By Luca Seccafien
Luca Cara Seccafien is an artist, writer, and community organizer living on the stolen ancestral territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh people.
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By Adam C. White
Upon release from prison in early 2014, Adam White started a successful interior design and remodeling company while maintaining a drug free lifestyle. His recovery from addiction became jeopardized after a nasty work-related accident left him permanently injured in both wrists. Turning back to drugs, he lost everything he worked so hard to achieve.
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By Yolanda Bonnell
There was always a sense of floating. Or running. Never touching the ground.
My personality was shaped by constantly having to adapt to new surroundings as I grew. I learned social skills to survive. Not fitting in was social death.
So youthfully dramatic.
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By Juan Velasquez
Like a newborn, it took me a few seconds to adjust to the light. Through my cloudy vision, I could make out the word “rawr”… sent by… Warren?
I was hiding from the party.
“What?” I said out loud. I felt a pang of pride ripple through my chest. I was already speaking to myself in English, after only a couple of months in Canada.
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By K. Zen’obia
The red couch looked like something that burst out of a tarnished lamp, or a genie's psyche, like a wavering third eye, when the number 1970 bubbles up on a Ouija. Not like a red Ikea in a dorm room, where two college girls, one Black, one white, are painting walls, and trying to outdance each other, freestyling, during a Calabria voice over commercial.
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By Sarah Brown
The eggs for the girls came from far away. Those girls with their unpressed seams, their loose threads—they looked like they were sprouting pink thread from their armpits. The skirts they made didn’t even cover their underwear. In the heat I could hear their bare thighs on the plastic seats, the squelch of their skin’s release. It truly made me shudder.
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By Madeline Ewanyshyn
It’s a Thursday when Dad tells me that Mom has died, so I’m allowed to swear to my heart’s content.
“Oh fuck,” I say, while feeding my tortoise Henry a piece of kale, “Oh dammit what rotten luck and terrible terrible shit.”
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By Hillary Flynn
Lilly pressed the button for apartment 5D and waited on the stoop as the buzzer rang. The blare was so loud she glanced down the street to see if anyone heard. None of the people walking down University Place paid attention to her.
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By Elaine Hayes
On an early February morning, Dad brought home the Ontario Application for Social Assistance. It came with a brochure listing the assets an applicant had to convert to cash prior to qualifying, as well as those an applicant could keep. I was eleven and excited and naïve.
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By Nat Kishchuk
The wan Lachine sun slanting through the managers’ open doors uplights the ninth-floor dust. The managers are all at the meeting in Miami, hustling their way into new boss jobs in the merged company, Meriem thinks as she wheels the recycling bin down the passage. Probably by a pool, with umbrella cocktails.
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By Hana Mason
The London Drugs Photo Lab emailed me to say that I had pictures that had been there for over six months and if I didn’t come to get them, they’d be put in storage for a year, after which they’d be destroyed. I’d already paid for them, so I walked downtown to get them.
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by Parker Baldin
Did the year make any mistakes? The whole
thing and not one. Maybe it was out looking for someone
it knew
by natalie hanna
you have torn your plaid skirt
wide at the side seam
but have no change of clothes
until your sister fetches a dress
from your untidy home
by Simone Person
and smiles a poplar-teeth chorus. with a sawed-off stare,
he adorns us queen, as in Black, as in his. names it admiration,
a burnt-cork offering, says if we’re smart, we’ll take it.
before he loses interest. his reminder of what he’s culled,
by Zoe Imani Sharpe
To hear the rapturous rock-star fantasy
“restless imminence” and still
shed leather skin like
some foxgloves float to the floor.
by Meryem Yildiz
the first morning of spring, it isn’t, but it gives us a taste.
the plants are thirsty, stems languid. i mist them with vinegar by mistake. i wipe their leaves one by one, strokes long and generous. i could be swimming,
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Translated by Simon Brown from Laurence Gagné
you’re the little guy in the wall
me i wonder what really comes through
i’m just like
hey come on through
Translated by Paul Curtis Daw from Jean-Paul Didierlaurent
Twelve years. Already I’ve been here twelve years. Thanks to Maria, the older of my two daughters. Oh, that didn’t all happen overnight with a simple snap of the fingers. I struggled, I fought. In the early days, I managed to push back the deadline, despite my daughter’s ever more numerous arguments.
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Translated by Neil Smith from Philippe Chagnon
About two to four weeks before I went to live for good in our storage room, I was spinning lettuce in the salad spinner. Margot had asked for a hand with supper. I didn’t feel like it, kept stalling, and she flipped out at me (I wanted to help, but at my own pace). The day after this latest blow-up, I made a decision: I’d start gradually moving my things into our junk room behind the kitchen.
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Translated by Philip Styrt from Clément Marot
Love and Death each me profanes:
For Love has tangled me in chains