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 »

Joshua Whitehead has a lot to say. The 29- year-old Oji-cree, Two-Spirit otâcimow, or storyteller, often finds himself fuelled by anger: from the day-to-day frustrations to systemic-sized injustices, and Canada’s political climate and the ongoing colonization of Indigenous peoples in Canada. His collection of poetry, full metal indigiqueer, came from this fire, this feeling “of wanting […] More »

[i. daughters of triton] Little sister / seventh sister Daddy named us well // mollusk-soft daughters for a great barrel-chested bell /// We don’t chime in unless someone points a stick at us. //// Conductor of daughters, of pearly white belles ///// An empty shell is no way to pander ////// to your pitchfork Daddy’s […] More »

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The Truth is Told Better This Way By Liz Worth Book*hug, $18.00 The Truth is Told Better This Way by Liz Worth is a book of piercing poetry that reads like a very intimate confession. Worth’s poems let out their mysteries slowly and deliberately, stringing readers along a path of loneliness and grief. At times […] 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 »

Voodoo Hypothesis   By Canisia Lubrin Buckrider Books, $18 Voodoo Hypothesis, the first collection of poetry by Canisia Lubrin, is a stunning debut that acts as a “rejection of the contemporary and historical systems that paint Black people as inferior.” Each of Lubrin’s finely crafted poems is timely, as she infuses them with pop culture, science, […] 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 »

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 »

This is the meaning of hedgerows, to divert us from Googlemap’s suggested routes. They are kept, and keep us, in good order, and are well-stocked with nectar and hawthorn. It’s my intention to be replenished, though I’m limited by what can be toted from beneath the archways back to my temporary situation. My mind is […] More »