antilang. no. 1

The Anti-Languorous Project

Mandate & Masthead Good. Short. Writing. Three words: our mandate at The Anti-Languorous Project. antilang. is an online open access literary magazine with a focus on concision and precision.

Show, don’t tell; imply and implicate. Antithesize languorous language.

Allie McFarland & Jordan Bolay, Founders and Editors Allie & Jordan (combined) have the “minimum 3 to 5 years editing experience (in both poetry and fiction)” that any reasonable employer would expect. Their library contains over 400 books (with very few duplicates). Allie writes novel(la)s, short fiction, and poetry; Jordan writes poetry, short fiction, and creative criticism. They operate across genres and read in a loosely choreographed dance (Jordan balters).

Design by Jordan Bolay Cover & logo by Lissa McFarland antilang., no. 1 Published by The Anti-Languorous Project in Calgary, AB, spring 2018 antilang.ca Printed and bound by Blitzprint in Calgary, AB ISSN 2561-5602 (print) ISSN 2561-5610 (online) All rights revert to the authors and artists upon publication.

No portion of this magazine may be reproduced without permission from the artists.

antilang. no. 1

Contents Weyman Chan Spring Cleaning, Herpes ———————————————— 5 Proletariat Hijinx ——————————————————— 42 Suction Cups ————————————————————— 84

Toni Hiatt Prairie Limbo ————————————————————— 6 Motherlands ————————————————————— 50

K.S.A Brazier-Tompkins Barn Swallow ————————————————————— 8 Osprey ———————————————————————— 80

Erin Emily Ann Vance Spring ———————————————————————— 10 Hymn ———————————————————————— 24 Honey Cookery ——————————————————— 77

Benjamin Groh Ursprung ——————————————————————— 11

Spring 2018

Nicole Haldoupis We All Fall Down ——————————————————— 19 Janie’s Cat —————————————————————— 79 Somewhere Near Danforth ————————————— 94

Jeanette Lynes Buried in the Back Yard ——————————————— 20 The South Saskatchewan ——————————————— 87

Amy LeBlanc Housekeeping ———————————————————— 25 Interlude ——————————————————————— 55 Luna ————————————————————————— 68

David Eso Thermometer Rising ————————————————— 27

Taidgh Lynch The Knock —————————————————————— 28 Collecting a Coffin —————————————————— 62

Marc Herman Lynch I ——————————————————————————— 30 IX —————————————————————————— 48 XIII ————————————————————————— 86

Aritha van Herk Tough girl ——————————————————————— 31 Cut and Run ————————————————————— 95

Jaclyn Morken Hidden ———————————————————————— 34 Nowhere ——————————————————————— 82

Rosemary Nixon Let the People Tremble ——————————————— 36

The Anti-Languorous Project

Larissa Lai Fragments from MAENAD MARTYR ———————— 44

Jess Nicol How to Tell If You Have the Face of My Ex ————— 52

Geoff Pevlin the broad cuffers of cramp-hand cap’n bob ————— 57

Lisa Murphy-Lamb A New Room at Twenty-Four ———————————— 64

Nikki Sheppy “The Real” from Paracosm —————————————— 69

Mikka Jacobsen Cok! Cok! —————————————————————— 72

Paul Meunier Orion ———————————————————————— 89

Spring 2018

Weyman Chan

Spring Cleaning, Herpes The question harped its way out.

Vaporous birdsong to agnostic flowers, who believed they were reason enough for rows of have-nots nixed by rain & lady’s slipper our hero in bed with ethereal headache fast food monoxides bounced by hickey bang, three ukuleles per succulent pile maybe the dumpster truck waits for the dumpster diver to climb out. A crow waits, too.

Hope machine hatches goon machine who writes, I’m cured by the golden dawn of air-dwellers, your Waldorf kiss backpfeifengesichts at birds I know better than I know myself. Guess that’s why biohazardous signs are ignored.

The Anti-Languorous Project | 5

Toni Hiatt

Prairie Limbo As we clobber along potholes, cobs of corn stacked in the cargo bed shudder and exhale brown puffs of dirt that dissolve into the dimming skyline. The scent of mud and sunstroked grass enters through the radiator. A blanket of bright squares is splayed across the back seats, two thirds of which a wooly sheepdog occupies, sleeping so statically it may just as well be a pelt. Wedged in the remaining third, I maneuver sunburnt legs beneath its heavy paws, and feel confirmation of life entering, exiting his body. I dig my fingers through crocheted seat cushions, where they trace the missing chunks in the foam below; more potholes in a land of potholes.

At each bump, the pink, plastic rosary swishes like a sugar-coated pendulum strung above the dash and my door jiggles as it considers abandoning us. But the doors are locked now.

Acrylic nails tap the steering wheel to claves of “The Girl from Impanema,” which crackles from a radio duct-taped to the dash. We halt at a fork, and my driver’s lips part in the rearview mirror. A tube of violet lipstick materializes and coats bottom and top lip in the time it takes for a semi to whizz by, so close it almost sucks us into orbit. Grey dust

6 | The Anti-Languorous Project

pelts the window and the outside world briefly vanishes. A tongue runs over slanted teeth, and an ivory stick finds its way to rest between the lips. The dust settles and the front window cranks down. The tick-tock of the turning signal. The metallic lilt of a lighter being struck. The lips part again, a furtive smile. Smoke exiting the body. “Want one?�

Prairie Limbo | 7

K.S.A. Brazier-Tompkins

Barn Swallow Scissor-tailed batbird slipping between breaths, you skimmed green skin

while Woolf weighted

her pockets and sank deep

between the acts

of written memory.

Where were you

before barns?

What painted cliff of primeval clay shaped your sudden orange

skin, the dusk purple you show the sun?

Where were you

before scissors

and signification

played you on the drama

of human minds?

8 | The Anti-Languorous Project

The wind did not call you skipper; the grass did not call you

wind.

You were unplaced

between the

folds of time.

Split-tailed agent acting on the skin.

Barn Swallow | 9

Erin Emily Ann Vance

Spring When I was young we housed doves ivory springing from concrete cages.

One march birthed infants —one stillborn.

Still warm in my hand I held the tiny, foetal being and cried, icy tears marked its grave.

Against my mother’s wishes I refused to place it in the trash and buried it out back, in the rain.

10 | The Anti-Languorous Project

Benjamin Groh

Ursprung Walter Benjamin is most famous for The Arcades Project, a work he composed by collecting and organizing citations from books about nineteenth-century Paris. The following excerpt forms the prologue to a work-in-progress entitled The Allegorist, which assembles a biography of Walter Benjamin using citations from texts that he wrote, texts that he read over the course of his life, and texts that cite him.

The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that original comes from the Latin verb oriri, to arise, to be born; the Latin genius, like genesis, derives from gen, the root of gignere (to beget), which comes from the Greek gignesthai, to be born.

—Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius The work is the death mask of its conception.

—Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street

The Anti-Languorous Project | 11

Benjamin’s monument, conceived by Israeli artist Dani Karavan, was erected in 1994 near where he died on the Franco-Spanish border, at Portbou.

(Leslie, Conformism

The question here is not so much of the memorial as of the person himself, not of the memory but of the present fact.

(Goethe, Elective

Hannah Arendt described the place: “The cemetery faces a small bay directly overlooking the Mediterranean; it is carved in stone in terraces; the coffins are also pushed into such stone walls.”

(Scholem, Friendship

Valéry, speaking of the effect of light upon the sea, calls it “a mass of calm and visible reserve.”

(Goldsmith, Capital

215)

Affinities 157)

283)

[528,8])

—— Benjamin was interned first at Nevers, where empty chateaux, vacant factories, and farms had been converted into camps de concentration for ressortissants (“enemy aliens”), including ressortissants allemands (those “coming from Germany”), and then at Vernuche, where 300 prisoners were crammed into a disused furniture factory.

(Jackson, “In the

Benjamin: “Last night, lying in the straw, I had a dream so beautiful that I cannot resist the temptation to share it with you…. [A] lady had occupied herself with graphology.

I saw that she had something in her hand which I had written…. I moved closer.

What I saw was a cloth that was covered

(Eiland and Jen-

12 | Benjamin Groh

Footsteps of Walter Benjamin,” bulletin. hds.harvard.edu)

nings, Critical Life 651)

in pictures; the only graphic elements I could distinguish were the upper parts of the letter D, whose pointed lines revealed an extreme striving toward spirituality.

This part of the letter had also been covered with a small piece of fabric with a blue border, and the fabric swelled up on the picture as if it were in the breeze.

That was the only thing there which I was able to “read”—the rest offered indistinct, vague motifs and clouds.

Gradually a proper camp ‘society’ developed…: ‘entrepreneurship’ and the service sector (construction of sanitary installations, water and mains supplies, production of crockery from empty cans, the establishment of a postal service, etc.).

(Brodersen, Biogra-

As editor of the projected Bulletin de Vernuche: Journal des Travailleurs du 54e Régiment, he assembled a first-class team of writers and editors from the camp population. The drafts for the first issue, which are held in the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, included sociological studies of camp life, critiques of camp art…, and a study of the inmates’ reading habits.

(Eiland and Jen-

Benjamin delivered lectures (one of them was on the concept of guilt) and offered, for a fee, philosophical seminars. The fees were paid by his “students” in the currency of the camp: nails, cigarettes, and buttons.

(Selected Writings 4,

phy 246-7)

nings, Critical Life 652)

“Chronology” 438)

Ursprung | 13

In November 1939, he returned to Paris, where he remained until the arrival of the Nazi armies in the capital. Then he joined the tramp southward.

(Schwarz, “The Mysterious Death…,” weeklystandard.com)

—— The apocalyptic atmosphere in Marseilles in 1940 produced its daily absurd story of attempted escape: plans about fantasy boats and fable captains, visas for countries unknown to Atlas, and passports from countries that had ceased to exist.

(Fittko, “Old Benja-

“You must understand that this briefcase is the most important thing to me,” he said.

(Buck-Morss, Dialec-

Lisa Fittko, who helped him and other refugees to escape, attested that Benjamin wanted the briefcase to be saved above anything else; for supposedly his latest manuscript was inside, and it was the most important thing of all, more important even than his own life.

(Walter Benjamin’s

When Fittko, the Gurlands, and Benjamin reached the small clearing that was their goal for the day, Benjamin announced that he would sleep alone in the clearing; he was at the end of his powers and unwilling to attempt any segment of the journey more than once.

(Eiland and Jen-

“Gnädige Frau,” he said, “please accept my apologies for this inconvenience.”

(Buck-Morss, Dialec-

14 | Benjamin Groh

min” 947)

tics 332)

Archive 1)

nings, Critical Life 673)

tics 331)

At the impassible frontier, Tired of persecution, he lay down.

(Wizisla 182, quoting Brecht, “Casualty List”)

The small group of refugees that he had joined reached the Spanish border town only to learn that Spain had closed the border that same day and that the border officials did not honor visas made out in Marseilles.

(Iluminations, Ar-

The knock came again, this time louder.

“Another minute, if you please!” he cried.

“I am coming.”

(Parini, Benjamin’s

In his room he yanked open the drawers of his desk at once; everything lay there in perfect order, but at first, in his agitation, he couldn’t find the one thing he was looking for: his identification papers.

