The Hart House Review

Tommy Leonard-Roy

Mon, 28 May 2012 07:54:47 -0400

From now until June, five pieces from our 2012 issue of the Hart House Review will be running every Monday to Friday, starting with the poem Two-Ring Circus by Emily Izsak, and ending with our feature pieces by Erín Moure, Jp King, and Rob Benvie.

Two People Between October 13th and 14th 2011

The two bodies in the room on the bed are functioning humans. Only one of them is closer to birth than death. They are young—younger than sixty-six percent of this country’s population—but not young enough to think that life is full of pleasure, succour, and success. This is one reason why they’re together, another being a mutual friend whose name I can’t quite remember, but it begins with an O.

Their positions go like this: side by side, facing, mouth to mouth, the delves of one body filled with the swells of the other, arms off on their own, legs indistinguishable from a distance. This is what they see: outlines, teeth when they’re showing, nose tops, eye whites, the red lipstick of one made purple by streetlight filtered curtain-blue, but no retinas, no tongues—too deep. Birth defects have been revealed, hands have been compared, and they’ve each said things tonight they’ve never said before. See the sky outside, raining and monochrome: no, you don’t. See the sock at the end of the bed. The other one fell and right now is beside a shelf of beauty products. They’ve each said sorry ten times, mostly without reason, and thank you twenty, with due cause.

If one of them were sitting at the desk, everything would be different. The one at the desk would be the doctor and the one lying down the patient, near death. Look at the pill bottles, the pillboxes, the pillows, and the window with no last view. You’re in a hospital ward or the red bedroom of a Swedish mansion. This is a final house call on the eve of winter. The doctor covers his mouth and nostrils with a handkerchief and coughs a little. He hasn’t brought his bag. He takes a document from the inside of his coat, uncaps his pen, and, at last looking at you, says

No, that’s impossible. What you thought were orbitoclasts are actually twin toothbrushes. That’s not a syringe, it’s lipstick. Nothing is being recorded, no one takes notes, and there is no humourless secretary outside the door. If he were a psychologist, he would quickly lose his license from the College of Psychologists of Ontario under clauses 2 and 6 of the 1991 Psychology Act—“failing to maintain the standards of the profession,” and “abusing a client.”

They are both capable of speech and movement but are right now quiet and still, but not silent—no one’s silent once you’ve met them. Even later, when you’re alone at your desk or in the mirror in tears, dinnerless, you’ll be able to hear them rustling, coughing, laughing in a new frequency, saying something important you never caught. Their minds lean in close and make guesses. Both swell with similar thoughts at similar times, usually within sixty seconds of each other. There are patterns they might suspect, even hope for, but never believe. Take right now. She is wondering if he is uncomfortable and whether he would say he were uncomfortable if he were, but, thirteen seconds before he has the same thought about her, she moves on to how his left eyebrow falls lower than his right, something no one else has ever noticed before, not even his mother. By now he is thinking about how much he loves her nose, and why, in case she asks. Meanwhile she considers what it would be like if you said everything you were thinking about out loud, in real time, as it happened, but the idea doesn’t make it to speech and fails right away. This is what he’s come up with: because it is unique. The real reason is that he is an impostor and can’t look her in her eyes. He recalls the date of his last shower and worries about the scent of his hair. He will never come up with it, but her hair reminds him of piano keys, outer space, and olives. She thought of his hair less than a minute ago, but about its texture, not its scent. Their hair smells and feels the same. They’re periodically almost the same person, but they’ll never know it. They’ve been together for seven hours, and this close for four. They just argued, but you wouldn’t be able to tell. You wouldn’t be to tell because right now, inside this room, atop this bed below a poster of Paris, between blankets and behind doors, across from books neither of them have read, near lotions, soaps, brushes, and lists of things to do, the two people look like they love each other. From certain angles they resemble two homo habilis huddled in a cave on a mattress.

They were arguing about how long it took for this to happen: almost two years to the day, twelve times together. If he had told her how he felt sooner, she wouldn’t have gone through one of the worst times of her life so far. He, the quiet, mediocre one, tries to remember what he was doing instead of confessing his love, and fails. He doesn’t know. Mostly he was sleeping, reading books, waiting in lines, and eating meals.

One of them moves from mouth to neck and the other murmurs “mmm,” meaning either yes or no or nothing. She’s shuddering, but not out of fear or disgust. She hasn’t seen a ghost. She isn’t remembering the first time they met. Her eyes remind him of a colour, rarer than black or brown, but he cannot remember. He thinks this is funny because there was a time when he used this word all the time. He manages to enslave only the first two letters. He hovers above her, a messenger without a message, and counts to ten. Her lips touch and reshape. The word he cannot remember is “obsidian.”

Hurry: wind opens curtains. Curtains don’t always flutter like this. They usually die after three seconds, like a voice, so you have to move forward, annoyed, and close the window. They’re open as if clutched by a specter or kept in place by someone’s infinite, traceless sigh. It’s lighter than expected. You can see outside if you look closely: people enter and exit buildings.

One of them says the other’s beautiful. Don’t think of how many people are saying that simultaneously, and how many might be lying. It’s less than you think. They can’t stop verifying and strengthening what they have. If you didn’t know any better, you might think them skeptics. You might wonder whether one of them is performing, whether both are, or if everything said since 9:13 pm EST has been completely true. Does one think honesty is immediate, unwashed, and natural—a cough we shouldn’t hold back—while the other thinks it requires deliberation, time, and delay? Both think honesty is the most important thing, but this does not mean they are always honest. Now, with your experience, rationality, and critical instinct, try to determine which person on the two-walled, twin-sized bed near a drinking glass smudged with both their prints, a closet of treasures, a hallway without story, and more identical rooms with identical beds spreading like vertebrae, is right, and who is wrong. But listen: mutters, the mattress’s response to a change of side, background unease, one long sigh. The origins of a question. You could hear more if you were with them: a third person, under the covers, in the middle, talked over. But then who would you be? Best to remain on the floor. Get in the closet or the branches of a tree. A black corner of the ceiling. No space under the bed. Hide.

“Why are you here?”

One swells while the other sinks, puzzles, cowers like some underwater anemone. This isn’t how it should be. The answer should be immediate, clear, and already spoken. It should be in the air right now; we should’ve already heard it. He shouldn’t breathe again until he says something, something good. That “um” shouldn’t have happened. If the lights were on, they’d flicker. You wouldn’t want to shower right now. She’s starting to feel disturbed, mistaken, as if he is unthinking. A machine out of order or an action figure caught in malfunction. A robot that can’t quite walk. His mind is vast and white. Every pen he tries is dying or dead. Feel that? The scissoring of the air? That flight of oxygen and contact? Ex-splendour.

“Because being with you is better than being by myself.”

There are no more sounds. Both repeat what they said aloud in their thoughts, but that doesn’t mean anything. It is hard to tell who is more disappointed. She is making sure she understands him entirely, while he is ineffectively trying to tear out whatever part of him gave rise to that sentence. You, sitting there, observe the wreckage and come up with nothing. One looks up, the other doesn’t. Temperatures compete around the thin space under the door.

This is what he should have said: because I love you and we make each other better. After the first part, the rest would have come without pain or edit. If he had said this, he would have meant it. He means it now as he finds it shivering under a piece of grey matter, wet, abandoned, and not sure what a home is. It can’t be bandaged and spoken now: it’s covered in motive like pox. She turns to the wall, a diplomat, a tragedian, or a girl learning again that people are confusing. You look away as he faces how sorrowful, yet nonetheless perfect, her back is. Someone saying something in the hallway: who cares.

A solitary bed bug makes its way down the wall on the Seine, its eyes fixed intently on the deep forest pattern of the slipcover.

Tommy Leonard-Roy is a third-year English student interested in creative writing.

Paul Hila

Fri, 25 May 2012 07:46:00 -0400

Gogol’s Nose

“Perfect nonsense goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no plausibility at all.”

