CONTENTS

Winners: Open Season Awards

JANN EVERARD

[5]

Blue Runaways

BARBARA PELMAN

[55]

Nevertheless

B. A. MARKUS

[89]

How Can a Dog Help a Goose

Poetry

JULIE BRUCK

[11]

FIVE POEMS

STEWART COLE

[27]

As Spoken from the Barrel’s Bottom

STEPHANIE BOLSTER

[29]

Tiffany, or Comfort

CHRIS JENNINGS

[30]

Hotel Art as Meditations on Desire

KIM TRAINOR

[40]

TWO POEMS

JANE MUNRO

[42]

Winter Piano

JOHN PASS

[57]

THREE POEMS

FRANK KLAASSEN

[64]

Furunculus meus—My little thief

TOM WAYMAN

[65]

TWO POEMS

CAROLYN NAKAGAWA

[77]

Horses and men

TERENCE YOUNG

[78]

THREE POEMS

A. F. MORITZ

[82]

FOUR POEMS

PATRICK LANE

[88]

Sada

MAUREEN HYNES

[94]

The Horses, the Sorrow, the Umbilicus

Fiction

S. C. BAYAT

[17]

Wild, Sweet Orange

CORINNE STIKEMAN

[69]

Things My Father Thought Were Beautiful

Creative Nonfiction

LAURA LEGGE

[33]

Presupposing Faith and Love

JASON EMDE

[43]

You Are Her

Book Reviews - Poetry

WILL JOHNSON

SARA CASSIDY

DAVID ESO

Book Reviews - Fiction

KATE KENNEDY

JONATHAN FLIEGER

Book Reviews - Nonfiction

COLIN LOUGHRAN

JOEL YANOFSKY

CHRISTIN GEALL

RACHEL YACAAAŁ GEORGE

125

Notes on Contributors

Cover

JESSICA EATON

cfaal 346, 2013

Archival pigment print

40 in × 50 in × 38 cm

Courtesy of the Artist

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JANN EVERARD

Blue Runaways

I watched you suffer a dull aching pain

Now you decided to show me the same

“Wild Horses”—The Rolling Stones

AT THE KEFLAVIK INTERNATIONAL Airport Liv held up a cardboard sign that read Artists, and I eyed her for twenty minutes before realizing she was there to meet me. In red pants, red boots, red sweater, red lipstick, she looked like she’d been turned inside out, a beating heart exposed. As we waited for a painter from France, she poured brutish coffee from a thermos and said, “So, are you here to make some art, or are you just here to escape?”

I gestured at my empty left sleeve. “I was sent here because I’m depressed.”

“You only need one hand to give the finger,” she said. “Have a kleinur.” She took my coffee cup and handed me a twisted donut. The gummy dough stuck to my teeth. With little more than a glance I felt she understood me, every shade of pain and anger and loneliness I’d felt since my surgery. I leaned toward her instead of sideways to compensate for the lost weight of my arm.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Twenty-four.”

“You still live at home?”

“My parents needed a break from me. They’re paying for this.”

Liv surveyed my body from top to bottom. A flush ignited at my neck, fired up my cheeks. “Like sending you away to summer camp,” she said. “Do you think your folks are making out right now—a little afternoon delight?” She winked, but then her gaze drifted off and her voice deepened. “God, I really wish we were in their place. You’ll see soon enough. This island breeds loneliness. It wasn’t made for sun-filled romance.”

I’m not an artist of any kind. I’m a lost soul, a person searching for a purpose in life according to my mother. She means well, so I haven’t told her that it’s worse than that. I’m looking for a purpose to live. “You just feel like you’re in a hole right now,” she said a month ago, the euphemism as close to the truth as her maternal feelings were able to get. She handed me a ticket to Iceland. “A few weeks at an arts retreat will help. You know what I’ve always told you to do when you find yourself in a hole.”

I nodded as she sat on my good side flipping the pages of tourism brochures. Images of waterfalls, fluffy baby puffins, and the pink shoulders of men and women lounging in thermal baths filled the pages. I think she secretly hoped I’d meet someone in Iceland who would care for me. Parents are always looking for fairy-tale endings for their children.

Liv drove the painter and me from the airport to the guesthouse. It took four hours by Jeep in a slanting rain the sun never managed to thrust aside. “This is the famous Ring Road,” Liv said. “You can drive around the whole damn island on this road in a week. Every gas station serves the same hot dogs and pastries. You’ll only see lava, the ocean, and moss. Unless it stops raining; then, you might see a glacier. After a while you’ll realize there are more horses here than people can possibly ride.” She made chewing motions and waited for me to look horrified. As she shoved a CD into the dust-covered dash, I noticed the case was familiar. “Wild Horses”blasted from the speakers, but the painter in the back didn’t wake up, even when Liv sang the chorus off key.

“Did you bring good weather with you?” she demanded when the song ended. “I could use some fucking sun.”

My stump bounced against Liv’s shoulder when we made a sudden left onto a side road without signalling. She pulled onto the verge and baaed out the window at three ewes standing motionless nearby. “There’s nothing here you can’t get where you live except volcanoes that erupt without warning. Most of the island is bleak and treeless.” She turned to me with damp lashes and down-turned lips, the shiny red lacquer chewed away. “I don’t get it. Iceland is small and remote and wet. Why do you people keep coming here? What do you all hope to find?”

The guesthouse is in the middle of nowhere. The next farm is thirty minutes away, the next town an hour. Although my parents paid for me to have a private room, a broken pipe makes it uninhabitable. Liv says, “She’ll sleep with me,” and the eyes of every other participant narrow with jealousy or suspicion. They’ve been on site a week already and have staked their claim to her attention with earnest sketches and eco-friendly collages. I soon understand that Liv is communal property. When she enters a room everyone shouts “Liv!” like she’s a long-lost relative or that dude Norm on reruns of Cheers. She is the dóttir of the house, the arts instructor, the life of the party. Next to Liv, the painter and I are just two more gulls in the cloud-sodden air, two more grey chunks of basalt on the fields that surround us.

In the morning workshop, Liv invites us to draw icebergs. We are only allowed to use blue crayons. Liv has amassed an impressive range of blues, each wax stick stripped of its protective paper. “The bergs hive off the glaciers and float away to sea,” Liv says, as she fills a page of her sketchbook with extraordinary shapes, hidden faces straining seaward from within each one. “Blue runaways,” she says in a voice that sounds so wistful everyone at the table looks up. She sharpens a crayon and her conciliatory smile is as unnatural as the turquoise she holds. “Imagine elsewhere,” she says. “Think warm, sea-side carnival. Think cotton candy and Blue Cherry Gatorade.”

Liv disappears after the Tuesday afternoon workshop. Since it is karaoke night, the guesthouse bustles with communal dinner preparations. Four artists from Denmark argue over a slab of fish that glistens on brown-paper wrapping. Two German girls peel a mound of potatoes with the dexterity of seasoned kitchen help. I try to catch the eyes of the two brothers from the States but they remain focussed on the pallid tomatoes and cucumber that will make a tasteless salad. The Frenchman opens wine. Invisibility is what I have come to expect since I became one-armed, so I retire to a corner to arrange crackers on a plate. I cut wedges of Jarlsberg with my right hand by draping the brick of cheese with a tea towel and anchoring it with my stump. My face must be very close to the cheese to accomplish this task, but I hold my breath so that I don’t contaminate the food. After dinner, while the others sing, I wait for Liv in the kitchen. I find the cheese tray shoved below the counter, soggy crackers topped with wedges that are dry and curling. I re-arrange the crackers to spell out LIV.

I wake up to cutlery clattering. It’s still dark but Liv is not in her bunk above me. When I find her, she has sliced half a dozen onions and piled them high in a cast-iron frying pan. She stirs the twisted rings with a wooden spoon, tears streaming down her face.

“Are you okay?” I ask, and she shakes her head.

“Let me,” I say, taking the spoon and bumping her away from the stove with my hip. I can do this for her: stir and stir the onions until they go translucent, sweeten and caramelize. I sense they are an excuse so that Liv can have a good cry. “Why don’t you just leave, if you hate it here so much,” I ask, and she asks me why I don’t just snap out of it, if I’m so depressed.

Then she sinks down to the floor, her back against the cupboards. The air is thick with vapours that sting the eyelids and draw others from their bedrooms to investigate the smell. They look at me with disgust before retreating, unaware that out of their line of sight Liv leans her head against my thigh whispering, “sorry, sorry.” Once they’re gone, I crouch beside her. We feed each other the glistening rings, twinned together by the odours that cling to our clothes, our hair, our oily breath.

Liv is white-blond with eyes the colour of reindeer moss. Her skin has the blue cast of fine porcelain, a scattering of freckles across her nose. She is long-limbed with taut muscles and whorled ears studded with silver Celtic knots. A Nordic goddess, a snow queen. On my third morning at the guesthouse, I wake to find her standing naked close by my bunk. She has no pubic hair, just red stipple as if each strand has been waxed away or plucked.

“You make me think of old European paintings,” I say.

She kneels by my bed and caresses my shoulder, then moves her thumb down to my stump. Her hair falls in front of her face like one of the waterfalls we passed on the way to the guesthouse. Foss means waterfall means oh my God, I feel her fingers on the missing limb. “How did you lose your arm?” she asks.

I open my mouth to tell her the story of my accident but her lips graze mine. “Not here,” she says. In the silvery light of morning, she tosses clothes my way. “Get dressed.”

“I’ll be too hot in these,” I say, too hot already.

“Not where we’re going,” she answers, and helps me pull one of her own woolly sweaters over my head. The struggle to clothe myself has, until now, been a private one, so this feels as intimate as if Liv’s run her hands over my breasts. I sense some longing pent up in her, but I’m too inexperienced at this to know whether it’s sexual, too stunned to believe it’s directed at me.

“What about the others? The workshop?” I ask, wanting Liv to tell me that we are an island unto ourselves. She wipes her hands together as if brushing off dirt. “Let them paint landscapes,” she says. “Rocks and moss and interminable cloud. Let’s see if they can find what they came for.”

Liv drives hard through the curtain of rain, the Jeep spitting gravel. The hard hat she hands me slides forward so that I can barely see. We park in a lava field and walk to a place where the rocky surface has collapsed into a chasm. She precedes me down a ladder and I can sense her hovering, ready to provide a steady hand if the wind blasts or I lose my hold. At the bottom she grasps my fingers. “There’s no path. It’s hard to walk here and keep your balance.”

To Liv, I must be transparent. I’ve told my surgeon, my social worker, my parents that I feel unbalanced by my missing arm, and by the driver of that other car who hounds me, trying to apologize for my loss. They all hear me, but they do not hear me. “Tap into your creativity!” my mother exclaims, as if I can imagine myself a new limb, draw myself as attractive, and this will fix everything.

We enter a cave. Where it narrows, there is a locked gate. Liv opens it with an iron key and waves me in, turning on the headlamp attached to my helmet. Stumbling after her, I become aware of how quiet the place is. It absorbs our sound; there are no echoes. It’s my first experience of Iceland without the pelting rain and howling wind. Once we’ve reached a larger chamber, Liv stops and pats a flat boulder that will seat both of us. “This is where I come when I need to dream,” she says. “Look up.” She puts an arm around me, directing the beams of our headlamps to a phosphorescent glow on the upper cavern walls. “Fungi,” she says, “that live here because they are adapted to this, and only this environment, poor things.”

She lets me take in their glow before continuing. “Have you ever been in a lava tube before? Way back in history, molten rock moved through here while the surface crusted over. The channel goes on forever—nearly 1600 metres apparently. All my life I’ve imagined it leads to the centre of the earth, Jules Verne-like—to some other world. Until now, I’ve never had the nerve to explore it. I’ve been afraid there’s no escape. It’s considered crazy to want to leave Iceland, you know.”

She reaches over to extinguish my headlamp, then turns off her own. We are in the deepest dark I have ever experienced. My brain wants to see some aura of Liv, but everything is black.

“Do you want to tell me what happened to you?” she asks.

My mother always said there are only two options when you find yourself in a hole: dig deeper, or reach for the hand that will pull you out. For a long time I have been digging. “Yes,” I say and tell Liv about the cars skidding on ice. I tell her that one arm is enough to push away everyone you love, and that I can’t see my life stretch out past twenty-four. “You could lock me in this tube and throw away the key and I wouldn’t care,” I say, knowing as I speak that it’s not true anymore.

From nowhere, Liv’s fingers quest on my cheek, turning my face toward hers. In the cold air of the cave, our warm breath pools between us.

“I hope you don’t mean that,” she says and makes her pledge with a kiss. It feels huge, and I’m roused to make some equal promise. I wrap my arms around her—feel whole as I do.

Liv leans her forehead against mine. “Here’s what I think,” she says. “Tomorrow, you should lock me in here and watch me walk away into the dark. Then you’llknow how the people who care about you would feel, if you gave up on life.”

The idea is ridiculous and perfect. “And you’re going to find the end of this tunnel,” I reply. “Just to prove that there’s no other way out of here but to leave.”

She seeks out my hand, closing my fingers over the iron key. “But when I get back to the gate—?” She doesn’t ask at that moment. She never asks directly. But I can read her, even in the dark. She wants to know that once she’s been to the bottom of her hole, once she looks back to the surface, she can count on someone to be there. It’s something I can promise. I only need one hand to reach down and pull her up. One hand to lead her away.

FIVE POEMS BY JULIE BRUCK

Signal Cry

Late afternoon. Over the bent backs

of migrants, miles of lettuce and strawberries,

to the Monterey shore, where three red kayaks

skim home on the cut-glass of returning tide.

It’s the cry for outgoing produce from Salinas,

or the progress of those few summer passengers

in no hurry, inching through the Valley from L.A.

It’s the sound that used to wake me daily

at precisely 4:03 a.m. on the digital clock,

when I slept fitfully on the couch at my parents’

Florida condo, a moan so deep, so historical

from that thin coastal strip of climate-controlled

developments, it seemed to spread through

the pre-dawn without interference from traffic

on I-95, threading among the dark duplexes,

surviving beach shacks, and the unsold monster

homes which had sprung up in every empty lot

before the recession and Rita. I never slept

past 4:03. I’d lie tangled in the sheets, but flung far

from the hiss of automatic watering, to the train

that rattled through a Quebec village, when

I was small and settled in my grandmother’s

capacious lap. Waiting at the hilltop window

for the promised red caboose, black tracks

stitched across the snow like a zipper waiting

for its pull from where we sat, I’d feel her

lean again into the past: the train that took

her from Missouri, the family she left behind

dead by then, but caramelized to an unlikely

sweetness, circa 1898. The whole world’s gone

crazy, she’d mutter, before weeping her way

through twisters or World’s Fairs, that piano

on the porch her older sisters learned to play

for their own pleasure. Oh, sweet St. Louis—

years before Florida’s swamps were drained

to lay rail, when all that disturbed an Everglades

dawn was the alligator lifting its primordial head

from Lake Kissimmee, drops from the long muzzle

casting ever-expanding rings on the brackish

waters. No crossings. No distances. No cry.

After Lorne

The doughy older man in a Marine Bulldogs jacket

signals his wife in the crowded hospital pharmacy,

clutching his bagged prescription like a dead pheasant.

That’s what it takes to get things done, he tells her

and the rest of the waiting room. If nothing happens,

you gotta investigate. That’s what it means to be a Marine.

Yes, Lorne, she mutters as he herds her to the exit,

her weariness suggesting she is familiar with his

credo. Yes, Lorne—and now the rest of us awaiters

wait, faces raised like forlorn hatchlings, mouths

wide, lest we miss our Last Name/First Initial flashed

upon the electronic screen way up near the ceiling.

This room used to be a participatory democracy.

Now we are mere fools of please & thank you.

We read our Patient Education leaflets. We wait.

Outside, darkness falls on the extravagant city.

Fledgling

Four mounted police pass on the sidewalk.

Such unlikely traction of iron-shod hooves,

sixteen bells striking the pavement.

My old father is failing, and I’m not there.

I’m watching wind play the horses’ tails,

shaken trees release curtains of white apple

blossom, and four midnight-blue helmets

recede into that whiteness, as if into snow.

My father labours to breathe. Two Canada Geese

perch high in a redwood on black rubber feet,

seeming stunned to have reached that height,

or maybe by what’s next. If I book a flight now,

I’ll be there tomorrow. A heron stumbles

from his nest out along the cypress branch

like a prehistoric drunk. Not one of these

big birds looks flight-enabled, though they are.

I am holding my ground, fixed as a penguin

asked to multi-task while cradling an egg

between its feet. What am I waiting for—a parent

to return and throw up into my open beak?

My father is dying. I have a valid passport.

A credit card.

Finally, I ran. Then I flew.

It Gets Old,

this enumerating of all the ways we fail

our ancient parents, when suddenly we’re

the furious, naked squallers we’ve always

been, now helplessly exposed to the cold

and rain. Our children don’t want to see us

this way, so they get busy. My mother liked

to say, whatever you do with your kids will

come back to bite you, so you may as well lie

back and relax. I thought this an echo of bad

advice to rape victims of the ‘70s,and clearly

I knew it all, having read the latest owner’s

manuals before my baby came.But our parents

muddled through, loving their lives. So what

if my old mother was admitted for observation

because she sang fragments of Sondheim songs

for thirty-six hours straight: that was one joy

she still knew by heart. We did not handle this well.

Nor will our adult children, and why should they?

They too are dying by degrees. They love us,

but will push back hard against this fact.

We love them to no end. The rest gets old.

Subscriber

I. Daily

For years, she turned the pages without

absorbing much, and then—stopped turning.

But the daily Gazette beside the juice glass was so

fundamental, I forgot to cancel it after she died.

For one mad moment, I imagined her published

obituary skidding to rest at the apartment door,

and hoped a neighbor would find it first,

so my mother wouldn’t learn she was dead

by reading the back of the Life section.

II. Monthly

There should have been wireless service

through the end of June, but I had lost her codes.

Cannot Connect, the message said. Tried

guessing: the little beach ball spun and spun,

but didn’t make contact with Preferred Network.

I dreamed she’d left a typically long, rambling

message. I heard her voice, but didn’t pick up.

Said she was calling from—then named all

the places she’d ever lived. Left no number,

no way to call her back. Now it’s mid-December.

S. C. BAYAT

Wild, Sweet Orange

IT IS SEVEN A.M., AND in half an hour you will be at Cathedral Grove, and you’ll find him there because he took you often and there’s nothing to distract you. On the way, you imagine Patrick weeping, surrounded by many smelly, bearded trees. As you drive, sun breaks the winter sky.

Three years ago, in the long gone, you saw him from across the crowded dance floor of a dark, shoebox-shaped bar. A strobe light from the DJ booth illuminated his wavy red hair, and for a brief moment you thought he was on fire. For some reason (cosmic intervention?), he looked your way at the exact moment you ogled his pseudo flame-head, and so out of all the faces to see, you found each other’s.

Sometimes people do things out of their orbit, like hold eye contact with a stranger while bodies leap like salmon between them. And sometimes, this new orbit leads somewhere unexpected, such as the fogged-up cab of a cream ’76 Ford F-150 at one in the morning, while thick bass and Biggie boom boom from next door. He wore a black T-shirt, The Clumsy Lovers written across its front with two speech bubbles below: “Ouch” and then, “Sorry.” Tattoos embroidered each of his arms but you were too intoxicated by him to study them. He said his name was Patrick L. and asked if he might kiss you. His face was sandpapered with stubble, and in the fluorescent light it glistened like fibreglass.

“You’re thorny,” you said. “Like an undomesticated rose.” You once worked as a landscaper but had to quit on account of hay fever.

He smelled his armpit, wafted it toward you. “Get a whiff of this bloomin’ scent.”

Patrick held his hands in a peculiar way; he hooked his index fingers and rubbed them along the pads of his thumbs, bent the other three into his palms. Nerves, perhaps.

He chatted about his spaniel, Pepper, black-and-white-and-deaf, that liked to howl along to Def Leppard (because of vibrations from the speaker, more so than the irony). You told him how your mind doesn’t mind blood but your body can’t stand the sight of it. He exhibited the upper row of his teeth: the incisors hadn’t ever grown in and so his canines jammed beside his big choppers, like every other mouth was wrong. You showed him the pea-sized scar on your right elbow, acquired fifteen years earlier in grade four from a head-on collision with a seventh grader, in which you ricocheted five feet backwards—but didn’t faint because the blood was stoppered by all the dirt. After years of BMXing he couldn’t relax cross-legged anymore, not without pain, so he sat with limbs extended straight in front of him, like a doll.

It was July, the air electric warm. Your blood pumped too fast to yawn. The two of you talked and talked, and the hours passed. He drove you home as the sun woke and joined you for some cereal on the peeling green steps of your building. You had three kinds to choose from, and he mixed a bit of each into two bowls and replaced the boxes on top of the fridge. Modern romance. You snuck sideways glances as he spooned Happios, Sultana Bran, and Corn Wows into his mouth. His hair grazed the neck just above his shoulder. There are different types of red, such as auburn or strawberry blond. And there is carrot like his, the most orange. He picked you a dandelion from between concrete slabs in the walkway. You used to think they were yellow because dogs peed on them. You didn’t tell him this. He washed and dried the bowls upstairs, then replaced them in the cupboard.

