I have no raisins. The larder holds no coconut. No pecans. Drat, out of nutmeg. Short one egg – O, I saw her – Aisle five, the woman who carted Last carton of eggs perhaps In the world. Her eyes above her Mouth-mask told me, ‘too bad, loser, I got here first.’ I do not [...]
Category: Story Time
“the flavour of change” by Mika Lafond
the land has changed no longer do the grandmothers pick from the wild breast of our mother we no longer move with the season with the herds since Treaty we have had to learn to find value in what the land gives us from this space where we have been placed displaced yet we find [...]
Excerpt from Cambrai by Guy Vanderhaeghe
It was eleven p.m. and the electricity was out all over Connaught. The town lay smothered in blackness except for a few windows where the light of a candle or a coal-oil lamp feebly wagged a flame. But in the Connaught Hotel, John Francis Dill’s room was afire with a grand and glorious effulgence. Minutes [...]
“Proofs of Winter” by Bruce Rice
Snow nothing more as cracks in the walk show through like veins under skin a sign for the kind of intimacy that buries its scars slips beneath the talk talk talk and finds its way a kind of rest like spaces left in the tracks of birds without loss without words [...]
“Burrowing” by Sarah Ens
The polar bear head at FortWhyte Alive considers the dust that coats her plastic tongue— she craves bite, dreams blood, hears a burrowing owl, sprinter, long-legged in the late afternoon. In chase, the bear's frozen jaw confesses: i would gather for you crickets, ground beetles, young mourning doves. The owl enclosure beams earthy sanctuary, damp [...]
“Behold, the Snake” by David Carpenter
once sewing a patch on the sleeve of an old shirt I saw you curled at my feet later I found your hibernaculum your family of gliding wonders I learned how to freeze and listen each unwinding coil an elongated whisper in the fescue you and your sisters wove down the slope around my sandals [...]
“Opening the Door” by Casey Plett
There’s no value in trying to work on an idea you don’t love. If you don’t love it, you’ll never make it sing. You need to love it. That’s more important than anything else I’m about to say. So. Opening the Door. “Write with the door closed, re-write with the door open.” This is a [...]
“Space-Xd” by Mari-Lou Rowley
Thinking about birds and wires flight trajectories missiles satellites geostationary versus low shallow 5G orbits thousands of gestapo spacecraft marching across the night sky Mars and Pluto conjunct in Leo in the tenth house communication versus Convenient Surveillance puffy clouds of lost language thoracic videogame bone pain thumbs numb tongues dumb. Who will Pay for [...]
“Red-winged Blackbirds” by Glen Sorestad
It’s the twenty-seventh day of April in the year of the pandemic and we are hoofing along the damp-from-yesterday’s-rain path through our local park and my legs are whimpering independently, while my back protests loudly from some unspecified injury it remembers, even if I can’t, when we notice first what seems to be several dark [...]
Excerpt from a Novel-in-Progress by Connie Gault
An old woman went by, pushing a baby carriage, wearing a long coat and a toque and runners, unlaced. I stood on the arm of a small t because the door to our building opened at its side and you had to walk down that path to the sidewalk. In the shade, in my shorts [...]