(Kafka, The Trial 7)

I regret to inform you Herr Benjamin, Frau Gurland but I must inform you Frau Gurland, Herr Benjamin you will understand Herr Benjamin, Frau Gurland it is my duty to inform you Frau Gurland, Herr Benjamin that your transit visas Herr Benjamin, Frau Gurland your transit visas Frau Gurland, Herr Benjamin are not valid

(Bernstein, Shadow-

endt, “Preface” 18)

Crossing 259)

time 31)

Ursprung | 15

Sometime later that night, he took a massive dose of morphine; Arthur Koestler later remembered him leaving Marseilles with enough morphine “to kill a horse.”

(Eiland and Jen-

Perhaps because the death certificate transposed his names, Walter Benjamin was buried in the Catholic section of the cemetery and not in the area reserved for those of other faiths (to say nothing of suicides).

(Ibid. 676)

nings, Critical Life 675)

—— Nobody knows about the heavy black briefcase carrying the papers that were more important to him than anything else.

(Fittko, “Old Benja-

Its contents were carefully itemized: a pocket watch and chain, with the watch’s many inscriptions duly noted; a fivehundred-franc bill, a fifty-dollar bill, a twenty-dollar bill, (all serial numbers duly noted); a passport (numbered 224) issued by the American Foreign Service to Walter Benjamin with a Spanish visa also issued in Marseilles; a certificate from the Institute of Social Research, previously of Frankfurt, now in exile in New York and affiliated in some way to Columbia University; six photographs; an ID card issued in Paris; an X-ray; a pipe for smoking with and a mouthpiece made of what looked like amber, and its case; a pair of glasses in nickel frames and its case; and several letters and newspapers.

(Taussig, Benjamin’s

16 | Benjamin Groh

min” 953)

Grave 22-3)

Scholem believes the possibility cannot be ruled out “that for reasons connected with what happened after Benjamin’s death, to which she referred only vaguely in her letter, Mrs. Gurland might have destroyed this manuscript […].”

(Buck-Morss, Dialectics 334)

—— Perhaps the most deeply hidden motive of the person who collects can be described this way: he takes up the struggle against dispersion.

(Arcades Project [H4a,1])

One might note, too, that the dispersion of which Benjamin speaks is opposed to the German lesen, meaning both to read and to gather.

(Richter, Introduc-

Ad plures ire [‘Going to the many’] means, to Latin speakers, dying.

(One-Way Street 109)

His life, indeed, unfolds from death, which is not his end but his form.

(Origin of German

tion, Benjamin’s Ghosts 7)

Tragic Drama 114)

Ursprung | 17

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Belknap, 1999. Print.

---. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 2007. Print.

---. One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. J. A. Underwood. Toronto: Penguin, 2009. Print.

---. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

---. Selected Writings. 4 vols. Ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge: Belknap, 2004-6. Print.

---. Walter Benjamin’s Archive. Ed. Ursula Marx et al. Trans. Esther Leslie.

New York: Verso, 2007. Print.

Bernstein, Charles. Shadowtime. Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2005. Print.

Brodersen, Momme. Walter Benjamin: A Biography. Ed. Martina Dervis.

Trans. Malcolm R. Green and Ingrida Ligers. New York: Verso, 1997.

Print.

Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. Print.

Eiland, Howard, and Michael W. Jennings. Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life.

Cambridge: Belknap, 2014. Print.

Fittko, Lisa. “The Story of Old Benjamin.” The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge: Belknap, 1999. 946-54. Print.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Elective Affinities. Trans. R. A. Hollingdale.

London: Peguin, 2005. ProQuest. Web. April 2016.

Goldsmith, Kenneth. Capital. New York: Verso, 2015. Print.

Jackson, Michael D. “In the Footsteps of Walter Benjamin.” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 34.2 (2006): n. page. Web. Sept. 2016. <http://bulletin.hds. harvard.edu/articles/ spring2006/footsteps-walter-benjamin>.

Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Trans. Breon Mitchell. New York: Schocken, 2011.

Print.

Leslie, Esther. Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism. Sterling: Pluto Press, 2000. Print.

Parini, Jay. Benjamin’s Crossing. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. Print.

Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. Print.

Richter, Gerhard, ed. Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. Google Books. Web. April 2016.

Scholem, Gershom. Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: New York Review Books, 2001. Print.

Schwartz, Steven. “The Mysterious Death of Walter Benjamin.” The Weekly Standard. Weekly Standard, 11 June 2001. Web. Sept. 2016. <http:// www.weeklystandard.com/the-mysterious-death-of-walter-benjamin/ article/1487>.

Taussig, Michael. Walter Benjamin’s Grave. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010.

ProQuest. Web. April 2016.

Wizisla, Erdmut. Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship. Trans. Christine Shuttleworth. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009.

ProQuest. Web. November 2015.

18 | Benjamin Groh

Nicole Haldoupis

We All Fall Down The oasis of mismatched couches and chairs holds us tightly as I struggle to hear what the man at the front of the room is saying. The room above the bar, beer glasses smashing below while the people dropping them yell at a hockey game on TV. He’s performing a monologue, holding a purse prop hostage and trying to talk an invisible person out of leaving.

I keep checking the stairs. The chair comes out from under me, but I think it was already broken anyway, and the actor keeps speaking. She comes up the stairs and pays her entry and turns her raptor eyes to me, like she knows where I sit before even looking. She might’ve thrown something but maybe it’s just the broken chair falling in from under me. Maybe it’s just me, falling on purpose because I knew it would’ve happened anyway and I’m trying to be over-prepared. Maybe it could’ve been avoided. Maybe she didn’t come up the stairs, maybe her eyes didn’t find me and maybe the chair isn’t falling out from under me. Maybe it isn’t broken. Maybe the hockey game isn’t being yelled at. Maybe I’m just sitting, listening.

The Anti-Languorous Project | 19

Jeanette Lynes

Buried in the Back Yard: Or, I Was a Graceland Zombie “Ma’am! – Step back inside the circle now.”

The burly security guard’s commando voice shuffles my feet back inside the designated spot for taking photographs at Graceland. Whoa, hard-core—no sense of humour—I’d only wanted a closer, more intimate shot of the Corinthian columns framing the front door of Elvis Presley’s mansion.

I’d traveled all the way from the northern shores of Lake Superior to view The King’s fabled home, hadn’t seen any harm in wanting to individualize my experience with photos from slightly different angles than the thousands of other identical tourist images shot from inside the circle (I’ve always been a photography hound dog, nothing but a hound dog).

But Graceland Security didn’t share my vision. They have suspicious minds. I’d worn blue suede shoes for this visit but my fashion choice garnered zero brownie points. Graceland isn’t about self-expression or artistic uniqueness or intimacy; it’s about distance and voyeurism. Besides, the security dude was armed and serious.

Graceland is about obedience. Conformity. I obeyed.

Snapped the same photo as legions of other tourists who 20 | The Anti-Languorous Project

soft-footed it through The King’s home-turned-museum each year. I’d thought Graceland would be a kitsch, fun, ironic experience. I’d heard so much about the mansion’s jungle room with its Polynesian vibe. I longed for marble, shag carpet. Taxidermy. Glitter. After all, Northwestern Ontario, where I lived, was pretty austere; sometimes a person craves excess.

Silly old twentieth-century me! Graceland is solemn, suffocating, lugubrious. Americans take their celebrities seriously. Entering Graceland felt a lot like walking into a funeral home. Heartbreak Hotel. I’d barely stepped inside its uber-regulated chambers when I began to mourn the death of humour and irony.

For some time, I’ve pondered the question of celebrity tourism. What, exactly, are we looking for, when we visit a site like Graceland? That day in 1995 when the armed guard put me in my place, literally, was a day of extreme heat in Memphis; steam wisped from my ears. It was so humid and scorching, I couldn’t think straight. Graceland’s colonialrevival lines weren’t built for thought—or imagination. I’d fantasized about embarking on a zany adventure, hopped on a big purple jet operated by a now-defunct airline.

Winged my way from Ontario’s northern wilds to Toronto.

A friend joined me in Toronto on the flight to Memphis; that city’s sultry streets swarmed with bikers at some outdoor motorcycle convention. Bizarrely, though, even though my friend and I both went to Graceland, my memory of it now, over two decades later, is feeling completely alone there— except for Security Dude’s barked directive to stay inside the photograph circle and, afterwards, when my friend and I bought tacky Elvis souvenirs at Graceland Plaza. Key chains, that sort of thing. Comic relief.

The truth is, Graceland turns you into a zombie.

Graceland as a signifier, a fantasy in your mind, differs from the real place. The real place body-snatches you, plunges you into grief for your kooky old self, the impulsive person who enjoys feeling a bit subversive by stepping outside the desBuried in the Back Yard | 21

ignated photograph circle. I couldn’t breathe in those rooms where everything was so grossly out of scale. Furniture designed for a giant, and why wouldn’t it be—it’s The King’s castle. The architectural style of Graceland isn’t called colonial revival for nothing. The people with their cigarette faces back in ‘Graceland Plaza’, watching the same Elvis movies over and over—the movies ran on a continuous loop—were zombies, too.

Now’s as good a moment as any for my confession; when I jumped on the big purple plane, Graceland-bound, I didn’t know Elvis is entombed in his back yard, along with other family members, in ‘the Meditation Garden’ monitored by closed-circuit cameras and staff security. I am the dumbest tourist I know, or perhaps just the laziest; I rarely research beforehand. I like going in fresh, with little context. I like to be surprised. Otherwise, why make the trip if you already have all the information? After all Graceland’s cordoned-off areas, glass-caged vinyl records and pistols (there may not have been pistols, that may be an embellishment on my part, a blur of memory) it felt refreshing, despite the heat, to step outdoors, into the backyard; there was this nice swimming pool and beside it—Presley graves! Other tourists stood, tearful, beside them. Several cried. Maybe I’m lousy at collective mythologies but my only reaction was aesthetic: how bizarre, the optic, the sheer strangeness of the juxtaposition—swimming pool/cemetery. The concept of taking a dip beside celebrated human remains. But a zombie wouldn’t mind that sort of thing. With heavy surveillance everywhere, I sure wouldn’t be dipping my blue suede toes into that chemical-perfect aqua water.

I stood in the ‘Meditation Garden’ with no clue of what I was meant to meditate on—the spectacle of capitalist excess I’d just witnessed? The outcome of a rags-to-riches narrative?

(Elvis’ humble beginnings and then stardom). The death of the twentieth century? The cultural disconnect between American celebrity and my identity as a Canadian? My own failure as a tourist?

22 | Jeanette Lynes

My foray into celebrity tourism was supposed to be a campy respite from regular life. But it left me with a suspicious mind; it made me bluer than my shoes. Two decades later the main images that remain intact in my mind are the teary people standing reverently in front of the graves in Graceland’s Meditation Garden. I couldn’t imagine their thoughts—perhaps how various Elvis hit songs marked epochs in their own lives, perhaps their own, all our own, shrinking hour glasses. All I could think was how weird it would be to be buried in your back yard.

Graceland is the death of pleasure, spontaneity, and fun.