“Like I was never here at all,” he said. He waggled his fingers at your chin and made a ghoulish sound, something like, “Oooooouuuuuuuuu,” and left through the front door.

Sometimes, Patrick took you to Cathedral Grove to see giants. The two of you would position yourselves on either side of a massive trunk and hug it, cheeks pressed into fragrant, mossy bark, and reach for each other but never connect. He once said the two of you were a couple of tree-cuddlers, and it made you want to close the space between your fingertips and his. A couple. There is something peaceful about standing at the base of an eight-hundred-year-old Douglas fir. It provides a sense of one’s own insignificance, and this is freeing because it removes some of life’s magnitude. Perhaps this is how ants feel when they stand next to you.

You’re here now, in Cathedral Grove, three years after you met him, so that your head might no longer be muddied and loud, and maybe you’ll find Patrick within the hush of old-growth because it’s been seven weeks and four days since he took his own life.

Within your chest is a giant silk moth thrashing in the web of a spider.

The morning is eager, the air bitten. All around is brown and green, and the forest is pungent with damp wood and loam. Sunlight manoeuvres through the needles and leaves. The knock of a woodpecker fills the space between trees. On the footpath, soil is fine like moon dust. Not far from where you are, Cameron Lake punctuates the firs, cedars, and hemlock, and these follow it round and up a mountain on the other side of the water. Three summers ago, you’d swum here.

“There’s a cave over there.” Patrick pointed to the slope. “Near the bottom.”

The two of you had come to escape the fever of August, to shelter beneath the awning of foliage.

“Probably filled with stalagmites and stalactites,” he said. “Petroglyphs. Unidentified bugs. Bats.”

“Bat shit.”

“Could move in. I’ll be Gollum.”

“Place must be buried in it,” you said. “You’d need a broom.”

He cut away from the path and stepped over a low wooden fence.

“You can’t go in there,” you said.

He ambled through the tufts of knee-high sword fern. Wet tentacles of hair stuck to his neck. You’d brought swim suits but forgotten towels.

“You can’t go in there,” you said, louder.

“Come, Preciousssssss,” he called. “Be my cave wife.”

He batted at fern fronds. You caught up and jumped on his back. His skin was warm against yours. The sun dried your bodies.

“The walls might shimmer,” you said. “Crystalized minerals.”

“We’ll live in a diamond.”

When his phone rang—a shrill noise—he put you down. Your chest and thighs were clammy from him.

“That was Drew,” he told you. “Party at mine.” He turned back to the fence.

Drew, the best friend and roommate. Drew, whose hobbies included ‘gunning Lucky beers in the bathtub and growing his corkscrew hair to his nipples. He’d once told you that his nickname in high school was Dirty.

“The petroglyphs,” you said.

Patrick had a way of walking with his hips, arms stiff, similar to a gorilla. “You think cider in this heat?”

You tore the tip off a frond, picked at the spores on its underside, and then left it to fall where you’d stood.

Think, now, of petroglyphs and diamond walls. Step over the wood railing and walk toward the lake, the caves. Be careful to tread only on soil, navigate the living green. Your sinuses itch. Ignore them. Several yards from the path, find a yellowed and bloated cigarette filter, a little blister on the landscape. A parade of black ants climbs over it, threads across the soil and up the trunk of a nearby tree. Stand below but lose sight of the procession before its end, before it’s even reached the branches.

In the long gone, Patrick tended bar on the weekends until two in the morning, and you’d get out of bed and meet him on your front steps. Often, he was buzzed. More often, he brought liquid joy with him. Potato, juniper, grape. You’d join in, because what else? In the wee hours, the world was yours. The two of you went to parties with Drew, basked in the excitement of whiff-filled dime bags and little brown pills. It felt dangerous, and danger is sexy. There was always music, though it was rarely any good, but that’s okay because everyone was so cool and your skin purred, and you had real conversations at three a.m. with people whose names disintegrated, and you smoked the whole pack of cigarettes even though you don’t smoke, and sometimes your nose dripped red and your sinuses bunged but it was all fine because FUN. The trick was to beat the sunrise. If you made it to bed before light-time you weren’t a loser. The golden hour rule. Slumber was out of the question after nights like that. So: sex. Again, and again, and again. Fuck till the cogs in your mind disassemble. The two of you traded copies of On the Road, because he liked books new and you preferred them beaten. You didn’t kiss in front of your friends, but to dip a sewing needle into India ink and then jam it into his skin at a party, you bet.

“Are you two together?” that guy asked. The one who was at every bash, in everyone’s business, that mooched from everyone’s drinks.

Together, but not together. Let the stars figure it out. People are too serious.

Unclench the fist in your chest. Study the ribs of his irises when he tells you his mother used to sing “This Flight Tonight” and weep. How if he ever proves his dad cheated on her, he’ll kill him. That his brother overeats and his sister hates her nose. How sometimes he feels so low he might as well be six-foot deep.

Some days you woke still clutching at one another. You would untangle yourself, and he’d sleep on until late afternoon, early evening.

“Have to get my twenty hours in.” He winked at you, hair rowdy, cheek pink from your pillow.

You made him scrambled eggs, and wound his waves around your fingers as he ate.

“You sleep in the fetal,” you said.

“When I was a little guy I’d tuck tight as a hermit crab, press my chin to my knees and whisper, ball of warmth.”

You snickered, ball of warmth, because it was the easiest thing to do.

Your building was a converted character home, with three apartments including yours and laundry in the basement, which was always cold, even in August. In the suite adjacent to yours was a fellow, Chad, in his thirties, and around back was a woman you had never seen but were told was retired when you signed the lease. Chad knocked on your door one afternoon, after Patrick had woken and gone home. He held a red towel and said he was doing laundry, and did you have anything you needed washed because he’d put it in with his load, since he only needed the towel.

Your face bloomed. “No, no I can’t. I’m flattered, but I’ve committed my hamper to whites only and your towel is red. We can’t do that. Maybe the lady in the back is interested. Thanks, you’re sweet. Thanks.” And you closed the door and watched him leave through the peephole. You made spinach and ricotta cannelloni for dinner, wrapped up a plate for Patrick in case he came over later. He was always hungry after work.

Nestled in Cathedral Grove, Cameron Lake is like textured glass on a shower door, frosted and pitted. You pick up a palm-sized stone, cradle the gravity of it in your hand. It arcs high and narrow and disappears with a ploomp, and then all of a sudden—all of a sudden—what’s left of this small stone pulses and undulates across the whole of the watery world it inhabits. You once heard that as a person dies their entire life flashes in front of them. But maybe it stretches before us like an ocean or a galaxy, and every chest-swelling iota of our existence plays on an endless reel.

There is still no sign of the cave. Perhaps this is uncharted territory. A compass is a handy thing to have, especially here, especially in all areas of life. The urge to sneeze shoots between your nose and eyes. The sneezy-shoots. Keep Cameron to your right and feel the earth steepen. You’ve never been so far off the path. There are logs the length of buses blanketed in heavy moss. A few of these are nurse logs. The soil is darker and moves like brown sugar. There are midnight-black oyster mushrooms, and they grow from tree bark like shelves. Consider picking one to fan away the cave bats. Maybe the mushrooms are edible, too, a multipurpose tool. Nature hack: spear them on a broken stalagmite and roast over a fire. Use dried moss and twigs for kindling. You could fashion a bed from a fallen giant.

Like people, Douglas fir build a thick skin over time, marred with deep grooves as they grow upward, outward, and older. The last time Patrick brought you here, you’d pointed out the similarity.

“Trees aren’t like people at all.” He cupped a fir cone in his palm, ran a slow finger against the bracts. “Except maybe kids.”

Water filled his eyes—the spontaneous whimpies, he called it. You didn’t have any tissues and thought about giving him the neck of your sweater, but then sneezed and had to use it yourself.

“I’ve met some rotten kids.” You hadn’t, but offered it anyway.

He tossed the cone and it skipped across the dirt. “This is the only holy place left.” He wiped his face with his sleeve, pressed a thumb to the end of your nose, and walked on.

The absence of sound is so loud in a holy place.

You pick up a cone now, snap off a few of its scales and pitch them aside, then throw the cone a moment later.

Within your chest is a boulder, balanced on a cliff edge.

On the sloping terrain, the expanse of understory shrubs is made visible: the large palmate leaves of Devil’s Club, arranged in a spiral around the stem; the tough and serrated egg-shaped foliage of salal; tall clumps of triangular sword fern; a thin, blue plastic bag of dog shit, knotted carefully at the top.

Even in the long ago, good things never tended to stay. With such undefined edges came uneasiness, came jealousy, came resentment. By the end of a year so much had happened. Together, but not together. It’s complicated.

“Aren’t you tired of standing still?” You walked asymmetric shapes across the linoleum of Patrick’s kitchen, gestured with your hands a lot. “What kind of woman am I?”

“I’m not a piece of shit.” Patrick sat on the counter beside the sink, peeled the label off his beer. He wore his favourite T-shirt, The Clumsy Lovers, and didn’t look at you.

“I’ve nothing to show for myself.”

“We’re easy,” he said. “Rule free.”

“No more parties. I feel like a husk.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong.”

What did he mean, wrong?

“What do you mean wrong?” you said. Because you wore socks, and because you ceased movement so immediately, you lurched, swung your arm like an oar to steady yourself, and knocked Patrick’s beer to the floor.

You stared at him, and he stared at the beer spilling its guts. Gull gull gull, the bottle said. Fool fool fool.

“What do you mean?” You leaned toward him, then straightened again. You knew what he meant. You knew from everywhere and nowhere at once. “It’s fine.” Your features, no doubt, pinched like a pallid dumpling. “I have to go.”

Then he looked at you, and all of the hardest moments in all of the weepiest films were there in his face. You swallowed all of the things that neither of you could ever bring yourselves to say. And that was it. Simple, till the sour end.

You spent a long, long, very long time wanting to stomp, and ruin, and kick him out of you. Who is he anyway. Who even cares. Not you. Not even a little bit.

For months, you found his hair curled like ribbon on your pillow, in your hairbrush, on the welcome mat. You’d hold each one taut between fingers and thumbs, and examine the shine that bolted along it in the light, press it into your lips. You taped the strands to the inside of On the Road, filled both the front and back covers with bittersweet orange.

Ballet flats are not ideal for hiking up forested slopes. Dirt, tiny pebbles, and splinters of wood burrow in the canyon between your shoe and the side of your foot. You continue for as long as you can stand and then have to empty the shoe, which entails hopping on the opposite-shoed foot so that your bare foot doesn’t touch the dirt. This is difficult on an incline. Laughter rings out and over from somewhere below. You turn and look but there are no signs of life, which is an arrogant thing to think, since you’re smack dab in a forest.

Twenty yards or so ahead of you, the soil is ruptured by bedrock, a looming behemoth that wears a crown of trees and shrubs, as if one day it thought, right, time for some fresh air, and burst forth from below. And there, at its bottom left, is a dark hollow.

Push into the slope with the tips of your feeble shoes, the gradient too steep now to flatten your feet. Your calves tighten, quads too. Use hands to pull yourself forward. Grasp at fronds and sugared dirt. Your eyes itch. Denim presses into your crotch, into the bend where hip meets leg. Laughter again—or a woodpecker?—don’t stop to look. Ignore the ballooning scorch of your lungs. Sneeze, slip, and then slide down. Apply knees to steady yourself. Soil crams beneath your nails. Your finger bleeds. The cave.

The cave is less a cave than a paisley-shaped smirk slapped four feet up into the rock. The entrance is six feet across, and perhaps two at its widest point. This is to throw the weary off. Inside will be cavernous. There will be stalactites that drip from the ceiling like candle wax. There will be luminous insects that you’ve never imagined. There will be all of it.

Within your chest are tectonic plates shifting along the fault.

Lower yourself onto your stomach, army-crawl your way in. Use your cell phone as a flashlight. There is muck, and it squelches and sucks at and seeps through your clothes, and settles on the skin of your forearms, chest, stomach, legs. The sneezy-shoots are back. The air is limp.

Crawl forward.

Crawl forward but there are no stalagmites and there are no gemstone walls and there are no petroglyphs and there are no bats. Inches ahead of you is the rock face, solid and damp and immovable. The cave is less a cave than a pit. The only heartbeat besides yours is a minuscule pale cricket that hops onto the back of your hand and tick tick ticks its way to your wrist.

From your mouth, a long, loud, anguished rumble, like that of a farm animal. The sound surrounds you, pushes into the world behind and beyond. Your chest wall buckles and then crashes up and out of your eyes. It crashes and crashes and crashes, and you are all alone and alone and alone.

Two years after you met him, the long gone had changed. You popped cherry tomatoes instead of pills, spent weekends fraternizing with homework. You got a tabby. Patrick told you he’d started to run, to eat spinach, that he didn’t sleep away the days anymore. He’d quit the booze for good. No more parties. A whole new man.

“Had to happen sometime,” he said. “I’m getting old.”

“Twenty-eight is practically thirty,” you said.

He had called and asked to see you. He’d waited till then, he revealed, because it took that long to forget what your perfume smelled like. You met him by the university fountain. It was summer. He wore a black cast on his right wrist. He’d started to BMX again.

“Not like my younger days.” He shook the cast at you.

“It’s too sombre.” You knocked at the black plaster. “No one can sign it.”

“Didn’t want to roll around with dicks and flames graffitied on it.”

Patrick pulled up his pant leg. On his shin, a stick and poke skull with a crack that meandered the length of its crown. This fracture was the sheepish result of too much wobbly pop, but you’d claimed it intentional after Patrick called it badass.

“It’s my favourite tattoo,” he said.

You smiled and thought, still his favourite in some small way, but didn’t tell him this.

“You look good,” you said, because he did. “It’s good to see you.” And it was.

The very last time you saw him was a week before Christmas. You’d met at a pub ten minutes from your house. You nursed a cider. He guzzled ginger ale, and asked if you’d been to Cathedral Grove lately. You hadn’t, not since him. At one point, he slipped off a shoe and placed his foot on yours, and left it there until you’d had to get up because your bladder is the size of a hazelnut. The two of you sat together until yours was the lone table, and the staff asked if you might please continue elsewhere so they could get the hell out and go to bed. Outside, you wanted to ask if he’d walk you home and there, on the front steps, you’d inquire if he would like to come inside. He’d say yes, yes he would join you, because what else? You knew this so you didn’t ask, and instead just said, see ya! and waved but didn’t hug him, and walked home alone. The two of you were in such a good place.

You didn’t know Drew would call you eight days from then. I thought he’d hung a mannequin in his closet, ass an inch from the floor, legs straight as pins. You didn’t know Patrick would fall so spectacularly off the chariot that he’d end up in Mercy Hill Hospital on Christmas Eve. You didn’t know he’d do so in secret, that he’d persuade the overworked staff into letting him leave the next morning, and he’d walk home alone. And you didn’t know Drew would be out looking for him at that moment, because it was Christmas Day and Patrick’s parents had called, wondering why he hadn’t arrived to unwrap presents.

How could you?

You fall four times on your way down the slope. This is not because you’re a bad walker, but because the muck on your clothes stiffens as it dries and hinders the bend of your limbs. You arrive at the lake. It is unseasonably warm for February, but still, if you wade into Cameron to rid yourself of this mess you’ll catch cold. What’s a cold anyway, in the grand scheme of things? It’s silly to be afraid of the sniffles. Ridiculous, even.

“Hah!” you shout at Cameron. “Hah-hah!” And Cathedral Grove fills with the echo of you.

Within your chest is a fiddlehead not yet unfurled.

You sit in front of a toppled trunk not far from the water and lean against the bark. It crumbles under your fingertips if you press hard enough. Ferns and fungi sprout along its length. At one end, there is a sapling. It smells of decay and of new flora.

Patrick once asked whether you thought the colours of sunset were like sorbet melting on your tongue. He’d heard the Milky Way tasted of raspberries, and while you lay on your backs atop his detached garage in the smudged light of dusk, you each opened your mouths and stuck out rosy tongues. Dinner for us, breakfast for Japan, he said. You looked at the far and wide for so long that the clouds seemed to tumble right for you, billowing tortoise-slow and inescapable. You held his hand in one of yours and with the other, reached to the sky. He reached for it too, but soon lowered his arm and sat up, put both hands on his knees. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, and his hair caught the last of the sun.

When we lose someone, it isn’t the memories that remain which are painful, but the gutting truth there will never be more.

You sit here, blurry, among hundreds of trees that column upward and branch into vaults, and sunlit mist breathes through the canopy and illuminates the green like stained glass in a nave. There is only still and quiet. You inhale, rooted deep and broad, and air fills the tributaries in your lungs.

STEWART COLE

As Spoken from the Barrel’s Bottom

Apartmented mansions of Old Louisville

Ghosted by segregationist river barons

Crumble annually into beauty

As only the horseshoed among us do

I heart this bourbon derby

This city with notes of tobacco and clove

To blend among whose gentlefolk I must

Throat local molten till I intone caramel

Every word smelling of burnt sugar

Like a wayward picnic ant urged

By some wonky hormonal cocktail

Beyond the scented edges of his colony

To reach the hole of a foreign hill whose lip

Silts like the pinch of a tilted hourglass

Grains of sand careening boulderwise

Down its tunnelling maw

I have arrived bearing a tribal musk

Swathed in the white funk of the north

And though unlike the formicid

I will not be murdered for my deviant aroma

Kentuckians being proverbially hospitable

I do feel I ought to accept their poison

Quantities of which are said to call down

Upon the imbiber a kind of seer-blindness

The foresight to deny his place in history

To Styxify the Ohio

For at least a night to see the river not

As freight-bearing or dividing

A snake’s back patterned along its length

With diamonds and welts alike

Nor to see this southern bank as anywhere

But just this side of Sunday

STEPHANIE BOLSTER

Tiffany, or Comfort

Hot, his glass could be blown into such shapes as others

could barely imagine from their low homes

while his at Oyster Bay looked out (of course through

his glass) onto an expanse

not large enough to hold him. The world was his, etc.

Then the fashion shifted.

The way he made the solid billow, hint at taffeta-rustle

and shimmer as the bay or the inside of the shells it held,

prompted noses to scrunch as if at an odour

that reminded the body of itself.

His name and kitsch rhymed.

Eventually Japan got a hankering for extravagance,

predictably brief. Now it’s a matter of taste.

In the best room of this exhibition, an oval couch

lets one slide around the many ways he sees

underwater, his berry shades, the wet

held in what, when liquid, was too hot to touch.

CHRIS JENNINGS

Hotel Art as Meditations on Desire

I

The walrus tells him where he is—white tusks

and whiskers chasing a flash of silver.

The walrus breaks through the dislocation

of waking to darkness above the parabola

of city lights reflected off the permafrost.

He sweats in the diesel heat, though the air

outside tastes of gunmetal and gunmetal

will always send his mind here, hunting

this fat mammal, this genius loci.

Years ago, he was in old Montreal.

His room had a photo of old Montreal

as seen from the window in his room

in a black and white past. His reflection

hovered over the snow-covered

square in the same place it hovered

over the rain slick square. Both bounced

off the mirror on the opposite wall

so that the whole room seemed intent

to say, you are here, you are right

here. You were always here.

II

The roof has weathered grey. He can smell the wood

as it would smell in that wet forest, and picture the cabin

that roof would shelter. The hummingbird’s wings

out-pace the shutter as it hovers and touches its tongue

to the nectar on the boxwood buds. He strains

to hear the cicada (that ubiquitous

cicada) but loses it in the fluorescent drone

and the urgent traffic, the urban

buzz, that could be Regina, Rotterdam,

Red Square, or Reykjavik. He gets dizzy

some days, a little lost. Vacuum tracks

parcel the carpet like farmland. He sucks sugar

from the packs laid out for coffee.

The knock, knock of the floating dock

against the piling brings him back,

though that might just be someone in the hall.

On the dock, he sees the girl on a Lifesavers

towel. He tries to get closer to her, but she wavers

and threatens to dissolve to little points of colour.

He stops. He wants to call to her but she’s too far

to hear him, but he hears her as if she’s in his ear

saying “you aren’t here. Why aren’t you here?”

III

Looking up through a gin haze

he wonders if vaguely cubist

is a redundant phrase. White sheets

look like a murder scene. He brushes

iron filings from his nostril, his lip,

tastes copper in the back of his throat.

Cubism, he thinks, discourages perspective.

Gin, he thinks, discourages perspective.

He has a higher tolerance for cold gin.

It keeps things from merging at the horizon.

You are better than lost without a horizon.

You’re just nowhere.

IV

Turn away from the terrible face of that clock

and the vase of white lilies with emerald stalks

and get your ass out and down to the docks

where the stalls sell coffee, bagels and lox

and hard-faced women with guts on their smocks

sell fresh fish and mussels from behind cedar blocks

and old men feed gulls in their sandals and socks

and the stink of the gulls meets the salt on the rocks

and thickens the air from the bridge to the locks.

