The Malahat Review (Issue 201)
Author: Author: John Barton, editor
Date: 2018-01-22T08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Essential Poetry; Fiction; Creative Nonfiction
Description: Essential Poetry, Fiction, Creative Nonfiction
Publisher: Publisher: The Malahat Review

Contents

1. Inside front cover
2. Inside title
3. Colophon
4. Table of Contents
5. Katherin Edwards
6. Three Poems by David Martin
7. Rachel Leclerc
8. Harold Macy
9. Steve McOrmond
10. Two Poems by Sue Chenette
11. Brad Hartle
12. Andy Patton
13. Nancy Holmes
14. Two Poems by Chris Hutchinson
15. Jan Conn
16. Erin Noteboom
17. Miranda Pearson
18. Sarah Puschmann
19. Irena Karafilly
20. Harold Hoefle
21. Jacob Lee Bachinger
22. Danny Jacobs
23. Two Poems by Dore Kiesselbach
24. Marta Balcewicz
25. Morgan Charles
26. Book Reviews: Poetry
27. Book Reviews: Fiction
28. Book Reviews: Nonfiction
29. Notes on Contributors
30. Ad: Brick Books
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47. Inside this Issue
48. Back cover

CONTENTS

Winner: Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction

Katherin Edwards | 5 | Faster Horse

Winner: Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize

Nancy Holmes | 55 | Flaubert’s Hummingbirds

Poetry

David Martin | 9 | Three Poems

Rachel Leclerc

14

Father/land
Translated by C. S. Lemprière

Steve Mcormond | 20 | Proof of Life
Sue Chenette | 22 | Two Poems
Andy Patton | 41 | Gramsci’s Ashes: An English Version of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Poem
Chris Hutchinson | 62 | Two Poems
Jan Conn | 65 | Peony
Erin Noteboom | 66 | There is something about coming a long way by water
Miranda Pearson | 68 | Camber Sands
Sarah Puschmann | 70 | Everything I Have is Mine to Lose
Harold Hoefle | 77 | In Transit
Jacob Lee Bachinger | 78 | The Green Man for Dinner
Danny Jacobs | 79 | Haruspicy
Dore Kiesselbach | 80 | Two Poems
Marta Balcewicz | 82 | Fetus Charles Atlas

Fiction

Brad Hartle | 25 | For What You’re About to Do
Irena Karafilly | 71 | A Visit to the Dentist

Creative Nonfiction

Harold Macy | 17 | Stranglers, Water Thieves, Wide-Mouth Pumpkins, and Sweet-Talking Angels
Morgan Charles | 83 | The Medium Lane

93

Book Reviews

Paul Watkins | |
Allison Lasorda | |
Joseph Lebine | |
Susan Sanford Blades | |
Jamie Dopp | |
Shannon Webb-Campbell | |
Aaron Shepard | |
Siku Allooloo | |
Susan Olding | |

125

Notes on Contributors

Cover

Brian Jungen

Prototype for New Understanding #8,
1999
Nike Air Jordans
58 cm × 19 cm × 38 cm
Courtesy of Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver

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Katherin Edwards

Faster Horses

Sam mckenzie lies strapped to a thin mattress in the back of his pickup. He hoists up on one elbow and considers his legs. Wonders why they won’t quit jumping. Figures the body stops in increments, wears out like cheap clothes, shuts down fibre by thread until, like the flap of his pyjama bottoms, it shakes a final flag of surrender. Brown leather slippers hang off his feet like death masks, and his green canvas barn coat, more holes than fabric, folds gently around him. He feels like a broken promise. He lies back down.

At the gravel road’s nineteen-mile marker, the truck turns off onto a quieter and narrower trail. A hand-painted sign nailed to a birch tree points the direction, Greenstone Mountain, fourteen miles. Sam knows the moment the truck double-hairpins up and around they’ll soon be at Selby’s pond and past the halfway point.

At this elevation, the air thins.

Two hours earlier his daughter had tied him down onto this mattress using orange webbing from a stack of sweet alfalfa hay. She snaked the bindings under the pad, tossed it over him, crossing it in the centre and securing it with hooks to either side of the truck. After sliding hay bales onto either side of him she snubbed his legs down tight with a thick white cotton rope.

“You’re not snaring a god damn calf,” said Sam.

Laura loosened off, just a little, but didn’t look her father in the eye. “Here,” she said, pressing a tin bike horn into his hand. “In case you need anything.” She tossed a blue plastic tarp across his lower half. Sam squeezed the horn twice producing duck squawks.

