November 23, 2013

“The Night the Rhinos Came” was commissioned for the symposium “Rhinoceros: Luxury’s Fragile Frontier” which was held in Venice, Italy in 2018 and published in the exhibition catalogue. It was also published in Canthius in 2019. In 2021, it will be included in a special issue of Luxury: History, Culture, and Consumption focused on the Venice symposium and edited by Catherine Kovesi.

Ronna Bloom is a teacher, writing coach, and the author of six books of poetry. Her most recent book, The More, was published by Pedlar Press in 2017 and long listed for the City of Toronto Book Award. Her poems have been recorded by the CNIB and translated into Spanish, Bangla, and Chinese. She is currently Poet in Community at the University of Toronto and developed the first poet in residence program at Sinai Health which ran from 2012-2019. Ronna runs workshops and gives talks on poetry, spontaneity, and awareness through writing.

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