Amelia Does

CHEAP MEDALLIONS

The milkman of Cheddar started off in business school. Lefty Orange sold
cheap colonial-style bronze medallions out of his coat lining.

One day he was outed by the mayor at a flea circus presentation at the edge
of Cheddar.

Lefty ran home and scurried under the gate, hiding outside in the doghouse,
wearing only a grey wig.

When the ninth night fell, he was back on the streets doing what he was
born to do.

Lefty was in and out of jail for four decades. One too many times and Lefty
learned a valuable lesson.

You can prowl the streets peddling delicious milk in a white uniform and
truck. But you’ll never be accepted by the bovine community. And you’ll
get all the familiar thrills of selling cheap medallions.



Amelia Does is an Ontario writer whose work has appeared in Acta Victoriana, Cineforum Italia, and Incite Journal of Experimental Media. She is the author of two chapbooks (The Yellow Piano and Baby Eat Violin), a biography (Do Not Look Away: The Life of Arthur Lipsett), a forthcoming novel (The Coming of Jarbina), and a children’s book (The Walking Tree and Other Stories).

Allison Chisholm

MY UNRAVELLING

Well, maybe I did
clamour around the subtle sense of luxury.
During the angular movement
I disfigured a Sanskrit scholar.

But maybe I didn’t
abandon the child prodigy
and the metabolic processes
like two drops of sadness
abundant on the teaspoon.

Pee break.

Our mutual decay
and your untying of my apron strings
occurs each Wednesday
or when hanging from the branches.



Allison Chisholm lives and writes in Kingston, Ontario. Her poetry has appeared in The Northern Testicle Review, the Puddles of Sky chap-poem The Dollhouse, The Week Shall Inherit The Verse, and the Proper Tales Press chapbook On the Count of One. She played glockenspiel in the Hawaiian-dream-pop band SCUB. Her photography has been exhibited in the Tiniest Gallery.

Amy Dennis

LIGHTNING

                                        i am
                                        a hushed

                                        daughter,
                                        the smaller. made
                                        in her. raised in her dark
                                        house.

                                        electric light silent, reminds
                                        i can write. overwhelming weather
                                        with swollen

                                        grip, ink
                                        rain, translate
                                        skin as sky,

                                        firefly
                                        firefly
                                        firefly





Amy Dennis received her MFA through the University of British Columbia and continued her studies at Harvard University, where she was a reader for The Harvard Summer Review. In addition to publications in England, Wales, and France, Amy’s poetry has appeared in over twenty Canadian literary journals, and in the chapbook The Complement And Antagonist Of Black (Or, The Definition Of All Visible Wavelengths) (above/ground press, 2013). She recently completed with distinction her PhD on ekphrastic poetry and new confessionalism. Amy lives in Ontario.

Stephen Brockwell

AURORAS, BORIS, ALICE

They remembered the night
auroras felted the summer sky
with green and golden hat
ribbons the way felters do
when they make hats
not for the young
who buy lids after all
(one wonders what interior
landscapes are made visible
when one pops said lids)
but for the forsaken
for whom much saké
has been poured and into whom
many tears have been eye-dropped—
all that rice!




Stephen Brockwell has nothing to say of biographical interest. He is, however, an Ottawa poet whose most recent books are All of Us, Reticent, Here Together (Mansfield Press, 2016) and Complete Surprising Fragments of Improbable Books (Mansfield Press, 2013).

Ally Fleming

HIDE, HORIZON

If you linger at a pool
my mink heart surfaces, chirps.

Waves break against bone,
lick clefts into edifice.

Pet frenzy,
something sweet between its teeth,

wild for your glance, it wants
in fathoms.

Nabbed animal,
my million eyes:

this depth for you, now, only –
this, us –



Ally Fleming is a poet and reviewer who lives in Toronto. Her work has appeared in CAROUSEL, Canadian Medical Association Journal Blogs, This Magazine, and the chapbooks The Worst Season (Anstruther Press, 2017) and What Happened Was: He Flew (serif of nottingham editions, 2011).

Tom Cull

INVASIVE SPECIES

European green crab
Purple loosestrife
Zebra mussel
Sea lamprey
Emerald ash borer
Didymo
Gypsy moth
Sub-Saharan Zeus moss
Asian long-horned beetle
Phragmites
Karaoke
Giant hogweed
Asiatic carpe diem
Common buckthorn
Northern snakehead
Killer shrimp
Rusty crayfish
Brown spruce longhorn beetle
Mountain pine beetle
Sirex woodwasp
Dutch oven
Butternut canker
Common crested brohammer
Japanese knotweed
Garlic mustard
Dog-strangling vine
Alfalfa blotch leafminer
Stuffed crust pizza
Prussian drone operator
Eurasian witch lemming
Holy Roman trebuchet
Oriental weather loach
Asian swamp eel
African clawed frog
Spanish slug
European yellow-tailed scorpion
Red-eared slider
Water hyacinth
Gangis Kanye
Jayden
Eurasian wild boar
Burmese python
Tyrannosaurus rex
Giant African land snail
Three-sceptred monarch
Herb-crusted salmon
Panko-crusted tilapia
Tilapia
Open-concept kitchen
Spotted eastern gulch
Barrel-chested man-child
Three-steepled tree weevil
Right said Fred



Tom Cull grew up in Huron County and now resides in London, Ontario, where he teaches creative writing and serves as the city’s current Poet Laureate. His chapbook, What the Badger Said, was published in 2013. Since 2012, Tom has been the director of Thames River Rally, a grassroots environmental group that he co-founded with his partner Miriam Love, and their son, Emmett. His first full-length poetry collection, Bad Animals, is due out in spring 2018 from Insomniac Press.

Délani Valin

 

TERRARIUM

Inhale ire and exhale worry. Hot-box your bachelor suite, pray

over holy basil chamomile concoctions for the frazzled

rhizomes of your sympathetic nerves. Bury the bones

of the animals you wish you didn’t need to eat.

Medicate: rum, milk thistle, rum, repeat. Pack the wounds

with mud and try to carry on. I come in with a shovel

but I also carry the hum of a million mundane car rides,

I’m asthmatic, with jagged gravel specks embedded in my feet, pollution,

my bleak, dogged atheism. Cleanse me. And I will help you

tie the twined, dried lemon balm and lavender from the ceiling. Sow

a row of carrots in your bed sheets. Sneak in all of the endangered

arbutuses and oaks. Plant little succulents in the countertops, and feed

honey to the moss spreading across the shower walls. Filtered

water for the willows, and coffee grounds for the fig trees. Lay with me

on the dirt-covered linoleum and place your pomegranate seeds

on my tongue. Let’s turn this soil together. Look how good, how grounded.

Délani Valin studies Creative Writing at Vancouver Island University. She won the 2017 Long Poem Prize from The Malahat Review and the Lush Triumphant Literary Award for her suite of poetry, “Modern Myths.” Her writing has appeared in subTerrain, the Canadian anthology Those Who Make Us, Adbusters, Soliloquies Anthology, Portal, and elsewhere.