“Just testing.” He turned his head to breathe in the greenness of the hay.

A sharp left and the pickup groans over shakier landscape. The hill bucks skyward and Laura shifts, pops the clutch. The truck tilts, rocks into a hole, spins stones, lurches onward. The mattress slides towards the tailgate.

He blasts the horn once, yells at his daughter through the back window. “Clutch in, shift, clutch out.” Laura tries but holds her foot too long on the pedal as she presses the gas. The engine grumbles. “Don’t make me come up there and drive.” It’s an absurd vision, Sam propped up, corpse-like behind the steering wheel.

Laura pops the clutch again. The truck jerks forward and Sam bangs on the side of a hay bale with his fist. She adjusts the rear-view mirror, sees her father’s waving hand. Her mother, Sally, smiles vacantly. Laura pulls the truck to a stop on the side of the dirt road. A ghost of powdered earth swirls beneath the tires. She glides open the rear window wider.

“What’s up?”

“Let the truck sigh between gears. Think of it,” Sam twists around trying to see her, “like you’re looking forward to the space between your heartbeats. The clutch disengages, the truck floats forward, you slide it into gear. It’s quiet.”

“Right,” says Laura, and begins to close the window between them. “The dust,” she says, and pulls it shut. Laura leans across her mother’s body and pushes down the lock. Sally barely notices.

Sam knows this truck. Not unlike life, full of rust and decay, travelling a road that grows always rougher. It’s damn near as old as his daughter. He supposes driving it now can’t be easy. Three-and-a-half decades ago, before the horses, when his life was new, when the paint job on this baby was factory-fresh skylark-blue, and the windshield unwebbed, gunning the engine, skimming over ruts and scrubbing the tires on the washboard of the road, was fun. Back then Sally bit her lip and seized the door handle.

“Slow down for God’s sake, Sam. Remember the girls in the back.”

“Jesus! Listen to them shout.”

He’d looked back in the rear-view. Laura, five, riding with her best friend, Susan. Giggles tumbling together, their thin wrists turned back on the edge of the pickup box taking the shock of their bodies, crazy blonde hair messed like a spaniel’s wild in the wind. Sam laughed, blasted the engine, and the truck skipped harder, the two shrieked higher.

Now it hurts.

Sam strains to see through the back window. Can’t see a damn thing, but when he looks straight up, a kaleidoscope of trees and sky mashes together yellows and blues. It’s the middle of hunting season, and Sam would bargain with the devil if only to hold a Remington shotgun. He envies the echo a gun makes after it fires. How it drapes like a cloak in the trees.

The truck bumps along as Sam drifts into his own thoughts, about time and tolerance and space and why the hell didn’t he ever think about getting Laura a horse? Jesus, yes a horse. A star horse. A right Christian of a ride like Leave An Answer. That big chestnut gelding with the triple heartbeat. Now that was a horse everyone deserved to know. Leave An Answer. He taught Sam a thing or two about patience and success, and when to listen to your own counsel. And when to breathe. He taught Sam all about breathing.

Sam remembered the speed advice from other trainers before every race. Foolish talk, a mix of bad sense, rampant superstition and pure bullshit. Make sure you run him hard two times around the track every three days; put him on the mechanical walker and turn it in reverse; brush him with soft badger-hair combs; don’t feed him for two days after a workout…. Whatever the advice, you had to listen to the horse. Just listen. It was true. Instead of blasting the big horse’s speed and leaving it on the track for the winner to run over later that day, Sam had increased Leaver’s workouts, galloping him three times slow around the oval every morning, so when he set the record for the fastest six furlongs at Calgary’s Stampede Park, everyone was surprised. Except Sam.

What a year that had been, 1974. No. ’76. Maybe. Didn’t matter. What joy, and the fame that came with it was golden. Like the morning after the Derby when the Backstretch reporter, Timmy Crowe, crowded in on Sam in the cold morning air, cornering him in his shedrow, asking in that loud nasal whine that made horses look up from their morning mash, “So, how did you do it, Mr. McKenzie? How did you get Leave An Answer to break that record?”

Sam, always polite, grinned. “Well, it wasn’t me at all, the horse just likes running.”