Of course, I hadn’t imagined I’d be allowed to jump on Elvis’ massive bed, or make monkey noises in the jungle room, or anything like that. Apparently, it takes a dispensation from the President, or Congress, or God, to be allowed into the master bedroom or The King’s bathroom, where he met his undignified end—though you can now peer at these macabre images online—really sad, sketchy boot-legged ‘confirmed’ photographs of these rooms. Now, forty years after Elvis’ death you can go online and behold what everyone else beholds—an overdose of red tapestry can be lethal.

Buried in the Back Yard | 23

Erin Emily Ann Vance

Hymn The rabbit licked the rock salt burning into ice the blackened muddy concrete eroded just in time.

24 | The Anti-Languorous Project

Amy LeBlanc

Housekeeping She winces as a trickle of blood spreads down her fingertip, onto the dishcloth and below the surface of her nail. She felt the dish brush’s bristles pierce her skin and the intake of her breathing when she registered the slight stab. Whether she likes it or not, pain keeps her focused on the task at hand. She knows her fingers will slip the moment she lets her mind wander, looking out the window at the evergreens across the street. She watches as the pine cones fall. She looks to the sink filled with pots, plates, and mugs with coffee stained rims. She runs her finger under water, not minding that the water is too hot for her skin. She looks at her unpainted fingernail; the spot of blood roots back into her. She turns her attention to the pot, baked with days old rice and cheese.

This was their arrangement: he put his dirty dishes in the sink and she washed them before he came home from work.

Neither discussed this and she didn’t complain. She’d take an old spatula and scrape what she could, because he didn’t soak his dishes in water before he left for the morning. Today, he left oatmeal caking around the sides of his bowl and orange juice pulp in the bottom of his glass. He’d left his dishes in the sink and closed the door with his shoe, since he had two suitcases in one hand and his bible in the other.

The Anti-Languorous Project | 25

After the door closed, she tightened the tie of her housecoat and moved to the sink. With her eyes focused on the pines across the street, she filled his bowl with water and soap, not noticing the water that sprayed over the edge and onto the countertop. She heard his car door shut and then the sound of tires on the road.

She picks up her spatula and begins to scrape.

She hears a giggle from outside and sees Beth, the girl from next door, riding in circles on her tricycle. Occasionally, the girl branches in a seemingly random direction, but returns to the pattern of her spiral. Beth waves when she sees her washing disses at the window, elbow deep in dirty dishwater with her hair matted to her forehead. The girlâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s blonde hair blows in the wind, delicate as feathers. She watches as Beth looks up to see hawks circling overhead. Beth lifts her feet from the pedals to slow until she stops, then stands in the middle of the road to watch the birds.

Her elbow cramps from scrubbing. When the last grain of rice releases, she dries the pot with the cloth and places it in the drawer behind her. She has only the coffee mugs, the juice glass and the oatmeal bowl left to clean. A few bubbles rise from the water and she blows them, testing to see if she can lift them off the surface and into the air. She opens the window to blow bubbles to Beth through the window. Water drips down her arms and onto the counter, wetting the sleeves of her housecoat and the cord of the blinds. The bubbles do not cross the window screen; they burst in wet stains against the weave. She removes the screen, picks up another handful of bubbles and helps them drift out the window. Most of them pop with the suddenness of her breath, but a few float out into the street, hanging languorously in the air. She watches as one passes the windowsill, but loses sight as the bubble crosses the street. She does not hear the laughter sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d expected from Beth. She watches the last of the bubbles drift into the street, dries her hands on the front of her shirt, and replaces the window screen. She scrapes the last bits of pulp with her fingernail, dries the glass with the damp cloth, and places it at the back of the cupboard. A breeze blows through the still open window and she notices a small bead of blood against the beveled whiteness of its frame.

26 | Amy LeBlanc

David Eso

Thermometer Rising Whatever will Canadian poets make of a flattened world sans winter?

Milk expires, fortunes change bare hands, many friends leave for the country.

But geology still takes forever.

The Anti-Languorous Project | 27

Taidgh Lynch

The Knock On October 14th. My mum’s birthday. I opened the door to a bald man in a dark-suit. Had a pin-a-smile-to-a-face sort of grin. An ex-Jehovah’s Witness or a white collar skinhead.

Said he was my half-brother. Used to have long locks, retired as lead singer of The Exhausted Vermin Worms and now as hairless as a Sphynx. Before I had a chance to slam the door he leaned in real close. His breath porcupine on skin. “The reason I’m here is I’ve a van load of nuns for you.”

Who gifts anyone nuns?

He pointed to his van, neon green, with windows blackedout. “They’re yours to do with as you please.” He tossed me the keys with a thimble on a keychain. It flew through the air, clacked off my wedding ring.

I neared the van, twisted the key in the lock, prised open the back door. Light illuminated a cache of black and white habits. Packaged tight. Bound and gagged. A sucker punch of sweat and Sisters.

Enact revenge or let them go?

There’s a sequence, my mum, the bookseller, sold a stack of books at the Frankfurt Book Fair, 1959. Caught the eye 28 | The Anti-Languorous Project

of a Soviet spy. Conceived me over vodka, microdots, and invisible ink. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s according to that book she wrote, the one I read before I knew who she was, titled, 44 Teaspoons of Salt. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s how much sodium chloride was in her before she became a dogsbody in a laundrette. Before the nuns snatched me from her and stuck me on a ship bound for adoption.

When mum was 80 she tracked me down, angle parked a pull-out couch in my attic for three months. Stitched baby clothes and blathered on about spies, slavery, and Sisters.

And then she up and left. Just when we were running low on salt.

The Knock | 29

Marc Herman Lynch

I In 1974, the Arecibo message began its flight towards the globular cluster M13, 25,000 light years away. The scientists involved transmitted the message without any intention of it being received. The publicity stunt merely celebrated the Arcebio Observatory’s new radio telescope. Nevertheless, even after travelling 25,000 years through asteroid belts, blitzes of icy bodies, and whirling particle disks—past stars, gas giants, and celestial bodies—the globular cluster the scientists originally aimed for will no longer exist in the same location. The message will just float on by.

One day in the future, an alien wearing a fishbowl is struck by a package of stray data as he zooms through the Hercules Cluster. The message is coded for a diagram containing the numbers one to ten, a chart of the Solar System, and the helical structure of human DNA. The image resembles a crude mosaic made of coloured tile, as though the graffiti artist Space Invader had, with a telescopic pole reaching up from earth, tagged the alien’s ship. The alien thinks, “wow” and “how cool” but, because he’s busy and traffic gets pretty hectic on the Intergalactic Super Way, he forgets to deliver the message to the proper constabulary. And like a crumpled ball of paper in the wastebasket of the universe the Arecibo message lays forgotten.

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Aritha van Herk

Tough girl down jacket, wine-coloured, shoveling snow fluorescent overalls, insulated, underground work, twenty below pitchfork, handle worn to gloss, the heft of hay and straw wheelbarrow, battered, dented, your grandfatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, moved stones and dirt and bricks, moved wood pieces, a device for moving loads forward, construction, gardening. Origin traced to 118 AD, the tomb of Han Dynasty Emperor Hui. Ingenious snow shovel, aluminum pusher, combos and U-lines, Arctic blasts, and scoops, transfers and ice scrapers, sleigh shovels and pushers screwdriver doubles as weapon, stabwound, hammer, bottle opener toque, close-fitting, tight-knitted, less structured than the ushanka favoured by Cossacks, or the papakha, cutting the Caucasus wind The Anti-Languorous Project | 31

hats with handles, hats without, pure warmth beyond fashion.

Astrakhan heat. The words roll with the wind, against workwear, gridwork and steeltoes, lined bibs and kneesavers, duck and sandstone journeyman slickers, insulated and flex high-visibility vests and visors balaclava and cargo coverall and under-all, base thermal and super-cold weldersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; gloves become oven gloves gardening gloves become manicure protectants parka and hard hat liners and neckwarmers, crew and chimney hard hats themselves: fibre or metal, wide-brim or side-impact safety vests and cruisers, surveyors and fishing vests and inflatables hurricane and dry-flex, pelagia the hook and line, the mechanicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gloves and motor grips, cut resistant and ironclad, seamless knit and stealth, rubber and dog fight, deer, range-rider and longhorn thermal mitt and polar, miracle workers and outsiders, quilted and while youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re at it, find some scrubs, white coats, stethoscopes, lab coats and antimicrobial protection

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and if you get the flat black shoes, the chefâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s jacket or the tuxedo blouse, service attends, butchery aprons under the blood of animals I inherited a job box, a rolling stack, related to cantilevers and pros. I kept staplers and sour pens in the drawers, old envelopes and old computer cables, outdated connectors.

This is the graveyard of work, a memory of lassitude, the calm after the sweat.

Tough girl | 33

Jaclyn Morken

Hidden “Come on, Terry!” A crackle of twigs underfoot and Ava resurfaces from the shadows. The floodlight from the shop only stretches to the edge of the copse: Ava’s face appears just within its reach, a spectral blot in the monochrome. “Last one there has to guard for the first three rounds!”

“That’s not how we play Kick the Can!” I complain, still leaning on Ava’s childhood swing set to tie my shoe. In my pocket, Mom’s car keys dig into my leg.

“New rule to get Julie to show up on time!” Ava flips her hood up and melts back into the darkness. McLean’s pasture is just on the other side of the trees, but the path threads through encroaching branches and shrubs. I wrench my laces into a knot and vault after her.

The black between the trees swallows the beam of my flashlight, reducing it to a white slash across brambles, mossy stones, a quick gleam of chrome— I grab at a tree to avoid skidding into the underbrush.

My flashlight drifts back over the deep greens and browns, finding a dull silver near the ground, not four feet to my right.

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The bumper glints, pockmarked with dents that reflect the light at odd angles. Rusted cones burrow into the frame in place of headlights, planted within two gaping rectangles that used to be grilles. Flakes of chalky red paint litter the ground, the fenders scored with long scratches that reveal the murky grey primer underneath. The tires, gone.

My light trails upward to unveil an ashen wall of tangles stabbing out from where the engine should be, an impenetrable mass of tendrils curling and jerking around each other.

The uppermost branches strain for the sky like limbs erupting from the earth.

The air before me feels hollow, as if its essence were instead lingering at the small of my back.

The rumble of an engine jolts me back a step, my light shuddering over a powdering of glass at the base of the windshield, but a chorus of voices from the other side of the trees informs me Julie has arrived. Pulling my eyes toward the path, I stumble out of the copse into lighter air.

Hidden | 35

Rosemary Nixon

Let the People Tremble Four beds. Muriel’s big feet, in blue socks, stick out the end of one. The walls breathe, rearrange themselves, loop and drift, her unhinged queasy spinning that left Roy last night staring at her as if she’d morphed into the Mad Hatter, or fallen off her chair vomiting, just to get his goat—that spinning has slowed to sine waves. Floor tiles glide by, but la-de-da, for the first time in seventeen hours, Muriel can open her eyes for moments without retching. The bed adjacent is hidden by a pulled curtain. On the bed kitty-corner, a man’s inert form, face up, as if already dead. In the bed across, a tall skinny frame unknots itself into a live wire twitching body that brings to mind the praying mantis Muriel once saw in Spain. She’s been deposited in a room full of men. What could be worse?

She’ll have to clean the sticky toilet each time, that or hover, which in her addled state could leave stains on her leotards. If Roy remembers to bring them. What floor did they put her on?

