Editors: Sarah Varnam and S.E. Chaves Graphics Editors: Sarah Varnam and Sara-Jane Gloutnez

Concept and Design: S.E. Chaves, Ari Derin, Shawna Dimitry, Sara-Jane Gloutnez, Jack Hostrawser, Sarah Varnam and Matthew Walsh

Contributing Writers: S.E. Chaves

Ari DerinShawna Dimitry

Devin P.L. EdwardsSara-Jane Gloutnez

Jack HostrawserJohn NymanSarah Varnam

Matthew Walsh

Table of Contents“Not One” by John Nyman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

“Summertime” by John Nyman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3

“100 Best Love Poems” by S.E. Chaves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

“It Is This:” by S.E. Chaves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

“Asymptote” by Jack Hostrawser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

“Firebug” by Jack Hostrawser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6

“Intestate” by Jack Hostrawser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7

“The Rabbit’s Head Social Worker” by Ari Derin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

“Rudy’s Last Day of Love” by Ari Derin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

“Aged” by Sarah Yvonne Varnam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10

“Straight Spine” by Sarah Yvonne Varnam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11

“Germany” by Sara-Jane Gloutnez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

“Sponge” by Sara-Jane Gloutnez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13

“The Hardscrabble Elegy (For Stompin’ Tom Connors)” by Matthew Walsh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

“Springtime” by Matthew Walsh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15

“No Sisyphus” by Shawna Dimitry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

“Rusted Penny Fountain Wish” by Shawna Dimitry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17

“Quinquagesima” by Devin P. L. Edwards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18

“Right the World, Max” by Devin P. L. Edwards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Sing to me oh goddess Muse.

– Homer, The Iliad

John nyman

Not One

I saw a pregnant woman on the buscollect a blonde-haired, red-tied ponytail.I read a sign that advertised a sale

for men’s suits, catching troughs of sun glowin its gloss and spitting it back out intothe sky. I watched a music videothat sang: seventy millions of people

do this, do that, keeping the number hallowed,the notes shivering with the strength of the sumof all those unique humans, differences swallowedtogether. The best numbers are not one,

though you say we have that many minds and souls.I’d dissolve if I argued, guarding thoughts too muchlike zebra mussels or flocks of white seagulls.

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Summertime

How do we survive this drought?Stop trusting the water spout; instead,use your hands dry, make bread, gainmastery of what grows against rain. Red,blown open dolphins beached dead sproutin heat haze. Our best minds back out, feignimpotence, and these odd results remain.

No scientist, even in tears, can explainthe sting of the mundane. Throughoutour cities there was a blackout; bedswere made in our cool summer sheds. Withoutanything to do, we worked out inanegames, propane-grilled our grain-fedchicken breast with a cold salad spread.

Most years, when the sun gets big, I treadalong park trails, tracing dry sled lanesup hills. It helps me maintain devoutprinciples. I have little doubt. Again,though, it’s tough. Weaker plants are slain, bleddown to brown crisps. But we’ll still head out,safe under a strange courage, and strong as a shout.

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S.E.ChavES

100 Best Love Poems Stay me with flagons,comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love—of being defeated by all that love is.

You once came to mein the speaking silenceof a dream, but nowI’ve the lightest heart I’ve ever known—Knowing that what you were will not happen again.

I hardly taste you at all for I know your savourComfortably:Bitter grapes which gathered through the vine

And though you sing Charmingly and sweetIt amounts only toFutile winds (Even if you by starlight by candlelightby dream lightor all through the nightwaking sigh my name.)

Do you understand?I can keep my soul in me so that it doesn’t touch your souleven if your cloud-soft hair is moist with fragrant mistit has lost its marvel

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And so,to little or no purposeyou’ve spent many daysopening the curtains of your beingwhile I still standa stone against the sky

It Is This:

How will we meet again?

Stamping feet have embossedSmooth black asphalt

With glittering shards of salt

This will be our magpie bridge

* * *

The intimacy of a subway car

A yellow light flickeringAs forearm brushes forearm

Baby hairs tangle for a moment

My lap is weighted with black plums

* * *

Staring out the window at intermission

The cool glass bears this outline: The hip of grey twill trousers pressed

Against the hip of gold silk

Two pale faces etched on passersby

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JaCk hoStrawSEr

Asymptote The event horizon of a black hole marks the end of time for all observers. Since c must be conserved, you will need infinite time to cover infinite distance if you wish to escape. Look uplike a drowning swimmer. The sight you’ll see is every sight left to see: the universe accelerating to

singularity

and out you fly, naked, toward a new asymptote. Time slows from infinity; chaos expands into order,with perfection as your limit,an entropy of failure.