Neither monk nor prisoner locked in a cell,

these floors are not bolgias of a renaissance hell.

You know you could be anywhere

it should hurt to not be

everywhere.

LAURA LEGGE

Presupposing Faith and Love

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.

—Simone Weil

i.

FOR MOST OF MY LIFE I have been a noticer, at times shadow, at others mirror. The woman who enters a home and detects, at once, the smells of lavender spray and last night’s garlic, the jumble of half-thumbed mail. On the streetcar, I take inventory of lovers’ vibes, of the heavy mood above that particular child, on that particular pilling, ill-kept seat. Some days this starts a throbbing, this having to hold so much. The so much full, of course, of inferred narratives, emotional curves. But even when it aches, and terribly, I find myself most in the world when offering my attention to it.

Notable exceptions. On the basketball court. On the dancefloor. In the weight room, I’m oblivious to other people’s affairs. Now and again, I’ll lose my single-mind and see some neon detail on another athlete’s shoe, or tune in to the repeated clatter of plate on Olympic platform. I’m a synesthete obsessed with music, but I wilfully leave my headphones in my locker when I lift so I can immerse myself in the practice. In that windowless, white room, using rope, barbell, I am alone and embodied. I am close to God.

I have not yet turned thirty. I belong to a generation of folks who do not, in my experience, freely discuss God with one another. Sometimes, I try. The conversations are stilted, eclipsed by ironic anecdote or intellectual muscle flex, or else by a response so impassioned it hints at more unprocessed matter. I’m most comfortable talking about spirituality with friends who are older than I am, by some margin. Otherwise, I feel tasked with defending, pardoning, illuminating institutions that, to me, are complicated.

I was raised United Church Christian. I still identify as Christian, but I don’t go to church, and I haven’t for the better part of a decade. My choice not to attend church is matted with a hundred things, from the fundamental (the legacy of United Church contribution to residential schooling here in Canada, for instance) to the mundane and personal (I write every morning, including Sunday). I certainly fantasize not only about going to church but about becoming an essential member of a religious community. I know from experience that these communities are like any other; they can be supportive and loving, or they can be austere and manipulative. The church is composed, after all, of people.

ii.

Even as a child, I was already a noticer. A lotus-eater, a hopeful heart, a romantic. Also an outside creature, a dirty-kneed dancer, a meadow runner, a ta-da!, voila! type, a girl with so much love around in the form of family, but many days without other little playmates.

I grew up on twenty-six acres. From our farmhouse, we could nowhere near see the road. One neighbouring family lived at the foot of our kilometre-long lane, and I remember next to nothing about them, save that they had a donkey named Elvis. We had a gorgeous, century-old barn in which my brother built a museum, exhibited fossils, animal teeth, pelts, foreign coinage, precious stones, all manner of collection. We had trails through evergreens, and in winter we tracked our skis through the whiteout, breathing. We had a lea of sweetgrass and golden sedge that I named, in my mind, Rivendell. On the acreage were rabbits and red foxes, and one time my family raised a brood of pheasants from small, speckled eggs. I spent so much time looking. Every insect was perfect. Each anemone a dream.

I do not remember being lonely, although my adult mind sometimes tries to convince me of that non-fact. I did, to be sure, assume I was invisible. All the ta da! voila! was to make sure I had not become a phantom, despite an impression I carried that at my finest I would leave no footprints, would always tidy my play mess even while I was still using the crayons and construction paper. I wanted to reflect all the beauty around me––as mirror––or else, when the beauty had disappeared, or where there was anger, hardship, harsh energy, I wanted to be imperceptible––as shadow.

In my mind and in the landscape were so many exquisite scenes. The trumpeter swan on the pond. The deer behind the primrose. My imagination, too, was amiably peopled, both with others’ characters who meant so much to me, Legolas, Luke Cage, Miss Honey, and with those I created. Interestingly, I never interacted with any of these characters. I did not invent imaginary friends. I invented people who were wonderful and who I was very happy were alive in my mind, and that was that. I didn’t need to insert myself into the equation.

This was before I fully understood the divine and sensitive effects of language on me, but I did understand that, though the farm terrain was distinct from my inner world, they were twinned. They informed one another. One may have had more power than the other at times, but neither could endure on its own. Similarly, I knew, as a child entering teenage, that the scripture I read in Sunday School did not speak to me directly. But there was something about the church’s rafters, the kind women who made and shared lemon bars during fellowship, the timorous voice of the minister––and the way those real details mingled with my mind charismata, my imagined remixes of the gospels––that filled me with feeling.

Thanks to my dad, I discovered Thomas Merton in my teens. It was a revelation when I encountered, in New Seeds of Contemplation: “The pale flowers of the dogwood outside this window are saints. The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of that road are saints looking up into the face of God.”

For a moment, I felt that someone had seen me. It seemed impossible, because I had only ever been shadow or a mirror, but maybe Fr. Merton had owned an extraordinary set of eyes.

iii.

My work as a noticer, at some point in college, got hijacked by a new need to be attentive. I lived in a city, where I lived through shocking, adult violence. I was stalked. I was called things I could never have invented, despite my being 70% water, 30% imagination. I was harmed by an intimate partner. Among other things. And so, my tracking took on a new urgency––I was not just tracking the outer world in order to honour the places in which I found myself. My marvelhad been a life-giving privilege, but it was no longer possible, and perhaps no longer desirable. It was not enough for me to reflect beauty and become impalpable in the face of anger. I started tracking to, as Ta-Nehisi Coates said, “protect my body, which is all that I am.” I stopped believing in God, whatever God had been to me, or in a higher purpose of any kind. I became very sad. I did things that were not especially good for my body or my mind, and I got farther and farther from the wonder I had, as a tiny person, cast over everything.

Last year I read an interview with Danez Smith in which they said, “When I talk about trauma, I’m really saying: ‘Why the fuck won’t you let me have joy? Why won’t you let me be?’”

It’s no coincidence that the texts that permit me to deepen my spiritual perception and practice come from the minds of poets. Danez Smith, Eavan Boland, César Vallejo, Agha Shahid Ali, Natalie Diaz––together, thousands of these noticers create and have created a kind of exultant, expanding, animate set of gospels. Fr. Merton, for all I learned later about his more complicated inner life; his turmoil over falling in love, having taken an oath of celibacy; his hermitage; his being so plainly different from the other monks around him; was first and foremost a poet, and in another life he could have followed an entirely different public path and still retained the same devotion to the divine.

I tend to think about my paternal grandfather when I think about my interest in mysticism and theology, and especially about my place in the prismatic world of religion. I think about my grandfather a lot. A minister who dedicated his life to working for the United Church, he was also a linguist. He earned a PhD that centred on asceticism and self-discipline, having studied, among other places, at the University of Edinburgh and the Sorbonne. He read poetry. He adored language in a joyful yet reverent way that resonates with me still, a decade after his passing.

He supported the revolution without vengeance of Ernesto Cardenal (a poet), from sounding the alarm on Somoza’s state-sponsored terror and arranging for significant funds to be sent to support Nicaraguan refugees in Costa Rica. Later, he worked with men like Desmond Tutu and Beyers Naudé in South Africa to dismantle the system of Apartheid. I do not think it’s a coincidence that Desmond Tutu, for instance, was a bishop, or that Ernesto Cardenal was a priest. Faith can help us to sustain good work, whether that is faith in a Saviour or in beauty. A felt, known sense of the grandiose.

I think sometimes, Oh, my grandpa’s life could have assumed any number of other forms. He could have been a novelist. He could have stayed on the farm and raised sheep, or livestock, or planted and tended to winter wheat. He had a gentle, humane spirit and a couple crooked incisors that I loved so much, as a child, to see—it meant he was set to enter one of his patented giggle fits, and nothing was better than earning such pureholy mirth.

I also think, He was so far from an island. He had his church world and all of his decent, public-spirited friends. He had a wife and young children with whom he had to communicate via postcards, sent from across this or that ocean, but he was not an island.

What I mean to say is, there is no objective way to measure our impact on the world. On our intimate circles and on our wider, ecological or societal circles. Sometimes the negative is blatant, as in the case of those who intentionally inflict trauma, for instance, but for the vast majority of human lives, we don’t have a clear and shared barometer. For those of us who are introspective, who have the capacity to live in a mental arcadia where we can do no harm, it’s utterly tempting to stay there. To be an outlier, an island––to be judged and affected only by our own actions and not by the past and current actions of whatever public identities we choose, whatever communities. For an occasional introvert like me, who retains on some level her childish, earnest hope for everyone in the world to be so happy, so healthy, so loved, the idea of living in a mind where I can cause no inadvertent harm is inviting.

But then I look to roots. Even if it were possible to stay in that mindscape, which it is not, it would be inadequate to avoid interaction with the world and its human gears. It would make living trivial. My grandfather was as interested in social ethics as he was in personal morality. I recently went through some of his very beautiful writing—which my grandmother, bless her artist’s hands, had keyed on their typewriter––and that much became clear to me. He believed in, among many other things, liability, the duty to consider how we affect others so that we may continue to adapt our actions accordingly, so that we may do more good than harm. He was conscious of the energy he brought into a room and into the world. His life was guided by a poetic, ever-present faith in human dignity.

iv.

I, of course, was obsessed when I was younger with the character of Uatu the Watcher, found in the Fantastic Four and other Marvel comics. His species, the Watchers, having taken an oath of non-interference, station themselves across the universe to monitor the activities of other species. Uatu, that eccentric, bulb-headed cutie, watches over Earth from his scenic home in the Blue Area of the Moon. Uatu is an altruist, but he repeatedly violates his oath in his efforts to help humankind. Though he has promised to remain unseen, he reveals himself to the Fantastic Four upon their discovery of the dark side of the moon.

Needless to say I was thrilled when I read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and saw that Yunior was into Uatu, too. How amazing is that feeling, when you discover that you actually hold in common with another brain—and an exquisite one at that—something you had previously believed to be peculiar, private?

I consider both religion and writing in terms of their most noble ambitions. I may misfire, fall flat, but I want to engage both elements of my person in as thoughtful and honest a way as I can, at any given moment. To that end, I was moved some years ago when I read, from Octavio Paz: “This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally, what always evades us […] the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.”

Those few sentences hit two essential notes for me. One, the attaching. Poetry as taproot, as proof that the noticing is only part of the labour and pleasure of being a human in the world. Poetry robust enough to turn desire, a completely interior sensation, into love, so potent and mighty that it can shift the course of whole cultures, civilizations. And two, poetry––made entirely of words––as conduit to the unspoken. I mean, damn.

In my experience, the coming into one’s senses, the paying attention, is precisely what Simone Weil said it was. An act of prayer, one that presupposes faith and love. I also believe that prayer, like any other internal work, is less potent when airtight. I used to trust that the internal work was the work. It certainly is a substantial part of it, but I now appreciate that a person who is interested in transcendent experiences can raise that cultivated faith and love to higher highs. Sometimes I sit in meditation with a group at a multifaith centre, and the climate created in that room, by our collective devotion and attention, is more significant than anything I have ever generated by myself. I believe in poetry and the unspoken, and I believe they can, sometimes, be selfsame.

So the question for me becomes… If we are not satisfied by meditation and acts of imagination—in some ways analogous to writing and never allowing others to read what we have written—but we do not want to be defined by the cruelties nor the triumphs of institutions and of other people, where does that leave us? Can our vestments be untouched by others’ hands? The dream of immaculate conception, or if moved forward in the lifespan, of immaculate presence—is it just that, a daydream in the mind of the child I was?

v.

Doubtless, it is easier not to be a noticer. The problem with that, of course, is that blinders are limiting, and soul-searching can eventually turn into narcissism. I do not want to force my frame into narrow spaces. I do not want to live in the immanent. I want to case-by-case; I want to get heady with dreams and yet stay temperate, pay mind to proof; I want to hear that chord in that chorus—a modern hymn—and know my melancholy and my bliss have a home in someone else. I want to hold space for others to ask questions. I think one of the gifts of noticing, and of introspection or prayer or whatever word best fits the practice, is that it allows us to see things as they are in that instant. It encourages us to be aware that nothing is static, everything becomes, transforms, everyone is worthy of individual attention. I am sure this is why writing by Christian mystics has always appealed to me more than the official scripture. All living beings are connected, yes, but the closer we can tune in to each one, the more deeply we will experience that connection, without attempting to control it.

One of the most tender essay moments I have encountered was by Zadie Smith, in one called On Optimism and Despair. She wrote, of her father: “He was, I realize now, one of the least ideological people I had ever met: everything that happened to him he took as a particular case, unwilling or unable to generalize from it.”

I found and find this to be a beautiful way to speak about someone. I would like to hold every person I meet the way Zadie Smith holds her father in this sentence, the way her father perhaps modelled for her. I would love for someone to say this about me: Everything that happened to her she took as a particular case, unwilling or unable to generalize from it.

As is fitting in a fluid world, made of mutable places—my childhood farm is strewn now with new wildflowers, the museum emptied—my spirituality shifts sometimes. This is a natural outcome of being a noticer. And it heartens me to know there are others out there sensing, seeing, doing similar work; this is the community, the collaged, off-centre community. For me, as I am today, this is my practice. To continue to notice, despite the many and many and many reasons it is understandable, in our soiled world, for a person to turn away. To look for the particular. To be unseduced by the idea of authority and conclusion, to sometimes leave prose unresolved, to let the blank space, here and there, sing the hymns—

TWO POEMS BY KIM TRAINOR

Manna

I wake beside you. You ask if I am hungry. “Tea? Cereal? Manna?” What? “Gathered

like dew, as small as the hoarfrost on the ground, like coriander seed, sweet

like wafers made with honey.” Shining like bdellium, an hsi hsiang along

the old silk road. You hold out to me a pearl of resin that will melt

in the sun, unctuous when crumbled, and bitter to the taste, that will rot

and crawl with worms. But now, it is translucent and sweet. You

woke at dawn to find it for me, travelled through Exodus and Numbers, through

Dioscorides and the lost botanies of Theophrastus. Hiked Bactria between Amu Darya

and the Hindu Kush, braved the cataracts of Nubia, the Erythraean Sea.

You hold it out to me—a teardrop. It cannot be saved for later.

It is for now, to eat in this morning light.

I wake beside you. You ask if I am hungry. “Yes,” I say. “Yes.”

The Fox

I knew I wanted to fuck you that second time we met, standing against the wall

of the Fox Cabaret, Cohen’s name in black on the marquee over the bar, black

cougars stamped RESTRICTED, crowd milling on the threshing floor.

The tribute band sang, whose darkness deepens in her arms a little more.

You pulled your sweater off the way boys do, your t-shirt lifting over

the dark stripe of hair down your belly, your arm brushing mine, and

there is no man or woman can be touched. Not even a kiss, not

yet, only this cleaving of the flesh. But you who come between them

will be judged. And how could I have known how deep you would come into me,

how deepen, your hips canted between my thighs, your flesh in my flesh, all

that long winter as it snowed and froze and snowed again on licks of ice,

how darken to a ripe sweetness I’d take into my mouth knowing

at a taste your body was the way, your body was the light.

JANE MUNRO

Winter piano

triplets cast over steady chords

Moonlight Sonata—my father’s reverie

in the living room

balancing the needle

in the opening groove

teak stereo lit with one low lamp

white oval rugs, granite slab

the hearth we’d sit on

silent fireplace, his peaty scotch

moon dust smells

of spent gunpowder

Milky Way’s serpentine meadows

beyond the city’s glowing dome

rounding a bend

loaded

JASON EMDE

You Are Here

MY MOTHER DIES, MY FATHER is suddenly undone and incomplete, and he decides to come and see me in Japan at last. I propose throwing our feet at the Shikoku eighty-eight temple pilgrimage, 1200 kilometres in a gigantic Buddhist loop around the smallest of the four main Japanese islands, just to see what would happen, what ghosts would swarm us on the path. My father, doleful, heartsick, and amenable, approves. “Sometimes a wind comes out of nowhere,” he says. We begin to prepare.

He arrives in late March, just ahead of the cherry blossoms. We spend a few days shuffling around Gifu, talking and drinking, and then I kiss my sleeping wife on the eye and my father and I hoist our packs and walk to the train station. The morning star flies roaring in the five a.m. blueing above; I wait for it to fly into my mouth. Crows fight in the cool shadows outside the downtown hostess bars and the moon flows over the rest.

“How’re your cosmic vibrations, old man?”

“Can’t feel ’em yet.”

“Don’t you know they neither increase nor decrease? Are neither pure nor impure and comparable Buddhist babble? Don’t you know anything?”

“Not much more than you, insolent son of mine.”

We make it to Tokushima City and start walking the next day.

Shikoku is the least developed, least populated, and least popular of the Japanese islands. Until I read about the pilgrimage I’d never had the slightest urge to visit during my thirteen years in Japan. Even the name is uninviting: Shikoku, which is written with the characters for four and province, is a homonym for death country. There are fighting dogs in Kochi, Sanuki udon noodles in Kagawa, a trashed-out economy, four million people, four prefectures of slowly emptying cities, no volcanoes, and the pilgrimage. Shikoku is authentic nowhere. As many as one hundred fifty thousand Japanese, most of them on bus tours, circle the island every year, visiting the eighty-eight temples and racking up karmic merit. Approximately five thousand walk. At the heart of the pilgrimage is Kobo Daishi, the saint responsible for bringing Shingon Buddhism to Japan from China. Born on Shikoku in 774, enlightened in a cave at Cape Muroto—he wrote the morning star flew into my mouth—he’s entombed among the giant cedars on Mt. Koya, awaiting his return, 56,000,000 years from now, to this messy plane of existence. The monks on Koya still bring him food twice a day. The staff pilgrims carry represents the Daishi, and his presence is invoked at each temple with the phrase namu daishi henjo kongo: Homage to the Universal Adamantine Illuminator.

Printed on the sedge hats and pilgrim vests we buy in the shop attached to the first temple is dogyo ninin: Two people, one practice. My father and me.

On the first day, between temples two and three, my father stumbles on a lip of pavement, wobbles hugely, and topples over in horrible slow motion, his overloaded backpack propelling him earthwards while a stone wall rushes cruelly up, snapping back into place only after he’s crashed with a lot of noise and a few cuts and scrapes but no calamitous damage. I take some of his gear and strap it to my pack.

“Tragedy postponed!” he says.

“Yeah but look at this, first day and you’ve already got me carrying your crap.”

“I was wondering when you’d say that.”

A woman rushes out of a nearby house and gives us cold cans of soda.

Konsen-ji, the Temple of the Golden Well. While my father bows and recites at the Main Hall I sit brooding over the smear of blood on his first-aid pouch. We’ve been fueled by a kind of self-congratulatory anticipation but it’s possible we haven’t thought this thing through. 1200 kilometres. Seven, eight weeks. Mountains. Snakes. My father, sixty-three years old, out of shape and wearing lousy shoes. Strain, damage, mishap, mistake. Bad luck and foolishness. Disarray. Death country.

At each temple we perform with candles and incense and our voices, scaffolding our unbelief with ritual. We bow at each hall, put our name slips in the metal box, throw coins in the wooden one, and murmuringly wrestle with the Heart Sutra.

No aging and death, nor the ending

Of aging and death;

No suffering, no cause, no extinction, no path.

We write wishes on the back of each name slip. I ask for all kinds of things: forgiveness from old girlfriends I treated poorly, for money, for my friends to stop fighting, for my wife’s face, for help getting off the slaving cigarette wheel, for my father not to fall down again. A string of half-hopeful, half-cynical demands.

“Do you change your wishes each time, dad?”

“Nope. Always the same.”

Nobody knows exactly how or why the Shikoku pilgrimage developed or how the path itself appeared and grew. One theory is that Kobo Daishi walked the original trail as mystical protection and purification when he was forty-two, a bad luck year for Japanese men. Maybe he did. Maybe government bureaucrats enforcing strict travel laws forced early pilgrims onto a single controllable route. And maybe the path just materialized around the island, mist coalescing, a ring of bonepain and incense smoke hardening in the air and falling to the ground and sinking in to make the trail, the way. Maybe Buddha nerves stretched from temple to temple like arteries, like earthquake cracks, gobbling up and absorbing earlier pilgrimages and making farmers gape in their fields; maybe some canny inn owners and priests saw a nifty way to make some holy dough. After his famous death the Daishi’s disciples began to show up at the places where he was known to have trained, and certain spots—his birthplace, the cave at the cape, the mountain where he chanted until a sword flew at him out of eternity—started to glow with mystical Daishi magic. Slowly, over decades, over centuries, the path crawled and snaked around the island, up and down the mountains, through the valleys, over the rivers, across the foaming rocks, emitting buddhas, linking the holy sites, connecting the temples, fastening the faith and ringing the island round. When a circle was needed a circle formed.

We walk and walk, averaging 23 kilometres a day, curving slowly around the island like excessively talkative, lumbering bugs. From internet cafes and hotel lobby computers my father emails our location to my six-year-old nephew Drew in Canada and Drew traces our inching progress on a map of Shikoku on his wall, telling every visitor My grandfather is walking right here!

