ROBIN RICHARDSON We’re Just Beasts with Big Brains Tipsy on the stoop beside a stone dog, faithful as the hurricane that claimed his face. It’s okay. The sidewalk’s arching orangetowards a chanting patch of shrubbery; it chants your name. Or does it state the ways of gods, or god, or something worse?I have misread myself for years: open as an infant crow below the worm. At my feet some German Shepherd, older than his owner, begsto
MATT RADER Lunar New Year’s Day, Year of the Snake – for Eduardo C. Corral The cross steepling St. George’s is so empty.Meanwhile, vultures cycloneTheir shadows motherfucking slowly.Meanwhile, five bisonSkulls on the barn wall sport oneOr two small black annuitiesTerminating where their brainsWould be.Meanwhile, fingerprints, Charybdis, drains. Again,All good fortune is wealth,All ill fortune the ouroboros of luck feedingItself itself.St. George’s is so lonely eveningsAfter the Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Lunar New Year’s Day, Year of
KIM FU Lifecycle of the Mole-Woman: Infancy as a Human I’ve seen this waist-high grassand weeping tree before, in a drugstore frameand a Bollywood movie, the trunk a pivot pointfor coquettish hide and seek. On the coverof Vanity Fair it had a swing,just two ropes and a plank, a girl levitatingon the tip of her coccyx. Poofy virginalwhite dress, elegant lipstick slash, Cubist chin,she had it all. Someone proposed here,votive candles in a heart, a
MATTHEW WALSH Scenes of a Sunday Dinner on Musquodobit Road They got the meat and pataytas, so all’s right wit the world.Even them cans a vegetables are smilin’. Father’s comin’ upfrom the harbour, he was wit the boys steamin’ them laubsters in the microwave on the backa Reed’s truck. Salt water sweetens em just fine.That rural rum went to his eyes, right red they were,just beamin’, but he’s temptin purgatory, comin’ through her doorlike that,
NYLA MATUK On Distance and Heartbreak Gift of grey from Man Ray,my heart was the shape of Australia.If p, then q. Incalculably wide marginalia.Plain, upside, down under, safe as houses. I didn’t trust the data accounts,the ville fourmillante’s thousand mounts.And that old dissonant airbus in the distance.It smarted like a barrier reef of a wound. On Distance and Heartbreakappeared in CAROUSEL 33 (2014) — buy it here
MICHAEL PRIOR Everything looking different, the night’s time took me so I wandered a twisting a dive, the bends transforming me,embolisms like diamonds hanging in darkness,tissue turning grey, then clear, then fracturedwith streams of white — the wings of a fly,six legs perched upon warm skinlistening to the decompressionof meaning, unfurling iridescentin my hand. Everything looking different, the night’s time took meappeared in CAROUSEL 32 (2014) — buy it here
NATALIE MORRILL Mrs. Fannie Winthrop, upon discovering that her husband is an octopus But she decides she mustn’t let him thinkit puts her off. She won’t throw the coversoff the thing, won’t draw undue attention, she,to his way of slithering gellish out their front doorMonday to Friday, radio twittering, him wavinghis hat — “Nice day, Fannie”: his gripslicked rope, the hat a Knox. She bought it for him, she remembers: his birthday, three years ago.Reservations
CASSIDY MCFADZEAN The Living Skies Struck Us Dead Most of this is coffee and metaphors,and mornings waking up in the dark.When lightning hit the gable,it shook our bed, made the radioshort out, left our fingers tingling,and when I asked you to touch my skinI almost thought I’d see sparks,almost thought we’d both be singed. But others felt it too, the dark cloudabove our houses. We were not alonein thinking light had left its tracesof ozone
Catriona Wright My Roommate is in love and can’t disguise it.Cara loitering on his lips,a tickle at the back of his throatbegging to be coughed out. When I pour milk into cerealI learn that Cara is lactose intolerant.When the radio begins to blare Wagner,he tells me Cara studied Germanat University. The strawberries he eatsare the colour of Cara’s favourite dress.The birds sing in Cara’s soprano rangeand Cara’s skin is soft as the butterhe spreads on
TERRY TROWBRIDGE Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen Puberty is the moment a man becomes beautiful.He wakes up stronger than he was when he fell asleepif he bothered to sleep at all.With a lightning-fast attention to detailsand muscles that never tire or fail to promise victory,when every setback is temporary, every thought is assuredby a galvanized body that conforms to the shape of growing, hardening manhood.Except for Jimmy Olsen. If he had a psychoanalyst, the verdict would
JANET HEPBURN Somei-Yushino Sakura (flowering cherry tree) I sit beneath a canopy of lace — exquisite, delicate veil of tissue paper circles Translucent white like the faces of porcelain dolls, faintest blush on cheek A warming wind plucks petals loose to float — confetti dots tickle spring-bare arms before frosting the lawn in cherry blossom fondant Somei-Yushino Sakura (flowering cherry tree)appeared in CAROUSEL 30 (2013) — buy it here
KATIE JORDON Waitress I see the same labourers every morning on my wayto work, they use yellow gloves that remind me of something other than yellow gloves. I want to say canaries,but there is nothing sweet or wild about them. I wear black and carry plates, glasses — full or blanked —for most of the day. An occasional, strange hand placed on my hip, the small of my back; their coins in my apron sing
LOUISA HOWEROW Jigsaw Puzzle The kitchen smells of cabbage and quiet.On the table a jigsaw puzzle,the Basilica di San Marcowhose four hundred pieces my mother sortsinto straight edges, corners, colours,greys, blues, blue-greens. I tell her I’ve seen the holy relics,bones of saints, a vial with the blood of Christ “I should have saved mine,” she saysreferring to her left kidney, the cancerous oneshe’s convinced is living healthyin somebody else’s body. I imagine her bringing the
CLAIRE CALDWELL The Summer of Dead Birds 1It was the summer of cold hands.We played bingo in the afternoons,sipping cups of warm beer. It kept the birds out. The bartender slipped us sunflower seedsin packets. They’ll grow in August, she said,fingers flapping. Our mouths too fullto reply. 2The bird didn’t know it was being rescued,the girl said. She hadn’t counted on the hotstruggle between cupped hands,the bird twisting through its brokenness,forgetting it at the sight
LAURIE D. GRAHAM The Window Blind Factory Hardshipis the endurance of atrophy. On break outside Derwent High School,now a blind factory cultivating jobs, in the bookless classrooms of industry,gymnasium lifebreath enterprise, entrepreneurial smoke-breaks or not — the women in front of the school have the same devout braids,the same homemade blouses under company windbreakers, the same empty hands. Maybe they’re made to wear uniforms. Blind into blind-slot, factory vinyl,promise of supper and a walk to
NATALIE ZINA WALSCHOTS Supervillains Charybdis wolf-bellied and writhingshe the rock to your whirlpool all bladder all mouthyou vomit seawatereffluence all salt slavering tentacle to gaping mawperfect dinner companions you shatter the vesselshe devours the crew Lex my stately pleasure dome, decree Parasite hunger gone hollow slobber shankedgnaw to marrow swallow Doom 1 grillwork rebuff skin, bitten superconductordata scatters toes to TENS unitmy circuit shortens gauntlet concave vice, blasted infraredtatters tracked heat signaturewhat alloy allows jetpack
YI-MEI TSIANG We Take Our Children Tobogganing after wrestling with boots and mittsafter packing hot chocolate, teddy grahams, extra socks,after waiting out the held-breath tantrum over zippers. We stand at the top, an impasse, clouds of breathforming a storm over their little woolen-wrapped heads. Their voices needle us, sharp and small — I don’t wanna — enough to draw blood. I hear the whir of a distant bird, air plunging through its struggling wings. Some
JAIME FORSYTHE Lavender Pulse He was in a home, had soft bones, pausedfor days between thoughts, but knew whenevery one of us was born. All those phone calls,triple ring of a rural party line as the entire blockeavesdropped. Never knew privacy. Wallsthinned to curtains; his skin became transparent.Blow-ups of his organs; amplified tune of his heart.The nurse was a man. The nurse was his son, and hisgrandson, and his best friend from high school.The nurse
JULIE CAMERON GRAY Widow Fantasies I want my husband to disappear, dissolvelike a spoonful of sugar in a cup of coffee. I want him to fall asleep at the wheelfor a distracted driver to make a mistakefor snow to conceal a slippery surface. I want it quick and painless and over in a flash.Twist of metal, bone, the shatteredwindshield a constellation across black ice.Traffic backed up for miles. I’d get a call in the night,
LIISA LADOUCEUR Warren Ellis’ Violin Because poets are like shoesbest when foreignand in translationall of ache is lost.Because sad songscan only say so muchin four minutes twentyand life is too messyfor such pretty mouths.Because words can be warpedby lips, fits, lispsand voices drowned outin dark rivers and bars. Play onyour ocean songs.Fingers singingbows for knivespiercing the skinsthat hold it all in.Those nights we pukedup desire, stumbled ashamedcrumbled, humbledby love’s lost namesthose dirty deedswhen we were