The distance between the almost dead and the recently livingis nothing.

Firebug

Your average suburban detached has a hole (cumulative) the size of an open magazine, a big open window blowing your heat (and money) out into the atmosphere and tussling the whiskers of the rats (Roof or Norwegian) that scurry in to grease their little paths through studs and between the wires (live, neutral or earth wire) and plumbing (copper, brass or plastic) in the floorboards whence they spread their filth and reach out to pull down your own alchemising disease (Lassa fever, hanta-virus, leptospirosis) from base elements that also feed the undulating insects and larvae that are eaten by shifting spiders in legion, unnameable, lurking in blindness in darkness whose stars are the deep pinprick corners of three-prong electrical outlets (NEMA 5-15) and moon the little hole in the baseboard behind the cabinet with the decorative John Wayne plates and that same framed picture I’m holding now of the house itself with its slatted nickel siding and the eaves dented by hail crusting a toast of roofing shingles infected with mould (Acremonium, Alternaria, Aspergillus, Cladosporium, Fusarium, Mucor, Penicillium, Rhizopus, Stachybotrys, Trichoderma) above the driveway trees that should take up the spurts of my butane (C4H10), collect it in beads in the folds of smooth maple bark, but don’t and remain green even as I light the glossy 4x6 again—just as the windows don’t crack and the firemen don’t ventilate the roof and the tar doesn’t drip and the carpet doesn’t dissolve and the furniture fumes don’t stain any walls and the polyester comforters don’t flow off the beds because pictures are too tight, too sealed up, and the photo’s always gone before your flame can take hold.

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Intestate We call these red geographies mountains, valleys, desert floors by analogy only, for these are not mountainsand this is not dust.

We, the colonizers of heaven,we brought with us our final breaths—the greatest men and womencanned with our words.

I knew a place where the earth reached up in dark, silent treesand the grey sky reached down, where I practiced being alone before everything.

I took those breaths, bigger than any,and inhaled centuries— in those last years of my lifeon Earth I named all things.

Here I exhale upon the heavens and suffocate.We have no privilege here.This is the spacebeyond language.

All we have are words.

I looked back. I’m sorry.I looked back.

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ari DErin

The Rabbit’s Head Social Worker (excerpt) It was fall, and the rotten wood siding had just received a fresh coat of mauve paint. Hidden by thinning tall grass and ancient maple trees now masked by shades of amber and crimson, it seemed as though the tavern had been built in antiquity. Inside, a tattered pack of red Aviator playing cards protruded slightly from a dead man’s breast pocket. He had been lying on the barroom floor since morning. Wrapped be-tween his stiff, pale fingers was a slender headband made of felt. The Annabelle clock, which hung squarely above the bar, ticked on over the dim buzzing of the pool tables’ neon lights. From a distance, the crunching of boots on gravel could be heard. It was the bar’s regulars, right on time for their afternoon drink. The two men walked in methodic silence. It had been around nine the night before when the lost traveler had arrived, leaning on a cane made of crooked bamboo. He had stood in the doorway before entering. On one of the many worn red stools had sat an elderly man sipping what looked to be whisky. On the bar in front of him had been a notepad and an ivory pen. As the traveler had made his way to the far end of the bar, the elderly man had extracted a single short du Maurier from his pocket, lighting it carefully with a match. As he’d casually puffed away, he had glanced upwards at the clock. Both men now sat in waiting, intent on the steady ticking of the clock. The barroom was clean, aside from the acrid smoke, which lingered long after closing. Everything had its place, from the spirits organized by age and purpose to the evenly spaced coasters set out for every customer. Old movie posters displayed in cheaply-constructed frames hung on all four walls. The most colorful of them, a poster of “Papillion”, was mounted beside the door.