Cardiology! a nurse name-tagged Théo announces cheerily, uncoiling the blood pressure monitor. Oh my. 221/189.

Cardiology?! Muriel struggles to sit up. The room distorts.

Don’t you people talk to each other? They did tests. My heart is just fine, thank you very mu—

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Stand please! Nurse Théo hauls Muriel up, floor tiles sailing. Whoopsy! Don’t upend! He grabs her hospital gown as she tilts, revealing the white slope of a breast. Muriel slaps his hand away. And now, 73/54. Weird, eh? Let’s try this again.

She sits. She stands. Your blood pressure plummets when you stand. Aren’t you a mystery! Careful now. He tumbles her into her galloping bed. She grabs the basin, vomits, and falls back, gravity pressing her hard against the mattress.

Nurse Théo hands her five pills in a tiny paper cup. Emergency never did figure out what’s wrong with you. He winks.

So the floors drew straws. We lost! But you won. He throws her an impertinent grin and whistling, pushes his cart, equipment-piled, through the doorway.

Just dandy.

Out in the hall, The Dance of the Heart Diseased. People in identical striped nightgowns, like Muriel’s, the occasional one in a slipping-off housecoat, shuffle off in all directions, returning to where they started to shuffle off again. One man, marching along as if in drill, flashes a bare buttock at every step. Lord! Can’t he feel the bloody breeze?

Skinny Twitch Man peers at Muriel. You gonna puke? He crosses the room to the foot of her bed, his stomach growling.

Eyes her socks. No boundaries here. So no one has the foggiest notion what’s wrong with you? Maybe some rare disease they haven’t thought of? And before she can tell him to sod off: Me? Open heart surgery. Tomorrow. I heard your husband say— Roy’s my brother. The bout of horrific vertigo hit out of nowhere, mid-way through their dinner at Boogie’s Burgers.

Roy’s treat. The most extravagant he gets. Bewildered Roy, who can’t understand why bleating Frances is leaving him.

Muriel has a sudden vision of her husband, Stuie, who she left three years ago, standing solicitously by, rubbing her ear.

Stuie. So charming and agreeable in public. At home, throwing sofa cushions, whinging scissors, crowding her into corners, cutting off her sentences, calling her names.

Let the People Tremble | 37

Gonna saw me open, right through the bone. Twitch Man jerks a deformed thumb at his scrawny chest. Change a heart valve—and glue me back together! Good as new with Superglue! He grins, revealing a missing tooth. What’s she supposed to do? Clap?

Yup. Polished floors on new high rises for twenty-eight years. Thirty stories above the city. Before the walls went up.

You wouldn’t know it but I’m fifty-two. He looks sixty-five.

The hard-lined leathered face of an addict. Coulda taken a header off an edge at any time. Wasn’t ever scared. But this place? He sucks in hospital air and blows it out. Lowers his voice. Hopin’ I don’t get a Paki doctor. There are some here.

You ever meet a decent one? And when Muriel informs him that she most certainly has, he just sticks his hands in his armpits and says, Girlfriend died six weeks ago. Fentanyl. Bad luck comes in threes.

Whoever’s behind the curtain flies into a channel-changing fit.

Broke my heart, she did, and now doc’s gonna break ‘er again. The man emits a series of mirthful grunts and lopes back to his bed.

The Lord is king and terrible, says Dead Man in the kittycorner bed. Let the people tremble.

Name’s Carl, Twitch Man says, behind his half-closed curtain, case anyone was wondering.

—— Forty minutes later the curtain beside Muriel whips open to reveal a Miss Havisham in a billowing white nightgown dotted with tiny rosebuds. Framing her ancient face, dry grey hair swirls in a loopty-do bun, making Muriel bilious whenever she looks at it. Long grey strands hang down the woman’s rounded shoulders. The room circles by. Miss Havisham stares up at her blaring television where an obese American couple races down an aisle, arms wind-milling, jack-jumping, pounding each other with clenched fists, because they just might win thirteen thousand bucks. We’re talking big money!

38 | Rosemary Nixon

screams the billionaire host. The televisions are set near the ceiling so Muriel gets the seizure-inducing flashes of the other three TVs. Time spirals. At some point she shakily rises to attempt a trip to the bathroom via the gauntlet between the two men’s beds when, You gonna eat those pastries? Carl calls. The door bangs open and a flock of people burst through, seven, looking neither right nor left, bee-lining for the bed against the window with Miss Havisham, whose name is Bar-bar-a, perched regally on it. Carl makes a Shoot-Me click to his head.

They all talk at once. Miss Havisham’s husband and her three daughters and their husbands. Words and sentences spin and collide, spewing exclamation marks in a frenzy of noise.

Muriel’s world tips. Focus. Three French pastries sit on her night table. So Roy came. She must have slept. He must have run out of ideas for his Reasons to Stay list he is composing for Frances. Muriel was in the middle of an argument with him—it had just become clear that Roy was hoping to move in with her—short term of course—just till he and Frances “sorted things out.” Oh, until we all die? Muriel had just said when she threw up and fell over and this nightmare climbed into her already stressed-out life. She hasn’t told Roy that on top of not wanting her forty-three-year-old little brother living with her, she has no money to buy groceries for two.

That her freelance jobs are running thin. Forty-seven years old and few prospects in sight since she reported her supervisor for feeling her bottom—three times the same week, only to be called in and laid off. Panic in her gut. She waves dizzily in the direction of the pastries and Carl bounds over in three long strides, stuffs his gravel-pitted cheeks and makes off with the remaining two.

The Havishams have laid out a spread of dishes from Tuk Tuk Thai, all seven going at it, shovelling food down.

The hospital’s food trays arrive. A blob of something.

Chicken? Beef? Baloney? A congealed lump of mashed potatoes, yellow over-cooked broccoli. Muriel sets her tray aside and heads for the bathroom.

Let the People Tremble | 39

Whoa! She comes to sprawled on the floor beside Dead Man’s bed, drool on her cheek. Dead Man’s snores rise above her. She tries to lurch to her feet but can’t find up. Carl is AWOL. The ceiling’s flying. She tries again. The Havishams ignore her until her third, EXCUSE ME! I need help? The men keep diving their forks into their Yam Nua. Miss Havisham pokes a daughter and hisses, Betty Lou! Betty Lou hits the buzzer.

Eventually the excitement dissipates. Muriel’s hauled into the bathroom stall that six men now use, her blood pressure’s taken again. 58/49 when she was pulled off the floor. 197/178 once she’s in bed. Well, aren’t you our stumper of the week!

Dr. Wyvill says. There’s been a shift change. Nurse Théo has gone home to his boyfriend to read sonnets. Or to his wife and short hair pointer. To do whatever healthy people do.

Stroke danger one minute, inadequate blood flow the next, the doctor is saying. She has small hands and teeth and her ears stick out through her hair. She looks like a child. The severe vertigo may return. Focus on remaining calm. A good night’s sleep is vital. As little stimulation as possible. You’re presently at risk for a stroke, heart damage, kidney failure.

If we can’t get this under control you may have to consider extended care…

Muriel rises up in her bed. Extended fucking care! She’s barely forty-seven!

Miss Havisham and entourage have stolen their three chairs, leaving four people to crowd onto her bed. Muriel lies still as death two feet away, listening to the damage unfolding inside of her.

You know that photographer? Miss Havisham says, picking clean her teeth. Of course you do! Well, the most famous one in America! I do, says the bald son-in-law. Oh! Yes! We met him once. What’s the guy’s name? We didn’t. Sure! He photographs the Kardashians. No, Mother! That one’s dead!

Well, I don’t know him. Don’t be ridiculous. You do…

They play cards, argue over Norman’s missing ashes.

40 | Rosemary Nixon

Eleven p.m. A slow rage runs over Muriel’s arms, around her neck and up the back of her head. It soaks her organs. The room seesaws. She wants to put on a ski mask and do something illegal. Across the room, Carl is slumped on his bed.

Dead Man intones: Oh Lord, Put an end to your grievance against us. Will you be angry with us forever? Will your anger never cease?

By midnight the noise and flashing TV lights drive Muriel staggering out to the front desk. For Christ’s sake, aren’t there visiting hours?! The staff exchanges glances. A nurse goes in and asks them please to leave. The family sweeps by like royalty. An aide walks Muriel back to bed, the floor surging beneath her.

The room is dark and silent. She closes her eyes against the roiling sickness.

Miss Havisham’s TV flicks on, sound off, and flickers red and green and blue. And then the whispering. What the hell?

Two people squished into Miss Havisham’s narrow bed? The whispering goes on until three a.m.. The kind of sound that grates at Muriel’s nerves until a scream lodges in her throat.

At two-fifteen Carl sticks his head through Muriel’s curtain, steps in and leans over her bed. Cigarette breath. Been here long as she has, he whispers. Thirty-seven days. One of those daughters crawls into bed with the old lady Every. Single.

Night. They yap. They don’t sleep. They’ve threatened a law suit against the hospital so the staff’s walking on eggshells.

You picked the wrong floor, didn’t you! Come morning I’m outa here.

Tiles spin across the ceiling. The whispering starts again at four. In grey morning light Muriel finds herself high on a sky scraper’s edge, pushed out on a narrow cement balcony.

Barely three feet by five. No rails. No lip to it. People tiny figurines far far below. She backs up, cowering. A whip of wind. The door behind her slams shut. It’s locked. She rattles it, pounds, crying, screaming, filling with slow horror, a piece of hospital nightgown stuffed in her fluttering mouth.

Let the People Tremble | 41

Weyman Chan

Proletariat Hijinx If you say there’s no void, then there’s no entropy no god, no envy childhood’s most chipper counting sticks skip indebtedness—add ons make quorum collectivized by laws that scare freedom, ah, so then there exist numbers— heart-literate swishy vertebrate, let’s blame commas, mayflies, Star Trek pizza cutters for nada’s newsworthy days—no ark tethering us to air, no sculpture to its garden sweet gestalt, epicurean plebes dousing nitrous gradients stunted by helter heroless skelter 42 | The Anti-Languorous Project

if not made servant to it, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll find yourself smeared by porcupines & sea lanterns: our makeshift focus canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t not hold.

Proletariat Hijinx | 43

Larissa Lai

Fragments from MAENAD MARTYR MAENAD MARTYR is a work-in-progress that both addresses and enters into the affect flows that have been circulating through Canadian and Turtle Island literature communities over the past few years as many writer/activists, including me, have worked to break the hold of deeply entrenched power formations. Grief, frustration, anxiety and rage have been necessary modes of engagement, and yet they seem to reproduce themselves, as affect does, without abating. If anything, these affects seem to amplify one another, especially on social media. Activist work has produced some political change, thank goodness, but never entirely and never perfectly. The trolls keep on trolling, while community-oriented writer/activists seem to keep hurting each other. This project does not offer solutions, but it playsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;sometimes seriously and sometimes notâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;with language and affect as they flow through this particular subject, in hope of producing new and better ruptures.

I think of these fragments sometimes as letters, sometimes as prayers and sometimes as curses. (Robert Majzels recently got me reading the curses of Antonin Artaud.) The fragments offered here are part of a much longer work.

