Proceeds will be donated to RAVEN & Climate Justice Toronto. |
A warning, a movement, a collection borne of protest.
In Watch Your Head, poems, stories, essays, and artwork sound the alarm on the present and future consequences of the climate emergency. Ice caps are melting, wildfires are raging, and species extinction is accelerating. Dire predictions about the climate emergency from scientists, Indigenous land and water defenders, and striking school children have mostly been ignored by the very institutions – government, education, industry, and media – with the power to do something about it. Writers and artists confront colonization, racism, and the social inequalities that are endemic to the climate crisis. Here the imagination amplifies and humanizes the science. These works are impassioned, desperate, hopeful, healing, transformative, and radical. This is a call to climate-justice action.
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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/
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. 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.
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 change Medium: performance documentation Duration: 10m19s April 2020 change is a 10-minute performance comprised of a single-channel video projected over a lone singer. The singer’s voice first delivers a rendition of Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come through a vocoder, then moves into spoken poetry. By manipulating archived, found footage and combining it with its interactions between the body and voice, this performance confronts decolonization through an Asian-Canadian lens, notably putting the singer/speaker/artist directly into the environment being challenged. Created and performed at the wake of the pandemic, change’s main function is to respond directly to the xenophobia, Sinophobia, and unabashed racism that the current COVID-19 pandemic and biased mainstream media encourage. James Legaspi is an emerging Filipino-Canadian multimedia artist currently completing an undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto and Sheridan College, living and working in Brampton, Ontario. Recent activity includes work exhibited at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto and Gallery 44, curatorial work at the Blackwood Gallery, professional experience as a teaching assistant at Sheridan College, and participation in the most recent rendition of Visual Arts Mississauga’s Creative Residency.
If you missed our Word on the Street Toronto event, you can watch it here. In Watch Your Head, poems, stories, essays, and artwork sound the alarm on the present and future consequences of the climate emergency. Ice caps are melting, wildfires are raging, and species extinction is accelerating. Dire predictions about the climate emergency from scientists, Indigenous land and water defenders, and striking school children have mostly been ignored by the very institutions – government, education, industry, and media – with the power to do something about it. Join us for a conversation with editor Kathryn Mockler and anthology contributors Carleigh Baker, Simone Dalton, Christine Leclerc, and Carrianne Leung on their calls to action for the climate crisis facing us all. The City Imagines series is presented by The Word On The Street, a national celebration of storytelling, ideas, and imagination. About the Panelists
Carleigh Baker is a Cree-Métis/Icelandic writer. She was born and raised on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Stó:lō people. Her first collection of stories, Bad Endings, won the City of Vancouver Book Award. Simone Dalton is a Trinidadian-Canadian writer, arts educator, and recipient of the 2020 RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Prize for nonfiction. Her work is anthologized in Watch Your Head, Black Writers Matter, and The Unpublished City: Volume I. Her play VOWS was produced in 2019. As a memoirist, she explores themes of grief, inherited histories, race, class, and identity. Christine Leclerc lives, works and studies in Coast Salish Homelands / Burnaby, B.C. She is an award-winning author and Physical Geography major at Simon Fraser University. Leclerc serves on the non-profit boards of Embark Sustainability and Climatch. She has also served on the board of Sierra Club BC. Carrianne Leung is a Canadian writer, who won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award in 2019 for her short story collection That Time I Loved You. Originally from Hong Kong, Leung moved to Canada in childhood, and grew up in the Scarborough district of Toronto, Ontario. Moderator Kathryn Mockler edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020) and is the publisher of the Watch Your Head website. Her debut collection of stories is forthcoming from Book*hug in 2023, and she is an Assistant Professor of Screenwriting at the University of Victoria. SWANS One frigid midwinter afternoon, early for the symphony, I look out on the frozen lake. Unseasonable cold, I worry. Climate change. That moment a huge bird glides by, slow motion, long neck outstretched, black bill, wings extended, body a downy white. I’ve never seen a trumpeter swan, mythical creature, surely dreamed to life. Inside the concert hall beautiful music swirls, like the thrill of the swan, elevating me, a wild reminder I’m part of the living world, an animal too. Trumpeter swans were nearly extinct. We think we protected them. But they protect us, from the impoverishment of a world without trumpeter swans. The music ends and I rush out, hoping to glimpse the swan, what it offers us -- a rare, precious encounter with what is real, the given world. Kirsteen MacLeod’s poetry and prose has appeared in many literary journals, and she was a finalist for Arc Poetry’s Poem of the Year in 2020. Her nonfiction book, In Praise of Retreat, is forthcoming in March 2021 from ECW Press. Her debut collection of short fiction, The Animal Game, was published in 2016.