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Rudy’s Last Day of Love (excerpt)

Two baby clones basked in fluorescent sunlight. Newborns, as Rudy would some-times affectionately call them. The tiny dorm room smelled of feet and Old Spice. This morning, the pungent flowery stench of purple Kush lingered in the stale air. The room was a mess. A construction vest, old sweatshirts, and a few aced essays on the evils of neo-liber-alism littered Rudy’s bare mattress. Even more garbage covered the dingy carpet. “Give me that will you bud?” he said, using the remnants of his empty coffee cup to point to an envelope caught underneath my shoe. “A T4 form,” I smiled. “You won’t need that, will you?” On the desk in the corner were a few neatly packed zip locked bags. An expensive-looking grinder was placed on top. He swivelled in his chair, produced a pack of rolling paper from his wallet, and went to work. I watched as he extracted the fine green mixture between the steel spikes of the grinder, transferring it with care to the envelope, and then finally onto the rolling paper. Picking up his coffee cup, he skillfully peeled a sliver of the Starbucks crown into a makeshift filter. Rudy would always use the cardboard sleeve of his short Americano to roll because it made the best filter. Not that it really mattered. The smoke wasn’t actually being filtered. I suppose cardboard is good because it’s firm, and because it’s firm it holds the joint together better than a paper filter would. I always thought his hands moved with the precision of a surgeon’s.

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Sarah varnam

Aged i.

Prayer filled fear like warm wine, richwith the full-bodied flavour of faith.

Now bottles run dry and thoughts turn sour.

ii.

Washing dishes, fingers slip:a long open vein in a glass.

Skin snags on shards;vinegar stings chewed lips.

iii.

I try to refine my palate, to knowwhat flawed paradigms taste like.

Perhaps slightly too sweet, with an aftertaste of salt and iron.

I still bite.

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Straight Spine

He steps on a line and breakshis daddy’s mind, every action in their house meant to be as precise as threading a needle, buthe tends to tear his clothesclimbing trees, while his father fights the windas leaves dance away from his rake.

He’s seen his mother stand outsidein autumn, no coat, early morning,as seed helicopters whir down into her hair.Or eat an overripe plum without a knife and fork and plate, juice sweet on her fingers and chin, drops sliding down her wrists, a small sticky puddle on the kitchen table between her elbows.

His father catches her as if she’s on the edge of a cliff with her toes over the edge, savouring the possibility

of falling.

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Sara-JanE GloutnEz

Germany

I was born smelling bloodflowers. It was the year the Berlin wall fell. It was the day the Yanks bombed the Japs until their skin melted off.

The sick sweet smell of bloodflowersseeped out of my skin like sweat until the other children sensed it on their feelersand when I bled it was the same dark red as bloodflowers.

When my body changedI drank bitter tea until my teeth fell out.I wrang all the sweetness from my fresh breasts and left petals on the bedsheets of the boys I turned into men and stained their fumbling mouthsred.

I sprouted them in the fields of my footprintslike a little bloody Buddhaand when I walked along the beach I saw the prints of all the feet this sea had washed.

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Sponge

Thirsty particulates crawl toward sunset out from the blanket blackness of cavernous ignorance. Soot colouredSeptember settles like snow flakes in the grandcanyon of his foreskinshe worships at the altar of an alternative;the knees of knowledge baked into faded vermilliontiles, these miles of desertCathedral floor patterned with constellations of cross-cut persimmons,a sand-sky sowedin dried apricot earth—the peasant’s house.

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matthEw walSh

The Hardscrabble Elegy (For Stompin’ Tom Connors) Anyhoo, We’ll do that gumboot cloggeroo,for you, the Great Provoker, see you spit,not give a shit down there in Minnesota,and we can’t say what and won’t say when,but we’ll rip the tar and count the stars ’til we see ya again. Took us down through Mactaquacjust to kiss the soil, took us down and took us deep,had nothin’ to do with oil. Up and down the highway, people saw that black hat toddle, oh,little things you said and sang, some regular Aristotle.

It’s cold to the ear but hot to the tongue that you had to leave your dear. The riverskeep on going; the Chocolate one ran clear.I imagine the eye of every tater cried, a terriblething to hear, and romances really do gored, red as soil or hair, so imaginethe ones we wouldn’t a got if ya had that nickel for beer.

Don’t gotta move the moon to move a pen,so giv’er to the ground, cause you won’tget to it to get at it again, and we’re throwin’ redleaves on the mound.

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Springtime How in the flameof your Bicyour eyebrows fly upmoth thoughtfullike you understand the night,your arm around the warm night.