—Nikolai Gogol, The Nose

A self-indulging fellow peered out the window and into the night before retrieving back into his room. The cool dimness of the four perpendicular walls smelled of wet feet. Oddly enough, his justifiable hurriedness to leave the unbearable odor sparked from an unjustifiable anxiety. He paused for an instant, enough for his elongated shadow to unfold itself under the door and into the other room, and only then he proceeded to secure the door behind him with a slight dissatisfaction. In the other room, the patients, all eight of them, tentatively opened their eyes. After the man had settled in, they anxiously turned to one another, the most they could with their limbs strapped to their beds, and began to whisper in a panicky low tone. The moonlight that had been only a thin streak of an ominous gesture, had now completely taken affirmative position, galloping over the milky white complexions and sunken features of the men. As if just out of a coma, they began to breathe heavily, taking in large mouthfuls of air while checking themselves for visible injuries. Up to this point, not much had been addressed regarding their circumstance. Perhaps they didn’t think much of their condition; maybe for most of them it was all a bad dream. Why struggle with something completely beyond them? Let the dream take its course, and no matter what occurred, the morning would bring them back to life, maybe lying in bed next to their wives. This time, as if the intruding light had transmitted shockwaves to each and everyone, they awoke with a sense of urgency and a discomforting expression. The lingering gloom that overshadowed the room for the most part of the day had been disrupted. They as well felt the disruption, as if awoken from a mild nightmare. Imprisoned since the 26th of March, they were already well acquainted with one another. A discussion sparked immediately.

“Did you see his face?” said Vladimir in a low tone, strictly addressing Ivan. They both considered themselves the cleverest of the group and had decided to keep this particular discourse from the others—not for any selfish reason, other than a group discussion led to a higher risk of them being heard by the faceless man. The faceless man, now what the hell is that, most of them had thought when they first heard Nikolai speak of his encounter. Nikolai, the eldest of them, had caught a glimpse of their captor in profile and ever since seemed madly convinced that the man had no nose. But within reason, Nikolai being the oldest and supposedly the frailest, this piece of information was received lightly by the group and even became a subject of ridicule. Together with the dim lighting and Nikolai’s weak vision, no one gave it a second thought. However, over time the tale became one of high curiosity amongst the patients, taking a strong hold over them all, so much so that thereafter the nickname remained: the faceless man. Since then, it had become clear that someone lived amongst them, a shadow that crept in and out of the room in brief periods. And when they did lay awake in hope of catching a glimpse of his face, he would slide into a reflection on the wall, becoming one with the shadows of the trees.

It was ten past two in the morning when the man began fidgeting with the knob. It was obvious that he hated the idea of locking and unlocking the door every night but it seemed necessary. As he made his way past the door, he went straight for the window. Very delicately, he went for the key in his pocket and unlocked the hasp. A gentle breeze was on the move. He withdrew his hands from his face and drew them out the window.

The wind tickled his fingers and a burst of warm air reached his face. Some curse words escaped his mouth almost unintentionally and faded out the window, merging with the whistles from the wind. From his pant pocket he extracted a white cloth and covered his face with it. With the same diligent manner as he had entered, he left like a ghostly presence that had descended upon the men.

It was too dark, Ivan was prepared to say, but as he turned to face Vladimir something astonishing took hold of his eyes and mouth. His thin lips departed in shock and both of his eyes dropped beneath his sockets. His skin loosened into a pale mist. He froze in that most terrorized expression, with two gleaming white marbles for his eyes. Then Vladimir let out a short cry. From the other room came the noise of wet feet against the polished cement floor. A few drippings of water were heard until the man made his way once again to the door and turned the knob to reassure himself, or that hesitant feeling within him, that all was in accordance to plan. As his steps departed away from the door, all fell silent.

* * *

An alarm clock suddenly went off and Mr. Gogol struck his head against the bed frame. “Fucking shit,” he mumbled to himself. Nearby, steps away or one thin layer of drywall separating the ring ring ring of the alarm from the cries of a baby, shouts were heard coming from a highly agitated woman. She seemed to be calling his name, followed by a long ramble of curse words. The cries of the baby were continuous only for a short while, for after the woman shoved a spoon in his mouth he retaliated with a gesture of his own. She ran down the hall to find Mr. Gogol, still mumbling to himself with a hand over his head, and screamed, “Wake up, you pig!” Then she hurried to the bathroom in the next room where she washed her face from the fluids her baby only moments ago threw all over her. If one were to say “all too typical in the Gogol family”, one would be overlooking a burden that hung in the tasteless expressions of them all, including the baby. Mr. Gogol rubbed his eyes, laid his head against the pillow and again fell into sleep. In brief moments, the woman’s voice interrupted his rest. He opened his lids but closed them once more. The alarm clock went off again. He smashed it with his hand and threw it across the room, where piles of newspapers had been leisurely thrown to the ground.

Headline reads: Noseless Man Goes Mad.

Nobody in all of Petersburg would have expected the unusual turn of events, least of all Mr. Gogol himself. The current news that was spreading around concerning Ivan Yakovlevich and Major Kovalyov, along with certain reoccurring nightmares, placed Mr. Gogol in a heavy mood. A feeling, he thought that morning, that would possibly never leave him alone until everything concerning this phenomenon had been put to rest. The doorbell rang from downstairs. After a few minutes passed and the door remained unanswered, loud knocks replaced the pleasant tune of the bell. The baby was still crying.

Mr. Gogol descended the stairs that lead into the living room of the house. Approaching the door, he tried to make out the person outside from behind the thin curtain of the window, but could not see very clearly. He opened the door. Mr. Gogol’s forced smile, rooting from a long line of hereditary values idiosyncratic of the Gogol family, was met by the sudden absence of the person whom he expected to be waiting behind the door. Instead, he was left there in the chilly morning in his pajamas frowning down on something that had been left on the front steps: a white envelope crisp in all corners except the middle where a bulge disrupted the flatness.

* * *

St. Isaac’s Bridge swarmed with police officers. Huddles of them on each end of the bridge observed the traffic flow, which was extremely slow in this occasion. Countless search parties of officers and noble citizens of St. Petersburg had been assembled. A large man with thick side-whiskers who seemed a head over every other officer observed the waters from the bridge. He was the officer in charge of the investigation.

Under the overpowering metal, somewhere near one of the tower foundations of the bridge, in the background amidst the cacophony of sounds, a loud gasp escaped the mouth of one of the official men. Then they all exploded with laughter. They seemed to be staring down into something. A small group of officers with one repulsed volunteer surrounded the area. They were pointing and throwing remarks of ridicule towards the object. Is it an object? A thing? What is it? Their heads hovered over it, all of them in a spiral, blocking every bit of light from entering their huddle. They turned to one another, but no one took responsibility. Should they file a police report? But on what they weren’t sure; maybe a missing persons report, suggested one of them. They all giggled. They can’t help it. Their repugnant behavior towards something so serious forced the volunteer to say something. They shoved him aside and continued with their amusement.

* * *

A lone square window up on the wall welcomed the light of day in. Gradually, but with great conviction, the light came to occupy much of the interior just before the early wakers obstructed its entrance. It caressed the dying layers of paint as its pristine shape softly thrived in the territory over the façade, under which the bed of Ivan Yakovlevich remained stone cold. The brightness swarmed over the dry crust until it could no longer hold back its passion and all at once unleashed itself onto all corners of the room. Then the door opened. First, only a fraction of a leg was visible: the elegant shin of a female covered in a stocking. It was tall and thin and sophisticated, at least in the eyes of Ivan. Then all the luminosity of the room spilled into the other room. Next, a hand came out lightly holding onto the frame of the door. It sparkled with expensive stones on each finger except the digitus quartus. Every part of her that came into clear sight Ivan watched intensively; a bond that only he could sense was beginning to take shape. The two rooms had made contact, and by the second, as the shape of a highly attractive lady was coming into full view, the exposure of each room to the other grew. The bond reached its greatest extent when the woman took a few steps onward and everything about her came into plain sight. Now what, thought Ivan. He thought of the others, and even turned to call Vladimir, but on a second thought decided to keep it to himself. Maybe he saw a way out of this and only then thought of reaching out to the woman. What would her reaction be? She was fully aware that he lay there along with the others, like dangerous convicts strapped to their beds. There was no reason, Ivan knew, for this type of woman to help him out. Meanwhile, another figure seemed to be signaling to her. At another time in this unusual setting, to Ivan her revelation in that wretched space seemed as an idealized caricature of a female. Following her was a somewhat stout older figure, equally impressive in her presence, but who seemed to hold herself even more highly. Ivan immediately recognized Madame Alexandra Grigorievna. Both ladies wore an expression of annoyance, very close to becoming one of frailty, as if just out of a quarrel with a man who had not wished to accompany them outside. Ivan thought that both of their presences in that room seemed altogether unfitting and rather alarming. A demanding shout was heard from behind the door. The older lady stopped and, with a nod to the younger one, turned to confront it while the other figure, which Ivan recognized as Madame Alexandra’s daughter, continued her walking. She scoped the room in a flurry, refusing to commit to anything in particular, even less to the dismembered beat-up men that lay before her. However, something did seem to appeal to her eyes, for immediately she walked over and acknowledged a ten-foot mirror Ivan had failed to see situated near the entrance door.