The first ten temples are grouped in the Yoshino River valley which, thanks to slack Japanese zoning laws, is a typical hodgepodge of residential neighbourhoods, light industry, and small-scale agriculture. Tidy, treeless, concrete suburbia and then, all at once, a lofty temple gate of weathered wood, the entrance guarded by snarling Nio statues. Inside: bells, chanting, candles, incense, pagodas, pilgrims, and assorted Buddhist statuary including usually a Jizo—the patron saint of children, pregnant women, and travelers—and maybe a Fudo with his sword and rope or Kobo Daishi with his staff and bowl. Often there’s a pond or a well and little mizuko statues for the spirits of aborted, miscarried, and stillborn babies. Mizuko means water child.

With no cell phones or iPods or laptops or anything fancier than our cameras, my father and I talk and talk. I hear about his high-school crush on Shelly Robinson, his best friend’s girlfriend; about his uncles coming back to Saskatchewan with too much war in their heads and too much booze in their bellies; about his father, Frank, killed by cold mining machinery; about the hearse he drove in Victoria in the 60s and the coffin breaking loose and flowers crashing the dashboard. I tell him about my capers in Africa, my love affairs with women and cities, my failures and flops. And his wife, my mother, hovers over everything we do and say, part closed story, part polished memory, part indestructible truth, part sinister fever dream.

Some days, late in the afternoon, after plodding for ten hours down hot impossible highways, I get a little irritated with my father, with his tiredness, with his wanting to stop, with his blisters and sunburn, and then I turn around and see him, limping, slow, head bent, beat, and my heart breaks and I swear up and down and think What are you, a jerk? Look at him, he’s an old man in pain.

Our days are very simple and we quickly settle into a sensible rhythm: walking together in the morning and splitting up after lunch to walk at our own chosen speeds. In this way we give our thoughts and each other a little room to maneuver; we create space in the middle of our days. We meet up again at the temples or pre-arranged locations and decide where to spend the night: shrine, field, hotel, beach, inn, temple, park. When we camp out we set up close to each other and talk from tent to tent, our voices low and slow with exhaustion, about mum and the house and my brother and sister and the future and kindness and the straightforwardness of our days. I always fall asleep first. My father, troubled by aching hips, lies awake for hours and, because his tent fly won’t close, watches the constellations wheeling hugely in the dark.

In the mornings I sniff out the closest vending machine and leave a can of coffee in his shoe.

We turn into pain experts, pain virtuosos. Everything continually sore and now, whoah, what’s this arriving? A bonecrack twinge in the middle toe of my left foot? A fizz of pain over here? The balls of both feet raw and tender and, suddenly, a lancing pain through my whole right leg from groin to calf, lasting ten minutes. Our necks all piledriver muscle throb, lashed with racing aches. My forehead hurts, guess I burned it. A low-lying heat murmur in both heels. Shoulders dully buzzing. Punished bodies, tired of the road.

Pilgrims believe that Kobo Daishi can appear at any time, in any form, to assist and protect them, and the people of Shikoku believe that giving to pilgrims is the same as giving to the Daishi himself. Every day my father and I are the stunned and grateful recipients of money, oranges, coffee, chocolate, offers of accommodation, every kind of help and sweetness. By the halfway point we’re gleefully hello’ing and konnichiwa’ing every person we see.

Tairyu-ji, Great Dragon Temple, is on the top of a mountain, cool and quiet and magnificently treed. A priest asks me to help with an English map of the temple precincts he’s making for foreigners. How do you say cup noodles, vending machine, You Are Here?

An elderly Japanese man walks up to me.

“I lost my wife,” he says.

“I lost my mother.”

He shows me a photo of his wife and I show him a photo of my mother and we stand in the mountains comparing our pain.

My father and I grind and reel into Hiwasa, both of us limping sore. The manhole covers around town feature smiley-faced turtles and bubbles and the inspiring slogan The Town the Sea Turtles Come To.

“What a dump,” I say, amused.

No rooms at the hot spring, no rooms at the only business hotel. We try a tumbledown inn down the street from the station. The Ichabod Crane proprietor opens the door and winces to see us.

“Ah! No rooms! We’re full!”

“Really?”

“Definitely.”

“Any other places we could try?”

“Down the street, across the street, turn at the bank, highway, next town—maybe.”

“You sure you haven’t got any rooms? We’re very tired.”

He squirms and jolts in the doorway, mortified.

“Well, one, possibly. But—no beds. Only futons.”

“That’s no problem.”

“And the toilets are Japanese style.”

“Can’t be helped.”

“It’s—it’s too late for dinner.”

“We’re not hungry.”

A Japanese woman appears behind Ichabod and stands looking from us to him.

“Seems like he doesn’t want you to stay here,” she says in totally unaccented English. She turns to the guy and yells “Daijôbu dayo!”

“No—spoons! Only chopsticks!”

“But no dinner anyway?”

He clutches his head in despair and writhes all over the doorway.

“It’ll be fine!” says the woman again, emphatic as hell.

He relents, bows us in and, kneeling in the entranceway, bows some more, all hospitable welcome now. The woman smiles and walks off somewhere and my father and I go in.

It’s the weariest guest house of all time, a dilapidated maze, everything tattered and creaking and dim. There are no other customers in evidence anywhere. Ichabod leads us to our room right at the back, up the final wobbly staircase. The room’s faded and stained; the winded curtains droop; an ancient brown air conditioner hangs in the corner like a gigantic mechanical bat.

At breakfast we meet the previous night’s mysterious doorway woman, Ruka from Tokyo, a dancer for twenty years in New York and the only other guest. She’s walking the pilgrimage as part of her rehabilitation after an injury.

“I don’t feel Japanese anymore. I always say, ‘I’m Japanese,’ but coming back here I don’t know how to talk to people. I can’t read their blank faces at all.”

Her theory about last night’s difficulty with the proprietor is that he was embarrassed because his place is so rundown and wrecked; he didn’t want foreign pilgrims getting a lousy impression of Hiwasa in general and his joint in particular. Hence the writhing lies in the doorway.

“You guys were the talk of the town last night,” Ruka says. “All the old ladies at the bath were saying ‘Have you seen those two Americans with their giant packs? They’re walking the whole route!’”

Rain shining on sting-ray-gray temple rooftop tiles and incense smoke in every inch of the air. Sodden tatami mats piled in a vacant lot. A pair of sunglasses on an upside-down bucket at the foot of a concrete power pole, a ring of green moss around the edge of a cedar stump. Tsunami Evacuation Area. My father crossing a temple compound in his bright red jacket, the sky bright white, the further trees misted indistinct. Security by SECOM. Water sounds. Iron eggplants dancing on a manhole cover. Distinguished by its genuine Asahi richness, this beer now adds more to your special occasions and enjoyment. live asahi for live people. Carp—yellow, orange, red, white, gold—in a rain-pocked pond. A crimson hedge, and laundry on a line, reflected in a paddy lined with new rice. Abandoned love hotels and karaoke joints and ancient roadside vending machines tilting at decrepit angles. The seven calamities: eclipse, stars in disarray, fire, flood, windstorm, drought, brigands. Our feet turning the earth. Both of my grandmothers, both in their nineties, dying slowly on Vancouver Island. My father’s face when I make him laugh. A red tractor in a brown field, one corner of an ancient star. Here we are. We are here.

With my mother in Canada and me in Japan we were cordial and casual and amiable and even affectionate with each other, whereas up close we tended to grate and chafe. I knew there’d be years and years to get it straight, get it right. After I’d grown up enough I could go back and square things with her. Years and years. But the last time I saw my mother her brain must’ve been busy cooking up its own shutdown somewhere deep in her skull, her death already curled in the day, patient and opaque. I don’t know the details and my father and I talk around it, plodding through millions of green under wheeling hawks spiralling in higher circles, higher circuits.

We sing a lot, and badly. One day I hear my father warbling in a tunnel.

“What’s that you were singing?”

“Aw, just some old Ian Tyson.”

I sing in the tunnels too, John Lennon under and around the roaring diesels:

Wherever you are, you are here.

It’s embarrassing to realize that I’m looking at the pilgrimage as a magic pill that’ll wipe out the uncharming parts of my personality and leave me clean and pure on the other side: a better person, better husband, better son. Pilgrimage as antidote, curative, and way out. I’m working hard but I’m not really doing the work because I’m hoping the path will do it for me while I enjoy myself walking around. But there is no mystical pill. There’s only the scalpel I’m too tired or nervous or inept or complacent or stupid to use.

In Tibet they say, If you find yourself in a donkey’s body, learn to love the taste of grass.

The Heart Sutra says There is no knowledge, nor is there attainment, for there is nothing to be attained.

Kobo Daishi said You are perfect already.

John Lennon said There ain’t no guru who can see through your eyes.

The old vexatious feedback loop of doubt, regret, confusion, muddle, perplexity, irresolution, and hope. Hello.

“I don’t want to talk about this if you don’t.”

“No, it’s okay.” And I hear the story at last, how in the morning the TV’s on and the bathroom door’s locked and he can hear her breathing but she won’t answer so he coathangers the door open and she’s sat on the toilet slumped against the wall. He lays her down and talks to her and calls an ambulance and they can’t find the house and the rest is a vortex of hospitals and machines and vacant waiting and dumbfounded free-floating anger and pain.

The nurse saying later she was probably gone from the first arterial blast.

My father wiping his eyes, in a bamboo valley, telling me this.

We camp at a shrine next to Temple 59. At 5:30 somebody slaps my tent.

“It’s morning!”

I pop my head out. It’s some local grouch, in a frayed baseball cap, with a frayed face.

“A foreigner,” he mutters in disgust. “Why are you here?”

“We’re pilgrims, we’re camping out.”

“Think you can sleep wherever you want?”

He jabs a finger at my father’s tent.

“Who’s in there?”

“My father.”

“How old is he?”

“Sixty-three.”

“Where are you from?”

“We’re from Canada.”

“Canada!” He squats down in front of me. “Canada, which used to be—a British colony—so—tell me—would you just go and camp in the bishop’s garden? Without asking? Huh? The archbishop’s? The king’s?”

I make every possible face expressive of polite contrition and regret.

He disdainfully throws two thousand yen on the ground.

“For you and your father. He’s sixty-three? This will be your last trip together. You have to eat!”

He rears up.

“I’m not angry!” he bellows, gesturing and stomping. “Nahhhhhhhhhhhh-on!” he thunders, and whirls, and leaves.

“What was that all about?” asks my father.

“Not exactly sure.”

“He sounded pretty upset.”

“The weirdest Daishi so far.”

The monkey mind pulls at its chain; the monkey leaps and yammers; images surface and sink. The cool dark of the Selborne Hotel bar in Bulawayo, no women allowed, me in there, 18 years old, drinking Castle beer. Peter the Great’s gang of dwarves. The redlight mystery of my father’s home darkroom, prints hanging dripping on a line, pans of chemicals, the sounds of the CBC coming through the door. My brother and I bent over mugs of steaming tea in an apartment in Poland in November. Mum, driving me somewhere, always saying I looked exactly like her father sitting in the car. One particular fantastic Lego spaceship I made and never bettered. The exact layout of every house I ever lived in. 10050 Cielo Drive, 3301 Waverly Drive. Did I fuck up mum’s death? The cold dark barracks building in Birkenau I was too scared to go into. My vanity, my bullshit. That French girl walking down the street on Isla Mujeures. Stacking the deck and lying with every breath. My goddamn teeth. The one dream, scribbled in my dream journal over and over again with only minor variations of item and colour: a screaming argument with mum and dad, me smashing the coffee table, smashing the whole living room, sick with the knowledge that this final intolerable insubordination means I have to leave the house forever, unforgiven. Leading the band with a crocodile bone. Kapenta boats at dusk on Lake Kariba. Blue plum in a bowl. Asking Maho to marry me and putting one of mum’s rings on her finger when she says yes. Small unsystematic things, divine average family elements, my mother in time. My mother. In the kitchen telling me John Lennon had been shot. The way she said Big whoop. Her bustling walk. Her shelf of Stephen King paperbacks, swollen from being read in the bath. And I know it’s impossible but nevertheless the memory-image of walking for the first time: diaper legs, rickety accomplishment power in my feet, a blur of kitchen, my mother crouched in front of me with open excited arms, her face a delighted smile, alive.

One day I perform at a temple after my father and see his name slip in the box, upside-down. On the back, his wish: Courage.

Thursday morning in Shikoku. A woman runs up, breathless.

“I’m sorry I don’t have more!” she pants as she hands me 170 yen.

The day’s hot and low but my father and I really ball along. Twenty kilometres by noon. I’ve been trying for days but I finally get up the courage to ask.

“What happened that time you broke mum’s collarbone?”

It’s a story I’ve known about since I was a kid and probably told to me in response to an innocent question about broken bones after my pal Steve fell out of a tree while we were playing space games. Mum had said, with perfect and even smiling composure, “Your father broke my collarbone.”

“Really? How?”

“We were having an argument and he pushed me and I hit the wall and it broke,” she said, but I was so young and she said it with such a lack of bitterness and anger that I’d taken it in at the time as a perfectly natural domestic event, especially considering my father’s general diffidence and the total lack of fisticuffs around our house. I only realized the strangeness of it much later, and the strangeness of the telling of it, too.

My father’s quiet for a long time.

“Well—I didn’t know anything about it or even what it was, but your mum was suffering quite seriously from post-partum depression after you were born. They didn’t even have a word for it then, I don’t think. Anyway, I didn’t know it. But she was. And she was giving you a bath—and you weren’t—uh—co-operating—weren’t doing what you were supposed to be doing—so—and—well, I was in the living room—she was screaming at you—I could hear her from—I really thought she was going to hurt you. So I run in—she’s still screaming at you—I push her out of the way, out of the bathroom, and grab you—you’re screaming too—but she’d hit the hallway wall with her shoulder when I—so I’m trying to calm you down—and she says very calmly ‘I think you hurt me.’ So I took her to the hospital. Broken collarbone.”

I make room for all this. The staggering awfulness of the scene, for both of them: my mother’s unimaginable pain and distress, my father’s unimaginable fear and guilt. The little tub. Water sounds and screams. My parents in total disarray.

Our staffs click on the road. We are large; we contain multitudes. We keep walking. We keep walking around Shikoku.

Near the end it happens. I’m sitting outside a coin laundromat reading Whitman’s Salut Au Monde! and, without any cosmic warning or purple celestial music, I fall in love with the human race at last, fall in love with the determination and accomplishments of humanity forever, bam, and look around, wonderstruck, astonished, at radiant everything and everybody, filled with adoration for everything I see: the guy watching dashboard TV in his car, the quiet swarthy weirdos reading comics by the driers, the washing machines clanking and revolving, even myself sitting there with a runny nose. The perseverance, the industry, all the great cities and bridges and lamps and roads and paths leaping at me out of history, all the prisoners, hotel proprietors, truck drivers’ wives, Buddhist saints, farmers, empresses, dancers, defectives, mothers and fathers, the enormity of our existence, and so much done, so much undertaken, so much tried, how not love it?

I grab our laundry and some beers and run back to the hotel to tell my father all about it.

“Yeah,” he says, lying on the bed, “humanity’s done some pretty impressive things.”

We phone my sister in Nanaimo. I’m not sure if our tired, excited talk makes any sense. I talk to Drew for a while, too. He’s quiet and polite.

“Have you seen any animals in Shikoku, Uncle Jason?”

“Oh yeah, a monkey, snakes…”

“Did you see—a cobra?”

I get into bed and fall asleep immediately, relieved and happy. I got my breakthrough, and tomorrow we finish.

We tramp down Route 3 and switch to a quieter, smaller mountain road. It’s sunny and green all over. Lying twisted and bent on the pavement is a dead dog or fox, all fly-blown bones and bits of fur and jutting ribs, green luminous bugs in the dark caves where its eyes used to be.

Ahead of my father, I climb off the road and onto the final mountain trail; it snakes into an almost purple darkness under the trees. There are no other pilgrims or hikers around and no sound from the road, just my breath and the bell on my staff and ambient forest hum and rustle. The path breaks up and disintegrates until it’s just a slope of jumbled rock. Below and behind me the crumpled green hills march away, turn into a milky blue in the haze, and dissolve in the sky. I go up and over the last complicated outcrop and descend toward Ôkubo-ji, the Temple of the Completion of the Vow. I clatter down the final steps into the bright, tree-busy compound, bench my pack, and wait for my father. He appears, tired and smiling.

“We did it, dad.”

A grinning handshake. He pats me on my sweaty back.

“Congratulations, Jase.”

“Congratulations yourself.”

It had taken exactly seven weeks.

We stay one last night in Shikoku and go back to Gifu. I call Maho from a bar near the station.

“When you guys come back?”

“We’re in the Bier Hall right now.”

“Bullshit!” she yells, laughing.

“See you soon. I love you.”

Late May. Spring curls into summer. My father comes back from a morning walk around the neighbourhood and reports that his cheerfully scattered greetings are met with blank Gifu City suspicion. I desultorily look for work. Mostly we sit around and drink too much, still talking. Above us, on the wall: the last picture he ever took of mum, walking on Long Beach, smiling.

“How’re your cosmic vibrations, dad?”

“No suffering, no cause, no extinction, no path.”

And then he leaves.

The neighbourhood temple still bongs its bells in the cool early mornings while the hostesses topple and wobble home under all the dead neon. You walk each day as best you can and when you’ve eaten your rice you wash your bowl. Everybody knows this. And I’m going back to Shikoku, back to the old path and the modern reports, and I’ll hang you in my heart there, and when I’m vain and unkind and weak and lost I’ll remember: you are walking right here.

BARBARA PELMAN

Nevertheless

we are saying thank you faster and faster

with nobody listening we are saying thank you

we are saying thank you and waving

dark though it is

—W. S. Merwin “Listen”

For the brief snowfall that salts the cedar branch,

for the rain that follows,

for daffodils straining to lift their green hoods,

for cut tulips on the pine table,

for the few days left until spring,

for the light lingering a bit longer each day

and Christmas lights still sparkling on city trees,

for brief moments of sunshine

through dark cloud, for the scent of things to come

we are saying thank you faster and faster

because nothing lasts. The hard lesson.

That summer riding the trains in Europe,

city squares a texture of brick

and cobblestone, the gleaming Duomo,

narrow streets where I wandered, hoping to remember

everything. Because one brief night in Amalfi, jasmine

and the sound of wind in the olive trees.

Nothing lasts, the colours fade like old fresco,

the taste of gelato slides from the tongue.

with nobody listening we are saying thank you

though we seldom hear the call of the roseate tern

or the piping plover, and never the ivory-billed woodpecker,

though the California condor whose huge wings shadow the hills,

returns, tentative. And though the Western Black rhino

is gone, and soon the Northern White Rhino,

Sumatran tiger, mountain gorilla—

long lists, categorized: vulnerable, threatened,

extinct. Yet each winter the hummingbird

returns to the hawthorn, the rhododendron to the bush, and

we are saying thank you and waving

to the deer nesting under the garry oak, the rare

sharp-shinned hawk on the fencepost, the star magnolia

pressing her white blooms against the window,

to the many acts of kindness from neighbors and strangers,

to the new words on toddlers’ tongues,

the cat curled under the bed, the dog at the door

hoping. To the lovers gone and the ones

who return for an occasional drink

for old time’s sake. For the sake of the future

dark though it is.

THREE POEMS BY JOHN PASS

Codex Canadensis

Time to put the big book back

on the back shelf. Circled it

too long. It was the homey appeal

of the title, the charm of the drawings…

But opening with a tiger and a unicorn!

You will understand why from

the exigesis (monstres, things worth

showing) but poor poem! Cutting trail

again in strangeness, eccentricity

across the continent, the centuries

for one more shot at a sensible country? By rote

he went AWOL in the New World, Père Nicolas,

patron saint of a crazed correctness, building his book

back home in Old France, the authoritative models

to hand. Hence the “grey partridge” in fluffy muffler

to play a ruffed grouse. His beaver hunches and snarls,

an aquatic wolverine, but eschews (from Rondelet) the balls

displayed, the beast splayed overhead as if a flying frog

or fish. There’s some fit to that staid category: fishy

and cagey as a spirit bear pacing an edge

of poster. O Canada! Oh fervent stiffness

with which the birds possess the pages

or tread another’s head or back making room!

One with a red heart on its wing. Motifs

and complex hatching crowd every figure’s

interior and the pipes of the Indians flare

like volcanoes. These are dimensions

of lake glare, vertiginous forest

and secret strengths in the latitudes

seeming to put away the books, seeming to give ground

or defer outside the lines, the borders. These are founding

and confounding precedents, flat evidence, “a woman

captured in war, whose nails were all pulled out

with teeth. I saw her burned in the village

of Toniotogéhaga for six (ten?) hours…”

And here is our elk, stub-legged and haggard

but insistently, “Elan ou caribou, alces

selon les Latins,” …or a moose?