NOTES TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOCENE FABLE AT A RUSSIAN SAUNA IN MISSISSAUGA Rumpelstiltskin’s first wife, I enter and exit the steam room in a eucalyptus cloud. My rumpled robe scratches. Silt rises to skin surface. I scrub my pores with sea salt. I pull a rusted chain and a wooden bucket tips cool torrent on my head. No one in these microclimates has a name big enough for forests, for air. I am trying to outrun my recurring daymare, the one with the turret. This olive string bikini, once sinuous, is now only fit for sweating myself alive. I beg a sauna man in a wool cap to wave his parched birch wand. My inner bitch wakes up, whining. I haven’t fed her in too long. My cells realign themselves, spread around. I eavesdrop on the heat, practice different pronunciations. He ate, she ate, we ate all the sun’s treats, licked black seeds from slit vanilla beans, plucked gold croaks from toad throats. I am trying to escape the king’s wealth, the kind that slashes and slinks through holes. I get to stay here longer than all the white rhinos, the bees. Will I hand a firstborn to the burn? Infused with cedar scent, buzzing, I lower myself into a barrel of glacial water. I imagine a cryogenic prince charming carrying me, limp, into the next ice age. Soothed, I shower. Calmer and slower, I sit in the tea room afterward, drinking vodka and kombucha, replenishing my salt sea with pickle brine. A television screens our ever after, a nature documentary about bleached coral reefs, all those fabulous bows and rainbows frozen white in the sunshine. Originally published in PRISM International (Issue 57.4: Spring 2019) Catriona Wright is the author of the poetry collection Table Manners (Véhicule Press, 2017) and the short story collection Difficult People (Nightwood Editions, 2018). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Walrus, Fiddlehead, and Lemon Hound, and they have been anthologized in The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry and in The Best Canadian Poetry 2015 & 2018.
THESE ELEPHANTS IN CANADA I memory is a mammoth failure a trauma dream a Zoroastrian declaiming upon a dead star weeping on a palimpsest of archipelagos on all that remains land written upon by rising seas animals run to land when the sea spills over its speech II overwhelmed by rising I spill my coffee onto the once fecund table as it pools disorder into the shape of an elephant’s ear I gaze into the lifeless dream to hear a scattering of sound reflection III alive a brown melted glacier going tidal the hot ocean of this elephant’s sneeze a disorder of all senses uncaging unguent memories drip out into the void of human space Gregory Betts is the author of Sweet Forme (2020), a collection of visual renderings of the sound patterns in Shakespeare’s sonnets (published by Australia’s Apothecary Archive, available here: https://bit.ly/383XaTl). He is the digital curator of bpNichol.ca and a poet-professor at Brock University. His next book is Finding Nothing: Vancouver Avant-Garde Literature, 1959-1975, due out in February 2021 with University of Toronto Press.
FOXES IN MICHIGAN hundreds of pelts drip off a flatbed truck spilling faces and paws velvety tongues within our reach flap in the backdraft to the mouth of the mighty Route 66 their innards still pastel pink like Johnson’s baby oil bottles sticky from slaughter dried musk-laden riverbeds lead us to distant edges splendid piles of matted fur splayed voyageurs just foraged in the woods below hawks’ nests not knowing their future hides tanned, skins cured suspended in a forever-sleep of glass-bead eyes dashed hopes and highway lines Archana Sridhar is a poet and university administrator living in Toronto. Archana focuses on themes of meditation, race, motherhood, and diaspora in her poetry and flash writing. Her work has been featured in The Puritan, Barren Magazine, The /tƐmz/ Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook "Renderings" is available through 845 Press, and her writing can be found at www.archanasridhar.com.
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, musician, and multidisciplinary artist and has published 25 books of fiction, poetry and work for children. His latest books include For It is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems, ed. Alessandro Porco, and Ampers&thropocene (visuals) and A Cemetery for Holes (with Tom Prime). A new novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy will appear from Random House in 2021. He currently WiR at Sheridan College. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and at garybarwin.com MANY NIGHTS AGO The flowers outside my window do not cry anymore. When the war first began, and the weeds took over, they danced about; stretching their roots—perhaps to see how long they could endure it. That and the shrieking kept me up at night, but that was many nights ago. Now they fall in line—silently, with heads hung—single file. The only sound I hear, is the “tap, tap, tap” on my windowpane. "Many Nights Ago" first appeared in Kelvin High School’s literary anthology, Stream (2018). Jessie Taylor is an avid over-thinker. She loves red lipstick, latkes and fresh cherries in July. She is studying at the University of Manitoba.
