How Quiet, How Quick
by Alana Dunlop
This is the place from where I came:
born misshapen, at the women’s hospital, near a strip mall.
When I go back it feels like I am drinking water, rediscovering
a cold feeling in my throat. I was in the backseat
driving through. In the car I said to my friends
surprise is the best emotion, didn’t mention shock, though
until that point imagined they were synonyms, curled in on
each other in thesaurus, but later had to distinguish between
the two, like anything.
I watched your house birth flames. Funny how
there is no synonym for birth, not really. We laughed
from a safe distance, watching the smoke like a noose choke
any wood there was left, and your ID, and your passport, and
all your clothes. I was shocked
by how quiet it was, how quick. After the windows smashed there was just
the wind blowing through the trees and the sound of our talking
and the firefighters extending the hose and the deer lurking
nearby, unseen. Is it fucked up if I smoke a cigarette? Sabrina said.
It was time, not sound,
that deafened me—at the end of the driveway, staring into the long
dark road, waiting for the fire trucks, squinting to see red,
knowing that seconds were prone to peeling off, burning away
but struck again by that silence, that silence while it happens.
Jade saved a bottle of Jameson, got drunk in the backseat on
the way to your aunt’s basement. We stopped
on the road’s gravel shoulder and got out to see the eclipse
and so many stars, your face opened like a field, wide mouth
full of surprise, or shock. Your aunt was watching someone
give birth on the television, I saw it all—the gore on the baby’s
face, screaming into the new air. Funny
how giving birth is the same as experiencing disaster,
new mother walks around the hospital shaken by the
thing in her arms, came from nothing. No, not funny, but I don’t know the difference.
We all slept back-to-back on air mattresses. Your aunt’s dog
humped everyone. When we turned off the light the room sunk down,
laughter extinguished. Later you said
now the world looks different but couldn’t say how.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Alana Dunlop’s work has been published or is forthcoming in ROOM, Maisonneuve Magazine, and Contemporary Verse 2, among others. Her writing has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the McCormack Writing Centre (FKA Tin House Summer Workshop).
Find her at alanadunlop.online.
Jade Palmer and Greg Santos
Bienvenue and welcome to carte blanche issue 55. After an eclectically international issue in summer 2026, we decided to bring it closer to home by featuring creators from Quebec and Canada only. Unsurprisingly, it was no less eclectic than any other issue of the magazine
Comic by Kate Lavut
Kate Lavut is an award-winning playwright, graphic novelist and film maker. Working within a variety of disciplines, she explores a different storytelling technique for every project.
Creative Nonfiction by Willy Blomme
The smoke is unsettling, but the worst part – more than the smell, more than the haze and more than the irritation at the back of my throat – is that I can’t see the mountain. I stand in the middle of Mont Royal – the street that shares its name with the mountain and with the city – and look towards where it should be, a wall shoring up the horizon.
Creative Nonfiction by Caroline Little
My dad belongs to raccoon alley. He belongs to streetcars and skyscrapers, to a rhododendron cloaked in winter canvas. He belongs to jazz standards on an upright piano, warbling their way up the stairs to almost-sleeping ears. My dad is ill-fitting in this domain of single-use plastics. Lately, the plastics seem to disagree.
Fiction by Anya Leibovitch
A large statue of a cassowary welcomes you to Wongaling, the midsection of Mission Beach, Queensland. It’s humid as hell and you’re sweating even before the sun is up. Most people who make it this far up the coast are motivated by exotic wildlife and white sand beaches, but you’re not here on holiday. Still, you couldn’t have imagined you’d be spending the majority of your time wearing a hair net and plastic apron, bent over metal troughs elbow-deep in water and rat shit.
Fiction by Sabrina Michael
She can see the man writhing on the streetcar tracks through the cracked screen of her iPhone, glinting in the bright sun of high noon. He’s screaming about damnation, in so much distress that it’s affecting his messaging, the specifics of the impending damnation muffled and unclear. Everyone’s damnation, she assumes, coming soon.
Photography by H.R. Link
Within the frame of a photograph, a window is a recursive frame, a sub-frame. In this series, I make use of these sub-frames in various ways.
Poetry by Calypso André
If you are falling it is not too late trust fall into these words the way I fall through these clouds because Father I am learning cloud is too distant a word for how clear the world is from up here don’t you know birds learn how to fly by falling
Poetry by Sarah Burgoyne
but where is my mother? ah, ah yes, by now she is the entire west
out the window, the milky way lets fall its milk from bright glass jars
the fish of the stream won’t stop dreaming
Poetry by Poonam Dhir
while pundits perform ganesh puja surfaces are wiped clean and envelopes slip into cotton kurtas. aunty pushes stories into tiny objects and finds herself missing the receipt.
Poetry by Alana Dunlop
This is the place from where I came:
born misshapen, at the women’s hospital, near a strip mall.
When I go back it feels like I am drinking water, rediscovering
a cold feeling in my throat.
Poetry by Chanel Sutherland
and the glasses sweat into the table and the forks scrape porcelain and the air swells with the smell of butter and basil and someone is laughing and someone is saying god, I needed this today
Translation by H Felix Chau Bradley and Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, from Anya Nousri
Look out. When you’re invited to someone’s house, don’t eat what they offer you. S’hour can be visited on you through food. Avoid drinking; if you don’t have a choice, always wipe the rim of your glass so as not to leave any saliva. Don’t let people touch your hair. They could do gris-gris and drive you to your ruin. Don’t send or post any photos online. Learn these invocations and recite them whenever you feel someone staring at you.
Translation by Misha Solomon, from Jean-Paul Daoust
4AM Parc Lafontaine. Ambiance de jungle. The pond. Like a pasteurized swamp. Some fog to make the decor vampiric. The lights float above the paths. Annoying buoys that signal erotic rambles. And the police, watching. Because there are men roving around there. Only men. It's the law.
Photography by Maggie McPhee
Traveling to Barbados with my family for Christmas. A set of three diptychs. A string of Christmas lights. A rope that I pull at. I want to get there but I never can.