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Dear Monster, I want my money back, no denying the eternal return of desire for passport house boots and fruits. I longed for arrival, lest it seem the lady doth protest somewhere other than the streets. I wanted my innocence and eat it too with XO sauce, in broth or fried in hot oil, crunchy tender as baby octopus, beef tendon the slippery lick of jellyfish on an platter of cold meats. I’m beat. The christian lean we gleaned to crack the pepper of the emperor’s absolute power has backfired, I’m a hoser a poser stuck in the loop of the wannabe buzzing around an empty hive. What five to get high with, sigh with, hung out to dry with? I’m afraid of what I feel, the affect of the man zips through me fast and neurotic as my myopic’s ontic, I’m gutted by the flutter of ugly feelings. I reel, I congeel so sorry, but sorry’s castle has already been co-opted by the state and capitalized as stable economy. My astronomy swings from the star machine I wish would rust and turn to dust or butter toast. A roast for the ghosts crowding doorways without papers bleeding from the body and beyond. I return my clean uniform eternally for the gristly bits, the love, the responsibility, my lineage knows the chop suey of invention, the few dishes for many extended by rice in rich times and water in lean. I welcome the dirt as long as the water’s kept clean. What am I suturing? I dream my seamstress grandmother sewing the garment to fit the body, unhooking, restitching through growth spurts and wounds.

I’m wound, bound to the boddhisatva of go and flow the double affect of the go-between haptic as happenstance reckoning with history as the reports from deep time roll tectonic earth waves shower me with truth’s debris.

Fragments from MAENAD MARTYR | 45

Dear Freedom of Speech, you leech masquerading as democratic process, I saw you in the washroom at Montana’s wiping beef grease from your beard. Weird or feared, your fury’s dreary, trolling beneath the bridge of birds webbing our digital sky. You swing the pubic of public opinion spinning the rotten onion one fart at a time, lining your pockets with the proceeds of Wall Street greed, feeding at the trough of rough golf and grim bills passed by bullies in the lamer chambers masquerading as corridors of power. You were beautiful once, a bunch of daisies a bed of poses, loaning your glamour to all and sundry, as part of the parcel, colonialism dressed as democracy. I’m not too shy to wear that dress battered and tattered, ill fitting in the hip and crotch, and screaming gotcha mad as a crow on the hatters wire every time the wrong body steps outta line. It’s fine, I bide my time, dreaming signs and pigeons passing on the truth of the park stark as cop cars policing my neighbour’s hood. Gratitude says be good, we thought you’d be nice, expedient, obedient take the blunt force of maxwell’s pilfered hammer sold down the shiver or horse traded down by the tracks where hacker’s anonymous and raised up only posthumously so some yung guy can make a career drink beer paid by your fear. Clarity, charity, the mock of democracy is that you’re only meant to adore it, adore the white man’s exploration. The habit of inhabitation is the straightjacket of race and know your place.

Face it, the encounter’s only for the chinaman if she wipes it down herself.

46 | Larissa Lai

Dear Saint Iris facing the virus of where I couldn’t look my reflection’s bloody glare death bright and mutilated in the light of red sun violence, I’m silent though it protects me not a whit don’t quit you haunt my monster clamouring in her cage of rage my holy Asian haunted by the head of the baby hooked on the imperial bayonet blood streaming from eye sockets floats Cheshire grin thin and mad as grief on a stick fog memory dense as flesh dear Apocalypse how of a thousand yellow bodies blasted up in the dirt as a sign of drugged out American madness I quiver water ghost of the same river Kwai riding the back of the world snake earthquake rumble of our fracked and finite future the war was cold only for the white man alt right in tight pants never acknowledging the cost of greed guaranteeing our safety pin only after gorging on our hunger. Dear Fish Monger, Dear Gorgon how love slips away on duty’s back scales not for just us prove first your super hum n intention only for attendants of the full subjective table able bodied and labelled already the red tape of exception stands you up for a fight. Dear Protestant, set me up for a contest I was never with or against my taint plays polo on a different plane we chain daisies awake at the iron dock waiting for the shipping lane to shunt my interchangeable container sing in inglish to the changeling foxing her wily way outta here only to get boxed anew. Am I safe in my iron box? Air’s thin as plot thickens stickin the knife in and I twist wriggle against the regulations designed to keep me from the corridors where the real decisions are made as to who’s played for the chance to dance the next ring float like madame butterfly dreaming she’s a man a ham a can of spam or some other brother howling grief and rage to the false sage who’s already turned his back.

Fragments from MAENAD MARTYR | 47

Marc Herman Lynch

IX Alice B. Toklas is sick so Nadia is having a hard time.

There’s no doubt that a dog being sick isn’t just about a dog being sick, considering her car that was vandalized, and her credit card debt, so she asks God, “why do you hate me?”

Nadia named her dog Alice B. Toklas because she’d finally found her life partner (her little Allie B.), and now Alice B. Toklas has a tumor she can’t afford to have lanced. Of course, if there were a tumor growing under her own breast she would go to a doctor, but she also has medical insurance whereas Alice B. Toklas does not.

What she wouldn’t give for a silver lining. Let’s say she did take Alice B. Toklas to the vet and maybe the vet did do something, Alice B. Toklas is not a young dog so the vet wouldn’t have done anything because it would take Alice B. Toklas the rest of Alice B. Toklas’s natural life to get over the surgery. In truth, she should just euthanize Alice B. Toklas and save both of them the suffering. But euthanasia costs two hundred dollars. If she really wanted to save Alice B. Toklas the misery, she would take Alice B. Toklas out into the yard and maybe hit Alice B. Toklas with a shovel. But what if Nadia didn’t immediately kill Alice B. Toklas? What if Alice

48 | The Anti-Languorous Project

B. Toklas were merely cudgelled and began crawling away, making her regret that she’d half paralyzed Alice B. Toklas with the first blow? And what if she couldn’t carry through and bludgeon her very own Tokey-toke monster in the head till death? So instead she tries to cradle Alice B. Toklas who lies betrayed and fearful of the very person who knitted booties in the winter, who hard boiled eggs for dinner, who’d taught Alice B. Toklas how to beg and roll over, and who’d just struck Alice B. Toklas on the head with a shovel?

IX | 49

Toni Hiatt

Motherlands Grandma was the jug of vinegar she hunched to wash her tub with. ritual illness rising before the sun, each day she scrubbed till her skin cracked like cod batter, and prayed to a water-walker fisherman for forgiveness.

Gran is a silver mixing bowl housing butter, sugar, flour ingredients for wafers from a motherland she communes with in dreams her fork dances highland jigs across the uncooked clays then cuts them in shapes of tartans.

Mother is her landscape paintings, valleys brush-stroked over careful pencil marks. where autumn is eternal, and fires never rage and acrylic trees stay glued to the canvas, never a twig out of place.

But I am none of these things.

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I am silver flashes of a spade tipped with sunlight, panting off the sides of cracked mountain ribs.

I take refuge from rain beneath ceilings of cedar, fold saplings into earth with dirt-stained hands, and worship horizons that stretch for forever.

One day I hope to find the kind of forest who recites to me my maiden names and cradles me like kin.

Motherlands | 51

Jess Nicol

How to Tell If You Have the Face of My Ex You notice me one day (or, maybe, on multiple days), standing across the street from you, and when we lock eyes, I quickly look away, dart down the sidewalk, and cower behind a streetlamp or tree. Once I’ve surreptitiously peeked at you for long enough, squinted my glasses into a more magnifying prescription, and determined you are, in fact, not my ex, I will saunter from behind the tree and casually scroll through my phone, while also periodically lifting my head to grin out at the world around me, like the relaxed individual I am.

My blank, name-only LinkedIn account pops up on the list of who’s viewing your page, many, many times before I realize I am logged in. I showed your headshot to everyone at work. And some friends. And a few relatives at my cousin Kay’s wedding over the weekend because everyone kept asking about my ex—“how are you managing since the, uh, split?; must be tough, you being here, you sitting here, alone, all alone, without X, especially since everyone loved X so much, like loved X; a shame. A damned shame. Your Aunt Hettie and I really thought X was The One, you know” and so forth—and after the completely-normal-and-not-excessive 52 | The Anti-Languorous Project

amount of $2 gins I consumed, I felt I had no other recourse for deflection.

If I’m not watching where I’m going and bump into you as I race toward the bus stop, I will yelp loudly, drop an overfilled bag of groceries, awkwardly fumble my oranges, discount tofu, organic kefir, Reese’s Pieces, frozen tater tots, frozen peas, coffee grounds, V8 juice, and hemp granola back into their sack, and hurry up the bus steps mumbling a mortified apology.

On the statistically improbable chance I stroll out the door of your favorite bar just as you arrive, my intoxicated friend catches your eye and yells, “DUDE, you look like my friend’s EX. Like, RECENT ex, man.” You’ll see me only for a moment, as I yank my arm free from his grasp and escape into the night.

One evening, you enter the bookstore I work at, and I appear briefly startled. But, my face regains its calm, neutral expression as you begin to browse, because I know, of course, that you’re not my ex. My ex a) never reads books, b) does not enjoy running into me, and c) would never be caught dead in the poetry section. I try to take a photo of you while you pay, since I’m basically right there, restocking the Europa shelf left of the till, but my phone isn’t on silent and the shutter sound ricochets off the wooden floor below me. I rapidly turn and make my way toward a door that says “staff only,” phone in hand. “Let me just check, Sarah,” I holler backwards at the cashier, “I took a pic of the cover!”

People occasionally mistake you for someone else when they first see you, and, lately, a few of them ask if you know me. You’ve started to reply that, weirdly, you do, or at least sort of…

You fall deep into an internet search, and find yourself scrolling through my old Facebook pics. As you pause on one of me and my ex, a barista places your latte beside the laptop and says “cute pic. I see you both in here a lot, but didn’t realize you’re a thing,” and you gaze at her in confusion for a How to Tell If You Have the Face of My Ex | 53

second. As she walks away, you lower your face closer to the screen and study my ex’s nose, cheekbones, eyelashes.

Once we’ve repeatedly run into each other all over the downtown core, you ask me to grab tea one day soon, and my response is to say no, immediately, and explain that you’re simply too much my type, physically.

After 7 months of us dating, my mother still slips up and calls you my ex’s name nearly every time you and I meet her for lunch at that bistro she likes, over by your friend Keith’s place, where you always order the same spicy ravioli with anchovies and a side salad.

54 | Jess Nicol

Amy LeBlanc

Interlude the flora spreads cracking veins in dark corners tied with duct tape and well wishesâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; recant spells to banish compulsions: the mastication and the sweat as icicles ebb your toenails in bed crooked tea bag strings opening books and bleeding sugar packs in the snow eleven pregnancy tests wired and fallow sedentary on the linoleum. you swell full of good blood, heaves counted with a mortar and pestle.

The Anti-Languorous Project | 55

emblematic: everything is wet­. you are unwell. you can’t swim, you are well.

56 | Amy LeBlanc

Geoff Pevlin

the broad cuffers of cramphand cap’n bob broad: (adj.) of speech, markedly dialectical cuffer: (noun) a tale or yarn; a friendly chat; an exchange of reminiscences cramp-hand: (adj.) of a person, difficult to understand, amazing, because of clever or humorous speech These prose poems are adapted from the words of the late Captain Robert Bartlett—a Newfoundland sealer, fisherman, Arctic explorer, and my great-great uncle—and “translated” into an intense version of Newfoundland English. They are part of a larger series which delve into Bartlett’s experiences of a life spent at sea and follow a journey he took on the ill-fated Karluk which got jammed in thick sea ice north of Alaska, drifted into Siberian waters, was crushed, and sank.

