past issues
CURRENT ISSUE
by Greg Santos
As I write this editorial for our second issue of 2024, we are in a period of transition in Montréal. While it’s no longer summer, it’s also not quite officially fall. Mid-September is that whimsical time of the year when pumpkin spice everything is upon us and kitschy Halloween decorations are starting to pop up around our neighbourhoods. With this playful spirit in mind, the carte blanche team and I are thrilled to present the twenty-four “Play” themed fiction, poetry, comics, photography, translation, and creative nonfiction pieces which make up issue 49.
by Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier
Originally from Mexico and with a Quebecois pépé, Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier is passionate about film, comix, poetry & hybrid forms, art-making in community, translation, and independent radio.
by Sarah Giragosian
Before the infamous “shower scene” in Alfred Hitchcock’s horror film Psycho, there’s target practice in the parlour, a sequence that at once grips and baffles me. Why does Marion Crane stay? There are too many red flags: Norman’s rictus of a smile, the sad stitching of the taxidermied raptors, his—cough, cough—hobby of “stuffing things.”
by Kaye Miller
i remember July before the wildfires, when we nestled on the porch beneath clothesline, the dripping of dishrags, and tucked ourselves small between grill and propane tank, waiting for that first tin-roof chime of rain. our team of fifteen, before the campers came, our anticipation, o’ sweet pinewood porch, watching the cap of clouds on the horizon. a ghostly pillar of cumulonimbus, slow gliding into camp.
by Lena Palacios
As a child of the late 70s and 80s, Paula often fell asleep in front of the TV and awakened startled to “snow” or static. She would tempt fate by calling on the demonic spirits of the other side of the white noise like Poltergeist’s little, blonde White girl, Carol Anne.
by Mia Dalia
Of all the many nuisances the Laurel Hill Cemetery’s ghouls have had to cope with over the years—and there had been many, from population booms and busts and the industrial revolution to gentrification, community tree planting projects, vandals, loud mourners, goths, Halloween junkies, junkies in general, etc., etc.—nothing irked them quite as much as hipsters.
by Trynne Delaney
While I lay in bed for the seventh day, only rising to shit and piss, eat, drink, and attend to the very most essential animal functions, I became aware of the mirror. It was my ex’s idea to install it there, an obelisk of a thing that took up half the wall, where we could see ourselves on the bed.
by Randal Eldon Greene
Lucy hugs me close. I am Lucy’s favourite friend. We go everywhere together. She takes me to the store, I attend church with her, and we love to go to parties together. Parties are our favourite.
by Cora Lewis
The first summer after college, I worked as a hostess in a restaurant. The place was open to the street at night, and—as with every place open to the street—rats would run in from trash-laden sidewalks, darting towards the kitchen with its smells.
by Jake Goldwasser
Jake Goldwasser is a writer and cartoonist based in New York. His poems have appeared in the New England Review, Bennington Review, and elsewhere. His cartoons and comics regularly appear in the New Yorker.