DEAR PRINCE OF MELTING ICECAPS, Bliss has escaped me. I went down to our beaches. The oil-sheened, the skinless salmon, the dead algae, the greasy rocks. We are in a state. A State. The moist bliss empty, the air chemical. The rat on the roof (the political). The call was internal, societal-- I stood up from a gold chair in the dank back room of a bank; you climbed out from under thousands of pennies piled in a cellar. We were recently human, we endeavoured to cycle, we wanted to juggle, we had only just learned how to play. The State blew out our candles and we were in a gorgeous dark, directing foot and bike traffic to the bridge. I have ten headlamps, community, and you have this hunch we might get along, get along. The sea coughs up cell phones as we build our boats. A kind rat with a human face helps me carve the oars. I vaguely remember a polar bear's story, the fluff of myth. Is it the red sky or the sea? We hesitate. Jen Currin was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, on the traditional and ancestral territories of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes. She did her schooling at Bard College (B.A.), Arizona State (M.F.A.) and Simon Fraser University (M.A.). She lives and works on unceded Coast Salish territories (New Westminster, Surrey, and Vancouver, B.C.), where she teaches in the Creative Writing and ACP Departments at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
Jen’s first collection of stories, Hider/Seeker (Anvil Press, 2018), was one of The Globe and Mail‘s top 100 books of 2018. She has also published four collections of poetry: The Sleep of Four Cities (Anvil Press, 2005); Hagiography (Coach House, 2008); The Inquisition Yours (Coach House, 2010), which won the 2011 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry and was shortlisted for the 2011 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (B.C. Book Prizes), the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry, and the ReLit Award; and School (Coach House, 2014), which was a finalist for the 2015 ReLit Award, the Dorothy Livesay Prize and the Pat Lowther Award. Her chapbook The Ends was published by Nomados in 2013. Jen was a member of the editorial collective for The Enpipe Line: 70,000 Kilometers of Poetry Produced in Resistance to the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline Proposal (Creekstone Press, 2012). DRONES Debris skirting breakers for miles – tub ring murk, shells suckered to trash and kelp like surf store necklaces. Grand Bend backwash. Scolded not to wade, children wearing bucket hats fill cups with mussel remains, raising each lumpy haul to the sun, the glint of marble shards. Toss them back in with a plop. By the docks, suburban fishermen curse the clear water driving walleyes deeper. Muttering about the crowds, rip cording their motor boats, spraying white fans against the waves. Under the pier, a teen wings in his drone to film locals with paint scrapers stripping shells from wooden legs. They yell get lost. He calls back it’s footage for a school project on damage from invasive species. David Barrick’s poetry appears in The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Event, Prairie Fire, The Antigonish Review, The Dalhousie Review, and other literary magazines. He teaches creative writing at Western University and is Co-Director of the Poetry London reading series. His first chapbook, Incubation Chamber, was published by Anstruther Press in 2019.
OBLIVION A Response to Don McKay Not no thing, but our fear of obliteration treats naming as an end. What species can conceive of nothingness? Shield moraines pines beechleaves magpies honeybees snowfleas cells do not tolerate a void. Man might be the unintended side-effect, the by-product of nature, since humans sense absence, which does not exist. The air, no longer a divine canopy, still teems with molecules, chemicals, atoms, and yet, man persists in declaring nothingness. This is a lonely species. Perhaps the origins of dwellings, man sectioning himself off, started with the walls of his body filled with isolation where there is none. Perhaps he believes he has the right to name the space between things, can perceive the end of all things. He precepts and nothing is worth his preconceived notice; he notices nothingness and does not see anything of note. But his species dies, man ceases, and the death rattle betrays that he does not know what nothing he will be. Mallory Smith is a Creative Writing and English PhD candidate here at the University of Calgary, and the current Artist in Residence to the Cumming School of Medicine. Her thesis poetry collection, Smutty Alchemy, looks at the re-telling of scientific information in verse, materiality, and the work of the 17th century philospher, scientist, and writer Margaret Cavendish. She has interests in photography, recipe making, canoeing, theatre, gardening, and bookbinding.
GREEN CAME INTO MY LIFE THROUGH A HOLE IN THE CEILING I was gestating the mountainside, as my father sustained betwixtment. the curvature of the earth was cone-like, before we ruled out old age—the lips hung like gravity failing. in the sun had a hedgegarden, if I groomed a mine-swallower, I, the tongues of hummingbirds animated, had a burglar alarm; only dogs spoke in a variety of dialects, their mouths corned. out of my shoulder, a man unable to reach low-hanging fruit, a palmful of water. * if brains lip the thoughts caught in the eyes of muscles, there are heavenward bodies cloth-pinned. had the mercy been brainless, our shrivelled sun is a highway sliced through hills. Tom Prime is a PhD student in English at Western University. He has an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Victoria (Specializing in Poetry). He has a BA at Western University. He has been published in Carousel, Ditch, Fjords Review, The Northern Testicle, The Rusty Toque, and Vallum. His first chapbook, A Strange Hospital, was published on Proper Tales Press. His latest chapbook Gravitynipplemilkplanet Anthroposcenesters, was published on above/ground press. His collaborative collection of poems written with Gary Barwin, A Cemetery for Holes, is available from Gordon Hill Press.