Near Greenwood

Arrow/Boundary Country

My grandfathers, my father, dead. Father-in-law

dying in Victoria, whose father worked here

circa 1911, in Phoenix, the townsite below

or rather the rubble remainder of townsite

mined through into open pit by ’58. Our vista

from the re-located cenotaph, over graves…

I would have been 11. Habitually these idle

chimes, correspondences, variances, paradoxes

to what end: lambs on the headstones of babes

and children? The pine

in wind on the mountain still.

On the way here from Osoyoos a shattered

deer on the Highways’ truck’s tailgate

at the viewpoint, again at the rest stop…

Really? That obvious? It’s taking

these deaths, is it, all of them, to take us

off our beaten track through Midway

into back-country, the dusty

grey-green mullein standing

at road-edge, meadow edge, edge

of the tailing pond? Of course

we’re getting closer. We are drawn.

***

Among the Leaves so Green o

I know it was the darkest shading

in that we played on after sunset

by porch light, but did we divide

the heaps of clippings into portions, make

our fortunes, or bury each other, or pretend

to be farmers? Yes it was grass, a spring’s

first thick mowing a decade or more

before I read Whitman’s beautiful uncut

hair of graves and decades before I’ve risked

this corruption of the wordless happiness.

Never closer, however it was we imagined

the world before being called in… Echoes

even then in the colour, in any mention

in myth and legend of green sward or green

wood… Robin Hood… Richard Greene

released the arrow that spun the titles thunk

and thrum into the tree first Saturday I stayed

awake late drinking cola, a caffeinated clarity

not blurred till boughs made bowers

unquiet for us, O lovely maids

in summer coming on…Drift of bright-

leafed aspen mist on the slopes beyond

the town in the distance…

***

Stack & Slag

A great part of huge earth

was scorched by the terrible vapour

and melted as tin melts when heated

by men’s art in channelled crucibles…

–Hesiod, The War of the Titans

…so close their lithe and delicate greenery

to the stack, its quarter million bricks’ worth

firm in the firmament a decommissioned

lifetime later, saplings edging

up to the slag heap, encroaching

upon the solidified mass, crowded

along the long draught tunnel’s

collapsing parade route. Cheers!

On the travel blog the photographer’s sons

shove and roughhouse under one

hell’s bell, Titan’s helmet, shape

of the slag pot’s cooling shell

on the black slump battle-

field strewn with them. Molten

are our days, our earth, our high

thrust of the toxins skyward, time

the only Titan standing.

***

I Know

Mid-morning slash

of summer solstice sun honed

on roof-ridges, aslant across the vacant

city lot, edges towards the doe

in the dirt heaving slightly, lifting

her head slightly toward her wet fawn’s

nudges, sinking back. I mean right

downtown, right on Hwy. 3. I know

says the owner of the antiques shop

opposite, only place open, coming

out beneath his awning’s shade to see.

I know. I’ll call. But what can you do?

***

Copper Beech

No gods but what we want in passing.

Let’s say this tree we’re planting, leaf shine

behind the fine mesh

deer-fence, marginal

protection. Ashes of parents

at root, eventual (centuries

hence) verdigris shade of canopy, not

in our lives, in our thoughts

we say looking that way.

Watching Surfers at Cox Bay

The edge of a wildness pulls them out, wild

in their bodies as it was in a world bigger

than our mess of it. Almost infinite

it seemed again on the long road in

or in idly pondering how many waves

to Japan. Past nuclear waste and too

much CO2 , out beyond the space junk

is our edge now. Over the Great Pacific

Garbage Patch. Fixedly they chase the swells

for the rhythm of return, the at-one-with

our oldest pulse. Girl in the coffee-house making

earrings names every beach from Malibu north.

Soft eyes, fresh skin. Mist past the Point in

a brightening sky as I take off my glasses.

FRANK KLAASSEN

Furunculus meus—My little thief

My fervent skryer’s prayer was not enough

to truly animate the uncorrupted space

within the stone, for my furuncle

clearly to appear: the boil upon my side,

my fortune, lover, and my petty thief.

But in his staggering absence, all the quiet

hanging whispers fell like feathers into place.

Bearded and hinky, becoming someone

else, he’d crept from my bed, took from my

cupboards spoons and rings and innocence.

The charm wrapped up, I saw his figure,

shifting ghostly in the stone, seize

what was mine and then, with

purpose raise his shears and prune

the flowering branches from the apple tree.

TWO POEMS BY TOM WAYMAN

Penis in Autumn

Head lowered, slowly shifting from withered tuft to tuft

it grazes in a straw-colored field

under the mountains. Not more aged-looking

and wrinkled than in its youth, its gestures, however,

are more deliberate, labored now

as it relocates its hooves a step or two

in search of fresh sustenance in the pasture.

Absent are its frequent raised, penetrating glances

around the horizon, its constant concern

to examine anything visible in the distance.

When it lifts its gaze occasionally, reluctantly from

a focus on what is underfoot, its attention seems

absent-minded—little appears to register

even when younger creatures like itself

penned in an adjoining paddock

suddenly gallop and canter about in spurts

as though disturbed or challenged by

some threat or opportunity. Instead

the older one shakes its neck

as if to ward off flies

long since departed with the first hard frost

before its head drops again to contemplate

where better nourishment might be found

or else to savor the relief,

the satisfaction of having no expected duties

except to thicken its coat

to survive another season.

The Air

Eugene McNamara, 1930–2016

At the DH tavern, a block from the river

on Sandwich St. southwest of campus,

Gene, Peter, John, Alistair, Joyce, Ray, more

crowd around some battered tables, the day’s teaching,

marking, course prep, office hours done.

Rounds, pitchers of beer land in front of us,

almost all dead now, Joyce with her 7 Up

intending, unlike the rest,

to return to her desk after dinner to write.

Clouds of words rise from our group

into the room’s smoky air: the visible ribbons of grey

sluggishly dip and curl as the talk that pours upward

alters air pressure and flow above us:

dissection of the department chair’s personality,

critique of a Windsor Star article

detailing a municipal scandal, first-hand report

on a new restaurant in Greektown, favorite jazz venues

elsewhere in Detroit, a writer’s pending visit to Ann Arbor

or Wayne State, the particulars of how a different author

was boorish, overbearing when he read here two years ago.

Weaving through the disputes, agreements, disavowals,

anecdotes, Gene’s voice intermittently a rumbling,

heavy-set presence punctuated by his occasional

half-laugh of incredulity at, or mocking the absurdity of,

some authority’s decision. “I don’t want,”

Billy Joel insists from the jukebox as if offended

by a back-and-forth exchange of puns that starts among us,

“clever conversation. I never want to work that hard.”

So many words spoken

amid the surrounding noise. Insights concerning

Steinbeck, accounts of a persistent twinge

in an upper molar, a scraping sound

in the transmission between first and second

spiral aloft and into the rattling ventilation system

to be propelled outside into the currents of air

headed downriver like the lake boats that steer for

Erie, Toledo, or upriver like ships navigating toward

Thunder Bay, Milwaukee, Chicago.

The typed sentences, lines,

the published words each of us haven’t yet composed

or had accepted at this moment,

also in time stream into air

and are lost, or maybe not lost, just

absorbed into a texture,

invisible now, of what occurred, of who we were.

CORINNE STIKEMAN

Things My Father Thought Were Beautiful

MADELINE’S HOUSE IS MADE OF plank wood. It has blue shutters and a sign on the door that says I left my heart in Catalina. It’s written in my father’s block letters. The house is framed with over-sized palms and wild bushes bursting with red flowers. They create chaos, but Madeline does not notice. She is standing on her front porch, waving.

I’ve never met Madeline, but when I step out of the car, she gives me a long hug with her thick, tanned arms. I do not hug her back. She says I have my father’s chin. Madeline has wood-framed glasses and long white hair. She wears a dress printed with pineapples. She’s not wearing shoes. Things my father would’ve said were arty. Things Ben thinks are neat.

“Come on inside,” Madeline says. “I have sparkling cherry water.”

Ben puts his hand on my back. The way he did when we were dating, when it meant after you. Today it means be polite. Ben is wearing checkered shorts and thick prescription sunglasses and a visor he bought at the airport that says Hollywood in pink cursive. Ben has never been out of the country before, so Ben is ready for anything.

We follow Madeline inside. Madeline’s house is small and old. Her living room has a conch shell theme; her dining room table is made of aluminum. Through the sliding glass doors, her backyard looks square and brown. It hosts two rusting lounge chairs and three empty flowerpots.

My father called this California rustic.

Madeline opens the fridge and brings out three bottles of sparkling cherry water. She hands us our waters and I hold mine like a life vest.

“You know, if there’s anything of his you want, you can keep it.”

“There’s not much. And I think he’d want you to have it all.” Madeline pauses here. Her voice is raspy. She smiles when she thinks. “He talked about you a lot, you know.”

My father talked about Madeline a lot. On Sundays when he used to call. Madeline was fun. In school days, conversations always started around Madeline and parties didn’t end until Madeline was leaving. If classes were skipped, it was because Madeline had borrowed her father’s sailboat. My father said Madeline was still fun. It was Madeline’s idea to go scuba diving, to watch late night television, to eat fried shellfish. It was Madeline’s idea to sail to Catalina and camp on a slice of beach and toss scraps at seagulls where they landed.

“Madeline doesn’t let the world fall heavily on her shoulders. You know her husband, Carson. Died from thyroid cancer. She says she’s okay with it because it couldn’t be helped. Isn’t she something?”

Madeline doesn’t look like something. Her shoulders are round, her wrinkles deep enough to flood. Her eyes are brown. Lifeless. Her fingernails thick, her hair unbrushed. I decide Madeline is not pretty even though my father said she was beautiful. This is what I expected.

We’re led back to the living room and Madeline slumps into a soft pink armchair as though she wants us to stay for hours. I sit on the sea-green sofa. I look to Ben for help, but he’s placed himself by the sliding doors so he can admire the yard and nod at the drought-friendly shrubs. When you marry a man who gardens and plows snow for a living, you marry a man who takes time to nod at everything that grows.

Ben thought I’d love California because my father loved California. “What’s not to love about palm trees?” He said this the day before we came here, when we were walking to the lake before dinner. The air was thick with burning wood and sap and mud-caked stones even through the spitting rain.

“He only liked California because he went to university there,” I said. “Everyone loves wherever they went to school. That’s the only reason we like Thunder Bay.”

Ben didn’t say anything. When Ben really thinks about something, he stops and pretends to tie his shoelaces.

We reached the lake. Ben put his hand in my pocket so our two hands together could create warmth for us both. “California’s sinking,” I said and Ben laughed. “You know that story about the school library that’s sinking because it was designed by students who hadn’t accounted for the weight of the books? When they made California, they didn’t account for the weight of the palm trees and mountains. They just assumed everything there would be empty.”

Ben held my hand a little tighter and told me something about architecture I didn’t listen to because sometimes he has a way of missing the point.

Madeline places her foot on her knee, a foot that’s black and scaled. My father would’ve worn shoes in this house. He would’ve disliked this sea-green couch.

“He went peaceful, you know. Sleeping. Sudden cardiac arrest,” she says.

“Yes, you said that. On the phone.” Ben and I were on the dock when I got Madeline’s call.

“Didn’t think a thing was wrong with him. When Carson went, that was awful. Years that took, in and out of hospitals, the whole thing. But your father. He was youthful. Active. Liked the outdoors. Liked to make things. Crafty. But you know that.” I do know that. But then, so does Madeline.

I look to Ben, still at the window.

“It’s a shame you never came to visit.” She pauses here. I can tell Madeline is swaying around something she won’t say. It’s what most women do. When women ask Ben to plow their driveway, they say, “It would be nice if you could do it on Friday morning.” It is a suggestion, not a request. These women live in one-room homes and spend their days washing salt stains from the cuffs of their husband’s jeans. Madeline is like these common women.

It takes me a moment to realize what Madeline’s doing as her pause becomes real silence. She’s trying to make me feel guilty.

Guilty for not liking her.

Guilty for not feeling anything but dislike for her.

But I did feel more. Didn’t I?

After Madeline’s call, when she told me about my father. When I was on the dock with Ben. We were watching mist off the lake hold the pines firm and still. Didn’t I think of how my father called that beautiful? I took needles from those pines and rubbed them between my fingers. Didn’t I think of summers when he’d done the same?

That afternoon, when I found his box of sweaters with embroidered snowflakes and moose and leaves, the sweaters he’d abandoned for thin linen shirts. Didn’t I smell them deeply and ache, my whole body rocking back and forth?

I did. I must have.

What else?

The morning he left. At the airport, in the car, in the dark of early morning, with Ben in the backseat. My father packed away in an oversized parka. The parka he wouldn’t need in California, but was taking with him anyway. It had been a slow drive. It was snowing, and we live far from the city, but gave ourselves plenty of time.

“We should give ourselves plenty of time to get to the airport,” he’d said.

I can’t remember him the way I used to, when I knew I’d see him again. When my memory wasn’t important. I can’t see his face. In my car at the airport he is smudged. Behind a window frosted with ice.

“Maybe this is a bad idea. Madeline’s… Maybe we’re too old for this.” He frowned. “Maybe all this won’t last a week,” he said.

I smiled. I patted his fidgeting hands. “Goodbye, Dad,” I said.

Ben squeezed his shoulder from the back seat.

And he was gone.

Madeline is crouched on the floor, shuffling papers in the drawers of the coffee table. Ben hears this and joins us. He stands behind the couch and puts his hand on my shoulder.

“You have a real nice garden out there, Madeline. Drought friendly. I noticed.”

“Ben’s a gardener and works the snow plow in the winter. He has a keen eye for shrubbery.”

Madeline ignores our pleasant conversation. She stands, holding a stack of photographs, puffing from crouching and shuffling. I take Ben’s hand and squeeze it.

“Your father bought a bunch of those, you know. Those plastic cameras. Disposable cameras, used to be everywhere. I just got these back the other day. Almost couldn’t find someone who would develop the silly things. He took so many pictures.” She hands me the photos.

They are photos of things. Poorly framed, out of focus. Photos of the beach on a cloudy day, the garden in the sun. A photo of a thermometer attached to the house that reads ninety-nine. A photo of Madeline on a sailboat, in the rain, her hair whipped around her like cream. At the bottom, there’s an old photo, smaller than the rest, ’67 is written on the back in pencil. He and Madeline are lying on one of the lounge chairs in the backyard. Madeline is slim and bold. Her teeth straight and wide. She has her arms around my father’s waist, her head on his chest. My father has messy hair and wears wide jeans. He looks off to side at something that can’t be seen. He is smiling.

’67.

He hasn’t graduated yet. He hasn’t moved home. He hasn’t met my mother. He hasn’t lost her because she was distant and cold. He hasn’t been hurt by his daughter who is just like her mother. His daughter who never told him how she felt about anything. He doesn’t know that later in life, he’ll think of Madeline as happiness. That he’ll want to return to this place when he’s seventy-three to see what she feels like again. He doesn’t know that he will die here, in this house, without warning. Suddenly.

Suddenly, cardiac arrest.

“That picture’s mine, but I thought you might like to have it.” Madeline takes the photo from my hands and removes her glasses to inspect it. “This was taken here. Right in that backyard.”

“That’s neat,” says Ben. “How long have you lived here, then?”

“It was my parents’ house. My house growing up. They both died in and around ninety-three, I moved in then with Carson.” Madeline sits down on the couch next to me. “Your father, he moved back to Canada in sixty-nine? He said he left ‘cause he was missing something out here. At least I got him back though, if only for a bit.” Madeline looks at the empty seat on the sofa beside her and starts again. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m not bad luck. If I’m not responsible for Carson and your father.”

Madeline becomes silent, shell-shocked. A soldier holding helmets of the fallen. Responsible and blameless for what happened to my father. Madeline, who is trying to be nice. Madeline, who my father loved.

Ben sits down between Madeline and me. He puts his arm around her. She grips his hand and brims with tears. Ben is good at this kind of thing. It’s as though he was waiting for it to happen.

I excuse myself to the bathroom.

My father said he’d prepared himself when my mother left. “You wouldn’t remember,” he said. “You were only in preschool.”

When did he tell me this?

The winter after I’d moved home from Thunder Bay. The same winter Ben came to live with us. It was the night of the snowstorm. The night we waited for Ben’s snowplow to clear us out. The night we stood for a moment at the open front door, the storm dense and silent in front of us, contained in the frame of the porch light. The night we were playing cards in the kitchen.

I noticed his hands when he dealt. His hands had spots, new spots. Age spots I hadn’t seen.

He repeated himself. “No, you were too young when your mother left. See, I took all her things out of the closet and put them in suitcases. I took her hair out of the drains and put that cinnamon tea she liked in the garbage. I took her name off the mortgage and the cable bill so I wouldn’t be surprised by her name in the mail one day. I took her snowshoes out of the storage unit under the house and put them near the driveway so there’d be no forgetting them when she stopped by.”

I told him I did not remember, but I did remember.

I remember the tea bags and the strip of sweat on the back of my father’s shirt when he pulled those snowshoes out of the basement. When she came by, my mother gave me a yellow leaf she’d found on her new driveway. A leaf all the way from Quebec. A leaf she thought was unusual because of its lopsided shape.

This was the last time I saw her.

She wore pink lipstick, her hair was short. She had on a camel coat I’d never seen, she smelled like a restaurant. She told me it was okay to forget.

I was holding this leaf later that night. In the woods.

Was it that night?

The night my father got us lost on our evening walk. It was summer, we walked for hours, his flashlight smacked against the trees that kept us on a thin bit of dirt that almost looked like a path. The blackflies buttered my ears and the back of my neck. We were lost. Or was he thinking? He scratched his chin the way he did when he couldn’t remember. His hands were warm. He wore corduroys that shush shush shushed as he walked. He told me we weren’t lost. He told me stories about the trees and dirt and the animals that lived in them. I sat on his shoulders and fell asleep with my cheek in his hair. Hair that smelt like salt. We must’ve been lost. We only found home again as the sun was coming up and birds were calling for morning.

I never told him I remember this.

“Madeline’s asked me to come live with her out in California for a while, maybe a year. I thought I’d see what comes of it. See what comes of us again.”

We were in the kitchen, it was after dinner. Earlier that night, we’d been laughing. My father peeling potatoes, Ben frying trout. We’d had wine.

I didn’t know he was still talking to Madeline, that this was a possibility.

Earlier that day, I came home and found my father staring. In his red armchair, out the window at the ice-crusted snow. He was surprised to see me home so early. He said he’d seen deer earlier and was waiting for them to come back. I didn’t ask more. I left him there alone to wait.

Madeline. The girl with the sailboat, the girl who liked parties. The girl in California.

The woman in California.

California.

I told him sure. Sure, with an exclamation point. A joyful sure. I turned around and continued to wash the dishes. He stayed for a moment, he watched me. He handed me our empty wineglasses. He dried Ben’s frying pan. And then he left the room.

Why didn’t I tell him to come home?

When he called on Sundays, before his walk to the beach, after drinking the green smoothie Madeline made for him full of nutrients, nutrients that didn’t keep his heart from stopping. When he told me the dry heat was giving him nosebleeds and cracking his hands, that the smoke from the fires spilled down the hills and made everything smell like toast. That the ocean was wild and cold, colder than he remembered. That the sun was too bright, too hot, that the sun expected too much of him. That he found himself lost on all the roads and in all the stores. That Madeline snored and was restless, that she’d never seen snow or swum in a lake. Why didn’t I tell him to come home?

Maybe all this won’t last a week.

I didn’t tell him I loved him. Not once. I felt it, it swelled inside of me when he was away, it made my chest hurt. I woke at dawn and sat in his red armchair. I looked out the window and waited for him, for the deer, but nothing ever came.

I prepared for his leaving. Like he prepared when my mother left. I boxed up his sweaters. I got rid of his tea. I smiled, I was helpful. I was okay.

But as soon as he slipped out of the car into the snow and through the airport’s sliding doors, I wasn’t.

Ben finds me in the bathroom on my knees, cleaning dust and hair from the corners of the room with a wet tissue. There’s another sign on the wall above the toilet in my father’s block letters. It tells us to have a wonderful day. I feel bad about the state of this bathroom. I am trying to help.

“Maybe we should get going. Madeline’s gotten herself together. She has your dad’s things at the door.” I stop what I am doing.

Ben’s sunshine face beams down at me. Me, on my hands and knees with tears in the corners of my eyes.

I didn’t let Ben hug me. The day I got Madeline’s call down on the dock. The mist on the lake holding everything still. Ben stood beside me and waited for me to say something. He tried to hug me, but I backed away. I didn’t tell him why. I never tell him why I do anything. Why had I backed away? Ben was hurt. He stuffed his hands into his pockets. He walked back to the house without me.

Ben didn’t have a father. My father was his father. My father had fixed his flashlight. My father washed his truck for him in the summer. When we were married, my father lent him his suit and helped him fold the pocket square.

Ben was upset. He cried when I told him. He cried again when he saw my father’s empty room that night. He lay on my father’s pillow and stared at the ceiling, like a parent whose child had just left for school. I watched him do this and did nothing.