They also draw heavily from Newfoundland history, folklore, and superstition.

The Anti-Languorous Project | 57

rally rally frore over arctic midnight marling upon us and I reckons it were the mad fox-eye that got the mampus of dogs in a fruz and kicked off the canine ree-raw. last going off an old holly echoes and one fance lashes into her sledge-mate jawlocked and panking, jowled ‘er down til the keecorn were in liddicks—face and eyes of a gallinipper wad pummied over the ice, peasing.

I firk more spit a scroud of a pitty-hole cross-handed and the ballicatter on her fur spread till the works of her were bazzom, burnt solid before we even lay ‘er down for an alley-coosh—kirby-wrapped all the same til a dead lumper broke the pan to lollies. keeled out in puppy’s parlour, nar raggedy-arsed flobber where she’s to now, dare say.

58 | Geoff Pevlin

Street Fight on the Ice The frozen perptual night of the Arctic winter approached and I guess it was the ring around the moon that got the dogs confused and excited, kicking off the uproar.

A strange cry foretold the Devil’s coming as one dog bit into her sled-mate with her jaw muscles cramped, panting furiously. Held her down until her throat was in tatters like a pile of mosquitoes squashed to a pulpy mass, oozing.

I dug a small grave by myself as the frozen moisture around her nose, mouth, and throat spread until her entire corpse was blue, frozen solid before we even had a chance to put her down to sleep, wrapped in a wool blanket. A heavy, sluggish wave broke the sheet into loose ice as she lay in all her clothes. Only a dead calm sea where she is now, I’m sure.

the broad cuffers of cramp-hand cap’n bob | 59

schooner rigged doz box a times I been wrecked. four been me own rig heaved out under the breaker, jammed in ballycatter, or scrunched to kippin chovy bavin shavings jillicked overright sunker rocks, knobs, tickle-ass covered cliff face—clefty, ragged auld state of affairs keeling me out to the jaws of jewry, raftered up on beachy landwash, hackering, schooner-rigged—liddicky screed of tatch tosselled off me craw, ampering. but ya knows I dies for the sea, sure, like a sooky cracky bones and panks for his master who’s after claving her for discipline of the ‘ouse.

60 | Geoff Pevlin

Nothing but Clothes on Back I’ve been shipwrecked twelve times. Four times it’s been my own ship flipped over under the waves, cracked in ice, or crushed to slender sticks of shaved brushwood kindling thrown against submerged rocks and ragged kittiwake-covered cliffs.

Washed up on shore, laid out and shivering, nothing but ratty scraps of clothes hanging off my chest, sputtering out brine over the beach.

But you should know that I love the sea like a whining dog begs and pants for his master even though he clouts her for discipline of the house.

the broad cuffers of cramp-hand cap’n bob | 61

Taidgh Lynch

Collecting a Coffin The news arrived clickety-clackety.

“All flights have been cancelled due to volcanic ash…”

My mind took off to Alicante. Damo, my brother, had gone there on holiday with his mates. Wasn’t much of a swimmer. Drank too much. Went for a dip. Drowned.

I imagined him lying in a dim-lit morgue, his favourite alligator boots still on, the smell of walnut and cedar lingering on his breath, a faint sliver of Spanish playing in his ears as he waited to come home.

“What’s taking you so long, Sis?” At Gate 13, I sat, stared out wide windows, watched airlines grounded on the tarmacadam, struggled to find the sun on the horizon.

Passengers swapped stories like stamps.

“Where are you going?”

“We’re having a family reunion.”

“Have to be there by Friday to close the deal.”

I went to the public toilets to freshen up. Brushed my teeth in front of the mirror as lava licked rocks, and clouds 62 | The Anti-Languorous Project

of ash billowed into the sky. In the midst of spits and rinses, cubicles clattered. I lashed on some Hot and Bothered blush as people washed and dried their hands. In-between excuse me and sorry I pulled out baby wipes, dabbing up underarm sweat.

Dee-dum, dum-dum-dum, dee-dum. A low rumble from behind the cubicle nearest me. Alligator boots snapped out from the stall and disappeared back under. I heard a shuffle then a wheezy cough.—“Please, Sis. Take me home.”

Collecting a Coffin | 63

Lisa Murphy-Lamb

A New Room at TwentyFour It is my last night in the House of My Father. I sit on a wooden chair between two neatly made beds and look around the room at all that held comfort over the last twentyfour years. Since Jennifer ran, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve used her bed for my own secret library, piling books two high under her mattress, bolstering its sagging springs with biography and Russian tales, slipping murder under the canary yellow comforter with its straight stitching, and pushing noir under the pillows, out of sight. My books! All my books! Those I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t take with me I disposed of in Little Free Libraries along the rise and dip streets of Ramsay. Now, under the bed only dust bunnies tumble where tales once simmered in wait.

The wallpaper will stay, of course. Vertical lines of orange and brown flower-faces have looked down upon me as I slept, as I trembled, as I read by flashlight, in the dark, in secret, and during those times when Father banged out the back door to exchange bullshit stories with neighbourhood men on nearby porches. The wallpaper will stay, of course, chosen by a mother already gone.

64 | The Anti-Languorous Project

On my dresser a porcelain mermaid winks, knowing full well my escape plans. A Ritz cracker tin bursts with a collection of bird feathers, scavenged in fields and bushes, a reminder to take flight, already taken out of hiding from my top drawer and placed beside the shimmery sea-maid. My globe will soon find a new window sill to rotate, and the paint by number mountain scene that leans against the wall ever since Jennifer painted it, is ready to be hung somewhere new. I’ll leave my clock radio until the morning, depending on it one more time in this room to rouse me from my sleep, if I manage to find any. I slip binoculars, usually hung off the closet door handle, into the duffel already crammed with books, as well as the painted rock mushroom diorama made in an Altoid box at Sunday school camp when I was a child and clung only to Bible stories.

Father sits at the kitchen table surrounded by prescription pill bottles, smoking a cigarette and rolling dimes. I say my good nights to him on my way back from the bathroom, toothbrush, soap, and shampoo concealed under my pyjama top, held against my stomach by the elastic of flannel pants.

He looks at me, says, ‘turn off the hall light, would ya, Carl,’ and shoots me a look that makes me feel, as it always has, that he wishes to strangle me. In my head I respond, ‘This is your last time to say good night. You may want to change your tone with me.’

I awake at five to voices on QR77. I dress in three sets of clothing, pants upon pants upon pants, shirt over t-shirt topped by a sweater, three underwear, three socks, a pair of ankle high boots, laced tightly at the back door when I leave. I bundle my bedding in the bottom sheet, make a knot. The rest of my takings are stashed in another duffle in the neighbour’s hedge. A note is left on the kitchen table where He will return to sit for his coffee and his pastry. Gone forever with my books, my late-at-night packed objects, I leave His house finally. The note says nothing more than ‘Enjoy your coffee.’

By half past five I sit on a bench on the north side of Fort Calgary, face the river under an arched scarlet sky and stroke A New Room at Twenty-Four | 65

my beard. I open my bag, take out the classifieds, and study three rooms I might rent. Looking at my wristwatch, I know it was too early to knock on the first door, so I fold the section, place it in the pocket of my jacket, think of my father putting coffee to lips while cursing me. I pull out a copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes and read while the sky splinters into red and blue shards and my father, no doubt, paces the floors, realizing he is alone.

I am twenty-four, too old to be running away from home, seven years later than Jennifer. Twenty-four is my year, though.

At nine o’clock, I leave the bench and walk along the river pathway, past Billingsgate Fish shop, through the part of town with the sad history. I remember when I broke my leg in three places and He wouldn’t believe me. I remember my first A in English, a ‘sissy subject,’ yet He was the one afraid of books, not me. I feel intoxicated by new-found freedom, if only a few scant blocks way from where I slept last night. To the few pedestrians I pass I know I look like a man wandering without purpose. They are as wrong as my Father has always been. In my pocket I have money for rent and three possible rooms to land in, circled in blue ink.

Crossing through the gravel of the parking lot the blue and red of the condo building bulks before me. A few people walk past on the sidewalk, a car whizzes past, I hear a horn.

From my pocket, I pull out the classifieds and confirm the address is the house next to the condo. It looks like a secret.

A woman, dressed in a uniform, her hair undone, a cigarette in her mouth, answers my knock. She directs me to the business entrance at the rear of the house. I ring the bell.

Three brass locks and a burglar proof-catch release one at a time and the thick door opens. Within the half hour, the room is mine. It is the seventeenth of July, 2003, and I have found a new room.

I stand at the door of my chamber, drop my duffel to the floor, hear the same ten o’clock train bound for Medicine Hat 66 | Lisa Murphy-Lamb

whistle past as I did from my old bedroom in the House of My Father. The woman in the uniform, now wrapped in a housecoat, walks from her lodging to our shared bathroom and closes the door. Water runs while I sit on the edge of the single bed, feel the springs collapse under my weight. Know a house with a woman is a lucky one, I remember this to be true. I unpack my books, stack them along the floorboards, take care to create a library ordered by author’s last name.

Soon my room—my room!—is tattooed with my pilfered belongings. The mermaid winks from the worn dresser, binoculars hang from the heavy window latch. My globe, I spin on my bedside table, but I do not need to travel any further.

In my new room, my new companion, I think to future meals cooked in the communal kitchen. To me, shuffling off to this room to eat alone. My new companion, keeping me company and my late-night secrets, encouraging me to make mistakes.

I check my life-guide, notes dashed and dotted throughout the years on pages of Moby Dick. On the inside cover, I read the five rules by which to survive on my own:

1. Find enough food to eat and eat it.

2. Find your own books and keep them.

3. Find a dry, warm place to sleep and sleep there.

5. Never let the light go out.

Noises of my housemates snap-crackle from the other rooms under the mermaid’s careful watch. My painting hangs crooked upon its nail, but I don’t mind. I don’t mind one bit.

I turn on the radio of my clock, find a station that plays fiddle music, ruffle my beard, open the Altoid box, air out the tiny mushrooms. This room does not frighten me into silence. I turn on my bedside lamp to the sound of the front door closing, dishes rattling in the kitchen sink down the hall. I choose A Clockwork Orange from my floorboard library stacked ten high and leaned back on my headboard, crack open the cover, and read on top of the covers. I am a man now.

A New Room at Twenty-Four | 67

Amy LeBlanc

Luna see how they crawl in secondhand lingerie, veins showing through their wax forearms. see how their keys bolt doors, unlocking funeral parlors with their breath. see how they cling to chicken wire, drifting to rain basins to bleed.

They eat their loaves of soap and blow out bubbles when they wish to speak.