EXTINCTION CHRONICLES 1662 In 1662, the crew of Volkert Evertsz’s ship was marooned on Mauritius. Spotting a plump bird, he grabbed the bird by its left leg. The captured bird let out a cry which attracted more of the birds. The entire flock was taken and subsequently eaten by the stranded Dutchmen. Five days later, the crew was picked up by a passing ship, leaving behind the well-gnawed bones of the last documented sighting of the Dodo. 1800 In 1800, the Giant African Snail was imported to Mauritius by Governor General François Louis Magallon de la Morlière as a potential food source. From there, it spread eastward: to Calcutta in 1847 by W. H. Benson; to Ceylon in 1900 by Oliver Collett; to Taiwan in 1932 by Kumaichi Shimojo; and to the Caroline Islands by Junki Miyahira and Palau Island by Shoichi Nishimara in 1938. By 1967, it had reached as far as Tahiti. It soon became apparent that the Giant African Snail was, in truth, an agricultural pest, so the predatory Rosy Wolfsnail was introduced to many South Pacific islands as a method of biological control. Instead of preying upon the Giant African Snail, however, the Rosy Wolfsnail preferred endemic tree snails to devastating effect. Since its introduction to Tahiti, for example, 71 of that island’s 76 species of Partula snails have become extinct. 1826 In 1826, the HMS Wellington made port in Lahaina, Maui. Sailors, rinsing out water barrels in a local stream, introduced mosquitoes to the Hawai’ian islands. The introduction in turn allowed for the spreading of avian pox and avian malaria. As a result, the Oahu Thrush, the Oahu O’o, the Oahu ’Akialoa, the Kioea, the Oahu Nukupu’u, the Lesser Koa Finch, the Ula-ai-hawane, the Oahu ’Akepa, the Lanai ’Akialoa, the Kona Grosbeak, the Hawai’i ’Akialoa, the Greater Koa Finch, the Hawai’i Mamo, the Greater ’Amakihi, the Black Mamo, the Lanai Hookbill, the Laysan Millerbird, the Laysan Honeycreeper, the Lanai Thrush, the Hawai’i O’o, the Lanai Creeper, the Laysan Rail, and the Bishop’s O’o were all extirpated from the islands. 1840 In the mid 1840s, the three Icelandic sailors Sigurdur Ísleifsson, Ketill Ketilsson, and Jón Brandsson were asked to collect a few Great Auk specimens for the Danish natural history collector, Carl Siemsen. On the 3rd or 4th of June, 1844, the three sailors arrived at Edley Island. There, Brandsson and Ísleifsson each strangled a bird. There being no other birds about, Ketilsson crushed an egg under his boot. These were the last of the Great Auks. 1894 In 1894, David Lyall was appointed assistant lightkeeper on the recently inhabited Stephens Island. In June of that year, Lyall’s cat, Tibbles, started to bring him carcasses of a previously unknown bird, the soon-to-be-named Stephens Island Wren. By 1895, Tibbles had hunted the Wren to extinction. 1900 On March 24, 1900, Press Clay Southworth saw a bird eating corn in his family’s barnyard. Unfamiliar with the strange bird, the 14 year old shot and killed it. Several years after the shooting, the state museum in Ohio determined that this was the last authenticated record of a Passenger Pigeon in the wild. 1902 The Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore is legendary, primarily for the Singapore Sling, first concocted there by Ngiam Tong Boon in 1815. Less well known is the Billiard Room where, in 1902, Charles McGowan Phillips, the hotel’s general manager, shot a tiger which had sought refuge under a billiard table. It was reported that, in the process, Mr. Phillips ruined his coat. Not reported, however, was that the tiger was the last on the island. 1918 By the end of the nineteenth century, settlers had managed to exterminate only four species of bird endemic to Lord Howe Island: the White Gallinule, the White-throated Pigeon, the Red-fronted Parakeet, and the Tasman Booby. In 1918, the Makambo, mastered by Captain ‘Stinger’ Rothery, ran aground on Ned’s Beach, allowing black rats to invade the island. These rats managed to exterminate the Vinous-tinted Thrush, the Robust White-eye, the Silver Eye, the Tasman Starling, the Grey Fantail, and the Lord Howe Gerygone. In addition to these outright extinctions, the rats also extirpated the local populations of the Kermadec Petrel, Little Shearwater, White-bellied Storm-Petrel, and Pycroft’s Petrel. In the 1920s, the Masked Owl was introduced in an attempt to control the rats. The owl managed to exterminate the endemic Boobook Owl, but not the rats. 1936 The Thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian Tiger and Ka-Nunnah, was one of the few marsupial predators. In 1824, Thylacine discovered that sheep were easy prey. This resulted in a private bounty being established by the Van Diemen’s Land Company in 1830. The VDLC bounty was supplemented by a government sponsored one in 1888. The government bounty was cancelled in 1912, while the VDLC bounty persisted another two years. In the summer of 1936, the Thylacine was proclaimed a protected species by the Tasmanian Government. Alas, the last Thylacine (named Benjamin) had already died of exposure at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart on September 7th of that year. 1943 In 1943, one of the last refuges for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Louisiana was slated for logging by the Chicago Mill Lumber Company. Asked by the Audubon Society to aid in setting aside a preserve for the bird, James F. Griswold (chairman of Chicago Mill’s board) responded by saying, “We are just money-grubbers. We are not concerned, as are you folks, with ethical considerations.” The last confirmed sighting of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Louisiana was in April of 1944. 