Ben tried to hug me that day on the dock, and I didn’t let him near me.

I crawl towards him now, on the floor. I hug his legs. I press my hot face into his bare shins that are pale and hairy, I squeeze them hard. I kiss them. My chest hurts and my breathing shallows. He sits on the floor and folds himself over me. We say nothing.

After a moment, he takes off his Hollywood visor and puts it on my head, backwards so I’ll laugh, and I do.

“Let’s go,” he says, and helps me up.

We leave with my father’s things. Two boxes placed in the back seat of our rental car, seatbelts around both. His parka folded between them. A lamp with shells placed at my feet on the passenger side. A sea salt candle placed in a cup holder.

We say goodbye to Madeline on the front porch. The sun surfaces. In the sunlight, Madeline makes sense. Her wooden glasses, her pineapple dress. Her hair slipping around her in the breeze. She hugs me again, and this time I put my arms around her. She hugs me and sways me like my father would. Like my father did. Like he did on the day my mother left. Like he did the night before he left for California.

Madeline waves as we pull out of the driveway.

Ben signals and blends us onto the highway. This ocean stands beside me now, the ocean that was too wild, too cold, for my father. The water is large and white under the sun. There are no trees to frame the water. It’s beautiful. More beautiful than I thought it would be.

My father must have thought this was beautiful, even with the too cold water and the too hot sun.

And then, I remember.

My father’s face. That morning, at the airport, in the car. His face, old and creased and pink. Wisps of white hair tucked into the hood of his coat.

Dad.

I hold him for a moment.

“Goodbye, Dad,” I said.

Ben squeezed his shoulder.

And he is gone.

CAROLYN NAKAGAWA

Horses and men

We were younger then, walked down the boulevard

enchanted with each other’s names, and all the kings

looked down on us in approval. You remember, later,

telling me we could line them up,

chop off their ugly stone heads. I’d imagine

my reflection in the hatchet blade, stained,

or dulled, perhaps.

What I meant to say is

we were younger, and had nothing

but our names. You had me.

You wanted every king to approve us.

You were certain they must. You

were the one who bought the hatchet.

Or maybe it’s being younger

that made our names cry out for a hatchet. I measured

your wants, called them affection.

Thought I was sharp enough for kings,

knew we had their approval.

Actually, that was when even graffiti was gold

and I still believed in accounting.

I mean, I’m happy for you. My best to the revolution.

THREE POEMS BY TERENCE YOUNG

Matins

To rise in darkness

for coffee and toast,

in darkness again to

baptize yourself under

the bathroom spigot,

to scrape away the

night’s persistent hair,

to select another tie, a

shirt, some socks, on

rare days to sit and

follow a thought until

it ducks under a hedge

and disappears, or

pick up a magazine

and put it down again,

because you’re without your

glasses, which are not

glass but plastic and are

on the piano or in the

junk drawer or finally

lost this time for good

and, thus, nothing to fret

about, more reason to stare

through the black kitchen

window at a street distorted

by the imperfections of a

pane that has let in light

for over a hundred years,

to remember the axe,

head down in a bucket of

brown water, a bullfrog’s

evening bagpipe wheeze,

rounds of Douglas fir, stacked,

five rows deep in the woodshed.

Absolution

Of my father,

I remember little now,

except his meanness,

and then only in dreams,

tawdry little scenes

which I repeat,

act out—something

in the kitchen,

my own ineptitude,

for which I blame you—

mean myself now—

to the point

that what I would say

to make amends

is irrelevant,

the way all apologies are,

so much like the grass we mow

again and again,

or the chair we pick up

and move, unable to place it right,

a promise as distant

as the moon walk,

some fiction on television.

Pettiness is a black coat

we slip on and take off

at will.

If we ever speak the truth,

it is in the small cruelties

we inflict on each other,

how irredeemable

we really are.

Five Titles From Sharon Olds

Satan says

whatever he wants now.

What has he to lose?

Sundays in the empty nest

he’s built for himself

he listens to the choirs

above him

the dead and the living

and criticizes their inexpert harmonies

their homogeneity

how they wail about their failings

their unworthiness

painting in countless pathetic songs

their heaven to be

as though time really exists

as though it is an arrow in flight or

a string leading to the core

of some labyrinth, when instead

it is more a language problem

a verb tense we cannot understand

the past future imperfect

something hypothetical

like the subjunctive

or God.

FOUR POEMS BY A. F. MORITZ

Glory

A young woman and man

curvetting unaware

of their all-dominating

beauty, only aware

of beauty around them

and at an imagined goal—

so her form and his form

flow over us, into us

and clear away the threat

of beauty’s remaining

in a crude vision of ours

the sole possession

of someone else, those

others, there, far away,

those two wild

horses in the unreachable

center of a stockade

of hungry ugly eyes.

I Want My Voice

I want my voice to mix

with the sounds of the pond,

the stirring beech tree

with spring nuts growing dark,

the tremor of fresh

willow withes, yellow,

hanging, a sketched fall

of golden rain on the far shore,

a short song

by an oriole, a cardinal’s

fresh thirds in the humidity,

a blackbird trilling

harshly above turtles

with necks avidly stretched…

they sun on an old part-sunken

snag half bridging the water,

its wood complex with sun-

and-weather bleach marks

and a patternless

rhythm of rot and moss,

lichen and weed. I want

print in a book you carry

that permits recovery

of many details of my voice

to be like the memory

of the body

of a dead friend

that walks with you,

her photograph

folded in your wallet:

you seldom look at it

but you know it

and its invisible

accompaniment, remembrance

of a remembrance, revivifies

that love. I want

this vain ambition, a not

infrequent subject

of my voice, to be forgiven by you

as you forgive self-careful

caution in a robin

who hustles away from

your footsteps…you bend to look

close at the sky-shaped

half of a blue shell and wonder

about success and failure,

the presence or the absence

of a voice that was to be

in the sounds around you.

When I Heard the Learn’d Futurologist

The hydrocephalic young person feels the shunt

that drains his brainpan failing inside his head

and knows he now has few minutes left till black.

Damn, it had to be here, he thinks. Death almost

cured as the futurologist flutes to the lecture crowd

of digitizing and downuploading their lives

to noodle free of precariousness for all

eternity. Plausible. Applause. The hydrocephalic

young man wakes up he has no idea where

attached to machines. There was a night, he thinks,

just before now, a night that did not gather

slowly, heralding itself, but burst in the heart of day…

or no: now he remembers, there was a feeling

not quite of falling, of being about to be falling.

Yes, that’s how it was, why he’s here. O God, he’s all

broken again. This night he’s just woken from,

he knows now, has lasted days, like the many before it,

and now he’s living again in the other night:

the day of seeing what happens and what can be done.

Sculptor and Standing Nude

1

The image seen obsesses him, can not

for now be moved away, he can’t see

how it can ever be finished with.

He has sat during centuries of words

that explained. He absorbed them all

and explained himself. The atmosphere

everyone breathed was pure meaning

and grew one with body and brain. Never,

he thinks, did we go down to the muddy

man and ox in the field…although, now

he thinks, how could we not have?

We must have eaten and shat our fair share

or else I could not now be here.

But the explanations of all those ages, so far

as he can still understand them

or even remember, do not make this clear.

It’s as if the image heard, the word, is now

completely obscure. He’s done with thinking

and its visions. He thinks he can hardly

see anymore for all that seeing.

2

Yet the girl

is there now, still, in the heart of his sphere

of looking, holding her veil aside. Her bush,

belly, thighs, and breasts are as if stone.

For the time being she stands compact,

clothed by the solid closeness of her thighs,

never to bend and hold herself

open to him, though he carved her

with the file of the attitude

of his own naked eye. He waits, looking,

and never does he hear her

say what she feels. All the words that still

fly from the striking of his gazes

on the flint of her skin—sparks

and razory chips of echoes within

the tinder forest of his thoughts—

wink, fade, and go out, leaving

on her unexplained nudity

a silent stare. The image he once heard,

the silent word, seems no longer there:

impossible desire that raised him

to carve the girl, love, freedom he never

could grasp but only sing. Now in

the baffled sex, it seems to cry.

PATRICK LANE

Sada

Barefoot in gumboots in the dark closet elsewhere,

the table I sat at named the Crows. The mind of poverty at six.

Mostly blind and looking out at the shimmering world. Child of light.

And my friend Billy with his Mason jar of maggots. Me with my gopher.

What I brought, the others with their puppies and kittens.

One girl, the blonde one I loved from the big house on the hill,

brought butterflies in a cage made of bamboo. She was a Bluebird.

How years later I left her with my children forever.

Still blind. That innocence once lost can only be wonder.

Billy weeping when they took his maggots away, one fly,

the mother, he told the teacher, crawling over the unborn

seething as they drowned.

Sada—pure one, or Mitsuko, child of light

B. A. MARKUS

How Can a Dog Help a Goose

Dedicated to Akeeshoo Sataa of Nunavut and Elma Moses of Cree Nation

DOG IS A CITY DOG so she can see all the problems in the world.

And dog wants to fix all the problems in the world.

She’s that kind of a dog.

Dog worries and worries about what she can do to fix the problems in the world.

And eventually Dog decides that her job is to teach all the other animals how to survive in the city.

It is her job to help the other animals learn what to do to stay alive.

Dog is enthusiastic.

But Dog wants to do so much more.

Dog also wants to encourage and inspire the other animals.

She wants to teach them to succeed in the city.

Dog knows that is how she can solve some of the problems in the world.

Dog is confident that she can do the job.

Soon Dog is given a class.

Her students are Fox, Skunk and Goose, Raccoon, Cougar, and Hummingbird, Groundhog, Rabbit and Mole.

“Dog is here to teach you how to survive in the city,” Dog says in her friendliest voice with not even a little bit of a growl.

Dog tells her students, “I will teach you how to survive traffic, and pollution, and noise and all the bad people in the city who are trying to kill you. I will teach you how to succeed.”

Dog sincerely wants to help every one of her students.

But Dog wants to help Goose most of all.

Because Dog can see all the pain and trouble in the world in Goose.

All the sadness and injustice.

All the terrible, terrible abuse.

Dog can see that Goose is very skinny, and that his feathers are missing in many places, and that the skin underneath is cracked and sore.

Dog tells herself, “The most important animal for me to help is Goose.”

She is happy because now she knows what to do.

And she’s sure that helping Goose will solve some of the problems in the world.

Dog is especially excited about helping Goose because she has always been interested in Goose’s culture.

Dog admires Goose’s ability to travel long distances.

Dog thinks it must be wonderful to be so free.

In fact Dog even has some Goose feathers in her home.

But Dog also feels guilty about Goose.

Because Dog is a Dog.

And Dog has made fun of Goose, and laughed when the other animals made jokes.

One Halloween Dog dressed up as Goose and imitated his songs and dances.

And Dog has eaten Goose.

In fact Dog would still like to eat Goose except now she can’t because now it’s her job to help Goose.

To teach Goose how to survive in the city.

To show Goose how to succeed.

Dog is so happy now because she has something meaningful to do.

Something that will help to fix the problems in the world.

Dog is confident that she will feel better now that she knows how to help.

All she has to do is fix things up for Goose.

Help Goose get fat and grow new feathers.

Show Goose that he has friends.

Teach Goose how to survive in the city.

Dog thinks a lot about what she should do in her class.

Dog decides that the best way to help Goose is to design all her lessons so they include a lot of information about Geese.

Dog thinks, “I am a good teacher. I am showing Goose that I honour and understand his history and his culture. I will show Goose that he can trust me. I can help Goose.”

So Dog shows her class movies like, Bury My Goose at Wounded Knee, and Rhymes for Young Geese, and Crazy Goose.

Dog has her students read books like, The Inconvenient Goose, and, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Goose and Through Black Goose.

And her students do presentations on the lack of clean water and safe housing for Geese.

Presentations on the genocide.

Presentations on the ways that Goose and his people are being abused, ignored and brought down right now.

At every opportunity Dog makes sure she tells Fox, Skunk, Goose, Raccoon, Cougar, Hummingbird, Groundhog, Rabbit and Mole who is responsible for Geese being treated so badly for the last five hundred years.

Dog says, “You see, it’s The Government, and The Church and The Police and The School Boards who are to blame.”

Dog knows for sure that she is not to blame for all the things that have been done to Goose.

She is not responsible for the genocide.

She is clearly not doing anything to perpetuate the abuse.

In fact Dog is doing everything she can for Goose.

She is doing everything to help Goose learn to survive in the city.

Everything to help Goose succeed.

Dog starts to imagine that she could end up changing Goose’s life in a big way.

She imagines herself like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, or Hilary Swank in Freedom Writers.

Dog knows that she and she alone can break through and help Goose where every other teacher has failed.

But the weeks go by and Goose isn’t cooperating.

He misses a lot of classes.

When he’s in class Goose never answers or asks questions.

He never takes notes.

He refuses to complete a worksheet about what the street signs mean.

Unfortunately sometimes Dog gets impatient with Goose.

“Goose!” she barks. “If you want to make it in the city you must learn to ask and answer questions.”

But Goose is stubborn and no matter how many questions Dog asks Goose never answers. And in pair work it is hardly ever Goose contributing.

One day Goose comes to class covered with blood and with even more feathers missing than usual.

That day Goose can’t sit in class and listen at all.

Hummingbird asks, “Goose, what happened to you?”

Goose says, “I got hit by a car. I was drunk and I wasn’t looking and I walked in front of a car on the street.”

Dog is very sorry for Goose because Goose is hurt.

But Dog is also mad at Goose because Goose cannot concentrate that day.

Well, Dog can be stubborn too and she won’t give up on Goose.

And eventually Goose starts making friends.

Sometimes Goose is in class and he seems interested in all the information about Geese.

And it looks like he might finally be starting to understand how to safely cross the street.

Dog can tell that Goose is proud of himself for learning this new skill.

Dog gains weight.

He smiles.

He’s more confident.

One night after class Dog goes home and tells her pups, “Listen children, even though I am not a Goose, I can teach Goose. I can get through to him. I am a good teacher and I know how to help Goose.”

The day arrives that Goose is supposed to give a presentation about how to cross the street.

The presentation is worth twenty-five percent of his final grade but Goose says he can’t do it because he has a sore throat.

“I got drunk at the St. Paddy’s Day Parade,” Goose whispers. “I fell on a cop and he took me around the corner and choked me around the neck until I passed out.”

Of course Dog is furious at the police for their brutality.

Dog has read a lot about systemic racism and she believes Goose when he says the cops target Geese.

But Dog is also frustrated with Goose because it is the last day of the presentations and Goose cannot do the presentation that day.

And Dog has noticed that Goose has all his papers crumpled up in a ball.

That he doesn’t have a pen or pencil.

That he’s started falling asleep in class.

The day Goose writes nothing down during the spelling test Dog has had it:

“Goose, you have to learn my language if you want to survive. You must use my words.”

Dog is horrified when she hears those words coming out of her mouth.

Dog knows those are exactly the kind of words The Government, and The Church, and The Police and The School Boards use.

And Dog knows that because she said those words she is as bad as every other animal who ever tried to destroy Goose and his ancestors for the last five hundred years.

Dog decides that the only way to try and make it up to Goose for what she has said is to learn to say some things in Goose language.

Because that way both Goose and Dog will have to learn new words at school.

That way it will be fairer for Goose.

More equal.

So every day Dog learns how to say something new in Goose.

Dog learns how to say Hello, and How are you? and What is your name?

Every day at the beginning of class Dog greets Goose in Goose language and Dog can see that that makes Goose very happy.

But then it is time for the final exam.

And when the students give Dog back their exam papers, Dog sees right away that Goose did not answer any of the questions.

“I’m sorry Goose, but you do not pass the exam.”

Goose does not look very disappointed.

Goose smiles, “I will come back and take your class again Dog. I will pass next time. You are a good teacher.”

But Goose never comes back to Dog’s class.

And sometimes Dog sees Goose outside of the Atwater Metro Station.

The first few times Dog goes over and says the words she knows in Goose language to Goose.

They talk for a minute or two.

Dog tries to encourage Goose to come back to school.

Goose always promises he will.

But he never does.

But these days when Dog sees Goose in front of the Atwater Metro Dog crosses over to the other side and tries to hide behind the parked cars and garbage cans.

Dog tells herself that she’s hiding because she doesn’t know what to do for Goose anymore.

But the truth is Dog is worried that one day Goose will ask her for money.

And Dog doesn’t want to give money to Goose.

Because Dog is afraid that money might be the only way that a Dog can help a Goose.

MAUREEN HYNES

The Horses, the Sorrow, the Umbilicus

Horses were turned loose in the child’s sorrow.

They galloped bare-boned, tore up her imagination’s

pasture. Simple things became surreal, malevolent—

a shoelace, a windup toy, the cross of a t

or the lost dot in her mother’s eye. Continents of grief

to traverse. She hadn’t yet seen the tidily grassed graves

at Arras or families rounded up in town squares, poisoned

blankets covering bodies in Haida Gwaii. Sometimes

under the night sky she mounted a mare and rode

into morning, through sunflowered bonfires, through

sermons and eulogies, past incense and tear gas

till she reached the saltwater tide. She never knew

if she had swallowed the sadness through her umbilicus,

joined still to her mother’s placental algebra.

The girl sat awhile, gazing out over the waves

to the rapidly rising sun, then dismounted,

looking to her left, looking to her right—

Note: “The horses were turned loose in the child’s sorrow” is the first line of Carolyn Forché’s poem, “Sequestered Writing,” from Blue Hour (New York: Harper Collins, 2003); “Looking to the left, looking to the right. She—” is the last line of Gail Scott’s Heroine (Toronto: Coach House, 1987).

Book Reviews

POETRY

ALDEN NOWLAN. Collected Poems (Fredericton: Goose Lane, 2017). Hardcover, 681 pp., $55.

Collected Poems offers the chance to reexamine the significant artistic contributions of Alden Nowlan (1933–83). The volume draws on fifteen collections that span from 1958 to 1985, from chapbooks to new-and-selected editions. Gathering them together into one sizable tome pays appropriate if overdue tribute. It places Nowlan alongside Irving Layton, Al Purdy, and Phyllis Webb, similarly “collectable” poets from Canadian literature’s explosive decades in the late twentieth-century. However, his peers saw collected editions prepared within their lifetimes. The gap between Nowlan’s memorial and his memorialization via Goose Lane’s collected testifies to the sad fact that this poet’s stature has lessened over the intervening decades. Brian Bartlett’s fine editorial work should help restore the unduly neglected legacy of a poet notable for his impressive range (and sometimes synthesis) of styles and themes.

Many associate Nowlan with deftly captured “local colour,” with the working-class Maritime profiles and sketches that have helped make him an enduring staple of arts and letters in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. This characterization pertains particularly to his early work, which often portrays economic harshness vis-a-vis emotional restraint in the poet’s impoverished, formative community of Hants County (N.S.). Consider how “Beginning,” from Under the Ice (1961), opens: “From that they found most lovely, most abhorred / my parents made me: I was born like sound / stroked from the fiddle to become the ward / of tunes played on the bear-trap and the hound.” These lines hold close to poetic heritage, via regular rhymes, and to a local/regional setting where traditional music harmonizes with howls and moans. “Language” provides a handy pronunciation-guide for readers listening for the poems’ original voicings:

…I catch myself talking

like everybody else from the northeast shore

of Cobequid Bay in Nova Scotia.

Tongue held close

to the floor of the mouth,

far back from the teeth,

breath shallow and slow.

…

A useful language

for exhausted men

saving their breath

for the next struggle.

My people say:

a man fights

for whatever he gets.

Pronounce it like an Irishman

just back from Armageddon.

Yet Maritime voices and settings absorb national and trans-national concerns. In “We Were Younger Then,” Nowlan recalls meeting with the not-yet Right Honorable John Diefenbaker in Hartland (N.B.) circa 1952: during “that drooping decade / before the century got its second wind.” The Hartland Observer offices, where Nowlan began his journalistic career, become The Clarion’s basement in the poem. The nineteen-year-old newspaperman searches back issues “within arm’s reach of greatness”: “Here is Lincoln born / in Ontario, Andrew Jackson come / from Saskatchewan. He will free us / from them, too, and all such / most admirable oppressors.” His poems often overleap regional/national levels, with those dedicated to the author’s associates (Elizabeth Brewster, Peter Pacey, Al and Marilee Pittman, or Raymond and Sharon Fraser) complemented by pieces dedicated to international writers (D. H. Lawrence or Yukio Mishima) as well as translations of Tudor Arghezi’s Romanian verses.