* * *

The child had not stopped crying when Mr. Gogol felt himself bursting into tears. They rolled down his cheek and slowly trailed along the outline of his nose. He quickly wiped them off with his long sleeve. What a sick joke this was, he thought to himself. While opening the envelope, curious to see the object inside, it slipped from his hand, rolled down the steps and came to a rest on the mat that read: “Welcome To The Gogol Home.” His sleepy eyes caught a glimpse of the severed nose. It looked animated, lying on the middle “o”. He turned away, rubbing his eyes uncontrollably. When he looked back, the nostrils tauntingly faced him. “A prank of some kind,” he whispered to himself, “by the neighborhood hooligans,” and a sneer escaped from his exhausted face. But he could not be too sure of this. The joke abruptly turned nasty. His exhaustion gave way to a serious stiffness. It just so happened that a neighbor walking his dog strolled by, and Mr. Gogol forgot to transform his expression into a proper greeting. He felt ashamed.

Paul Hila immigrated to Canada at the age of ten along with his family. He is currently a second year student doing a double major in English and Visual Studies. The first book to have a true impression on him was Charles Bukowski’s Ham On Rye. One day he hopes to dedicate his full time to writing.

Michael Labate

Thu, 24 May 2012 07:45:09 -0400

Domesticity  

leathery drunk,
he tries everyone on,
 lives monologue
 blurs, his victims
 hide in used newspapers

my youngest pulls beers out of her
 purse, opens
 bottles with keys,
 I don’t know what she wonders

  I tuck another fractured tablet under
 our tongues, evade
 attack or invasion, recall
 tank ambushes in mud

Michael Labate is an English student at the University of Toronto, whose writing has previously appeared in ditch, The Hart House Review, and The Varsity.

Iris Liu

Wed, 23 May 2012 08:01:16 -0400

Hershley

Iris Liu is a second-year student specializing in philosophy. In her spare time she enjoys Wittgenstein, chimpanzee intelligence and red wine. A photographer by trade and a writer by calling, she aims to be a quiet contemporary exemplar of what Kandinsky called “the perfect merging of pure but discreet art forms.”

Matt Santateresa

Tue, 22 May 2012 08:02:54 -0400

Regeneration of the Lover

Let’s get thinner and make love.
Better yet, let’s get thin by making love.
Our priority to thinly go where others
waddle to feeding frenzies’ sad periodic
tables loveless, or at least, lover-less.
If not, restricted to double-wide bodies embrace
and bump over-loaded bread-baskets together
in mattress-breaking nights.

Let’s forego diets, gyms, regimens, pills, and distractions
that busy our thoughts with gardening outdoors while
indoors our bower with flowered duvet lies mocking
without a wrinkle.

Let’s forget unpaid bills, kilowatt hours, chores’
lively search to engage us: frightful states of disrepair
needing renovation. The world has waited over and over
Let it all slide for now, let’s keep our names echoing
from our rooms like before.

Matt Santateresa, a U of T graduate (‘71), lives, writes, paints and teaches in Montreal. He has published three volumes of poetry: Combustible Light (2000), Beggar’s Loom (2001) and Icarus Redux (2004), and has appeared in numerous Canadian literary journals. Presently, he is working on a fourth volume of poems, as well as curating and creating a number of tableaux for his vernissage.

Tamie Dolny

Mon, 21 May 2012 13:19:17 -0400

PAUL, AND SAM.

You watch his shoulder blades as he exhales, the fine white bones moving under his skin.

He’s leaning over the railing, head tilted down with that thick, black hair, a cigarillo dangling out of his long fingers. You’re beside him, tracing his spine with the tip of your index finger.

“I wish that I were an old beggar, rolling a blind pearl eye,” he says softly. You watch as his thick red lips drag out the words, and you spot a flash of a pink tongue.

“What does that mean?”

“Yeats wished that he was blind, so he wouldn’t have to live with such horrifying beauty.”

You smile back.

“I’m not that beautiful.”

***

You’re slow dancing on the moon in space suits, and as he twirls you, you notice the drag of his gaunt cheeks against his sharp cheekbones.

You’re amid a cloud of other dishevelled wanderers, all of you in various shades of off-white—eggshell, cotton, cream—and they’re playing Sinatra, the jazz contrasting maddeningly against the empty, crater-ridden landscape.

You inhale sharply on the compressed oxygen, and as you exhale your breath fogs up your helmet, clouding your vision. You startle when he touches the small in your back, pressing his cloth-ridden fingers against your plastic-wrapped skin, and lightning streaks up your spine. You hadn’t realized that you stopped dancing.

“What?” you ask loudly, almost wincing at the harshness of the word and the coarseness of your spirit, your voice ringing at you through the sound system wired in your suit.

“We’re mad, Sam. This entire place. Stop worrying. We’re mad, haven’t you realized?”

You purse your lips and stare straight forward, your eyes sharply focused on the record player blaring out music. Music—the music that the rest of the group seems to be dancing to, the other space suits moving around you in an alien formation, one that you don’t understand, and one that you almost fear.

***

Nothing collapsed, nothing changed, and yet slowly your entire world revolved into a new sort of day.

It’s your morning routine—making sure that you line the inside of your mouth with the cotton balls, to prevent against vocal cord destruction. It’s your morning routine—plastering your skin with the liquid cement to guard against the “cosmic rays” that scientists now blame for everything. It’s your morning routine—stripping off your boxers from the night before, rolling them into a ball and watching the pieces flake off from your closed fist.

Now, even clothing decomposes.

You stride to work with sunshine injected into your veins, bottled up clouds stuck in your briefcase with a thin IV connecting them to your mouth, where you rapidly inhale and exhale the semi-condensed water. It’s almost ironic that your scarf is rainbow-coloured.

You sit at your workplace in front of a cold, white desk. It’s company policy to not decorate, and you’ve never had a rebellious bone in your body, so instead you scratch at the inside of one of the drawers with neon orange scissors that you keep in your briefcase every time that your boss closes his door. You like to examine the mark, and think that it will keep you immortal, long after you’re dead and gone. (You fail to remember that the desk will, most likely, be recycled.)

You don’t feel alive anymore. You lost that feeling seconds, minutes, hours, years earlier, when your wild pill-popping teen years had disintegrated into dust. Now you just sit in front of your screen, prodding it occasionally with callused fingers (your fingerprints burned off during childhood, after touching so many smooth surfaces) until it is time to go home to a microwave dinner—and, if you’re lucky, maybe some toast.

***

His eyes were like diamonds, and the cliché frightened you to no end.

You were looking at yourself in the mirror at work one day, smoothing down your fine brown hair by licking your palm and slicking down the top of your pate. It’s embarrassing the amount of frizz that you produce, but you always blamed it on the humidity and sun rather than genetics.

You then looked in your eyes, in the pale pale pale green just outside your pupils, in that strange way that only mirrors allow for, and you started to self-reflect on whether you should consider perming your hair, licking your lips and fingering them delicately. Then, the door flew open with a bang, and you turned like an idiot, finger on your bottom lip, mouth dropped open, eyes wide, and he soared past you with an expletive ripping out of his mouth, slamming a boombox onto the counter beside you.

You were flabbergasted, and your eyes darted around nervously, eyeing up the “Men’s Bathroom” sign to your far left, but instead of twitching you just remained silent.

