Issue 37
Featuring new work by Kathryn Aldridge-Morris, Kate Axeford, Jenna Burns, Gary Fincke, Cynthia Gordon Kaye, Jenna Grieve, Sophie Hoss, Cheryl Markosky, Jack Morris, Rowan Tate, and Dilys Wyndham Thomas.
The Truths Behind a Pumpjack Dare, Northern Alberta, 3rd July, 1991 by Kate Axeford
I’d hauled myself skywards on steep metal rungs. You were safe below, hurling taunts like stones. We’re two brothers, poles apart, but I’d climbed the ladder. I’d had to. You’d dared me to rodeo the Donkey.
One of the Six Million Speaks to a Great-Grandchild about Inherited Trauma by Cynthia Gordon Kaye
Tell your mother the truth, complicated boy. Illuminate your cramping collegiate mind-spills, logarithms, fruit flies, Shakespeare, splattered on plush beige carpet, unreachable from your bedridden grasps.
Remember your souvenir from Pride by Jenna Burns
It’ll burn on your skin. The problem is that you won’t put a whisper of sun cream on underneath; you’ll just slap the hard stick of face paint on under your eyes, faintly sweet like crayons, one long stripe, and you’ll think of the school fair, six years old at your favourite stand, begging to be made a tiger.
The Adoration of Borders by Gary Fincke
Once, Alex ate the same cereal for nine months because each carton earned a square inch of Alaska. “Eighteen, all told. You earned them,” his mother said when Alex was thirty-one, handing him the deeds the summer before she died.