Beyond the local, regional, national, and trans-national levels so studiously represented in Collected Poems lie the un-locatable realms of the artist’s imagination. Expansive, fabulist, and visionary poems reverse the “ultimate indignity” of small-town life that Nowlan depicts elsewhere, whereby one suffers “loneliness without privacy” (“Scratchings”). Through the poet’s writing room cum imaginative sanctuary, he communes with historical figures, spirits, and non-human animals. The speaker of “In Praise of the Great Bull Walrus” joins “the walrus people,” enjoys “lying on the rocks with them.” In contrast to Robert Kroetsch’s contemporaneous poem “How I Joined the Seal Herd,” the speaker here does not attempt to transform into or exchange “cosmic secrets” with marine creatures. Rather, he merely offers friendly greetings. “‘How yuh doin’ you big old walrus?’” “‘Me? I’m doing great.’” The trans-species encounter imagined here is remarkable for its casual familiarity, whereas Kroetsch’s poem is sexually charged and mystically presumptuous. Nowlan concludes: “How good it is to share / the earth with such / creatures / and how unthinkable it would have been / to have missed all this / by not being born: / a happy thought, that, / for not being born is / the only tragedy / that we can imagine / but need never fear.” Goodness, sharing, un-thinkable non-existence; happiness, imagination, tragedy, fear. These lines combine the alienating, unshakable sense of terror they would seemingly deny (but reference anyhow) with an emboldened, childlike sense of wonder and belonging.

In “Siege,” the poet defends the sovereignty of his prodigal imagination—a “crumbling castle”—from an unspecified enemy: “I hold the stairs / to the bells / whose laughter / reinforces me; by night he infiltrates / but, being inhuman, is / not fully aware how / powerless I am.” Skirmishes recur throughout Nowlan’s writing. Workers battle wilderness; desire and decorum clash; empires rise and (moreover) fall; the author composes in conflict with multiple selves: former, future, or conjured. “In any [such] hunt” Nowlan sides “with the quarry” (“A Night Hawk Fell with a Sound Like a Shudder”). But weapons appear as religious symbols too; they provide illuminating spectacle. In “The Magic Man,” a performer:

…makes a fist

and out of his hand

there flashes

a great flaming sword!

It’s all done

with props, he

explains—the liar.

If this magician’s trick is no trick at all, one wonders about the proximity of Nowlan’s artistic confabulations to his experience of a world potentially limited by geography and class but broadened by his wide reading and inspired wit.

—DAVID ESO

CLAIRE KELLY, Maunder (Windsor: Palimpsest, 2017). Paperbound, 72 pp., $18.95.

MARK LAVORATO, Blowing Grass Empire (Windsor: Palimpsest, 2017). Paperbound, 72 pp., $18.95.

Writing poetry these days must feel like fighting off a bear by grabbing hold of its tongue. In Claire Kelly’s debut collection, Maunder, there’s a piece called “How to survive a bear attack” in which the protagonist does exactly that: “And I says, if you’re goin’ / to hurt me, I’m goin’ / to hurt you too.” In a world with no shortage of refugees, where a former reality-TV star accused of sexually assaulting women is president of the United States, and where climate disasters can destroy whole cities, what role can poetry have in helping us heal? Even if we close our eyes to these realities, as Kelly writes in “Keeping Track, Keeping Pace,” “catastrophe is possible even when there’s a lack of exertion.”

Kelly’s characters are searching for meaning—or not. In “Crows—fire eaters,” they’re like “off-duty pallbearers / professional mourners / on a smoke break.” It’s those in mourning, who can’t cope, who are the ones she fixates on—even though they make others uncomfortable. In “Maundering,” she writes, “the jean-clad man in the back pew is crying; the shrewd congregation strains not to hear.” The world doesn’t always have a place for people’s grief, and empathy can only get you so far. Her advice, delivered in “News-Scroll for Dream Junkies”: “Don’t play with your wounds: they’re pink and healthy as watermelons.”

For the reader who is grieving (as I was while reading this collection), there is plenty from which to take solace. If, indeed, collision is “the true failure to connect,” (“Street Haunting”) then maybe there’s something to salvage from the wreckage. One speaker, in “Honing in the too-early morning” says, “Let us live like labs do. Dig / in the garden for the sake of digging.” Companionship is all that keeps these dogs distracted from the “tragicomic hunger” of the “ever-panting present.”

Though her collection is secular, Kelly’s work is profoundly spiritual and reconciliation is on her mind. In “Curb’ N.” she writes about “a prophesy from one unaccustomed to giving good news,” which seems like an apt way to describe her book. Although there is violence, conflict, and angst throughout, hope comes from our relationships, and from fellowship with our communities. In connecting with each other in our pain and recognizing our unique traumas, she writes “we can be two cans lined up and shot off a wooden fence that settle next to each other, damaged and yet somehow safe, serene.”

When two jetliners careened into the World Trade Center nearly two decades ago, the speaker in Mark Lavorato’s poem “September 11, 2001” was embarking on a serene hike through the mountains. He remembers feeling blessed that “this little world I inhabited / was so unwaveringly peaceful,” only learning later of the carnage. The stark contrast reminds readers that although it’s a mad world, it’s a beautiful one too.

In the title poem of this collection, Lavorato conjures up The Lion King by having an elder take a child to overlook a gorgeous vista. But the message isn’t Disney-esque: “You child, are the noble heir to none of it,” she says, “No one will remember you.” Repeatedly, throughout the text, readers are encouraged to contemplate their own insignificance. Lavorato’s been compared to Raymond Carver, and his work can feel similarly bleak. In “Loralee,” one character meets sudden death thusly: “everything she was came to a floating-glass, metal-crumpling end.” In “Monsters,” he writes of a five-year-old that “there are / those who would undo / every golden sinew of that / wide-eyed and trusting form.” As for those lucky enough to continue drawing breath, they can’t make much sense of the world around them. In “Tuesday, 3 a.m.” his character says “I feel like I’m eavesdropping on a song / that I do not have the talent to decipher / being recited through these urban branches / a song that is tireless, that will not sleep.”

So how does the author feel about the universe, sans religion? What are we supposed to take from all of this? The meat of his message seems to be contained in the middle of “Orbital,” which describes the Voyager Interstellar Message Project: “In a billion years, when all the water has evaporated from Earth, a lazy recording of Blind Willie Johnson will still be adrift, his plaintive guitar and gospel humming.”

—WILL JOHNSON

REBECCA PĂPUCARU, The Panic Room (Madeira Park: Nightwood, 2017). Paperbound, 96 pp., $18.95.

Quebec writer Rebecca Păpucaru is an alert and intrepid craftsperson. I had to take a few runs at the collection’s first poems to get oriented, because the narrative lines are not taut or linear and the metaphors leap realms, with poems ending far from where they cozily begin, the connection between then and now, there and here, fleeting, confounding, and exciting.

“I pass the workday in throes of Dadaist delight” the very first poem, “My Anne,” begins. The collection does have Dadaist elements, such as collage—of images, anecdotes—and resistance to accepted standards—of what a poem can do, what a woman can say. Surrealism, another Dadaist delight, often leavens and unsteadies. “Papa sends me to cottage country/with six new toothbrushes” begins “Cottage Country.” Another poem starts with exclaiming, “And the theory! You couldn’t move in their bedroom for the theory!” (“Said Saint George to the Maiden: Wait in the Car”). Nevertheless, Păpucaru’s confidence and clever self-awareness allow the strange land of her poems to be possible, then probable, and then true.

In his blurb on the back cover, poet Jacob Schier writes, “Panic Room is a truly exciting event in contemporary literature and in particular Canadian Jewish Literature.” Păpucaru is a second-generation Eastern European Jewish immigrant grappling with her roots. In ”On Watching an Eastern Bloc Comedy,” she writes, “I’m one generation apart from all this, and ashamed. Of my father, before his / refrigerator, mourning age spots on lettuce.” In “My Anne,” she admits a disconnect: “I’m monosyllabic, dark, not some cobbler of laced felt / slippers prized by Black Sea rustics.”

In “Prague Fugue,” which takes place at, presumably, the Czech Republic’s Jewish Museum, she inverts institutionalized memory and suggests that healing may be had by the museum’s curators “filching from the relics displayed”:

A speck from a silver spice box, unembossed.

A blue thread dangling from a prayer shawl

for young boy, c. 1811. A nail’s worth of wax

from the dormant pit of a menorah,

provenance doubtful.

Smuggled under the tongue, a scrap

small enough to run any gauntlet will harden

into new enamel. For now, the throbbing

toothache of reprieve.

Later, in “Prayer for the Headless Boar,” Păpucaru contends again with how the Holocaust is remembered. “Must you dawdle in the Jewish ghetto?” the poem begins. Though she risks being separated from her tour group in Old Nice, France, the speaker continues to stare at a plaque “dedicated to victims / of hitlérienne violence” while her fellow tourists move on to apéritifs. She asks (note the engineered breeziness), “What should it matter to you if the others can’t spare it a moment?” Her first encounter with the word “hitlérienne”—“Hitler was an adjective”—has activated the past, but she decides to keep the haunting discovery to herself, musing sardonically, “you’re on holiday. Why spoil it for the others?”

Păpucaru implies that, with lineage that has been violated and fractured, family—and self—become fused with spirit. In “Inauguration,” a girl remembers her mother’s inventions at Seder, the Passover meal for which people often leave a door open in case the messiah Elijah arrives. The mother secretly drains Elijah’s wine goblet and nibbles the matzo on his plate. But, the girl can’t tell where the pretending begins and ends. “Even the curtain blowing over the open window / was her.” The poem ends with her hospitalized mother becoming spirit for real: “Talk to her, says the nurse. She can still hear, I swear.” The poem’s entire final section is five words: “This can’t be my life.” Like much of Păpucaru’s work, the line reads several ways: such loss can’t be life; “this”—the material world—is not life; one’s life is never singular…

In a villanelle about the death of a grandfather with “ninety-one years of life stowed in one chest” (“Ninety-one years”), who in his younger years “Christianized [his] dark curls with Brylcreem,” spirit is again the most reliable shape for family. “We laid hands upon / what remained of him, indivisible as ether.”

Păpucaru’s assuredly feminist poems “Rosalind Franklin in open-toe sandals”—about the English chemist and crystallographer Rosalind Elsie Franklin, whose study of X-ray images of DNA led to the discovery of the DNA double helix, and who died of ovarian cancer at thirty seven—and “The Panic Room (Glue Ear at forty-five)” are feats of metaphor wizardry. The closing poems, about a love affair with a truck driver named Didier, showcase Păpucaru’s gift for oblique insight and connecting the seemingly disparate.

—SARA CASSIDY

Fiction

CYNTHIA FLOOD, What Can You Do (Windsor: Biblioasis, 2017). Paperbound, 150 pp., $18.95.

What Can You Do is Vancouver writer Cynthia Flood’s fifth collection of short stories and my first introduction to her work. These twelve stories, several of them set in Vancouver, share a close-cropped narrative style, sharp sense of humour, and delight in the ambiguity between past and present, intentions admirable and less so.

Where so much depends on the parsing of this ambiguity, the collection rewards careful reading. In “Going Out,” for example, a woman goes to a fundraiser, one of her first social excursions following a breakup, knowing her ex will likely be there. What follows borders on fantastical in the quick switches from real to imagined outcomes over the course of the evening. Things said and not said occupy shared space, a grey area made even more nuanced by the story’s central exchange between the protagonist and the deaf man sitting next to her as he explains to her the plot of the mystery novel he’s been reading:

The woman, smiling under pink lamplight, fingers her glittering gift, a necklace. Steaks arrive. The two eat. Their dessert’s meringue-y. Fisher [the detective] grimaces. Aha! You recognize a Manly Sleuth who dislikes sugar, cats, fiction. Doubtless he knows all about some war. You roll your eyes. No one rolls back.

“Struggle” is told from the point of view of a veteran women’s rights activist who, it soon becomes clear, is struggling with mental illness. As she participates in organizing a Mother’s Day march for abortion rights, she attempts to keep straight what she has said only to herself and what she’s spoken aloud. Meanwhile, as readers, we attempt to sort out whether what preoccupies her is a current concern or one from the distant past. She knows what’s being said about her and at the same time has much to teach:

At the campaign office with the women, seven hours today. Tired, even with the helmet. The angry men want it off. I must fight all the time.

Many in this collective are new to all political struggle, let alone to work for abortion-law repeal. They’ve never built a demo before, can’t see the dangers. I must teach as much as work. Whoever speaks at Mother’s Day will need careful coaching.

Perhaps my favourite story in the collection is “Open, Close,” an exquisitely paced portrait of a father-daughter relationship following the mother’s death. It initially put me in mind of Alice Munro’s work with its quiet intensity, until a fascinating twist made it more akin to Kate Atkinson or Paul Auster’s recent novel-length experimental forays into alternate lifetimes, but here winnowed, almost miraculously it seemed, to just fifteen pages.

My quibbles with the collection are few. I will say that occasionally the author’s clipped, tucked style, with its pointed annotations, borders on glib. In “Wing Nut” what is at first a surprising, funny demonstration of a collective response to events at the local school (“Mothers followed sons,” “Inadequate sleep followed,” “the guardian mothers accommodated”), later begins to feel ever so slightly gimmicky. Similarly, in “Dog & Sheep,” a story that centres on a group walking tour in France, initially apt snapshots of a group mindset, including observations on landscape, local culture, their daily provisions, diminish in effectiveness by the end of the story because of their sameness.

In “Food,” on the other hand (another of my favourites), we see Flood’s shorthand in its absolute element. Two sisters in their fifties on their regular lunch date at a local restaurant observe, with delight and horror, the noisy family sitting at a nearby table.

A flush started at Ellie’s nape. Firmly she said, “Eat up, Charlotte!” Child and Great-aunt grinned, waving through the window.

Grandfather glanced at Ellie’s plate, still heaped. “You don’t eat either?”

Great-aunt blew a smoke-ring towards Charlotte and moved off to a corner newsstand to examine headlines. The child, abandoned, gazed with dislike at her bowl. Her face puckered. She squirmed, made the high chair rock.

“Stay still,” ordered Dad.

Two pieces of our bread remained. I still had most of my butter, my sister very little. Her eyes pleaded.

I wouldn’t. Why should I? She could have done as I did, saved her butter, got through school to a decent job.

The scene demonstrates beautifully Flood’s knack for streamlined synopses of past and present—tucking whole decades of sibling dynamics into an aside on butter. And in a sense the story hinges, thematically, on this: the entertainment value of one family’s disagreements and delights set against the submerged drama of another. Here the very contained nature of the observations is wholly suited to the observer narrating them.

At its finest, Flood’s precision and the sly parallels she draws made me gasp. I will be tracking down her previous collections and looking out for the next.

—KATE KENNEDY

KEVIN HARDCASTLE, In the Cage (Windsor: Biblioasis, 2017). Paperbound, 310 pp., $19.95.

In the Cage owes much of its power to the sense of entrapment it creates. Throughout, the decisions made by the novel’s protagonist, Daniel, are framed as the inevitable consequence of the metaphorical cage in which he lives, and signifiers of financial strife—a second mortgage, a denied loan application, an unexpected layoff—are punctuated by the trauma of more literal forms of violence. As a naturalist meditation on the economics of desperation faced by Northern Ontario’s rural poor, Kevin Hardcastle’s novel repeatedly demonstrates how tight margins and bad luck can press otherwise good people into a corner.

The broad strokes of this story will be familiar to most readers: a once-promising mixed-martial arts fighter, Daniel is drawn back into the ring in an attempt to make good for his struggling family. Hardcastle’s accountsof these fights do much to engage the reader, and we see Daniel at his most empowered in these scenes, but it’s also clear that a long-term comeback is never an option. Ultimately, his entanglement with organized crime—where his ability to hurt people is equally valuable—brings about the ruin of Daniel and those around him. “Nobody ever gave him a decent job in his life,” his wife, Sarah, tells the local crime boss in a plea to be left alone. “Can you believe it? A good man like that.”

Does a narrative framed around inevitability necessarily owe it to the reader to be more surprising or original? Perhaps not, yet comparisons to Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, another backcountry thriller that flies a similar flag, seem inevitable. Still, McCarthy’s novel manages to defy the expectations of the genre instead of reinforcing them. Hardcastle’s novel even has its own version of No Country’s remarkable villain, Anton Chigurh. Like the terrifying Chigurh, Tarbell seems chillingly remote from any codes of honour, and he commits senseless atrocities far beyond the requirements of criminal enterprise. When he murders two strangers in a parking lot, he takes the time to watch “the last plume of fog depart the workman’s lips.” However, unlike McCarthy’s monster, whose nihilistic allegiance to random death makes him a fascinating narrative cipher, Tarbell ends up more like a prop than a provocation. Like the technicality that costs Daniel a crucial win in the ring, he represents just another bit of hard luck and, as such, he’s the least convincing character in the novel.

The author also often writes in a kind of hardscrabble polysyndeton—or “spare, muscular prose,” according to the publisher—that seems de rigueur for young male writers growing up in the shadow of McCarthy. “He put them down and threw another light jab and then a hard jab and felt the heft of the bag under his raw knuckles and then he threw a one-two and stung the bag with a straight right and sent it spiralling counter-clockwise.” If you think of each conjunction as a body blow, then there’s something to enjoy here, but my attention occasionally waivered, and I suspect this prose will likely repel some readers. That is a shame, though, because Hardcastle is a talented writer, and when his language unclenches it shines. The moments between the potboiler carnage evince a rough-hewn texture that captures both the beauty and the sadness of the characters’ working-class existence. Take, for example, Hardcastle’s lyrical sketch of Daniel’s town on Georgian Bay, which explores the intersections of time, space, and memory through crystal-clear detail: “Houses rebuilt and others gone to rot. New roads and subdivisions at the high side of town. River valley where the body of a local girl had been found. A debris-strewn promontory near the docks where a grain elevator used to be. Malls and superstores on the westerly edge of town atop forest where he’d rode and ran. Entire universes that he’d invented as a boy paved over, places now for plazas to squat and shit.” Throughout the novel’s quieter chapters, the experiences of its characters are revelatory of other more insidious forms of violence, and of how progress for some might represent loss for others.

Tarbell aside, many of Hardcastle’s minor characters are exceptionally rendered, and this goes a long way in reinforcing the novel’s sense of place. The author is particularly gifted at capturing paralinguistic gesture, showing how small actions communicate interiority: “Sarah took his hand in hers and put it to her cheek. She let go and sat up straight and poured more wine. Took a swig from the glass.” Be it a caress across the cheek or a blow to the head, Hardcastle seems to emphasize touch and sensation above the other senses in order to show how crushing poverty reduces people like Daniel and Sarah to mere physical beings.

In the Cage is a strong first novel that wrestles with its influences. The narrative’s imperative—its ceaseless thrust toward violence—works both for and against it, but Hardcastle mostly steers into the skid, finding novelty not in plot but in the remarkable details of place and character. Certainly, hyper-masculine violence need not be the lynchpin of stories of the working class, and it’s not necessarily a virtue for prose to be “taut” and full of “rigour”—whatever that means—but Hardcastle’s ability to find truth in minor details frequently overcomes these inherited faults. This is a highly crafted piece of crime fiction, and when you strip away the genre’s trappings, you find something truly special.

—COLIN LOUGHRAN

DANIEL GRIFFIN, Two Roads Home (Calgary: Freehand, 2017). Paperbound, 334 pp., $21.95.

Daniel Griffin’s Two Roads Home is a reimagining of the 1993 Vancouver Island logging protests. In this version, instead of playing out peacefully, the protests culminate in protestors who, frustrated by getting nowhere with peaceful methods, plant a bomb and (unintentionally) take a life. They then scatter, and variously hide, go off the grid, cooperate with authorities, and deal (or resist dealing with) the consequences of their actions. Griffin sketches complex characters—the activists display both a relatable (and, for the most part, reason-tempered) passion and conscientiousness alongside moments of sometimes sweet, sometimes eye-rolling naiveté.

An accomplished short-fiction writer, Griffin has a talent for setting scenes where two people talk to one another in short bursts, letting the reader uncover the differences between the various characters and their relationships through their chosen words and how they react to one another. This technique is more or less successful, but it can slow development somewhat when unnecessary scenes (was this originally envisioned as a short story collection?) creep in. The digressions are naturalistic, but too frequent, and not always compelling. For example, there is a moment fairly early into the novel where two characters see a dog. One tells a story about the childhood dog she grew up with. The other does not directly engage or respond to this story at all, but tells a different story about the breed of dog. We learn about the characters a bit here, and I suppose conversations often go this way, with people waiting to speak rather than listening and responding accordingly, but I feel as if the author, confident in his ability to create realistic dialogue, is expecting it to do the work that plot and development should be doing. Make no mistake, however; when he focuses on moving the characters forward, the dialogue in this book is mostly strong. I hear these characters speak, and that’s a very good thing. They just don’t always speak about things that advance the action.