“I’m Paul,” he said loudly, fumbling with dials on the ancient-looking contraption. He was speaking into the boombox, and for a second you didn’t comprehend that he was addressing you, but then you jolted and started stuttering.

“S-Sam,” you muttered, pointing at yourself.

He smirked, and glanced over at your shaking frame.

“Why are you so scared?” he asked, turning back to his radio player, biting his lip. You tried to not look too hard at his thick, coiled fingers.

“You just startled me,” you rebutted, turning almost snobbishly back to your mirror, fluffing your hair. You heard him snort at the sight of you primping, and you turned back towards him, a scowl plastered on your face. “What.”

“You look insecure.”

His comment shocked you, and your face painted itself a facetious shade of red.

“I’m going to go put this in my car. Would you like to join me, Sam?” he continued, turning towards you and eyeing your blushing complexion.

You watched him for a second too long, taking in his dark hair, his tall, lean frame, his sharpened cheekbones and knuckles.

“Alright.”

He took you drag racing in his small rocketship, type A983 brand RedTrain, roaring around Mars for four hours after midnight, his dusty boombox roaring out the blues in your lap. After he drove you back home, landing softly outside your apartment, you winced and closed your door tightly shut, leaning your head against the metal tiles, your eyes shifting wildly against your twitching lids.

You’ve never met someone so dangerous before.

***

Sam and Paul. Paul and Sam. Paul, and Sam.

You become the afterword to his name, an alexandrine twirling around the main paragraph. Instead of being the opening act, you resort to closing. But you never excelled at conclusions.

But don’t lie. You enjoy the champagne, the liquor, the booze that comes with his heady lifestyle. You like the cheese—the gouda, the swiss, the old cheddar—prodded on small coloured toothpicks, laying out at the lavish conferences you now attend. You love—not love, but adore—twirling around the ballrooms on hoverboard shoes, your pants ballooning around your waist. The electronic sad songs, the titillating dresses covered in glitter, even the bubble machine he bought on your first anniversary gives you pleasure, the giant glistening circles of soap amusing you as if you were a child.

It’s as if there’s nothing to despise!

***

You despise his women.

There’s Magda, and Annette—and Sophie, Lauren, and Jennifer. Then there’s the exotic one: Tracey, with her dark, beautiful skin and thick red hair (a contradiction that you cannot seem to wrap your mind around). She laughs and glistens, and you’re so painfully simple that sometimes you want to burn excitement into your skin, gather it up from the ground like wheat and surgically connect the word to your bones.

Paul, and Sam.

***

You watch his shoulder blades as he exhales, the fine white bones moving under his skin.

He’s leaning over the railing, head tilted down with that thick, black hair, a cigarillo dangling out of his long fingers. You’re beside him, tracing his spine with the tip of your index finger.

“I wish that I were an old beggar, rolling a blind pearl eye,” he says softly. You watch as his thick red lips drag out the words, and you spot a flash of a pink tongue.

“What does that mean?”

“Yeats wished that he was blind, so he wouldn’t have to live with such horrifying beauty.”

You murmur back.

“I wish I was that beautiful.”

***

You despise the way that you look, staggering into a washroom on six-inch high pumps, making sure to only step with the ball of your foot, since current fashion dictates that the heel be missing.

Your eyes are dilated with tiredness, and you search desperately for the green that you once knew, holding back your limp brown bangs with an unmanicured hand, the other arm holding you against a reflection that you no longer recognize.

A girl to your left stares at you with undisguised condescension, but you turn and sneer back at her, the fabric of your long black dress twirling with the action, crafting you into a weak, tottering Cruella de Vil.

“Are you Paul’s friend?”

You are tempted to ignore the words she’s uttering, slowly dripping them from her pale pink mouth, almost drooling onto the floor in front of you.

“No.” (You lie.)

“Who are you here with?”

(You pause.) “Paul.”

The girl looks at you as if you’re a toddler, and sniffs a bit.

“I don’t understand,” she retorts, turning back to the mirror but still glancing at you suspiciously out of the corner of her violet eyes, her pink sparkly dress reflecting artificial light.

You speak deliberately with your teeth, your canines flashing white.

“Paul’s my boy.”

***

Paul, and Sam.

Paul and Sam.

Sam and Paul.

Sam.

It was an accident really, the whole incident, the entirety of it.

You were cruising around with him in his rocketship, and he had to make a pit-stop at some variety store, and when he was gone you accidentally knocked over his boombox with your heels. And lying on the carpeted floor was his little cellular phone, you were bored and curious and you opened it and found the texts between him and Tracey.

You didn’t tell him. He came back into the rocketship with arms loaded full of chips and candy and chocolate, and you smeared the food on your face on the silent, long ride home in a way that you hoped imitated a smile.

***

You stride into work with your bottled clouds and injected sunshine and rainbow scarf, but instead of sitting at your tired little cubicle you’ve been upgraded to a window seat amid the stars.

Now you sit and stare at the gray clouds of smog that perpetually block your five-star view, and every once in a while crack open a can of “Pure Air” and breathe it in, your knuckles white and shaking.

“Sam?”

He’s slid into your door, and he’s leaning against the wooden entrance, closing it quietly and turning to glance at you, that effervescent smile lighting up the room, and if you could you swear you’d tie him up and sell him to the pharmacy. A little box of anti-anxiety.

But you’re remembering that you hate him now, because you’ve figured him out, and your eyebrows are closing together and you’re fingering the piercing you’ve got on the bridge of your nose, the two studs cold and metallic against your too hot skin.

“Sam?”

Then suddenly you’re up on your heels, and you’re remembering that you’re his boss now after that lucky promotion, and you’re firmly grabbing his arm and escorting him out of your office.

You return home that night to a microwave dinner, and are too tired to operate the toaster.

***

You’re at your apartment. You call him, and tell him what you had found the night before. His voice is tired on the phone, no longer ecstatic, no longer boombox Paul.

He sweeps into your place with the bravado of a dying man, and you follow him over to the balcony where he lights up.

You watch his shoulder blades as he exhales, the fine white bones moving under his skin.

He’s leaning over the railing, head tilted down with that thick, black hair, a cigarillo dangling out of his long fingers. You’re beside him, tracing his spine with the tip of your index finger.

“I wish that I were an old beggar, rolling a blind pearl eye,” he says softly. You watch as his thick red lips drag out the words, and you spot a flash of a pink tongue.

“What does that mean?”

“Yeats wished that he was blind, so he wouldn’t have to live with such horrifying beauty.”

You scowl back.

“You’re not speaking about me, are you.”

Tamie Dolny is a 2nd year English Specialist from St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. Her works have previously been published in The Toronto Star, Urban Voices, Young Voices, Cuspidor and others. Her passions include Modernist poetry, dubstep, and Debussy.

Mike Erwood

Fri, 18 May 2012 07:49:52 -0400

What We All Need to Feel Home Again (Ruminations on Modern Architecture)

Editor’s note: Given the emotional duress the author was under during recording, it seemed prudent to add a few explanatory footnotes to some of the more idiosyncratic observations made during this narrative.

You are leaving. More to the point, I am staying. You are leaving and I am staying and something heavy thuds around in my chest like a bird trapped in a too-small cage¹ as I consider the implications of all this. We are on a claustrophobically narrow street and I am suddenly very aware of how many people are rushing by, how strange it feels to be standing still in the middle of all this chaos. Next to us the buildings rise up defiantly, all rough brick² and cold steel, sharp angles³ and hard lines⁴ pushing against the sky, and I feel very small. I want to get out of here. I want to be home again.

Your face is wet and your voice shakes and erupts in tiny, impossibly fast streams of words punctuated by sobs like a dam slowly breaking. I can’t even focus on the words at first; they all get lost in the sound, and all I can understand is that you are leaving. While there is a part of me that hates you right now for doing this, there is another part of me that can’t help noticing the wisps of brown hair long enough now to blow across your face. How long had you been growing it out? That hair I’d seen grow and die and change, framing a face I’d watched turn every shade of pale, those features I’d grown to know so intimately until they became like my own in that those subtle changes we notice in others over the years became lost in the steady continuity of days. We rarely notice the way we slowly change and re-invent ourselves or are re-invented over the years because each time we look in the mirror in the morning it is still ourselves that we see, even as we become other people. What will it mean to see you become someone else after days, weeks, years apart? Your hair is longer than when we met, your face ever so slightly more worn, eyes more closed, weary. I can’t look at you because when I look at you all I can think about are all the times I’ve held you, all the parts of you I’ve known that are suddenly forbidden, and how can you still be here and how can we be this distant, like I’ve never known those other parts of you, that other side of you that I’ll never see again and how can that make sense when I didn’t even know just how much I could lose, and wondering how I can get through never being that close to you again. And I get all sucked up inside myself and suddenly all these words and thoughts take on weight and start pressing against me until I can’t quite breathe and I try not to look at you, to look at the buildings, but there’s nothing there, just series of spaces to pass through and abandon, and shouldn’t there be something more?

Without you I am trapped entirely inside myself. I have no one else, no one I can talk to in the coming days, to try to explain what happened here. Did I forget everyone else or were you really the only one I could ever talk to? I want an open space to run to. I don’t want the tiny rooms in our apartment anymore. When did they start making buildings like that, so carefully divided?⁵ I need somewhere open, warm, green. This city is so crowded with concrete I can’t even see the sky.⁶ How does everything still manage to seem so lifeless even in this giant mob of people? Inside we would have been cordoned off. Inside the lines next to us delineating countless office buildings, further subdivided into rooms, cubicles, even tiles separating each square foot of floor, everyone is kept in their own space.⁷ Out here the controls are out of place, and we all crush together. Inside we could be safe. Out here it’s all noise and body heat, and even as we push together we’re still on our own, and how am I going to face this space without you?

You wanted to get out early you tell me, be gone before I could get home and try to stop you. You are sorry to have done it this way, with no explanations or apologies, but there was nothing to say. At the very least there were no words left to say it, and so you had to go before I got there, before those wounded, clumsy words that couldn’t hope to explain anything could spill out. You had to leave, and any explanation beyond that would just be pretending at truth, so your absence would have to explain what you couldn’t yourself.

I struggle for the words you can’t find, thinking over every mistake I might have made.

“I don’t understand this. I thought things were alright. What happened?”⁸

“…”

“Can’t we talk about this? I know things have changed, but I still love you. Christ, I don’t even know what I’m going to do tomorrow if I have to wake up in the morning without you. Doesn’t that bother you?”

“V

—-”

“I can change. Please–”

Something breaks.

“It’s not about that–”

“Then what is it about? What? You can’t be packing up all your shit and leaving over nothing. There has to be some reason.”

But there isn’t. There is just you and me, and this sudden, growing distance between us as you recede between awful grey buildings, and the crowds rushing by, and everything seems disjointed, somehow crooked, and I’m thinking so much that I can’t really think and I might be shaking, and I’m watching you go and my legs are carrying me after you, but always a bit too slowly, and I know there is nothing left to say and soon I will walk back to a home that isn’t really home anymore, through streets that seem suddenly alien, and I will open the door to what is now my apartment and I will sit down in my own small room alone.

¹ See first sub-note to footnote 3.

² Though some poetic contrast was probably intended by the narrator between the rough, unyielding texture of the brick and the more organic nature of the bustling crowd or the chaotic swelling of emotion, it should be noted that much of what appears to be solid brick on many modern buildings is actually a cheaper, Styrofoam^©-like material painted to appear like brick to give the illusion of rigidity and permanence, while allowing for faster and more efficient construction.

³ A historical note on the building design here observed: Modern architecture saw a move away from ornamentalism beginning in the late 19th century, epitomized by the phrase “form follows function” coined by the architect Louis Sullivan in 1896. While architecture preceding the modern period was arguably concerned first with the aesthetic appeal of buildings, the industrial era ushered in a privileging of utilitarian principles. The lack of regard for cosmetic considerations arguably reached its culmination in the appropriately named “brutalist architecture” of the 1950s to 70s, characterized by rough concrete exteriors and sharp, repetitive angles. Despite the alienating, even prisonlike atmosphere created by the style, it gained a great deal of popularity in urban areas. Ironically, the philosophical intention behind the style was actually a facilitation of community-building. Recently the critical regionalist approach has attempted to counter the perceived lack of identity in many modern buildings, but the contemporary cityscape, particularly in the narrator’s city of Toronto, still reflects the minimalism that dominated much of the twentieth century. Tall, rigid, sparsely decorated buildings line the streets through much of Toronto’s downtown core, particularly in its financial and entertainment districts. Robarts Library on the University of Toronto campus is in fact one of the crowning achievements of the Brutalist movement.

⁴ In what we deem a rather sophomoric use of metaphor, the narrator has often imagined the character of his previous relationships as being akin to something constructed of tin; highly malleable but largely incapable of formations that do not consist of crude, sharp angles and lines. Conversations felt unnatural, forced, rigid. Words were misconstrued as they followed simple, straight trajectories, never encompassing the full depth of thought or emotion he wanted to articulate. The current relationship, he felt, had developed more organically, growing like a tree in fertile soil, perhaps branching out awkwardly at first, or growing out at a slight angle, but gradually correcting itself through each season of growth, and becoming stronger. This naïve notion was in fact probably a result of the novelty of the relationship, which, in our opinion as outside observers, was really not so different from any of his previous romantic infatuations. Nonetheless it is probably this ill-informed distinction which is responsible for the narrator’s obsession with the rigidity of form and apparent lifelessness of the crowd surrounding him.

⁵ Such compartmentalization has been typical of living spaces in the West for centuries, though it has become more pronounced and its purpose has arguably changed in recent times. As communities and families have dwindled in size and the desire for separation and privacy has increased, the already small core of the modern nuclear family has become increasingly fractured, with each member demanding their own four walls.

⁶ While there is much to recommend the view that if we are to allow large buildings to obscure the natural horizon we should at least do so with an eye to mimic something of the symmetry and splendour being lost there, nature has a certain resilient beauty which forces its way through even under the most severe impositions of mankind. For example we have it under good authority from other passers-by that a small flower, possibly a rhododendron*, had taken root in the cracks in the pavement beneath the narrator’s feet– a tiny reclamation of the land we feel was made all the more poignant, given the incredibly limited means it was granted**. Unfortunately, between his overwhelming desire to abstract himself from the present situation through academic observations and the surge of emotion obscuring his rational processes, the narrator seems to have been rendered unable to note anything of significance in either the poetic poignancy of the scene or a critical analysis of its more tangible features or history.

* This identification should be regarded with some suspicion given that none of the observers had any training in botany, and it has furthermore been demonstrated that memory is very impressionable and may have been influenced by the suggestion of the expert who the editors brought in to help make the identification. Even if they did have the prerequisite knowledge, people rarely notice such details in passing as would have been necessary to make a definitive identification.

** There was also a faint pulse of sunlight on a nearby building rising and falling under passing clouds in a steady, rhythmic imitation of a human heartbeat, in marked contrast to the frenetic and irregular palpitations of the narrator’s own cardiac muscle.

⁷ Though the narrator is not explicit here, he is probably thinking again of the divided rooms in the couple’s own apartment building.* They never knew their neighbours, nor made any attempt to, but sounds would occasionally leak through the thin walls separating the units. He could distinctly remember some trivial argument that had grown (as these things tend to do) to a completely disproportionate level, being fuelled by the thousand unspoken complaints that had gone ignored in the course of an increasingly uncommunicative relationship. The argument was suddenly broken up by the loud sound of crying from the room next door. These were the sounds of genuine pain and loss, and were accompanied by a desperate consolation that served to illuminate the triviality of their own petty argument. On other occasions they had heard the sounds of intense love-making, laughter, and arguments: all the drama of a shared life condensed to those moments when emotions grow too loud to be contained by mere architecture. The disembodied passion permeating through the dry-wall in the form of muffled voices had somehow always translated into a heightened awareness of their own closeness, for which he was grateful. Such experiences led also to a profound sense of cognitive dissonance for him, since he could never imagine any of the nameless faces avoiding eye contact in the hallways being capable of such displays of passion. The loss of community implicitly mourned throughout this piece meant a lack of access to those more mundane daily interactions which built up to the explosive moments heard through the walls.