Open mouthed, Iyawn in your foliage,in the chemoof amens, the lacunaeof echoes, the hulaof your tongue,the cameo of aches,the couleeof your tongue.

How I could drownface down, under a coca-colaof stars, a fizz of eons,in the dark amonga menuof tight-lipped flowers.

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Shawna Dimitry

No Sisyphus I’m thinking of a Marilyn quote:“If you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.”So all the folks who’ve ravished me on days glazed light bright, but upon lesser laughterare hazy to the admission of our connection—they slip through by cerebral.

It shark-attack stings, but I’m okay.I’m done with resentment,with debating if I’m enough for anyone to love,because I’m at a place full of hailstormsof kisses and hugs not sold by Hershey’s. I’ve realized to move up is to forgive,because we don’t all live the same.We can’t always expect to give what we take,get what we want,what we need,

But we gotta keep rolling.’cause the stones may be heavy,but there’re dimpled grins at the top of a hill.So climb,’cause you’re no Sisyphus.

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Rusted Penny Fountain Wish Bed sheets creased from countless encounters make connections processed like cheese, not reincarnation. Recycled sweat-infused one-night stands erect a monument to the unexceptional.

I’m leaving this place of careless caresses between forgettable ejaculations. I’m searching for connection seamless in timelessness, where a he and me become “We”.

I want to fall asleep to clichéd emoticons.I want to be Cleopatra, Warhol-Inspiring, Candy Apple of Someone’s Eyes Special.

I want a fellow to trace me: temple through mangled mermaid hair, counting speckles of yellow around my pupils. I want to be someone’s rusted penny fountain wish.

So on bed sheets creased for me, my legs will lengthen around heating hips of a he placing me in plurality. “We”: me and a he, who threw a penny into a fountain as a child and never shared his wish.

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DEvin P.l. EDwarDS

Quinquagesima He fancies himself a genius, but instead comes off as a strange kind of quasi-intel-lectual journalist who is constantly reporting on events without truly understanding what they mean. He wants to be a diamond in the rough, and does seem that way, but when you know better you realize he’s just quartz. Flipping through the newspaper’s business section, he quips a likely-contrived opinion about the economy.

“We’re on a regular upward swing, which I think will continue throughout the week, but keep an eye on the futures market and when prices start to fall jump on it.”

I’m not an expert, but I know that’s a fairly meaningless piece of advice. I’m wonder-ing what exactly he’s advising me to do when the whole experience starts to make me feel a little queasy. I hang out with this guy all the time. People see me with him, associate me with him.

“It’s been a strong quarter, but companies are over-reporting. They want consumers to feel confident.”

I’m about to question him on what exactly “it” is and who exactly “they” are when my confidence wavers. Instead of the sharp, biting response I imagined, my voice quavers and I say, “Well, uh, what does that mean?”

His eyes display that I’ve just failed some kind of quiz and behind his quirky smile, for all his efforts to ensure the appearance of charm and wit, his weak-will folds and he re-veals a sharp and quick-quilled guile. He is truth and poetry becoming, in a moment, bile. A well-formed quatrain descending into a quagmire of quotes and clichés.

I don’t think he quite realizes (or is willing to admit) that the day is over and the game is up, so he refuses to quit. His face reddens and I can see his body-temperature rise. Cracking his knuckles, he rubs his hands together and almost visibly shakes and perspires. Barring the presence of mosquitoes and quinine, I prefer to conclude that he’s getting excited over his forthcoming over-explanation. I, having broken the status quo by asking about his areas of expertise patchwork quilt, am forced by the others who didn’t to endure the cacoph-onous marathon of regurgitated facts and figures alone.

I attempted to unmask him—and intend to—but he doesn’t know it yet.

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Right the World, Maxfor Max Baru A sonnet should be written freely, Max,but it should still, most certainly, follow the rules.Rules can make or break a sonnet. The factsare: A poem that does not follow the schoolsof thought is simply not a sonnet at all. 5Make a free-verse, unrhymed poem instead,and, for your own joy, you cannot a sonnet callthis unruly school boy of a poem who has fledfrom form. I say, “Fake the rules, Max, not breakthe rules.” Remember this: Write from the heart, 10but right from your head remember, no mistake,it is the rules, Max, the rules that make the art.Max, I tell you this for you, and for poetry:Follow the rules and write your poems freely.

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