Jeff Latosik

A HUMANE SPIDER REMOVAL SERVICE

– seen on a subway car ad for Go Daddy


They show up in their saffron robes,
no scheduled date, no number
you could call to offer your complaint.

Grown men and women, quiet,
you guess they wouldn’t fare well anywhere
rallied in this strange sainthood.

No gloves. No plasticky contraption.
The service uses only hands.
You may have heard it’s deadly work

in the south. One person extracts
the creature; another salvages the web
with tiny pincers that a naked eye can barely see.

Is there a windless, winterless place
to set that small world down within?
The abattoir is far from here, you’ll almost say

and all the dairy in the fridge is cage-free.
They’ll nod and closely read the trim
and cupboard corners as if the everyday were scripture.

Then, requiring nothing, they leave.
You watch them hobble on the road
now cupping their hands, the rain, the wind.

You’ve heard that recruitment happens in this moment.
Even now some people have been known
to simply up and leave to follow the service for their days.

It’s true a wife or father’s often left behind
by this sudden apostasy. Meanwhile the spiders go on
spinning their reasons from nothing.



Jeff Latosik’s latest collection of poetry is Dreampad (McClelland & Stewart, 2018). Recent work has appeared in Poetry Magazine and The Walrus and is forthcoming in The West End Phoenix. Jeff is a member of the InkWell Workshops Collective. He lives in Toronto.

Angie Quick

WILD/WILD/WILD

That the soul requires ritual/ smoothed back breathed unconscious fur/ damped by
whispers/ would weigh a heat/ trapped scent/ that could be described as rustic/
antiquated relief/ of the body/ untamed balding limbs on the linen spread/ let weave and
wave the worth/ each thread/ with honey accusing the wound/ slips light/
It would have been the word wild/wild/wild
had 3000 years not been enough to arrive at an after-life.




Angie Quick (b. 1989, Calgary, Alberta) is a self-taught painter and poet working in London, Ontario. She is known for her large oil paintings, which explore flesh in a historical and contemporaneous manner. Her practice experiments with the nature of language and sensation within both a visual and performative context. Her work can be seen at www.everythingipromisedyouisbeingsold.com.

Matthew Zapruder

POEM IN YOUR POCKET

Hey Jack put me in your pocket
so I can be by the blue above
all those ungrateful heads
somewhat darkly bereaved.
The sky once thought
it knew me and never will.
Please feel not quite
sorry enough to take me
out in the sun. Leave
me here where I can’t touch
the shoulders of tourists
shopping for apples. You’ll just
have to lean down and listen
to me tell my reliquary
what it almost felt like to be
a breeze. Listen. Then you can
tell everyone you’ve heard
a poem in the world.



Matthew Zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon, 2010) and Sun Bear (Copper Canyon, 2014), as well as Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017), a book of prose. An associate professor in the MFA at Saint Mary’s College of California, he is also editor at large at Wave Books. He lives in Oakland, California. “Poem in Your Pocket” was written for a librarian who requested a short poem he could carry around on Poem in Your Pocket Day, April 26. On this day, Americans are instructed to “select a poem, carry it with you, and share it with others at schools, bookstores, libraries, parks, workplaces, street corners, and on social media using the hashtag #pocketpoem.”

Amelia Does

CHEAP MEDALLIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Allison Chisholm

MY UNRAVELLING

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

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

Pee break.

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



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

Amy Dennis

LIGHTNING

                                        i am
                                        a hushed

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

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

                                        grip, ink
                                        rain, translate
                                        skin as sky,

                                        firefly
                                        firefly
                                        firefly





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

Stephen Brockwell

AURORAS, BORIS, ALICE

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




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

Ally Fleming

HIDE, HORIZON

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

Waves break against bone,
lick clefts into edifice.

Pet frenzy,
something sweet between its teeth,

wild for your glance, it wants
in fathoms.

Nabbed animal,
my million eyes:

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



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

Tom Cull

INVASIVE SPECIES

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



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

Délani Valin

 

TERRARIUM

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

over holy basil chamomile concoctions for the frazzled

rhizomes of your sympathetic nerves. Bury the bones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

honey to the moss spreading across the shower walls. Filtered

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

on the dirt-covered linoleum and place your pomegranate seeds

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

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

Conyer Clayton

 

PAYING FOR STORAGE

 

I pound my fist against your back

to loosen phlegm. I’ve always

told you smoking kills, but

you’d do it with ropes

and bottle tops. Your soles

unsteady on a wicker chair. 

Pour yourself into

one more moonrise.

Draw out the misery in me.

I can only see

this failing. You disappearing.

A man’s frayed face

and brittle leaves. A boulder

obscured in slow-moving fog.

I can only see

you vanished

among tall desert rocks.

Your mother says

she thinks she’s heard

the last from you,

and I can only see

the chair leg tremor.

Are the floorboards even?

Did you even check?

Conyer Clayton is an Ottawa-based writer who aims to live with compassion, gratitude, and awe. She has two chapbooks: The Marshes (& co collective, 2017) and For the Birds. For the Humans. (battleaxe press, 2018). Her work appears in Prairie Fire, The Maynard, In/Words, Bywords, Transom, and others. She won Arc’s 2017 Diana Brebner Prize and received third place in Prairie Fire’s 2017 Poetry Contest. Check out conyerclayton.com for updates on her endeavours.

Heather Birrell

FLASHMAN

i

The filmy-eyed old man went searching for him during the Polish Festival. He had a sister

but they had to put her down. There were beautiful girls wearing coronets of red flowers

drinking beer out of plastic cups on every corner.

ii

I didn’t know when I met you that any of this would happen. We were playing Scrabble on

an island closer to Africa than Spain. You used the word cozy in a way I had never seen or

heard before. We went to see a movie. La Momia Vuelve.

iii

Desert dog, street dog, half fox, half hare.

Listen. Nails clicking out circles of goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

Heather Birrell is the author of two story collections, Mad Hope (one of the Globe and Mail’s top 23 fiction picks for 2012) and I know you are but what am I? Her work has been honoured with the Journey Prize for short fiction and the Edna Staebler Award for creative non-fiction and has been shortlisted for both National and Western Magazine Awards. She lives in Toronto with her family.

Chris Banks

Garnish

Check out these invisible handcuffs. Death

is classically trained. You are free to go

on your own recognizance until the time

of your execution. Every minute is garnish.

The entrée is missing. We live under

an embarrassment of stars. Each face

is a living portrait. A work in progress.

Dreams build cantilevered balconies into 

the world. Hold this mirror. So begins

our secret congress. Let’s not meet out 

in the open. What do you wish to know?

I promise to pull you out of an earthquake.

Give you first aid. When the ocean recedes,

do not go walking amongst the fish gasping

in its wake. Head for the hills. Stay with me

one more week. Wave goodbye before

slipping into a dark limo filled with techno

and champagne. I hate the crowds so I won’t 

be at the premiere with its paparazzi. I’ll be 

working on my patents. There is this one 

for a new type of glass. When you hold 

a hand up on either side, it simulates human 

contact. Here, place your fingers like this. 

I forgot how warm you are to the touch.





Chris Banks is the author of four poetry collections. His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004 and was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review, Prism International, among other publications. He lives and writes in Waterloo, Ontario.

Tom Prime

THE HUBRIS OF THE TONGUE

the tongue is talking to itself
mumbling, shaking its head
has lost its mind

the throat is its apartment building
the throat wants back payments
the throat has called the police

the tongue is homeless
lives in empty cigarette packages
slips through the streets
a snail without a shell




Tom Prime is in the MFA program at the University of Victoria (specializing in poetry). His poems have appeared in Carousel, Ditch, Fjords Review, The North Testicle Review, The Rusty Toque, and Vallum. In 2017, Proper Tales Press published his first chapbook, A Strange Hospital.

Dale Tracy

CLOSET DRAMA

This is a script for performance.

The blocking is in your palm

or punch.

The dialogue goes like this:

I see you are playing at living a story.

How many levels in?

This is a closet drama in nested acts.

Open the door. Take the string from the hanger

where mittens drape, justly balanced.

Put your hands inside. When pleased, clap.

Wait to be entertained or be two puppets 

eating up the stage of shucked shunned shirts, 

one hand reliable, the other the clown

who seeks love so hard it falls on its knitted tail.

Be the delighted audience. Revoke your love

when the clown tries the fall again.

This is how it ends:

How many doors did you open? 

Can you close them again?

With those mittens on your hands?





Dale Tracy’s mini-chapbook, What It Satisfies, is published by Puddles of Sky Press. Her writing has appeared in Arch-l’Arc, illiterature, and Artfest Ontario’s Canada’s 150th: Who We Are, Where We Are and Where We Need to Be Going. She lives in Kingston and teaches literature and culture at the Royal Military College of Canada.