68 | The Anti-Languorous Project

Nikki Sheppy

“The Real” from Paracosm These 11-line pieces are from a poem called “The Real,” which excerpts the lexicon of Real Estate listings in Calgary. In composing these, I found that the language of the ads became more impoverished as the price of the housing property dropped. In effect, the richness of the poem’s language serves as a gauge of the home’s luxuriousness—and vice versa. “The Real” is from a section of my manuscript Paracosm, entitled “Hauntology,” which considers Mark Fisher’s notion of the hauntological as those futures that haunt us because we have lost them as possibilities in our lives. This “slow cancellation of the future” measures our nostalgia for once-bright prospects that will now never arrive because of contemporary plights like precarity, neoliberalism, and ecological decline.

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I deluxe motorized dream boasting designer access impress the soft corner of a crafted move south beautifully gorgeously everything with ensuite shop & built-in location the secret is close to huge the multi-tiered complete ready facing a gleaming theatre of automated wine

II maple height transition w/ elegant family finishes the living is a stage overlooking addâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;l plenty this high-end eating & media crest absolutely is the custom of spl. access Wolf-coiffured ravine & raised fire island the ultra Subzero bonus of gourmet wood

70 | Nikki Sheppy

III short-shaped and facing, the cabinetry flowering in proximity a cozy master, a newer past, a discriminating abundance meticulously assigned to flow with please-built doors and private vanity mall the gas light features both share and tree stall

IV steam travertine, the minutes shower, sound-court flooring the system, living incredible guest, schools of jetted mountains coveted wet, lakes flanking fully away study the other, the forest of motion steps west, an exquisite wolf, your senses staggering kind

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Realâ&#x20AC;? from Paracosm | 71

Mikka Jacobsen

Cok! Cok! Wher dremes be somtyme—I sey nat alle— Warnynge of thynges that shul after falle.

—Chaucer, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale”

Perte was admiring Clarence’s physique when the bus rolled into view. She’d seen a school bus before; Happy Dale Farm operated as an occasional petting zoo, where children could milk a cow, chase a sheep, whip grain at a chicken, and swing from a rope onto loose hay. This school bus, however, was like none she’d ever seen. White, with yellow crosses and looping letters painted in blue along each side.

Perte was what the farmer called a free-range hen, which meant she was permitted to scratch around in a small, dusty yard for a few hours a day. She was only occasionally allowed to see Clarence, and they made hay of their conjugal visits.

Not for the first time, Perte wondered if she loved Clarence.

Of all the roosters Perte had coupled with, Clarence was by far the most exceptional. Rumour had it Clarence’s father was considered among the great roosters for his throaty power of song. In stubborn refusal, Perte had never asked Clarence 72 | The Anti-Languorous Project

about his family.

Perte preened her feathers as she watched Clarence patrol the fence. He was handsome. A comb redder than coral and more artfully ridged than a palace wall. Clarence’s bill shone black as onyx; his legs and toes were as blue as the sea on a cloudless day (Perte had been born on a farm in Coquitlam, owned by a French-Canadian farmer. She’d seen the sea once, from the flatbed of a pick-up truck on her way to Alberta.

None of her companions had ever been outside the province, and Perte lorded her experience over the others, often talking of the open waves).

Because of his natural proclivities, Clarence told Perte, he was polyamorous. He called monogamy a straightjacket.

At the moment, Clarence had seven other mistresses. Perte could tell this popularity made Clarence think he was highly desirable, but, really, there weren’t many options for a hen at Happy Dale. Perte didn’t mind. None of her former lovers had been into monogamy. Besides, her feathers were fairer than any of her competitors; Clarence’s favour was obvious.

When the farmer loaded Perte and three of her sisters into a travelling crate, she was relieved a few minutes later to see the hatch reopen. In a flurry of feathers, Clarence was thrown inside before they were hoisted into the rear of the school bus.

“What’s going on?” she clucked, after she jostled aside Margaret, Halley, and Val, who were nestling next to Clarence.

Everyone was excited, but Perte felt uneasy.

“I heard the farmer talking with the man wearing the cross,” clucked Clarence. “The one with the melting face was rough with me. They’ve bought us, but it doesn’t sound like we’re going to a new farm. A revival, whatever that is. He wants your eggs to feed someone called Congregation.”

Perte was indignant. She’d been deprived of chicks most of her life, and any she did hatch were inevitably snatched.

“Why are you coming along, then?” she clucked, more curtly than she’d meant.

Cok! Cok! | 73

Clarence’s feathers puffed around his neck. “It seems I’m not wanted here anymore. I was thrown in for a bargain.”

Perte looked away. “I’m glad we’re together,” she clucked.

Clarence warbled. He grabbed Perte with his toes and rode up on her rump. He feathered each of the hens in turn but mounted Perte more often than the others. Perte had never copulated in a moving vehicle, and the experience was electrifying. They passed the rest of the trip rather pleasantly.

—— Their new coop was second-rate and slapdash, nothing to write home about in the workmanship, but the air smelled fresh. They were surrounded by trees, and an aroma of shit soon wafted on a pleasing breeze of silt, river, and clay-baked earth. Perte scratched about her new home, winking as she basked in the sun. Clarence tread her as often as he liked, a nice change from their former life, when his visits had been limited to an hour or two at most.

Clarence crowed, and everyone was happy. In fact, Perte couldn’t believe their good luck. The new farmer had thrown a dozen handfuls of grain, which rose high in the air like pollen and fell cascading around their feet, and then he’d left them to their own devices.

The only time the foreboding atmosphere of the morning returned was when the ugly one walked by the coop. A shadow stretched across the dirt as the man dragged a branch along the mesh of the enclosure. “Cluck, Cluck, Cluck,” he said. How often Perte couldn’t believe the idiocy of humans!

The day passed without further excitement, and when Perte, Margaret, Halley, and Val cuddled together against Clarence in their wooden hutch, Perte felt safe.

She woke in the middle of the night to Clarence’s mangled crowing. “Wake up. Wake up,” Perte clucked as she brushed her wing over Clarence’s face. The other hens too were awake.

The threat, they discovered, turned out to be Clarence making a fuss for no reason.

74 | Mikka Jacobsen

“Shut up,” clucked Margaret.

“Roosters,” clucked Val. “They’re only good for one thing,” clucked Halley as they tittered and resettled in a huddle on the other side of the hutch.

“Est-ce que tu vas bien?” clucked Perte. The others hated when she spoke French, but Perte didn’t give a plucked hen what they thought. They were jealous.

“Perte, I’ve had a horrible nightmare.”

“It was only a dream, Clarence.”

“This one was terrible. A black shape with cloud-like feet blotted out the sun. Blood was pooling on the dirt. Feathers in the air. It felt real. What do you think it means?”

“It means,” clucked Perte softly, “you’ve eaten too much grain. You shouldn’t go to bed on a full stomach.”

“I have a bad feeling about this, Perte.”

“C’mon, Clare.”

“The shadow in the dream was evil.”

“Please,” Perte sighed, “don’t start. How can something be evil? Especially a shadow, of all things.”

“What about God?” Clarence had overheard the farmer at Happy Dale praying and reading aloud from the Bible.

Perte clucked in disdain. “What about God?” “What if God doesn’t know what He wants? Those beasts,” clucked Clarence. His eyelids fell. “They think we’re incapable of shame.”

“I’m tired, Clare. Go back to sleep.” Perte ruffled her feathers and closed her eyes.

Clarence fell asleep near dawn. By the time he woke, the sun was high and bright, and he’d slept through his principal task, greeting the morning with song. Perte went on pecking grain with the others.

—— Cok! Cok! | 75

Simon strode into the yard in his white high-tops, a potato sack in one hand and a baseball bat in the other. The fat end of the bat dragged through the dirt as he approached.

“Cok! Cok!” cried Clarence in warning to the others.

“The rooster first,” the Pastor had said. “Blasted the middle of the night with that God-awful screeching. And then? Not one damned cock-a-doodle-doo this morning. Past his prime, just as the farmer said.” The Pastor hadn’t been wearing a shirt, and the sun gilded the hair on his shrivelled chest.

Simon had to chase the rooster, the bat under his arm and grain in his outstretched hand. The rooster had been fooled, shuffling over at the sight of food, but at the last minute, the chickenshit bird flapped its wings in panic, screamed circles around the yard, before Simon seized it by the legs. Blood trickled down his arms where the bird’s nails tore his skin.

Simon took special pleasure beating the sack into stillness.

76 | Mikka Jacobsen

Erin Emily Ann Vance

Honey Cookery When I was pregnant for the first time she gave me wine with honey and royal jelly so that our baby could feed the way that bees do; growing fat and sanguine in their cells you moistened the envelopes with your lips each letter marking a year stuck in tart glue your pencil marks, insect legs on recipe cards your lecherous saliva acidic on my breasts peeling back the areolas to reveal honeycombs,

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that sticky, yellowy substance leaking into your mouth I salsa danced to the yellow substance while my little worker bee suckled at the pollen caking your face we boiled the products of our labours over the wood fire mixed with breast milk and thistle and fed them to the neighbours

78 | Erin Emily Ann Vance

Nicole Haldoupis

Janie’s Cat Hi, Janie.

The phone was too large for Janie’s palm so the corners dug in. Cold plastic rested on her cheek, cord squiggling to the wall. Hi Sara. I can’t talk to you.

Why not?

Mom says you’re a negative influence in my life and I shouldn’t talk to you anymore.

Oh but, Janie, wait—um, your cat, you know your cat?

Yeah.

He’s dead, Janie. I went for a walk around the block from your house and he’s on the road, he’s dead. Someone ran him over, Janie.

Janie squeezed the receiver, slippery in her hand now. I can’t talk to you, Sara.

But, Janie, your cat. Just walk around the block, Janie.

Bye Sara.

Janie, wait—

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K.S.A. Brazier-Tompkins

Osprey Details snag, so at first I see only a bird

borne by wind,

bone- and bark traced wings outstretched.

Osprey, I think,

watching the wings, running Birds

of North America pages across my mind.

It is only after seconds

that I see the fish

flailing

water dripping sun-wrapped

back to the South Saskatchewan and the muddy waves.

80 | The Anti-Languorous Project

Fish-bone bird,

airborne, fishborne,

talons so deep

in living meat suffocating with the shock

of dawn wind and impalement, and I with my eyes

flicking between bird and fish

and pages of heedless details.

Osprey | 81

Jaclyn Morken

Nowhere Edith dreams of Nowhere whenever she can. Whenever Mrs. West’s cake knife eyebrows cut down in a frown at impropriety. Whenever Ms. Travers fastens Edith’s white collar too tightly, trying to button the path from Edith’s mind to her heart. Whenever Edith must flatten her thick, unruly hair with tiny metal clamps.

But when Edith’s feet find their grooves atop of her Collins World Atlas, and she can peer out her bedroom window at the forest below, she finds Nowhere. Edith pitches her thoughts across an infinite space, creating impossibles and unbelievables beckoning between the trees.

Edith slips out of her bedroom into the hall, only to see Mrs. West.

Where are you going, Edith? she asks. Her dress is always the colour of dust.

Nowhere, Edith replies. Mrs. West scratches her head, salting her shoulders, but Edith skips away. The deception is thrilling, and but a nick in her conscience. Edith tiptoes around the rains of plodding feet and flashing eyes that are drenching the corridors with grey. She escapes the grand doors, and finds herself at the edge of her haven.