This lethargy plagues the novel. Despite the explosive and thought-provoking subject matter, the book is slow to develop. Griffin does not seem to trust the reader to move along with the characters, and so often restates the various problems for the reader and overexplains the interrelations of the characters. At over two-hundred pages in, the activist responsible for actually planting the bomb—Pete (going by the alias “Ash”)—hides in a colony of forest-dwelling squatters, not really having dealt with any consequences for the bombing yet. He meets a kindred free-spirited woman, an artist, and the two develop feelings for one another. The woman muses to herself: “Painter and stranger meeting in the forest, falling in love, making a life together. This very thing was now happening to her, and yet some niggling doubt held her back, some worry she couldn’t quite finger. Maybe that Ash was younger than she was? That she knew so little about him? That it was all so rushed? That they had no money?” Well, sure. Probably those are some doubts that niggle. Although she does seem able to finger them here pretty easily. And needlessly, as we’ve been reading along and understand where these doubts come from. Simply relisting them doesn’t do anything except pad out the sections between conversations and deliver on-the-nose exposition. But the real problem with these linking sections is that Griffin reverts to oversimplified drugstore-prose quick descriptions so that he can get back to dialogue. An example from later in the niggling-doubt section: “Ash was handsome enough, youthful with a rugged air that attracted her.” And then Griffin uses “niggling doubt” again on that same page.

Given his flair for dialogue and his expertly crafted settings—in his descriptions of the forests and the water, especially—I can’t help but feel that Griffin can do better. As it stands, however, the novel can feel rushed and uneven, with moments of brilliance between long stretches of the author not trusting the reader to perceive the subtleties. This is a shame, because there are some great lines running through the book. The various ragtag bands of characters are all interesting in their own ways, with quirks and foibles that elicit both sympathy and indulgent snorts. Pete’s development is slow, but sustained and interesting. Even as the forest woman is falling for him, Pete is self-consciously aware that in order to protect himself, he is willing to abandon and even steal from her. Pete is a rare character, he is by turns callow and caring, sacrificing and selfish. He has profound depth and promise, but the novel ultimately leaves many of his complexities unexamined in favour of more surface-level considerations.

—JONATHAN FLIEGER

Nonfiction

SARAH DE LEEUW, Where It Hurts (Edmonton: NeWest, 2017). Paperbound, 123 pp., $19.95.

In her essay collection, Where It Hurts, Sarah de Leeuw has no illusions about how the Northern B.C. city of Prince George, her home for half the year, is perceived. “This is a city that guidebooks warn tourists and travellers away from,” de Leeuw writes. “Prince George… is not a place to linger.” So, obviously, she lingers. Though not out of any cheerleading, chamber-of-commerce obligation, but rather a writerly instinct to attend to those things that so often go unattended. In “Columbus Burning,” the essay quoted above, there’s the small, telling moment when de Leeuw’s eye is caught by a sign outside a local bar. “Live Girls and Home Cooked Meals,” the sign reads, which she reports without judgment. It speaks for itself in any case. There you go, de Leeuw seems to be saying, the squalid and the welcoming all wrapped up together. Here, as in most of the eleven essays in this book, de Leeuw’s preoccupation with overlooked places is only exceeded by her concern for the women and men who live undervalued lives in those places, who are out of sight and off the map. Like the anonymous man who dies in a hotel fire in “Columbus Burning.” He is someone for whom neither guidebooks nor history books are written. Instead, there’s this essay. And this book.

Shortlisted for last year’s Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction, Where It Hurts is undeniably intended to console and honour the marginalized and misused. Like the asbestos miners in “What Fills our Lungs,” who sacrifice their health and lives to a mineral considered, in its time, “a miracle of nature.” In the same essay, de Leeuw matches tragedy with tragedy, recounting the drowning death of a teenage friend, a memory she still struggles to come to terms with. “I want to ask one favour of the world,” she writes. “Do not take the lives of teenage girls looking only for answers to questions they don’t yet know how to ask.”

This plea recurs. In “Soft Shouldered,” de Leeuw speculates on the fate of a hitchhiker she once picked up along a road where thirty-three girls and young women have gone missing or been found murdered. It’s a compelling meditation on evil and the disconcerting matter-of-factness with which it is so often treated. A point driven home by a billboard de Leeuw later passes on the highway: “Girls, don’t go hitchhiking. Killer on the Loose.”

In “Seven in 1980,” de Leeuw recalls a childhood spent learning words like “tectonic” and “abduction.” For a young girl, her growing vocabulary highlights the terrors nature and human nature can hold. As the Mount St. Helen volcano erupts across the U.S. border from her in Washington State, ten children, between the ages of nine and eighteen, go missing across the lower mainland of B.C. Eventually, their bodies are found—victims of a serial killer. The killer’s well-known name is, no doubt, purposefully excluded from the essay. Instead, de Leeuw, adopting the perspective of her seven-year-old self, memorializes the first victim, twelve-year-old Christine Weller:

I watched 12-year-old girls in my school very carefully, memorizing the special ways they tucked in close to each other to whisper things, all the different ways they swung their hair and fiddled with their earrings, the ways they pulled their shoulders back and dabbed on raspberry-flavoured lip-gloss while they walked around the school in roving packs, studiously ignoring those of us still relegated to the monkey bars, to hopscotch and tetherball games.

In Where It Hurts, de Leeuw skillfully reconciles her background as an academic—she’s an associate professor at the University of Northern British Columbia and a researcher into the issues that affect marginalized communities—and a poet. What she chooses to say is intimately tied to and ultimately revealed by the way she chooses to say it. In the passage above, for example, a long single sentence unfurls into a heartbreaking tribute to the simple, fervent, sometimes insupportable hope that a young girl should grow up free from interference and harm.

Most of de Leeuw’s essays proceed elliptically, offering up fragments of information and flashes of emotion. Narrative connections tend to be left to the reader and there are times when this reader couldn’t help wishing there was more that was personal and, for that matter, more that was story in these deeply personal stories. Admittedly, this is a quibble. In the title essay, for instance, de Leeuw highlights the power of empathy at the same time as she acknowledges its limitations. The lyrical evocation of all this pain—whether from a faltering relationship or witnessing inexplicable acts of physical cruelty—is cumulative and devastating.

There are lighter moments in Where It Hurts; the best ones focus on de Leeuw’s recurring efforts to come up with a counter-narrative to those guidebooks disparaging Prince George. “Quick-Quick. Slow. Slow.” practically choreographs the trick to surviving and celebrating a city with a boom-and-bust economy, unbearably harsh winters, disappearing resources. What is the trick? You keep dancing, de Leeuw points out, literally and figuratively. “This is a back-and-forth town,” she writes.

In “After Paul Auster Spoke about Lightning,” de Leeuw even indulges in some cheerleading on behalf of Prince George’s cultural scene, boasting about the town’s three-day film festival of edgy documentaries. Though, to be fair, she seems much more pleased and preoccupied with the mystery surrounding “the bank of urinals in the women’s washroom” at the local movie theatre. It’s one more thing, in other words, for de Leeuw to linger on in Where It Hurts. Another chance for her to put the people, places, and stories she cares so much about on the map.

—JOEL YANOFSKY

ARTHUR MANUEL and GRAND CHIEF RONALD DERRICKSON, The Reconciliation Manifesto: Recovering the Land and Rebuilding the Economy (Toronto: James Lorimer and Company Ltd., 2017). Paperbound, 312 pp., $22.95.

In January 2017, Indigenous communities were rocked by the loss of a tremendous leader. Arthur Manuel, a leader and activist from the Secwepemc Nation, stood on the front lines and his unwavering determination and strength in the fight for Indigenous rights have been a beacon of hope for many. As Shiri Pasternak remarked: “Art taught us to better people. He changed the way we saw the world. He showed us a different way to relate to the world.” It is this pursuit of justice that guides and inspires those of us who continue to defend the land and water, and fight for Indigenous rights. His passing left Indigenous peoples aching, but his presence persists and his leadership and direction are found within the pages of his posthumous book The Reconciliation Manifesto: Recovering the Land and Rebuilding the Economy, leaving us a roadmap to finish the work he, and many other great leaders, have been striving to complete.

Expanding on the ideas of his first book, Unsettling Canada, Manuel provides a step-by-step approach to show us exactly where we are today, how we are arrived at this point, and how to shift where we are heading toward an honourable future. The current socio-political landscape in Canada would have people believe that the country has entered a period of heightened morality, awash with apologies, regret, and a renewed sense of purpose in “reconciling” the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Yet, Manuel’s sharp analysis and quick wit debunk this myth, not only depicting the tendency of the government of Canada to commission reports disguised as justice, but also the unyielding intentions of the government which remain unchanged since before Confederation. While this may not be a moment of increased government morality, this period has ushered in an increasing awakening of consciousness in Canadians across the country. It is at this moment that we have reached a tipping point, a moment of urgency when we must join together in “demanding justice from a country that has often trumpeted it, but rarely delivered.”

With the fundamental belief that we must come together to challenge the status quo, Manuel asserts that our path forward must first begin with truth, which has been in short supply from the government of Canada. Only through the unravelling of our twisted histories can we begin on that “long and complex process of fixing what is so obviously broken.” Tracing the history of the country, Manuel actively and critically deconstructs the revisionist narratives that form Canadian identity and stand in the way of reimagining the relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canadians. Not only do these narratives structure how Canadians understand their history, but they perpetuate the colonial relationship. Over the course of multiple chapters, Manuel breaks down the intersecting facets of colonialism which allow for this country to currently exist: dispossession, dependency, and oppression. Unapologetically, Manuel calls a spade a spade, documenting and deducing colonial policy historically, and presently, to one dirty notion: racial superiority.

The persistence of colonialism has demanded that Indian policy—to use the legal terminology—appear disconnected, as stand-alone aberrations perhaps executed by “a few bad apples.” Yet Manuel unpacks and weaves colonial policy together to highlight one fact: it always comes back to the land, “who has title to it and who is the legitimate decision maker over it.” The continued denial of Indigenous rights has led us to where we are now. At this pivotal moment, Manuel challenges readers to look past teary-eyed Liberal expressions of reconciliation and “Trudeau’s charm offensive,” to understand this critical fact: Our land and water rights are intrinsically connected to our inalienable right to self-determination and without the recognition of our fundamental right to self-determination “all of the hugs and tears, and increases in program and service money are meaningless.”

The pathway forward, to an honourable future for us all, is clear to Manuel: the complete recognition of our fundamental rights outlined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, including the inherent right to self-determination. Change only comes from substantially challenging the status quo, and this power for change is inseparable from the grassroots. It is beyond the capacity of colonial structures to change as they are entrenched in the systems that hold “our oblivion [as] precisely its objective.” Instead, Manuel sees our freedom in grassroots movements such as Defenders of the Land and Idle No More. The urgency of this work echoes throughout the pages of Manuel’s book. As Grand Chief Ronald Derrickson notes: for Indigenous activists, this book “is something of a warning shot—suggesting that if Indigenous people do not come together to demand their liberty soon, they will lose it.” What is needed is not misguided surface reconciliation, but a remaking of Canada on the principles of the affirmation of our rights, and human rights.

The Reconciliation Manifesto is Art Manuel’s call to action. Within these pages lies a step-by-step plan to move toward an honourable collective future for all of those who live in what has become known as Canada. While Manuel recognizes that embarking on this will take courage, he believes that with the full truth of our collective histories, “the only guide you will need is a sense of justice and decency.” In response to the current reconciliation rhetoric that paints a hopeful picture of hand-holding and skipping into the future, Manuel’s work outlines a program for Indigenous and non-Indigenous to engage in a way that bypasses the mediation of the colonial state to result in true structural change.

—RACHEL YACAAʔAŁ GEORGE

THERESA KISHKAN, Euclid’s Orchard & Other Essays (Salt Spring Island: Mother Tongue, 2017). Paperbound, 168 pp., $22.95.

In Theresa Kishkan’s new book of essays, the archaeology of simple lives is made wonderfully complex by the excavations of the writer. This is a literary book first and foremost, esoteric at times and oddly plebian at others. The writing is clear, calm and precise, the tone measured. The stories within the essays—researching lost relatives, exploring gardens and landscapes—never flap or snap. Methodical and mellow, these are meditative essays, controlled, inquisitive and, at times, beautiful. The writing is at its most lyrical in the sections on nature. Kishkan writes of the Albertan landscape of her ancestors with a keen eye, ecological understanding, and poetic style: “Turn, turn, bend the song to the roadside plants, the hosts, long syllables short ones, free verse composed of craneflies, dragonflies, bluebottles, broad-bodied leaf beetles, greasewood and cocklebur, the miraculous monarchs hovering.”

Kishkan is a writer’s writer and it’s her voice that holds the layered narratives in “Euclid’s Orchard”—the piece from which the collection takes its name—together. The subject of the essay is the author’s desire to understand the mathematical language of her son and, through her exploration, we discover how the family orchard was established and abandoned, how the author quilts and why, and how she understands the world through language. Kishkan holds the reader’s attention across this range of subjects by revealing the machinations of her own mind.

However, “family is both the source and inspiration for the essays collected in Euclid’s Orchard,” and that is regrettable. In the opening essay on her father, ”Herakleitos and Yalakom,”—the most poignant essay in the book—Kishkan writes: “At this point in my life I’m trying to make sense of the knot-work of relationships—yours to me, mine to you and my mother, the loops my brothers make in and amongst you, me, how we are tied to each other, places, hitched and slipped and reefed.“ This call-to-memory’s-arms appears early in the book and establishes trust in the narrator, setting us up for her interrogations of the past. But questions of intent nagged at me as I read on. Why are you telling me this (in this form)? Is it an idea of legacy that drove you on or an essayist’s quest for identity? And if the latter, why so few juicy details of your own life, why so little drama?

This is the challenge of an essay collection that leans towards family and biography: the author’s pulse is the one we feel most. Stories of ancestors, whether couched in the author’s discovery or not, can only be as interesting as those people were, and let’s face it, many of us are not.It requires tremendous skill to animate lives, let alone make sense of them, and Kishkan gives it her best in this book, breaking many of the essays into segments, weaving in ruminations to liven things up. Yet, by end of the book, I felt that nothing was truly made sense of, the knot-work made more complex, having been intellectually tackled as opposed to emotionally teased apart. I felt more confounded, the essays leading me from the Maritimes, to the Fraser Valley, to the Sechelt Peninsula and the aforementioned Alberta, all the while peopled with interrogations about strangers whose stories meant little to me.

In the essay ”Poignant Mountain,” there’s a nod in the notes section that the essay is a “memory map,” and a quote from Herman Melville used as a kind of disclaimer for how the author’s memory may differ from the actual places described: “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” A clever quote and approach, but memory’s subjectivity may have been a more provocative topic for an intellectual essayist than a ramble about town.

Perhaps my struggles with the book could be a result of the fact that I’d just endured a slew of holiday dinner parties when I cracked it open. Unfortunately, for the author, I’d decided people could be conveniently divided along the lines of those who like to tell stories and those who prefer to converse. Like any easy binary, this little model of mine was quickly applied to other pursuits: How do we speak to readers as nonfiction writers? Do we entertain with story? Or enquire and propose? And is it best to do both? Kishkan does the latter and in the end this book surprised me, as questions of place resonated long after I’d finished it. Can we really know where we are from? I doubt it, and thankfully so does Kishkan in this small but rigorous book.

—CHRISTIN GEALL

Notes on Contributors

S. C. BAYAT is a graduate of the writing department at the University of Victoria and is currently in the ma Creative Writing program at the University of East Anglia.

STEPHANIE BOLSTER has published four books of poetry, most recently, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth. Her first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems, won the Governor General’s and the Gerald Lampert Awards in 1998.

JULIE BRUCK’s third book, Monkey Ranch, received the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2012. Her new collection, How To Avoid Large Ships (Brick Books), is forthcoming in fall 2018.

SARA CASSIDY’s poems have been published in Geist, Prairie Fire, Grain,The Fiddlehead, and The Malahat Review. She lives in Victoria.

STEWART COLE is the author of Questions in Bed (Goose Lane), and the recent chapbook, Alien Freight (Anstruther Press, 2017). His second collection, Soft Power, will be published by Goose Lane in the spring of 2019.

JESSICA EATON received a bfa from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2006. She has shown across Canada and internationally. She lives and works in Montreal.

JASON EMDE is a teacher, Beatles enthusiast, amateur boxer, and the co-author (with Curtis Emde) of The Crunch Gang vs. The Deadly Zombie Ninjas of Japan.

DAVID ESO is a doctoral candidate at the University of Victoria, a poet, archival researcher, literary critic, and the editor of Where the Nights are Twice as Long, an anthology from Goose Lane Editions.

JANN EVERARD’s fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Canadian and American journals including Grain, The Fiddlehead, The Los Angeles Review, and Room. Jann lives in Toronto and works part-time in research ethics.

JONATHAN R. FLIEGER writes for video games in Quebec. His work appears in numerous journals and anthologies. His novel You are Among Monsters was recently released by Palimpsest Press.

CHRISTIN GEALL is a columnist, sessional lecturer in nonfiction, and owner of the design business, Cultivated. www.cultivatedbychristin.com

RACHEL YACAAʔAŁ GEORGE is Ahousaht of the Nuu-chah-nulth Nation and a PhD student in the University of Victoria’s Indigenous Governance Program. She is a visitor on unceded Lekwungen and W_SÁNEĆ territories.

MAUREEN HYNES is the past winner of the Gerald Lampert Award. Her most recent book of poetry, The Poison Colour, was a 2016 finalist for both the Pat Lowther and Raymond Souster Awards.

CHRIS JENNINGS is the author of Occupations (Nightwood, 2012). He was the first Prose Editor of Arc Poetry Magazine and was a founding editor of filling Station. He lives in Ottawa.

WILL JOHNSON is a writer, photographer, and journalist from Nelson, B.C. His work has appeared in Maisonneuve, The Fiddlehead, and Little Fiction.

KATE KENNEDY works as a freelance editor in Victoria, B.C. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and has been selected twice for the Best Canadian Poetry in English anthology.

FRANK KLAASSEN teaches history at the University of Saskatchewan. His poetry has appeared in Oxford Poetry, Poetry Salzburg, and The New Quarterly.

LAURA LEGGE lives in Toronto. She is the winner of the 2016 pen International and the rbc/pen Canada New Voices Awards. She recently completed her first novel.

PATRICK LANE resides on Vancouver Island with his wife, poet Lorna Crozier, and two fine cats, Basho and Po Chu. Mister Lane is the author of thirty-four books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada.

COLIN LOUGHRAN is an independent scholar who has taught at the University of Toronto and Centennial College. He lives in Vancouver.

B. A. MARKUS is a Montreal writer, teacher, performer, and a Grammy and Juno-nominated songwriter, and her reviews, essays, and stories can be found in publications such as Carte Blanche, Queen’s Quarterly, and The Montreal Review of Books.

A. F. MORITZ’s most recent book is The Sparrow: Selected Poems, published by House of Anansi Press in spring 2018.

JANE MUNRO’s sixth poetry collection, Blue Sonoma (Brick Books), won the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her previous books include Active Pass (Pedlar Press), and Point No Point (McClelland & Stewart).

JOHN PASS’s most recent book is Forecast: Selected Early Poems 1970-1990 (Harbour, 2015). His poems in this issue are from This Was The River, forthcoming from Harbour.

BARBARA PELMAN is a retired English teacher who divides her time between her home in Victoria and her family in Sweden. She has three books of poetry, the most recent of which is Narrow Bridge (Ronsdale, 2017).

CORINNE STIKEMAN was born in Toronto. In 2010, she received a cbc Literary Award (Fiction). Her work has since appeared in The Fog Horn, PRISM international, and enRoute. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a writer for television.

KIM TRAINOR’s first collection, Karyotype, appeared with Brick Books in 2015. Ledi, a book-length poem on an Iron Age horsewoman of the Siberian steppes, will appear with BookThug in 2018. She lives in Vancouver.

TOM WAYMAN’s most recent collection is Helpless Angels (Thistledown, 2017). A selection of his essays, If You’re Not Free at Work, Where Are You Free: Literature and Social Change, is forthcoming from Guernica Editions in 2018.

JOEL YANOFSKYis the author of five books, the most recent of which, Bad Animals: a Father’s Accidental Education in Autism, won the Mavis Gallant Prize for Nonfiction.

Contents

1. Inside front cover

2. Inside title

3. Colophon

4. Table of Contents

5. Jann Everard

6. Five Poems by Julie Bruck

7. S. C. Bayat

8. Stewart Cole

9. Stephanie Bolster

10. Chris Jennings

11. Laura Legge

12. Two Poems by Kim Trainor

13. Jane Munro

14. Jason Emde

15. Barbara Pelman

16. Three Poems by John Pass

17. Frank Klaassen

18. Two Poems by Tom Wayman

19. Corinne Stikeman

20. Carolyn Nakagawa

21. Three Poems by Terence Young

22. Four Poems by A. F. Moritz

23. Patrick Lane

24. B. A. Markus

25. Maureen Hynes

26. Book Reviews: Poetry

27. Book Reviews: Fiction

28. Book Reviews: Nonfiction

29. Notes on Contributors

30. Ad: Goose Lane

31. Ad: Palimpsest

32. Ad: Brick Books

33. Ad: Ronsdale

34. Ad: Event

35. Ad: Prairie Fire

36. Ad: Vallum

37. Ad: The New Quarterly Wild Writers' Festival

38. Ad: Mother's Tongue

39. Ad: UVic Writing

40. Ad: Malahat Review Queer Perspectives

41. Ad: Malahat Review subscribe

42. Ad: Malahat Review contest calendar

43. Inside this Issue

44. back cover