1954 At one point, Lake Victoria contained well over 500 unique species of Furu, also known as Cichlid. In August of 1954, J. Ofula Amaras (a Kenyan fisheries officer) introduced Nile Perch into the lake by means of a bucket. This was done with official sanction in the interest of increasing the value of local fisheries. For 30 years, the Nile Perch (a voracious predator) co-existed with other fish, having a relatively benign effect on the local ecology. In the early 1980s, however, a slight increase in the number of Furu led to a population explosion amongst the Nile Perch. Within a few years, over 90% of the total species of Lake Victoria Furu had been eaten into extinction. 1964 Prometheus was a Bristlecone Pine located on Wheeler Peak in Nevada. In 1964, Donald Currey, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina, was conducting field research on the climate of the Little Ice Age. In the course of his research, he attempted to core-sample Prometheus. After breaking his only increment borer (a $200 drill bit), Currey, with the permission of Donald Cox (a forest Service District Ranger), cut the tree down. Subsequent analysis showed that Prometheus was almost 5,000 years old, making it the oldest living known organism at the time. 1997 On January 20, 1997, Grant Hadwin swam across the Yakoun River on Haida Gwaii. A former forester, Hadwin had decided to make a statement protesting the exploitation of old growth trees on the Haida Gwaii archipelago. Once across the river, he made a series of deep cuts into the trunk of Kiidk’yaas, a striking 300-year-old Sitka Spruce that due to a genetic mutation had golden (rather than green) needles. Kiidk’yaas was a culturally significant tree to the local Haida. Two days later, Kiidk’yaas toppled in a winter storm. 2006 Sometime in 2006, onboard a research dredger off the coast of Iceland, James Scourse did what he has done hundreds, if not thousands, of times before: he threw a small Ocean Quahog clam into an onboard freezer, preserving it for later study. On that very same day, Ming the Clam did something that hadn’t occured even once in its 507 years: it froze to death. 2014 Lafarge, a multinational construction company, owns the mineral rights to Guning Kanthan, a limestone hill in peninsular Malaysia. As is the practice of the company, they are in the process of razing the hill to procure limestone used to manufacture cement. The north side of Guning Kanthan is also the exclusive home of six species of snails. The most famous of the six measures a mere 3 mm in length and was, in July of 2014, named Charopa lafargei in honour of the company that will drive it to extinction. 2016 Late October, 2016, gardener Paul Rees of Widnes, England, found a peculiar Earthworm in his garden. Named Dave by Paul’s stepson George, the worm, at 40 centimetres, was twice as long and over five times heavier than the average Earthworm. In fact, it is thought that Dave is the largest worm ever recorded. In the interest of science, Rees donated Dave to the Natural History Museum. Dave was transferred to the care of Emma Sherlock, whose speciality is worms and other related animals. The first thing Dr. Sherlock did, as might be expected, was to euthanize and preserve the specimen. 2018 On March 19, 2018, Sudan, a male Northern White Rhino, died at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy if Kenya of complications. Well loved, he is survived by Najin, his daughter, and Fatu, his grand daughter. He was, as you are surely aware, the last male of his species and Najin and Fatu are the last two females. Michael Maranda is assistant curator at the Art Gallery of York University. For the past thirty years he has been engaged with the visual arts sector in Canada, as artist, organiser, administrator, curator, editor, advocate, publisher, critic, and, more recently, as quantitative researcher. He runs the publishing activities of the AGYU, and is a prolific commenter on social media. Maranda was educated at the University of Ottawa, Concordia University, and the University of Rochester. His work has shown internationally, primarily in artists book-related venues. For some deeply ironic reason, his rip-off of Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations was exhibited in several of Gagosian’s gallery spaces.
NYCTALOPIA n. the inability to see in dim light Reason drips and to me it speaks to my radical, lost dreams it shrieks yet suits on Wall Street they say, they say, what are you doing, where are you going? Compartmentalize these things. My throat closes and wonders, when will the cared-for things, will the weather-worn things break from their binds, my stomach pushes my insides in two billion knots of plastic rouge. That should be enough money to buy a roof, that should be enough money to buy a noose, that should be enough money to // Reason slips and to me it speaks to my sweet, soft, youthful delusions it shrieks yet suits on Wall Street they say, they say, come play, come stay! Compartmentalize your dreams. TELL ME THESE THINGS AND I SHALL TELL YOU MINE I was taught shyness, they ask for a volunteer I was taught propriety, see women are not meant to go there I was taught silence, so to stand up for myself and other people of colour means that I feel the need to say sorry, to you. For simply being, well, here. Yet the world is clearer from here. From here, from this place where I happen to sit I might just believe that I might, just be a person whose skin tone does not make me, the definition of who or what I am, perceived— by you so, here is where you may find me. Where you may, because I say, stare into my eyes and watch me as I stand up to you, calmly shore up to you, hands clenched in to fists at the insolence that you are unaware, that you are. Ellen Chang-Richardson is an award-winning poet, writer and editor of Taiwanese and Cambodian-Chinese descent. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, Unlucky Fours (Anstruther Press), Assimilation Tactics (Coven Editions) and snap, pop, performance (Gap Riot Press); the founder of Little Birds Poetry; co-founder/co-curator of Riverbed Reading Series; and a member of the poetry collective VII. Her work is forthcoming in The Fiddlehead, untethered magazine, third coast magazine, among others. Ellen currently lives and works on the traditional unceded territories of the Algonquin Anishinabeg First Nation (Ottawa, Ontario). www.ehjchang.com
EPITAPH I should’ve known when I was born my palm lines were light and cut short if I walk the beach I walk the line cadavers and shards shore against my feet I saw on the news a white man brought a snowball in court admit into evidence our invincibility, we’ll live I’ve been chewing on plastic since too old for faith, too young to die follow smeared geese shit on the sidewalk to Neverland each day the red sun goes into the drying ocean and I ask: will you come back for me? is it funny or tragic? we will all end up sharing one tombstone here lies a monumental collection of fuck-ups ask me then, oh neighboring bones where have I been and where did I really come from. Akshi Chadha is a writer based in London, Ontario, Canada. She is pursuing an Honors Specialization in English Language and Creative Writing at Western University. Her work has previously been published in The Roadrunner Review, Symposium, and SNAPS. She is committed to addressing issues surrounding race, climate change, and feminism through her writing.
SOUTHERN GASTRIC-BROODING FROG Rheobatrachus silus collected by David S. Liem Australia 1972 adult male 38.4 mm snout to vent slate-coloured smooth, slimy skin prominent eyes, black with gold spots round blunt snout jaws close snap inhabit boulder-strewn streams, spend days submerged summer rains initiate breeding females swallow fertilized eggs, tadpoles develop in the stomach, are birthed through the mother’s mouth fully-formed froglets spew forth 1978 summer rains late 1979 rains very late 1980 & 1981 rains late again last seen in the wild December 1979 last captive frog died November 1983 Extinct THE CALL OF THIS SPECIES The grunting of a pig a hen cackling the bleat of a sheep the low bellow of an ox a cricket singing near the water a dog’s bark a duck quacking young crows cawing a delicate insect-like tinkle a broken banjo string a finger running over the small teeth of a comb a squeaky door being slowly opened a carpenter’s hammer the tapping of paddles on the side of a canoe a cough a watch being wound a nasal snarl a low-pitched snore two marbles being struck together sleigh bells the clangor of a blacksmith's shop P-r-r-r- pip-pip-pip-pip poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo purrrreeeek cr, cr, cr cre-e-e-e-e-e-p, cre-e-e-e-e-e-p pst-pst-pst queenk, queenk eeek! kraw, kraw, kraw jwah, jwah ah, ah, ah, ah krack, krack, krack ca-ha-ha-ac, ca-ha-ha-ac, ca-ha-ha-ac pé-pé, pé-pé kle-kle-kle-klee cran, cran, cran, c-r-r-en, c-r-r-en creck-creck-creck cut-cut-cut-cut ric-up, ric-up, ric-up ru-u-u-ummm ru-u-u-ummm grrruut-grrruut-grrruut-grrruut grau, grau gick, gick, gick, gick tschw, tschw, tschw wurrk, wur-r-r-k trint-trint tr-r-r-onk tr-r-r-onk, tr-r-r-onk! The call of this species has not been recorded THREATS fragmentation of forest clearance of cloud forest movement of the cloud layer up the mountainside timber harvesting landslides ice in the montane grasslands late rains severe dry seasons drought-related increases in evaporation successive fires extending deeper into the rainforest slash-and-burn agriculture cattle grazing illicit crops irrigation practices illegal mining guerrilla activities construction of a dam upstream construction of a cable car pesticides used in maize farming upstream airborne pollution conversion of habitat into a golf course Las Vegas invasion of mist flower introduction of the Bullfrog non-native trout safari ants feral pigs lack of genetic diversity heavy parasite loads exportation for the pet trade stress due to handling for data collection over-collecting chytridiomycosis chytridiomycosis chytridiomycosis
Kate Sutherland lives in Toronto where she writes poems, makes collages, and teaches law. She is the author of three books: Summer Reading (winner of a Saskatchewan Book Award), All In Together Girls, and How to Draw a Rhinoceros (shortlisted for a Creative Writing Book Award by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment). A new collection of poems, The Bones Are There, is forthcoming from Book*hug Press in Fall 2020. These three poems are part of a longer sequence about extinct frog species which will appear in its entirety in the new collection.
