I am standing in a cemetery eating a breakfast burrito, Kyla. In its aesthetic wisdom the city irrigates this cemetery by pumping water through black tubes so that our dead, however problematically they lived, god rest them, will reincarnate as big dead trees with burgundy rotting blossoms. Don’t worry, Kyla— I know how death works. […] More »

I was writing a quiz in organic chemistry when you texted me. It was the first time I ever missed a test. Technically, I didn’t miss it because there were five quizzes per term but only the four best counted toward the final mark. You thought it was funny that I was there when you […] More »

I say your name and I do grieve. All names dredge the deep, but they fail to take heed and sprout. Hereabouts, mustard seed got choked by conglomerate needs rendered too economic. Scrub grass debriefs our fields. Old Dutch farmers sing about crop yield and claim to have never yielded, but wrote wills to sons […] More »

We stapled your promise inside our eyelids. Now we sleep to the image of you with a tapered blazer and leather suitcase whispering: if you work hard you can have this. So we wake at 7 a.m. Cook our lunch. Women daub makeup on their irises and men stuff their bicep muscles with protein powder. […] More »

  In the kitchen everyone is talking about Kendrick Lamar. Health Goths. Social workers. Lovers being just a little bit mean to each other. But who am I to judge? I who watch nature documentaries in the bath.   The bride-to-be stretches her toes on the sofa. I sit beside her and look at photographs […] More »

Stinging cells tip the tentacles fringing the polyps’ mouths. Family to sea anemone, hydra, and jellyfish, corals live in many-minded masses, anchored to hard surfaces, growing together in sync. They grow over centuries, agglomerating into reefs by secreting exoskeletal calcium carbonate under their derrières (or, they poop the architecture of their limestone foundations). Cities of […] More »

On the way to my first day at my new job in Edmonton, it finally happened: I found my soulmate. Thick brown hair, oystershell ears, baby blues that laserbeamed out from under a fringe of butterfly lashes. Shoulders wide as the Milky Way. Hands that could palm the moon. I was in love but he […] More »

My mother had given birth a few months ago. I thought it was odd, as she just turned sixty recently. I had not seen her pregnant. But there it was in the room, all formed. A baby boy. I didn’t know what his name was, only that she told me I could have him, if […] More »

in the end they say all poems are about hope but out of money I took this poem’s hope and pawned it I spent the money on a rhyming dictionary went home and looked out the window from my apartment you can see Hamilton mountain which is really just an escarpment like a mountain without […] More »

I met Ana at a girls’ school where I taught French to her fifth graders, and lived in residence until June, in a room overlooking an all but abandoned airport. Ana and I spoke little during the first six months—the winter months—only becoming friends when the weather changed, skin already bruised, bearing a sudden heat […] More »

after joshua jennifer espinoza here, no one is birthed only pieced together. i tire myself out pretending to have a body. everyone worships feelings they don’t have names for but no one is talking about it. love is a burning house we built from scratch. love keeps us busy while the smoke clears. history lays […] More »