Category: Story Time

On his Instagram, figure skater Patrick Chan poses with a dog. I don’t think it’s his dog, but it’s a dog nonetheless. I think Patrick Chan is the kind of man who looks sideways at everything first to make sure but also the kind of man who indulges in emojis. I think Patrick Chan wakes [...]

It plays like a Tarantino film: establishing shot of the long gravel road, dust spiraling, blue-sky hawk soaring above a car in the distance. Tighten to a close-up of the car’s velour seat covers, ashtray overflowing, coffee cups perched on dashboard. The soundtrack bursts through the speakers, funkytime bass blending of hiphop, rap, techno. Cut [...]

Often people who are not poets, and even some poets, think of poetry as entirely a short form—one page and you are done. Then there is another page. And another. Poetry can be this. But I would like to explore the way poetry may present itself as poetry “systems” spreading themselves, drifting through a number [...]

Bump arose one fine morning fully awake to the eventuality of his morality. He would die, he could plainly see that—not even he, Christopher Downing Bump, QC, Oxford-educated, respected by his peers and comfortably well off—was above that. But the nature of his death and its timetable were now clear to him, as one’s reflection [...]

Stare numbly at the screen as the computer, interminably slow, warms up. Needles and yarn sit on my desk within my peripheral vision, visible comfort every morning when I push the button. Cast on sixty-four, type the password, knit a row while recalling what I named the last draft. Waiting for the doc to arise out of the [...]

All I want to do is have my first decent breakfast in days and get centered. I’ve been criss-crossing the state’s highways all week. I’m here to write about two thousand-year-old Native American earthworks along tributaries of the Ohio River. Travel is the easy part. There are so many ways this could go wrong.

I do not consider myself an ignorant man though I’ll admit to having done ignorant things. I make this disclaimer because, once again, I have somehow booked online a hotel room, assuming I was booking with the hotel itself, only to discover when I’d completed the deal, I had transacted this reservation with one of [...]

Standing in the shower with his eyes closed, a few days after his second surgery in as many weeks, Erik saw two bright kidney beans of light facing each other, a dark line between them. A bad sign, said his ophthalmologist. Erik and Syl made the six-hour drive to Edmonton for a second opinion, which echoed [...]

Today you made lunch buttered my heart, grated heather hills, spread thick a warm, summer sky. Your eyes sparkled in the almond sun as you wrapped love in cling film. Outside in the apple orchard a warbler sings our favourite song. ~ This poem was first published in The Ofi Press and in First Lift [...]

They’re called procedurals, crime shows where the police work their way through bits and pieces of clues, half-statements, forensics reports. We get our fix from PBS: mostly polite British cops without guns staring hard at the landscape, trees, stones, a car, till a secret reveals itself. The sweep of the land is important, the gritty [...]