BLAZE ISLAND: AN EXCERPT Miranda woke in darkness. She was riding a fierce wind. The changes were not going to stop. Someone was moving about below her, and the small sounds would have been reassuring, except that it was only a little after five a.m. Whoever was below had lit a fire. Heat ticked in the metal chimney on the far side of the room, the ticks speeding up. Miranda whispered to Ella, the dog, not to stir. Through the half-open door of her father’s bedroom, she took in the tussle of his empty bedclothes, reading glasses tossed atop his dresser. Always there had been secrets in this house, and she had surrendered to her father’s desire for them, the things they’d kept hidden about their past, other things he’d attempted to hide from her and she’d allowed herself to ignore, but a new impatience surged as if she were struggling to climb over the fence that encircled her. Downstairs, in his coveralls, eating a slice of toast at the counter, her father turned sharply at the sound of her footsteps. “Miranda, what are you doing up?” “Couldn’t sleep.” She kept her voice as low as his. He’d made only the one mug, not a pot, and everything in his posture made her presence an intrusion. He wasn’t welcoming her, she was merely slowing his escape. “Why don’t you go back to bed. There’s no need for you to be up so early.” But she was wide awake. “Where are you off to?” His face relaxed into a smile. “To see if by some miracle I can access the internet at the cabin.” “Can I come with you?” It was an impulsive thought, and he said no before adding, “There’s no need for that.” “Why not if I want to. Are you meeting someone?” He shook his head. “Best to have one of us stay with our guest.” Our guest, she thought, and then, more possessively, my guest. Something else gnawed: Would her father lie to her? Had he before, would he again? Did her own safety make the lies justifiable? “Dad — the plane that landed at the airstrip the day before yesterday, who was on it and what are they doing here?” Her father gulped down the dregs of his tea and set his mug in the sink. “Miranda, I need you to sit tight for a bit. Can you do that for me?” He was ruffling her hair, asking her to do something for him once again. She shook herself free, some essential part of her refusing to be deterred, a new resolve forming in her throat. “Why won’t you answer me? I’m supposed to do what you want but you’re always hiding things from me — saying we should never leave then inviting people here and going off with them. What are you actually doing? Whatever you’re up to, it isn’t just weather monitoring, is it?” “Miranda.” He stepped into the middle of the room. “If I’ve kept secrets, it’s only been for your own good. Things are in such a precarious state. I’m trying, from this out-of-the-way corner of the world, to do everything I can—” “What if I don’t want to be protected like that?” He didn’t have an answer, other than to show her that she’d jarred him. When he hugged her, the strength of his embrace stopped her mouth even as she struggled to say more. The next moment, with a rustle of jacket and shudder of boot, her father was gone. Always when she’d allowed herself to think about the future it had been shaped by the contours of the past: how else did you envision what was to come other than by reconfiguring what you knew? There were days when, swayed by Caleb’s suggestions, Miranda had imagined living with him on the far side of the cove even as another part of her retracted from the dream. She had assumed that somehow Caleb and Sylvia would be in her life forever. What she loved would always continue, how could it not? More often she’d seen herself living in the little white house in Green Cove with her father and Ella, taking care of her father, because he needed her to do this. She’d ruffle Ella’s fur, meet her brown-eyed stare. There’d be more animals, because she wanted more, she would tend the land, build a bigger greenhouse, listen and note each time the wind shifted, there would be order and safety in such a life, in its deep choreographies and self-sufficiencies, in being responsive to sea and sky and the wild and ragged weather growing wilder all around them. There had been ruptures and alterations, but nothing had shaken her fundamental belief in the continuity of this life, given to her after the biggest rupture of all, the catastrophes that had sent the two of them fleeing to the island: everything here was proof that, despite grief, a new life could be made. Even the rupture of losing Caleb, painful as it was, had somehow been bearable. She’d gone on. They all had. Now, though, the world looked so different she wasn’t sure she could step back into the body she’d inhabited only a day ago. Catherine Bush is the author of five novels, including Blaze Island (2020), the Canada Reads long-listed Accusation (2013), the Trillium Award short-listed Claire’s Head (2004), and The Rules of Engagement (2000), a New York Times Notable Book and a L.A. Times Best Book of the Year. She was recently a Fiction Meets Science Fellow at the HWK in Germany and has spoken internationally about addressing the climate crisis in fiction. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Guelph and Coordinator of the Guelph Creative Writing MFA, located in Toronto, Canada, and can be found online at www.catherinebush.com. ![]() Blaze Island: a novel By Catherine Bush Goose Lane Editions, 2020 Synopsis The time is now or an alternate near now, the world close to our own. A devastating Category Five hurricane sweeps up the eastern seaboard of North America. On tiny Blaze Island in the North Atlantic, Miranda Wells finds herself in an unrecognizable landscape. Just as the storm disrupts the present, it stirs up the past: Miranda’s memories of growing up in an isolated, wind-swept cove and the events of long ago that her father, once a renowned climate scientist, will not allow her to speak of. In the storm’s aftermath, things change so quickly and radically that she hardly knows what has happened. Blaze Island asks how far a parent will go to create a safe world for a child and how that child will imagine a future. A gripping story, the novel unfurls in the midst of constantly shifting elements: drifting icebergs, winds that grow ever wilder, and the unpredictability of human actions. { judith }
COLONY COLLAPSE Survivors crawl across withered black comb, invisible apocalypse, sisters wandering lost in the corn fields, seduced by filaments of silk, the toxic pollen. Scooping up death-- no distinction between friend and foe, all obliterated in service of unblemished fields, poisoned bees littering the ground. The low hum of welcome washed into air, torn apart by a breeze. Sent down streams like the limbs of Orpheus; the queen perched on her throne, wondering who will come to feed her. Regal head tilting patiently, big eyes surveying the decay. Where is her long train, her cloak of swarming bodies, tight as tapestry? Gone, all gone. Her own body meaningless without them. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS “Colony Collapse” has been published in a previous version in Hamilton Arts and Letters and in Under the Gamma Camera (Gaspereau, 2019). Madeline Bassnett is the author of the poetry collection Under the Gamma Camera (Gaspereau 2019), and two chapbooks, Pilgrimage and Elegies. Her poems have appeared in journals including long con magazine, Prairie Fire, Hamilton Arts and Letters, The New Quarterly, and in the anthology, In Fine Form, 2nd Edition: A Contemporary Look at Canadian Form Poetry. She is currently on the board of Poetry London and teaches in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University. She lives in London, Ontario.