* Incidentally, it is the opinion of the authors of these notes that the pre-marital co-habitation of the couple was to some degree responsible for the dissolution of their relationship. The statistics regarding the fate of such living arrangements paint a grim picture indeed.

⁸ According to spectators, the narrator was less articulate than he wishes to appear. The conflicting feelings of urgency and impotency in the moment left him fidgeting, stuttering, and rambling, performing the kinds of useless activities one finds themselves doing after realizing they have made some terrible mistake, the consequences of which can not be undone but which demand some action.

Mike Erwood is a philosophy major at the University of Toronto in something like his fifth year. He spends his summers planting trees and wandering around Canada trying to remember what it means to call somewhere home.

Jenn Gardner

Thu, 17 May 2012 07:55:11 -0400

Clusters

as you trod upon your floral dream-world 

pierots on pillows gaze. 
watching you with 
intent.

   peonies are being pulled back beneath,  

the false divider, between
 earth and fire. 

 barriers

are simply states of your soul stuck watching,
 divine totems decapitate themselves 
instead of succumbing to
 slumber.   

the blades on which you rest end abruptly.
 leaving only an ancient path within.
  somewhere between dying
 dynasties.   

there is a hole in the dirt where gravity sings,

 to cobblestone satellites scanning 
the skies.   

for more than a sign that knowledge need not be,
 a colossal misconception. transcending,   

even the most distant star clusters.

Jenn Gardner is a poet from Georgetown, Ontario. She is currently living in Toronto while studying English at Victoria University in the University of Toronto.

Ellie Anglin

Wed, 16 May 2012 07:45:43 -0400

Toothvalanche

Ellie Anglin is a Toronto-based writer of prose, poetry and creative non-fiction as well as a visual artist working mostly in collage. Her work has been published throughout Ontario, and in February 2012 she was the featured writer in Papirmasse. Her first book, a fusion of fiction and collage entitled Tender Buttons, will be available in June 2012 and is generously supported by the Toronto Arts Council.

Andrew McEwan

Tue, 15 May 2012 08:01:19 -0400

from Functions of Variable Data

data.codex

interleaved impressions // grass // utility

bends to conform // nodes and their endings

in composite // digital spoke leads away

lost serial // impression instance mirrors bond

distance // modal weave in visual span // lag

built disjunct // logic puzzle in platforms

of sound // out-distance simulation // rift

waves introduce wild absurdities // their concord

discord // ending in the hand // archive

data.parallax

a cross // or crossed // overwritten file // dead

air anyway // delays // chatter break-up double

skip // dredge wilderness for voice cracks // dial

broken ululate between // value limits merge

field identity // beautiful dominate // first

nil stands // anchored at centre // back

formed // parallel run standard // eyes ears adjust

com // word word tremor // sudden disrupt

data.retroflex

x knows itself only // functional

level of abstraction enacts lower function

validator of base // conversation

absence of number schemata distress

descriptive bits of architecture // in conversion

lapses absent unit absently in fray

of epistemic error // this line

describes code in // columns of

Andrew McEwan is the author of the forthcoming book, repeater, from BookThug, and the chapbook, Input / Output, from Cactus Press. His writing has been awarded the E.J. Pratt Poetry Medal. He is the current poetry editor for the Hart House Review.

Tracy Kyncl

Mon, 14 May 2012 08:01:22 -0400

Post-Script

Twenty-seventh century CE
translucent fossils found
hiding on the third floor
of the ancient reference library.
Atrophied, mouths agape
amidst scratchings
carved out
by workless fingernails:

PROFESSIONAL PALLBEARERS
ANNOUNCE THE FALL OF COLLOSUS
after the fact.

Flurries of threadbare
black ribbon
antiques by their time of use
wrapped around the neck
of one gargantuavis philoinos.
Pencils poking out
of the crumbling eye sockets
of a static failed attempt.

It was said that after
modernity’s post mortem
there was no voice loud enough
(lost in the cacophony of ‘bright’ ideas)
to act as harbinger
for the soft lunatics
waiting for their moment
in the depleting vanguard.

Papa’s Kino back again
to strike upon the doubled billions
images to provoke epilepsy
short words
no home of the brave
if empirical evidence can tell us anything.

Sleep on, lifeless dreamers.
The moment had already passed
before your stubby instruments
could whimper a letter.

Sleep on, ma and pa.
I can educate myself
with 4000 colours
on a shallow, speechless screen.

Tracy Kyncl is a fourth year student at the University of Toronto, majoring in English and Cinema Studies. She is very proud of her Czech heritage and resents any descriptions of Slavic beauties as “babushkas”. When she is not working on essays or watching films she enjoys to write, draw, and is said to never wear the same outfit twice. She plans to pursue a Master’s degree at the University of Toronto and to one day own a Harley Davidson. This is her first published work and she hopes the prophecy contained therein will not come true.

Christopher Laxer

Fri, 11 May 2012 07:23:48 -0400

The Tower

Isaak Babel is born in Odessa in 1894. In 1905 he survives his first pogrom: though his family is untouched, he will dream strange iterations of the violence for years. He will always be uncomfortable in crowds. By twenty-two he is living in Petrograd, drinking with Maxim Gorky, and publishing his first stories, all failures. He sees action in the endless wars of the revolution, writes Red Cavalry, tastes fame. He becomes a lover of women. In 1926 he is hailed as Russia’s “most famous writer.” In 1930 he travels in the Ukraine, searching for inspiration to write the great socialist epic and finds only fear and famine, the strange fruit of utopia. At the First Congress of Soviet Writers in August 1934 Babel announces that he has become a master of literary silence. His words hang in the hall a moment too long, dooming him, though he will live another six years.

The old Tsar never saw the inside of one of his labour camps. But the new Tsar has spent several long years in one, in Siberia, and is determined never to go back. Stalin, terrified of the engine that has trapped him at its heart, is inspired by a beautiful and humane philosophy. It affords him much ruthlessness. His secret police suspect a secret truth: all men—all words—are weak and equally guilty. Babel’s friends, forced to confess, damn him.

On May 15th, 1939, Babel is charged with espionage.

Universal literary history credits him with the immortal line: “No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.” Despite the poetry of his punctuation, despite his Odessa Tales, despite his children and his wife, despite that peculiar certainty he’d had as a child that he could never die, on January 27th, 1940, in Lubyanka prison in Moscow (whispered to be the tallest building in Russia because you could see Siberia from its basement), Isaak Babel is executed by firing squad.

Babel spends his final hours tossing on a bare cot, unable to sleep. Though he’d resigned himself to his fate months earlier and had made the confession demanded of him with more dignity than most, now the animal—Fear—twists in his belly. It disgusts and delights him, this betrayal of his soul by his body. He can’t decide whether to laugh or cry: in the end, he does both. When he finally returns to his senses, he finds himself curled up on his side, grinning viciously in the dark. He recalls his own words from hours earlier, during his perfunctory trial in Beria’s chambers:

I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others… I am asking for only one thing—let me finish my work.

It is cold in the cell. His breath hangs in the air. He shivers.

There is a murmur of voices from a nearby guardroom. Calmly, he listens. But the words are too muffled to understand. Though he knows that the men who belong to these voices will likely be the ones to execute him, he clings to the sounds they make.

His is the mind of a writer: a scavenger, weaving with scraps, trying to breathe into them all of himself that is nameless. He shuts his eyes and pictures himself sitting at a table outside a café he knows in Paris, in the vicinity of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In earlier days he had wasted many an afternoon in such places, in pursuit of the perfect phrase. By an act of will or imagination he transmutes the sounds of the guards into the sounds of this café. And for several minutes it’s as if he’s really there. He can see the waiters busying about, the old men reading newspapers, the young playing at love or war. Everywhere people talking. They joke. They argue. They lie. He smells the coffee and cigarettes, the breath of Parisian spring.

Outside, snow settles silently on Red Square.

