Category: Issue 15

            The trailhead’s gravel lot opened onto a meadow shimmering with red clover, primrose, and fireweed, even in early fall. Most mornings, Meg and her pack of spoiled mutts—their owners too busy, or just too rich, to hike their own dogs—had the ridge to themselves, not a human want or word for miles. The promise…

                  Red earth smells like my daddy when he’s happy. Like he was before, when he used to sit beside me in the cane fields in his dirty work pants, put his arm around me and tell stories about when he was little like me, and believed in fairies and magic dust. Mummy smelt…

  I’m thrilled to introduce Tara Alavi as our new Payroll and Benefits Administrator. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Accounting from Polytechnic University of Tehran, Iran. In her previous job in Vancouver, she worked as the head of finance for a small start-up. A newcomer to Toronto, Tara enjoys travel, books, movies and singing.…

ELEGY FOR SABENA           1969-2007                               eyes, loud-soft with crying and with smiles.                                         –Gwendolyn Brooks Sixty-months of a dreamed glare,           away from Manhattan and Columbus,                     avenues slick with year-round verse,                               way up in back of the Poconos. Much on which to muse,           much for the notebook,                     always some other someone                               wasn’t always easy. January was picturesque:           squirrels…

I want to be worthy of living. I want to be. I keep. A band. Of horses. Up late at night. Writing poems. Like these. They are watching me right now. Saying we are resting. Our eyes. They need very little quality. Rapid-eye. Movement. Have faster pulse. & dreams. My horses. Sleep standing. & altering.…

I thought we had solved them all, these problems of humanity: how we die, and why, and who it is we ought to be. I’ve learned to count to infinity, to touch my toes, to plug my nose when I jump off diving boards; I know how to exhale when waxing my body, how much…

Leaving North Winsloe, Prince Edward Island, July 2015   As for the Japanese maple, we left it to rot on the porch, its red leaves already streaked with tar spot. And abandoned the bassoon-shaped, stunted lemon tree you kept alive for a year in the wrong climate, the branches forced open by hard, green half-fruit—illegal…

Trust that there exists                     a version of you who has set her alarm                 for seven a.m. and wakes to it        who remembers to floss to sweep tangles        from her hair        root to tip with a wide-toothed comb   before she leaves the house      that there exists      a version who leaves            the house      Trust the sober     tidy version    who makes her bed keeps her appointments     calls her mother Trust…

  Late morning, one settles down on a leaf afloat, plying his chain-mail oars, his little raft a fragile boat. My father would say darner where I saw “dragonfly.” Who knows any longer what a darner is? Time flies. Late afternoon, Lake’s hem unraveling, Sun squints toward dusk—leaning in to finish her day’s stitches. Evening…

I acknowledge salt in my palm, weight of furnace in my ears. I signed contracts with lilacs and marigolds, assumed depth of voice, its sound in my head. I plead with my body, ask her to believe in salt again, exchanges between tense and subject, verbal altercations, the mendacity of pelvis and spine— they represent…