VANCOUVER SEAWALL, THIRD BENCH FROM THE WATER let there be a word for how it feels to stand waist-deep in your tide let it be queer as in landfall as in the constellation of sand on a lover’s elbow or the lie that this land could be owned or queer as in the way time arranges the earth into wrinkles the mountain knows no monument can stand longer than the mountain already has let there be language for the unceded shore yielding pieces of itself to the outbound ocean call it love without ownership call it the skin between my hands and your sand and her collarbone unpinned call it queer as in grace comes from letting go of what was never ours to keep in the first place Previously published in haunt, Damaged Goods Press (2018). Jody Chan is a writer, drummer, organizer, and politicized healer based in Toronto. They are the author of haunt (Damaged Goods Press), all our futures (PANK), and sick, winner of the 2018 St. Lawrence Book Award. They can be found online at https://www.jodychan.com/ and offline in bookstores or dog parks.
SOLASTALGIA
View on Vimeo (Closed Captioning Available) Short, Lyrical, Dramatic Film Millefiore Clarkes - Director / Emma Fugate - Producer 13 mins 2019 www.solastalgia.ca Solastalgia (/ˌsɒləˈstældʒə/) is a neologism that describes a form of mental or existential distress caused by environmental change. When the panic over global crises threatens to engulf her, Ava embarks on a vision-quest to put things in perspective. SOLASTALGIA from Millefiore Clarkes on Vimeo.
SOLASTALGIA is a lyrical film that explores the anguish that climate change and a global state of uncertainty can impart upon the human psyche.
Ava, (played by Rebecca Parent) a mother of two young children, is bombarded throughout her day with news of global disasters. Over the airwaves, on the internet, overheard at a grocery store - cataclysmic stories of the effects of climate change steadily erode Ava’s inner peace. She acutely feels the burden of guilt for her entire species. She worries about her children's futures. Her mental health is unwinding as she searches for solace and a new perspective. This film is a dreamscape set to the formidable poetic verse of Tanya Davis (former poet-laureate of Halifax). It is a poetic gesture to the vast timeline of the earth and humanity's small but significant place within the web. SOLASTALGIA is a traditional drama that utilizes non-traditional, stock and archival sources for some of its imagery. It blends a straight-forward narrative with a surrealistic journey underpinned with a musical score by Philip Glass, Russell Louder and others. Funded through FilmPEI Film4Ward program.
Millefiore Clarkes is an award-winning filmmaker from Canada’s smallest province, Prince Edward Island. Through her company One Thousand Flowers Productions she produces a variety of media work: short and feature documentaries, music videos, drama, experimental shorts, and video installations. She recently received the DOC Institute’s Vanguard Award for her work as a documentarian. Her most recent work is a short lyrical, dramatic film SOLASTALGIA that explores the theme of climate grief. It won Best Canadian Short at the Silverwave Film Festival.
She has directed three documentaries for The National Film Board of Canada: THE SONG AND THE SORROW, BLUE RODEO - ON THE ROAD, and ISLAND GREEN. THE SONG AND THE SORROW won Best Short Atlantic Documentary at FIN - Atlantic International Film Fest, Best Documentary at Silverwave Film Festival, Best Atlantic Doc at Lunenburg Doc Fest, Best Mid Length Documentary at The Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival, and was a Top Ten Audience Choice at Available Light Film Festival. Her films have screened at festivals across Canada and the US and have been broadcast on CBC and Bravo! Her experimental short December in Toronto is featured on Vimeo’s Staff Picks, and her music videos have won a number of awards. She is passionate about making films that connect us to one another and to nature. |
AboutWatch Your Head is an online journal of creative works devoted to the climate crisis and climate justice.
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