And that inane quote made him seem like the smoothest guy on the track. The article made the front page of the Daily Racing Form and two days later went nationwide. There was a photo too, of him, and his groom, Blind Billy Babble, and Leavers in the background. Big white blaze splashing down his face—seemed like he was smiling as well. Hard to believe guys back east reading that crap, lapping it up, looking for answers when all it was, as the old timers would say, trying to keep a straight face, “Just a matter of being smarter than the horse.”

He could have been a better father.

He gropes at a thread on his cuff and pulls. Hard to figure it’s been with him almost forty years. Little older than Laura. No doubt, they’ll throw this old friend away. They’ll probably throw everything away, including the hardware. Some rainy Sunday afternoon, with nothing on tv, Laura and Sally will take an old box from the basement, toss in all the trophies, the horse blankets with his name stitched in block letters, and the special aluminium shoes Leavers wore when he won the Canadian Derby. Sam can see the box outside Value Village, the shoes propped up next to a puzzle of Newfoundland. He hopes a bright young kid will pick them up, pay attention to the engraved words, maybe line up all four next to each other, create the sentence. Maybe even write a book. Or not. Probably play a single game of horseshoes before they end up in his basement. Win pictures. They’ll toss those too.

Christ. Not the kind of ending he was expecting. Three weeks. Laura running into his old high-school friend, Doc Doug, asking him to make a special follow-up house call. Doug climbing the steps to Sam’s place, holding his hat in his hand like a doctor from a different era. Bowing his head just a little, said, “It’s spread.”

Sam had put up a hand to stop him. “It’s like the vet telling me my horse’s sprung a tendon. Don’t need to hear more.”

“Maybe you should consider—”

“I’ll think about it.”

The crisp snap of his black bag and a slow handshake.

Sam heard Doc call Laura in from the front garden. Didn’t hear much, just the words Quick now, and Laura came into the bedroom. She put down her gardening gloves, folded their edges back. Sam reached up to wipe away a streak of soil just below her ear and neither of them knew what to say. He patted her hand, “Go wash your face.”

“We’ll go up the mountain before the end of the month,” she said a few days later. “I can drive. We’ll take Mom.” Sam nodded. Fulfilling old promises. Still Sam wishes he’d spent the time and taught her how to drive properly instead of leaving it to Sally.

But here they are. In an old truck groaning upward.

At the sixteen-mile marker a slim rain begins to fall on sagebrush and stone. Sam sniffs the air, struggles for the word. Can’t get it. Rain falls harder, the clay-bound road turns greasy. Lipstick traction. Slippage.

Passing Roberts Lake, a heron lifts like a prayer from the marshy edge, and again Sam thinks. If only to hold a gun. If only to hold a gun.

three POEMS BY david Martin

Turner Valley Formation

They trotted out his anticline,

capstone crust punctured

by a wedge thrust to the town’s

makeover bonanza, where

seismic pricks could plot

secured flab, and flatter him

under talk-show sunlight.

Yet look at the after shot:

Devonian shell-sweat is

girdled by a deer-head buckle,

his footwall has lead foot

in a King Cab, and during

the apotheosis to carbon cloud

his Nudie suit will blacken

at night, shedding sequins

over our sweet, sweet sleep.

Nicolas Steno

Mr. Medici was kind enough to mail me

a shark. And when I had fitted

my head within its jaws, I saw

its teeth were stone, like those feisty

angles I tread upon when beach-bound.

Now Pliny will say fossils are tossed

from the moon, and Kircher lectures

they are geocosmic tears, but I know

this beast devoured a mountain,

played perpendicular with time

to discipline me for silt rungs,

pilot my pocket-watch gears.

I remove my mind from this mouth

and chant: a carnivore is a door

to our petrified future. I am entombed

upright, sealed with a sleeping shark

fostered in my arms to prove

all that rises once lay flat.

Feats

Touring up the ecotone’s

sloppy home, its pines

starting to flag, I sidestep

a ventilation shaft

gaping from the ground:

a lifeline lobbed out

for the miles of veins

undermining my feet.

Words arrived

at his lips’ threshold

and hesitated

The pit-mouth’s gums

crumble, and chokes on

festering red fescue.

It is Christmas in Banff,

tourists swarm in scarves,

fencing with selfie-sticks.

I silently count

how many tries it takes

to get them out

From the slag heap’s

black hump, I can mark

Minnewanka’s silty blue,

floured and fired

under the sun.

to hobble out a sound,

a name, or a whole phrase

At the bottom of the lake’s

bowl, a town drowns.

Aqua-plaque furs the grain

of notched foundations.

before the feeling can flood

from his voice

It’s an aquarium of the past:

Cinched in sediment,

compressed by varves’

seasonal pudge, Clovis

points sharpen

their aim against eras

and root into earth’s chest.

as the reins on his talk

go slack, then whip taut

At the lip of the cauldron’s

scoop, I find mountain goats

scaling the cirque’s

glacier-ditch. These devil-horned

shaggy-cragsmen lead kids

to the cusp of land’s end

and demand they keep

ascending.

for him to speak,

from the underwater pulpit

of the church. “Can

you hear me, Father?

I mouth words that only

foam. The trout jackknife

in main streets of refracted racket.

Why can’t you drain

My eyes, drenched

in night’s fir

and aspen tides,

disappear into

the lake

to resuscitate

my tongue?”

a wind-white wave

that lashes

grit smooth over time.

Rachel Leclerc

Father/land

Father, I see you there

in your cries between the columns

of red summers lost to yourself

in your domain crippled with hate

spiralling whirling arms spread wide

pushing back the walls

the night filtering in under the eaves

witness to your dispossession

where helplessness hoisted us up

arms full of pillows

deluge of wool feathers cotton

we had to bury our mother

in the secret folds of our being

The morning saw us fall

slowly back down like dust

on your shattered riches

in the great white house

we walked on symbols in ruin

up to the borders of our domain

where the rumour started

of all those people who saw

nothing heard nothing

swear to God!

I see you there

your face ground down

by the weight of mirrors

I release you from the trembling

landscape of the sixties

I leave it all in your hands

the shiny ’49 Ford in the middle

of the yard black and round

it served as our bunker on days

of ground assaults and serious illness

when your brother had to be called in

when we had to slice open our bellies

cut off our tongues bury them

under the tallest tree in the orchard

trace the sacred number of healing

two times inside a circle of five ripe fruit

and pray to the man in the hat buried

under the solarium and make Peter

eat an apple core then an earthworm

I waited many more days

before mapping out the Far North

all that wandering and solitude

in your coat of the 60th parallel

you entered into the silence

like it was your home under

the boreal sky poised to fall

under the weight of its stars

no longer able to endure words

to stop breath erase gestures

you encased your flesh in the Polar ice

while we played at spotting

similarities and differences

in the photos of Inuit children

that arrived without explanation

In the contours of days

everything is there

I surrendered waiting

for the light to cede its colours

to the table of poetic maturation

I leave you the child in the night

boarding the train

the memory of shrill whistling

a hand raised to her ears

disappearing into the continent

where the future is this solid grey

like scrap metal we drag to war

bodies plunged into the sky

eyes rolling over the century

the fleeting touch of legend

Love passed by here

when we planted the hedge

along the road with promises

nascent like flowers

here under this sky that begins

where the rising pollen fades

this sky with its smell of wet earth

Translated from the Québecois by C. S. Lemprière

From Les vies frontalière (Montréal: Éditions du Noroît, 1991).

Notes on Contributors
siku allooloo, an Inuit/Haitian Taino writer from Denendeh, has published creative nonfiction, poetry, and other writing in The New Quarterly, Briarpatch, The Guardian, and Truthout.

jacob lee bachinger has published poetry in Arc, Riddle Fence, and Prairie Fire. He lives in St. John’s, where he is working on a PhD at Memorial.

marta balcewicz (@MartaBalcewicz) lives in Toronto. Her writing and comics have appeared or are forthcoming in The Offing, The Normal School, and Matrix.

morgan charles holds a PhD in communication studies from McGill and lives in Toronto with her husband and daughter.

sue chenette, a Toronto classical pianist and poet, edits for Brick. She’s published two collections, Slender Human Weight and The Bones of His Being, with Guernica.

jan conn’s ninth book, Tomorrow’s Bright White Light, was published in 2016. Her poetry has received a cbc Literary Prize, the P. K. Page Founder’s Award, and been nominated for the Pat Lowther Award.

jamie dopp teaches Canadian literature at UVic. In addition to scholarly writing, he has published two books of poetry, a novel, and several short stories.

katherin edwards has published with Arc, The New Quarterly, and JackPine. Her creative nonfiction appears in In This Together (Brindle & Glass).

brad hartle’s fiction is forthcoming or has appeared in The Dalhousie Review, The Fiddlehead, and Windsor Review. He works in Edmonton as a speechwriter for the Premier of Alberta.

harold hoefle’s poetry has won the Bliss Carman and Great Blue Heron Poetry awards, and a National Magazine Award. His story collection, The Mountain Clinic, was a Quebec Writers Federation fiction-award finalist.

nancy holmes’ fifth book of poems is The Flicker Tree: Okanagan Poems. She teaches creative writing at ubc Okanagan in Kelowna.

chris hutchinson, author of three books of poetry and Jonas in Frames (described as a picaresque novel in verse), once lived in Vancouver and is now based in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

danny jacobs’ poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in journals across Canada. His awards include the P. K. Page Founder’s Award and PRISM’s 2015 Creative Nonfiction Contest.

brian jungen lives in the North Okanagan. Vancouver’s Charles H. Scott Gallery first exhibited his Prototype for New Understanding series (1999–2005) in 1999. His work has since been internationally recognized in major solo and group exhibitions.

irena karafilly, a Montreal writer, poet, and aphorist, has won a National Magazine Award and a cbc Literary Award. The House on Selkirk Avenue (novel), is her most recent book.

dore kiesselbach’s first book of poetry, Salt Pier, received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. His second, Albatross, appeared this fall.

joseph labine, a PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa, with research interests in Irish and Canadian studies, is poetry editor for Flat Singles Press.

allison lasorda’s writing can be found in Taddle Creek, The Fiddlehead, and Hazlitt. Her debut poetry collection, Stray, was published in 2017.

rachel leclerc has published seven books of poetry and received numerous awards, including the Prix Émile-Nelligan. In 2016, she returned to her native Gaspésie after making her home in Montréal for over three decades.

c. s. lemprière, a writer and translator, is translating Rachel Leclerc’s Les vies frontalières (Borderlives). She lives in St-Mathieu-de-Beloeil, Quebec.

harold macy studied writing at the ubc Mentorship Program, Victoria School of Writing, Sage Hill, and North Island College. His first book is The Four Storey Forest: As Grow the Trees So Too The Heart (2011).

david martin works as a literacy instructor in Calgary. His poetry has been awarded the cbc Poetry Prize and has appeared in Grain, Event, and Contemporary Verse 2. His first poetry book, Tar Swan, is forthcoming from NeWest in 2018.

steve mcormond’s new poetry collection, Reckon, is forthcoming in 2018. His poems have been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry in English 2016, and have appeared in Cordite, Jacket, Lemon Hound, and Poetry Daily.

erin noteboom trained as a physicist and is at work on a poetry collection about science and scientists. She also publishes children’s fiction as Erin Bow.

susan olding, author of Pathologies: A Life in Essays, has published poetry and prose in literary journals and anthologies in the U.S. and Canada.

andy patton, a Toronto painter, represented Canada in the Fifth Biennale of Sydney in 1984 and has recently shown in Transformation of Canadian Landscape Art in Xi’an and Beijing. As Pain Not Bread, with Roo Borson and Kim Maltman, he co-authored Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei in 2000.

miranda pearson’s fourth poetry book, The Fire Extinguisher, was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She lives in Vancouver.

sarah puschmann has taught English in South Korea, Argentina, Sweden, and Germany, where she now resides. She holds an mfa from the University of Florida.

susan sanford blades’ short fiction has appeared in The Puritan, Prairie Fire, and Coming Attractions 16. She is nearly finished writing her first novel.

aaron shepard, the author of When is a Man (Brindle & Glass, 2014), lives, works, and writes in Victoria.

paul watkinsteaches English at Vancouver Island University. His creative and academic work focuses on intersections between improvisation, poetry, and sound.

shannon webb-campbell, a mixed-Indigenous (Mi’kmaq)/settler poet, writer, and critic based in Montreal, won the inaugural Out In Print Award for her first book, Still No Word. Book Thug will publish her second, Who Took My Sister?, in 2018.

GET THE MALAHAT REVIEW

In issue #201 (Winter 2017)

The Malahat Review’s winter issue features “Flaubert’s Hummingbirds” and “Faster Horses,” the winning entries of the Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize by Nancy Holmes and the Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction by Katherin Edwards. A highlight is Andy Patton’s remarkable “English version” of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Gramsci’s Ashes”; more than a translation, it is a personal response to the Italian master’s canonical poem. Don’t miss stories and CNF by Howard Macy, Irena Karafilly, Brad Hartle, and Morgan Charles; poems by Steve McOrmond, Sue Chenette, and Danny Jacobs; and reviews of books by Shane Rhodes, Dawn Dumont, and Eddy Weetaltuk.