82 | The Anti-Languorous Project

She brushes her fingers over pleats of tree bark, opening the way to Nowhere. Where golden flowers stand sentinel at the entrance, the Nuns of Nowhere devoted to guiding her passage. Where shadows frighten the branches, so light embraces the trees. Where shining silver leaves swirl about her as they dance on a toasted breeze. Where tiny winged creatures kiss her arms and lift her up into a sky so blue she forgets the colour of mystification.

As the others contemplate the weight beneath their shoelaces, Edith crests the slope of her imagination and borrows the soul of the forest.

Nowhere | 83

Weyman Chan

Suction Cups Does not satisfy the verb* fetid, you vouch Tink for tat atrocidades placeholder, exceptional Doris shifting berries in her high chair poor “we” handful catastrophe is beside the point *wakings up don’t add up bleakest flower who called me dear stars that bee-jump summer (kicking his tassels over did Keats listen to wee pollenators roaring for him?) tilty sweat, known to whisper soft sizes Smore that way spooning a Winehouse pump they fatten me tricycles (oh glyceride, she didn’t have to die) 84 | The Anti-Languorous Project

I picture deliverance: the childâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ball heap in snow found an express passover on treaty land to let traffic get by.

Suction Cups | 85

Marc Herman Lynch

XIII It’s called bei gwai ja—the ghost that sleeps on top of you.

For a couple nights now, he’s had a dream where he’s lying in bed eating ramen, and light flares through his bedroom window, brightening the cowboys on his bed sheet in firestorm orange. He smells a swimming pool—that chemical, chlorine smell. But when he tries to sit up, he can’t. The ghost is lying on top of him. Mouth to mouth. Nose to nose. And the boundaries between ghost and boy gradually disappear until he becomes the sleeping ghost pressed nose to nose, staring at the Big Dipper of birthmarks under his body’s rippling eye.

86 | The Anti-Languorous Project

Jeanette Lynes

The South Saskatchewan She is only interested in the river when itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s half water, eddying, half iced. Frozen crusts at its edges.

Liminal river.

Take a picture; it will last longer. Use all interventions at your disposal: double exposures, abstract light forms, astral anomalies, stencils.

The gelatin silver bromide process if itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s payday. No cheap telephone screenshots: The river is better than that.

Whatever technique, the picture will pang with severity, with pathos.

The river rocks on days when luminous vapour, loose strands of white gauze hover like half-told stories, above its expansive strand. Suspended in the perishing morning like the veils of lost brides, long plumes of froth.

Vernacular eyes see ice fog.

Astral eyes see ectoplasm.

Fashion-conscious eyes see an alien scarf.

(Ectoplasm has been largely discredited but depends on the source.)

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As for her, they’ve stuffed her mouth with cheesecloth. They’d rather she shut up, for a while, about the river, about everything.

The river is no longer of interest once it’s fully iced over.

Having reached reticence.

It will have nothing more to say for several months.

88 | Jeanette Lynes

Paul Meunier

Orion (meissa)

to name a star, ink in mouth, assemble elegies in parallax. built again like braille.

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(betelgeuse)

to bait a hunter, explore limbs, stalk in language. belie like an animal lair.

(bellatrix)

tilt a halo, pixels in a matrimonial link. an unbreakable grail.

90 | Paul Meunier

(mintaka)

atom blinks in aerial minuet, an opal hailing a lark.

(alnilam)

sail in lamplight, binaural like a neon oar.

Orion | 91

(alnitak)

orbit, lingual, a pink alien ashore.

(saiph)

perihelion, a burial song.

(rigel)

oriole bluing near

92 | Paul Meunier

(nebula)

boolean ruin

(orion)

or, ion.

Orion | 93

Nicole Haldoupis

Somewhere Near Danforth I mean, your lip does this thing sometimes where it curls down when you think no one is looking at you and you stare off into space or at the TV or the wall or into the fire pit or wherever it is you’re looking. Sometimes these moments consume you and I’ve learned not to tear you out of them too quickly.

I imagine us living on the eighteenth floor of a building, one with an outdoor pool we don’t swim in very often because it smells like piss all the time.

Sometimes your eyes look sad but I know you’re not really sad. You just have sad eyes sometimes. I know how to change them back now.

We’ll have a balcony and we’ll sit on it every morning, or whenever we wake up, and we’ll watch smoke swirl over parts of the city we can see until we blend in with the smog.

94 | The Anti-Languorous Project

Aritha van Herk

Cut and Run “The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.”

—Aristotle Hurt.

Not a locker, for storage or otherwise, keyless and flat-faced, intent on its own secrecy, smug safety deposit boxes holding their midriffs tight, railway stations and gyms hosting that temporary keeping, custodial duty over backpacks and sneakers.

Tautology of locker: equipped with a lock.

Hurt strains against confinement, swells like sponge in water, soaking up the moisture of affliction, its aggravation. Not unexpected or surprising, but still a shock, the surprise of flagrante, the mirum of damage.

Pleasure nurtures the same voluptuous prodigality, but without the ornament of harm. Almost nothing of Epicurus survives, a few fragments, misinterpretations of his subtle distillations. He The Anti-Languorous Project | 95

was no sybarite, but tried to coax reductive thinkers toward some balance between absence of pain and tranquility of mind.

Theories misconstrued as hedonism. Materialist that Epicurus was, he sought ethical pleasures, friendship and retirement.

Aponia was enough for him.

But hurt persists, thick-thighed and clumsy, no fluency or coherence. “I am trying to articulate . . .” What? What? Some abstract dolefulness, tied to the melancholy of senescene?

Do no harm, physicians recite, Primum non nocere, ad nauseum.

Applied to an epidemic, the intent prevails, but the prevention of positive ill applies negative to positive, a doubling back on central suspicion.

And what of the virtues of selfishness, that excuse for cowardice, the narcissist cringing behind his own fantasy of happiness? Two dogs and two cats and a dish rack upending scorch-bottomed pots? Married and mauled. Send that to the recycling bin.

The wind tears punctuation to shreds, leaves us shivering behind its sting. Hurt is less mutilation than laceration, a scrape that will not heal, road rash and rancid dermatosis.

And as for the cleansing denouement of pain, the stocks were a better answer, meant to educate and fumigate, the wooden boards a holdfast for humiliation. A criminal’s earlobes would be nailed to that pillory, and when he was released the torn flesh signaled a permanent record of conviction. Notice those ear piercings.

Hurt unexpected or coincidental, lurking behind its own disbelief, waiting to materialize, to perform. Nothing more or less than suffering and sorrow, but that’s an abstraction, does not 96 | Aritha van Herk

clone the slice of a knife or the nick of a razor, blood appearing as a way to signal pain.

Study theology in search of answers to the origins of pain, relentless torment or the persistent affliction that refuses to subside, that shudders past time and into the orbit of Mercury, determined revolve.

Pain is temporary, the quick stab, the burn or sting. But pain is the prologue to hurt, and the afterword to event.

Discipline that cry, its vanished echo contrasting two kinds of crime: professional crime and personal crime. In order to improve on felony and damage, the detective must become accomplice to the suspect.

Hurt has no classification, resists amnesia and repeats, although bodily harm and injury are not the same, their suddenness no maiming.

“History is what hurts,” Fredric Jameson claims, that unhappy problematic suffering the predicament of its quota. If “history is therefore the experience of necessity […] it […] refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis…” Ah, there’s the rub.

Inflict harm, wound and damage, and ruin forever the colour of the sea, eau de nil.

It takes work to disappoint hurt, to lock it up in the locker of sadness and embarrassment, the pathos that arouses schadenfreude in the heartless. Hurtle and injure, ban causality, its merciless forceps.

Cut and Run | 97

Always remember the caution, “You could hurt yourself.”

Ghandi may have been correct, that “Nobody can hurt me without my permission,” but I am definitely interested in doling out some testicular pain, measured against the radar of an incoming high-headache Chinook.

Hard work does not hurt, and as for the Middle English origin, hurten, from Old French hurter—there is a push, a thrust, a hit, waiting to ambush the unwary.

The wisdom of Robert Kroetsch, in Excerpts from the Real World: 10/3/85 That role [sic] of barbed wire you put in my bed. Don’t you realize I could have hurt myself, mistaking it for you?

The last four unbearable reps: that is when the muscles tense and rebound, assert themselves toward strength, endurance, vigour.

Be afraid. Hurt rebounds.

Works Cited Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics (Penguin, 2004).

Mahatma Ghandi, attributed.

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Cornell University Press, 1981).

Robert Kroetsch, Completed Field Notes (University of Alberta Press, 1989, 2000).

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antilang. no. 1

Contributors K.S.A. Brazier-Tompkins has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Saskatchewan. Her previous publications include academic work, novels, and short stories.

Chan’s fifth book of poetry, Human Tissue—a Primer for Not Knowing—was published in 2015 by Talonbooks.

He is a poetry editor at filling Station Magazine.

Weyman

David Eso studies literature at UVic and creates it largely

elsewhere. He helps select poetry for The Malahat Review and co-edited Where the Nights are Twice as Long (Goose Lane).

Benjamin Groh is currently a PhD student at the University of Calgary. Another excerpt from The Allegorist appeared in filling Station Magazine in 2016.

Haldoupis is a co-creator and editor of untethered, the editor of Grain, and an editorial board member at JackPine Press. Her work can be found in a few Canadian journals and anthologies, most recently in The Feathertale Review.

Nicole

Spring 2018 | 99

Toni Hiatt writes stories, songs, pen-pal letters, and

perhaps one day more poems. Her favourite word at the moment is symmetry. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Saskatoon.

Mikka Jacobsen is a Calgary-based writer, editor, and

teacher. Most recently, her writing received subTerrain’s 2017 Lush Triumphant Award for creative nonfiction.

Larissa Lai is the author of five books, with a sixth,

The Tiger Flu, forthcoming. A CRCII in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary, she directs The Insurgent Architects’ House for Creative Writing.

Amy LeBlanc holds an honours BA in English Literature

and creative writing from the University of Calgary where she is Editor-in-Chief of NōD Magazine. She has work forthcoming in Room, Contemporary Verse 2, and The Antigonish Review.

Marc Herman Lynch is the president of filling Station Magazine. He works as a Creative Team member at Wordsworth Youth Writing Camp and is a Writing and Learning Strategist at Mount Royal University.

Taidgh Lynch is a poet from the Southwest of Ireland.

His writing can be found in Bare Hands Poetry, The Ofi Press, Boyne Berries, and The Poetry Bus.

Jeanette Lynes is an author of poetry and fiction.

Her second novel is forthcoming in May 2018 from Coteau Books. She directs the MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan.

Lissa McFarland hails from Calgary and creates art in a

variety of styles and mediums. Her visual work has appeared in Hooligan Magazine and on the cover of NōD Magazine. Her poetry has been published in Hooligan Magazine.

100 | The Anti-Languorous Project

Paul Meunier is an English PhD student at the University of Calgary, studying experimental poetry. Paul also has a photography background, and he explores relationships between visual art, poetry, and subject representation.

Jaclyn Morken is from Saskatchewan. She completed

a BA Honours in English at the University of Saskatchewan and is currently in its MFA in Writing program. Jaclyn writes fantasy and speculative fiction.

Lisa Murphy-Lamb writes in solitude in an old log cabin in the Crowsnest Pass whenever she can escape the city.

Her novel, