Bildungsproprietor
by D.M. Bradford
Slow and funny in the gut, our year of home ownership. Would love to tell itself it's going to be spent being written. Would love to tell itself its lack of poetry is already sidelined and collected. Three weeks moved, what I've got, for now, is this messy folder of cost projections, savings distributions, quoted brickwork, lead paint how-to's, doors and windows and the grade and the stumps into money counted, ins and outs, here and gone. To show for it all, in part: new maple floors, an old marshy grey from the kitchen to the front door, a faulty radiator, and a hundred or so wall anchors left behind. I can't imagine putting a hole in the wall, but I'm ready to learn, same as with all the yard work to wrap our heads around, because we have a yard now. Have does some heavy lifting there. And it's yards, really: out front, two magnolias, saucer and yellow bird. The one flushed pink and icing white, the other lemony green and yellow. The one probably millions of years in the record, the other—Kay looked it up—born in Brooklyn forty years ago. We're told those who planted them thought they were getting two pink ones, but the nursery screwed up and so here we are. Together, they frame the season for my eyes to itch and water, and they really, really do, earlier than they have in forever. A friend says this is when the English go looking for nettles to sting them, but I settle for tea, I settle for half a roll of toilet paper in a blown-out heap, a drill and putty knife off to the side on the cherry tabletop, a 5Ah battery on the charge, a life quite still, and yet not. I settle for Gateau, the grey-blue cat who shits, seemingly exclusively, on the back lawn, our gardener in waiting, who paws at the kitchen door to be sat with and overserved and looked after, slow blink, slow blink back. Mid unplanned hole around a stump, I quit digging, for now, and sit with him in a patch of sunlight. After dinner, Kay and I follow the last bit of day to the front porch to sit with the trees before the pink and white starts to shake off spring, right on the edge of too pretty. Walkers-by stop to take their selfie after their close-up after their video of the blossoming trees. And we can't help but enjoy the privilege, embarrassed. We take our own pictures, too. Your trees are so beautiful, they say, and we act the gracious keepers, having done nothing. I still have no idea how much an electrician's afternoon will cost, but we'll pay for it anyway. Our trees—the strange, lush problem of even just the phrase. Did you know, an admirer volunteers, that they kind of taste like ginger? For the first time, we share a petal from each tree, and it's true. I want to say this all has more to it than that. I want to say a year from now, yet right here, with the snails hyped up and out. Say, a couple of videos of them. Say, you've got to see them go.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Credit: Annie France Noël
Darby Minott Bradford is a poet and translator based in Tio'tia:ke (Verdun). They are the author of Governor General Literary Awards and Griffin Poetry Prize finalist Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books, 2021), and Bottom Rail on Top (Brick Books, 2023), which was shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award and the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Bradford's first translation, House Within a House by Nicholas Dawson (Brick Books, 2023), received the Warland Award and John Glassco Translation Prize, and was shortlisted for the Governor General Literary Awards. Ring of Dust by Louise Marois, Bradford's latest translation, was released in spring 2025.
Instagram: @newportmanteau
Greetings, friends! We’re thrilled to bring you issue 51—an open-themed collection of thirty exceptional works spanning fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, photography, translation, and comics.
Creative non-fiction by Elisa Carlsen
Righty, from Surf Pines, was one of six free chickens my neighbor Rudi called to tell me about. He knew a guy who knew a guy and offered to give my partner and me a ride to get them.
Creative non-fiction by Marion Cline
The purpose of the complete breath is to acknowledge mortality. Just as it easily enters, it easily dissipates. The purpose is to hold the breath, let it swim for a little while in the lower pit, and to let it go.
Creative non-fiction by Alana Friend Lettner
I was eighteen and living in a small flat in Argenteuil, a forlorn-looking suburb of Paris that had, in a past life, been a favourite place of Monet and Renoir.
Creative non-fiction by Eve Krakow
Before leaving the house, she double-checks her bag: music binder, pencil, glasses, water bottle. There’s something comforting about the ritual of going to choir rehearsal, the same day and same time each week, year in and year out.
Comic by Kaya Davies
Kaya Davies (b. 2002) is an artist who seeks to understand what she does not through the process of creation.
Comic by Elias Doering
Elias Doering is a pen and ink artist from the East Coast of the United States. They primarily work in black and white to make comics about the sea.
Comic by Josie Levin
Josie Levin (she/him) is a visual artist and writer whose visual work has appeared in a variety publications
Comic by Jem Woolidge
Jem Woolidge is an emerging artist based in Tiohtià:ke (so-called Montreal).
Fiction by Rachel Mattingly
Misty is undoubtedly splattered somewhere outside the IHOP a few blocks down. Gives a whole new meaning to the house of pancakes.
Fiction by Erik Moyer
Jackie Flapjacks stacks eight plates on each side of the barbell and drizzles them with custom syrup-colored spring collars. Some new gym-goers peek out of the corners of their eyeballs.
Fiction by Amber Nuyens
The first time Jamie goes to a gay bar, she thinks of those viral videos of cows being released into fields for the first time in their lives.
Fiction by Jordan Thibault
The yo-yo they used was blue. It was not their favorite color—red like their frumpy hair—but of the remaining primary colors, blue would do.
Fiction by J.M. Young
I’m not supposed to be in the line of deep lifeguards. I’m a registered shallow guard who has miserably failed the deep guard test, not once but twice.
Photography by Phi Phi AN
These photos are part of a long-running visual archive series named “As far as half the way to the Gateway,” a flow created based on traditional analog photography techniques.
Photography by Austin Cullen
Our relationship to the natural world is inextricably tied to technology; and as technology changes, so does the way we represent the world around us.
Photography by Judy Thorn
This series was shot during an exquisite period before the pandemic. It came together only in retrospect. Each photo tells of a stalwart friend, lover, seer.
Poetry by D.M. Bradford
Slow and funny in the gut, our year of home ownership. Would love to tell itself it's going to be spent being written. Would love to tell itself its lack of poetry is already sidelined and collected.
Poetry by Katherine Chiemi
I like the fragile eggs, just the size to crack between molars.
I like the Rube Goldberg of it all, the little egg engines and the rattle of the dice tray: watch me
Poetry by Judith Lapadat
Its hulked form nosing into steel grey bay
the chop, its incessant slap, the cold salt
Poetry by Madi Haab
there: in the hollow
concrete medulla
of the city skeleton
Poetry by Alessandra Lynch
HERE IS—THE MESSAGE---TO THE RAIN---NOT A TELEGRAM---"I DON’T WANT TO--- STOP----TALKING TO YOU”---LIGHT
Poetry by Dawn Macdonald
without stiffening. a bump,
a rebound. a dampening
Poetry by Aaron Rabinowitz
She separates from the distance from the other moving forms across the canvas—you mean campus—like a sticker unpeeled from its backing
Poetry by Dominique Russell
Peut-être pas maintenant, mais bientôt et pour toujours
à tout jamais, éternellement
Poetry by Mazzy Sleep
The sun in the morning.
It was snowing so hard it seemed like
it had always been snowing, since Eden,
Poetry by Lily Thomson
After hearing about it for so long
I finally ate an orange
In the shower
Translated by Neil Smith from Jean-Christophe Réhel
i am
less and less
i say goodnight chair good night ventilator
Translated by Willow Loveday Little from Jean-Guy Forget
my girlfriend and our friends
blossom into a choir of laughter
Photography by Angeline Teoh Simon
My collage work is an examination into personal ancestry and immigrant history. As a second-generation Canadian, I have felt disconnected from my German and Malaysian-Chinese heritage, motivating me to focus on a collection of family photographs that were passed down to me.