Babel drifts into sleep and the café scene acquires the fluidity of dream. Someone shouts, and a white cat (twisting its tail) runs under his table. Paris begins to look more and more curious, more like Prague perhaps, or Istanbul. The café begins to develop odd angles, strange doors and stranger windows. Without warning Babel slips out of his chair and tumbles into the sky.

No one notices.

He stares with amazement at the heads below. From up here he can hear all the conversations at the tables simultaneously. The young man with the pipe, the lady in the yellow dress. Babel’s hat falls from his head and spills his coffee across the table below. Weightless, legs dangling, he spins higher and higher. And now, in addition to the voices from the café, he can hear voices from inside the nearby apartment buildings. They blend together and buzz like the sound of bees in his ear. His stomach flutters. Now he can hear all of the people on the busy streets below, and realizes (with some surprise) that soon he will soar higher than the Eiffel Tower. He feels his senses grow perfect. Somehow he sees, in infinite detail, every dizzying street in Paris: every stray shadow, every quivering leaf, every missing coin.

Beyond the northern suburbs of the city, impossibly, lie the endless dunes of the Sahara.

He rises faster. As more and more voices join the buzzing it becomes a steadier hum, a sound not unmelodic, like a cello perhaps, or distant thunder. Hurtling head over heels past damp clouds he sees below him the map of Europe, borderless. The continent seethes with shouts, whispers, tears. Curiously, as he is pulled into the frozen embrace of the stars, he begins to hear patterns in that whirlwind below, as if at this height new words could be made out.

Vast words: incomprehensible, circular, perfect.

He is awoken by the sound of a key in the door. A guard barks at him, and Babel picks up silence again, his weapon to the last. As he is led down a short hall (the last he will know) he struggles to recall those final words from his dream. For an instant he feels he can grasp them, and understand.

History does not permit us the final revelation of Isaak Babel, for a door opens and he emerges into a cellar, where four or five men are raising their rifles.

Christopher Laxer is a freelance screenwriter and scholar. He has lived and studied in Japan, Ireland, and Italy. In 2006 he began his career as a Romanticist scholar at the University of Toronto. His most recent essay, on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s supernatural fragment poems “Christabel” and “Kubla Khan,” will appear in European Romantic Review next year. His most recent screenplay, Limelight, is a Canadian Gothic thriller based on Neil Young’s song “Long May You Run.” He lives in Toronto.

Aaron Kreuter

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:59:20 -0400

Surefire Signs Your Loved One is a Cellphone User

When you ask why her pants are vibrating
she says she ate too many beans last night,
then leaves the room, her hand on her pocket.

You wake up in the middle of the night
to find him under the covers, which are glowing.
In the morning his thumbs are chapped.

Commercials about the dangers of second-hand
cellphone use send your loved one to the kitchen,
where she loudly puts away the dishes:

ten minutes later he says he’s going
for a walk; hours pass, and when he climbs into bed
he stinks of radiation and Listerine.

You discover cellphone chargers plugged
into sockets in the furnace room,
the attic, hidden in the garage behind the firewood.

The tension soars. You air out the cars,
have midnight panic attacks for the children’s health.
The landline rings and you fear confrontation.

Aaron Kreuter is a writer currently living in Toronto. He has had his short fiction and poetry published in InkTank Magazine, Existere, The Toronto Quarterly, Carte Blanche, and The Antigonish Review’s Poet Grow-Op, among other places. He is also the author of the chapbooks Waiting by The Sea and Other Poems and Suburbs I & II. For more on Aaron, visit him at his website: www.aaronkreuter.com.

Nicolas Scroggins

Wed, 09 May 2012 08:01:18 -0400

Hotel

Nicolas Scroggins was born in New York, and raised in Brazil and Canada (mostly). He is currently studying cinema at UofT. nicolastscroggins.wordpress.com

Marlena Millikin

Tue, 08 May 2012 08:02:52 -0400

miner’s hands 

how do the miner’s hands feel
 when they come upon 
the soft, supple 
white sheet of skin
 their coarse and callous 
dragging, lingering
 in the pockets and valleys 
opening
 as if lit from within
 the divine creature
 of both flesh and stone.

Marlena Millikin is a third-year student at Trinity College in the University of Toronto. She is pursuing an Honours Double Major in English and History and intends to continue her studies at a Graduate level in English. She is currently the co-editor in chief of the Trinity University Review and a past recipient of the Hugh Stephenson Memorial Scholarship as well as the Fraser Crawford Scholarship. She was previously awarded the Hamilton Association for the Advancement of Literature, Science and Art’s Young Poet’s Award and has twice won the Hamilton Power of the Pen Award. When not writing, she enjoys nature, reading and yoga.

Liza Kobrinsky

Mon, 07 May 2012 08:02:19 -0400

Mother Courage

We left behind
Lemon trees, barefoot children,
A people united by a common
Feeling of nausea
Thinking about 1944, 1945…
You put a rock on the tombstone,
But you don’t cry. Especially
If your tattooless arms
Are still strong.

The plane landed in snow.
I had split my lip
Running around the airport.
We held on to each other
As the cold blew us along.
Too many languages, I gargled.
On the playground we learned each other –
Endurance, respect for getting the rules right,
And all silently not understanding
When the teacher died of Hep B.
I wasn’t yet sure what the custom was
So I sang, slowly, a sad Hebrew song.

You never offered any explanations
But I felt you in your worry:
As I chipped my teeth getting the words out,
Skinning my knees on Canadian concrete
Stumbling through wilted trees.

My arms and legs grew longer
Mother Courage drags her cart
On two twisted ankles.

Liza Kobrinsky is a fourth year economics student who reads too much and always writes everything down. Born in Moscow, she now lives in Toronto. She likes traveling, politics, and theatre.

Andrew Shenkman

Fri, 04 May 2012 08:02:28 -0400

A Serious Work

My name is Hector. I write fiction of medium quality and international popularity for young adults. The artfulness of my craft, I often think, is trying to slide in the right amount of sex and violence underneath the surface of the water. To be too direct is death. The goal, instead, is to seem innocuous and titillating at the same time. It’s a strange alchemy. I can admit that getting that mix just right has left me feeling exhilarated and/or pathetic, depending on the occasion. Young athletic women riding wild dragons in the rain. Descriptions of flesh and skin. Sword fights without stab wounds. I traffic in the sense that the obscene is hiding somewhere in the wings. Looking backwards I see that I have sometimes written my own story a little like this.

Twenty-two years ago, instead of stories for children, it was cocaine and small amounts of other narcotics. Both careers have been rewarding in their own way. The drug dealing ended when four Hell’s Angels beat me unconscious and dropped a small refrigerator on my chest in London, Ontario. That episode left me hooked up to a respirator with a collapsed lung. It’s an experience that has helped me keep perspective on occasions where I’ve received a ‘brutal beating’ from the press.

I wrote my first stories there in London, before it turned sour. I used a type-writer I inherited from my father. In the summer I would put on tapes by Santana and Run-DMC and sit on the porch of my old house with liquor bottles and blow bumpers and proceed to feel very romantic and verbose (for a small time thug). I can remember the sunset glinting off the hood of my car, the sound of occasional passersby. Sometimes I would keep a gun near my person to bask in the warmth of its presence. I wrote crime stuff mostly. Mostly trash. These are very fond memories for me.

After the Hell’s Angels broke my face, body and spirit, I spent a year in Buenos Aires, the place where my mother was born, failing to relearn Spanish. After that I travelled for a while in Europe and spent all my money. I was actually in Sarajevo a year before the war. By the time the siege had begun, I was back in Canada, caring for a sick mom and settling into a living as a short-order chef in Toronto. I dabbled a little bit in dealing weed, weed I purchased from Burt of all folks. Burt, of course, was one of the Angels who did me in so unkindly. He had broken my nose with the palm of his hand. These days he is working as mechanic and I count him as an old friend. It would have been impossible for me to imagine a future where Burt was a softie for German Shepherds surrounded by his two Grandkids. Back then, however, every time I’d meet with him I’d get terrible shakes.

