Conyer Clayton

 

PAYING FOR STORAGE

 

I pound my fist against your back

to loosen phlegm. I’ve always

told you smoking kills, but

you’d do it with ropes

and bottle tops. Your soles

unsteady on a wicker chair. 

Pour yourself into

one more moonrise.

Draw out the misery in me.

I can only see

this failing. You disappearing.

A man’s frayed face

and brittle leaves. A boulder

obscured in slow-moving fog.

I can only see

you vanished

among tall desert rocks.

Your mother says

she thinks she’s heard

the last from you,

and I can only see

the chair leg tremor.

Are the floorboards even?

Did you even check?

Conyer Clayton is an Ottawa-based writer who aims to live with compassion, gratitude, and awe. She has two chapbooks: The Marshes (& co collective, 2017) and For the Birds. For the Humans. (battleaxe press, 2018). Her work appears in Prairie Fire, The Maynard, In/Words, Bywords, Transom, and others. She won Arc’s 2017 Diana Brebner Prize and received third place in Prairie Fire’s 2017 Poetry Contest. Check out conyerclayton.com for updates on her endeavours.

Heather Birrell

FLASHMAN

i

The filmy-eyed old man went searching for him during the Polish Festival. He had a sister

but they had to put her down. There were beautiful girls wearing coronets of red flowers

drinking beer out of plastic cups on every corner.

ii

I didn’t know when I met you that any of this would happen. We were playing Scrabble on

an island closer to Africa than Spain. You used the word cozy in a way I had never seen or

heard before. We went to see a movie. La Momia Vuelve.

iii

Desert dog, street dog, half fox, half hare.

Listen. Nails clicking out circles of goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

Heather Birrell is the author of two story collections, Mad Hope (one of the Globe and Mail’s top 23 fiction picks for 2012) and I know you are but what am I? Her work has been honoured with the Journey Prize for short fiction and the Edna Staebler Award for creative non-fiction and has been shortlisted for both National and Western Magazine Awards. She lives in Toronto with her family.

Chris Banks

Garnish

Check out these invisible handcuffs. Death

is classically trained. You are free to go

on your own recognizance until the time

of your execution. Every minute is garnish.

The entrée is missing. We live under

an embarrassment of stars. Each face

is a living portrait. A work in progress.

Dreams build cantilevered balconies into 

the world. Hold this mirror. So begins

our secret congress. Let’s not meet out 

in the open. What do you wish to know?

I promise to pull you out of an earthquake.

Give you first aid. When the ocean recedes,

do not go walking amongst the fish gasping

in its wake. Head for the hills. Stay with me

one more week. Wave goodbye before

slipping into a dark limo filled with techno

and champagne. I hate the crowds so I won’t 

be at the premiere with its paparazzi. I’ll be 

working on my patents. There is this one 

for a new type of glass. When you hold 

a hand up on either side, it simulates human 

contact. Here, place your fingers like this. 

I forgot how warm you are to the touch.





Chris Banks is the author of four poetry collections. His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004 and was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review, Prism International, among other publications. He lives and writes in Waterloo, Ontario.

Tom Prime

THE HUBRIS OF THE TONGUE

the tongue is talking to itself
mumbling, shaking its head
has lost its mind

the throat is its apartment building
the throat wants back payments
the throat has called the police

the tongue is homeless
lives in empty cigarette packages
slips through the streets
a snail without a shell




Tom Prime is in the MFA program at the University of Victoria (specializing in poetry). His poems have appeared in Carousel, Ditch, Fjords Review, The North Testicle Review, The Rusty Toque, and Vallum. In 2017, Proper Tales Press published his first chapbook, A Strange Hospital.