The weed stuff ended up being too much bother for too little profit, so I let it fizzle out like the end of a soggy joint. Around the same time, a woman who worked in a kitchen with me confessed pridefully that she wrote romance novels on the side. She suggested I try the same and I took up her challenge. She helped to connect me with her publisher. In my time in the harlequin trenches I took on a nom de plume and wrote five books on a beige Dell PC in the corner of my single bedroom apartment. I listened to a lot of CDs of solo guitar music. Did you know John Williams, the classical guitarist, isn’t the same John Williams who scored the Star Wars movies? When I think about those days, I can hear freight trains rattling by, cutting through the centre of the city behind my window.

Recently, Universal Studios made a movie out of one of my children’s books and the sequel will start filming very soon, if I understand correctly. The first was directed by another ex-pat Argentine who no longer speaks Spanish, which I thought was a very nice touch. The money has been extraordinary and, in my opinion, wholly undeserved. They filmed the whole thing in Iceland, which was a nice excuse to go travel. Reykjavík was flat and cold, and I suffered from freak nose bleeds my entire visit. It did little to dampen my spirits.

I have a memory of playing a board game from the UK (the rules of which I could not understand) against the young girl they cast as Stella. We sat in a hotel room with a big window and a great view as various cast and crew flittered around. I lost many times. This girl, half in costume, told me that she had been a fan of my series, that this was like a strange dream for her. They were going to film her favourite scene the next day, where she finds the magical sword ‘The Dayskreamr’. I stared out the window at the frozen landscape and recalled the Stella of my youth. Her name was Christine. Like Christine, a lot of people I once knew long ago end up trapped inside my stories, with their finger prints filed off and new names pinned on. They’ve been made to put on strange clothing, to fight monsters and demons and sometimes each other. Watching that patchwork world be willed to life in Iceland was like being submerged in fever.

Around the time I heard about the second film entering pre-production, I received an anonymous letter threatening blackmail. The wording was extremely vague, absent of a specific threat. It instructed me that there would be further contact soon. It was a kind of foreplay, I guess. My immediate response to reading the letter was to take an afternoon nap. In the evening I got down to the business of wondering what the hell it might be that was hovering over my head. What could it be and what would it do to me? The kid’s writer, he used to do coke, you know. He used to sell blow to high school kids. Would that hurt or help my sales? Would that be the end to this chapter?

For a period of my life, I used to provide a man who called himself Monk with cocaine. He paid no fee. The coke was a dividend gained from his lofty place in London’s criminal ecosystem. I’d end up at his place a couple times a month for three years or so. I saw a young girl OD off my shit there, she may have even died. I saw heroin thrust upon the unwilling. I saw cruel and unthinking violence. Sometimes I was disgusted, sometimes I laughed, and sometimes I colluded. Monk’s place was a vortex of calamity and madness. To enter his gates of your own free will was to forfeit your right to safety and security.

Of course, there were those swirling around in there who never had a choice. My Stella, Christine, was Monk’s daughter. The resolution to Christine’s story is less dramatic than the Stella in my stories, the future queen of a fantasy world. She is a mother of three and a social worker. Monk is still serving his prison sentence if I am recalling things correctly. If Christine has read my stories, to her children at bed time perhaps, I doubt she sees much of herself in Stella. Even the part where her father almost beat her to death for her transgressions in front of a gaggle of stunned party goers.

I’ve thought a lot about trying to break out of my genre and write a serious work, whatever that means. There’s a folder on my hard drive full of unfinished stories straining towards that lofty goal. They cannibalize even more blatantly from my life than my other writing. Stories stolen from my family and friends and acquaintances in detail. I usually begin writing them in bursts of exuberance and slink away in disgust. Later I arrive at some sort of grey, neutral emotion and the whole process becomes funny in retrospect. I don’t think that work is really for me. In many ways I have happily stunted my imagination, travelling no further than the realm of the little boy who learned English reading X-men comics under the covers. This is the constant that runs through my ill-conceived life that I cannot consolidate. The daydreams of a child. That’s what makes me write.

I’ve been dating a woman named Celeste, who I think decided some time ago that I’m not right for her. She has acted on this impulse to abandon ship with kindness and care, and I’ve enjoyed the slow uncoupling of our relationship more than I would have expected. Glacial slow, fascinating and quietly sad. We spent an evening drinking wine and reading my old romance novels, acting out the parts and trying on voices. My home here is small enough to give me comfort and large enough for nights like this, for pushing the furniture aside and gesturing drunkenly.

She called a cab in the small hours of the morning and left me wide awake and grinning. I put an unopened letter of blackmail correspondence through a paper shredder. If you ever have the opportunity to do something similar, I can report back that it is an enormously satisfying experience. My eyes were fixed on the way the envelope struggled to retain its shape as it was forced out the other side, on the tension in the slits of folded paper inside it. Let it come, I thought, I have no children in this world. I have no parents left to embarrass. There are no surprises left for my brother and sisters to discover. Let it come.

After the shredding, I dug through my old things in the basement. I ended up pulling out a stack of my old stories from the late-80s and putting on my glasses before retiring to read in the kitchen until the sun started jabbing angrily through my windows. I read one centring on a police investigation led by a dirty cop climaxing in gun fight with automatic weapons. Then I read a story about a small time drug dealer driving through the rain, drunk out of his mind and lost in the dark. He hits a dog. It takes him a half hour to drag himself, cowardly and shaking, out of car to survey the damage done. Ravaged by tears he tries to dig a grave by the roadside with a car scraper as a shovel. A truck rattles down the road with a single working headlight. It looks like a monstrous cyclops, a biblical terror. The dealer assumes he too will be struck and killed, but the truck passes by uneventfully. The morning comes and he wakes up shivering next to his patch of slightly disturbed earth, near the dog itself. Of course the dealer was me. A telegram from another life.

Andrew Schenkman is a U of T alumni and Toronto resident. He recently won the 2011 ‘This Magazine’ Great Canadian Lit Hunt for his story ‘Salt Water’. Andrew also plays in the band Crowns for Convoy and tries not to spend too much money on records and comic books.

David Starkey

Thu, 03 May 2012 08:02:50 -0400

Fontana di Quattro Fiumi

How comic Bernini
found the great rivers
of the world! The portly

Ganges slouching
on his rock; the Danube
with arms outstretched,

legs akimbo; the bald-
headed Río de la Plata,
tilted back as if roaring

drunk, about to topple over;
and the Nile, so afraid
of everything he’s draped

a blanket over his face.
Perhaps this Baroque
in-joke is a figure

for the very fountain-
head of ideas: where pratfalls
beget resplendent art

and even the gods
are not exempt
from sitting naked

in a gawking crowd
with pigeons
shitting on their heads.

David Starkey served as Santa Barbara’s 2009-2010 Poet Laureate and is Director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Barbara City College. His most recent full-length collections of poetry are A Few Things You Should Know about the Weasel (Biblioasis, 2010) and It Must Be Like the World (Pecan Grove, 2011).

Stephanie Turenko

Wed, 02 May 2012 07:08:08 -0400

Kitchen

Stephanie Turenko is a 4th year student at UofT with a passion for photography and poetry. Sometimes she likes to narrate her life through song. She thinks she’s funny and some people agree. One day Stephanie would like to publish a book for adults or children fusing her two hobbies.

David Starkey

Tue, 01 May 2012 08:01:00 -0400

Wax Monk in a Glass Box

I forget the church—somewhere
in Trastevere, I think—where we saw
the wax effigy of a monk
resting his eternally sleeping head
on a silk pillow. It was a well-lit coffer,

and he looked peaceful enough
in his robe and sandals, his cincture
loose and comfortable.
He carried a Bible and a crucifix
and a rosary for the journey

skyward, and for a moment
I felt simpleminded
enough to believe I was looking
at a semblance of the truth:
the candles burning for the dead

were beacons, and the angels painted
on the ceiling were singing just to me.
Then the church door opened,
and a couple walked in loudly speaking
German. I noticed his hair

was made of nylon, and I thought
how like a sideshow attraction
this contrivance would seem
even in America, that other land
where lies are tarted up as dreams.

David Starkey served as Santa Barbara’s 2009-2010 Poet Laureate and is Director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Barbara City College. His most recent full-length collections of poetry are A Few Things You Should Know About the Weasel (Biblioasis, 2010) and It Must Be Like the World (Pecan Grove, 2011).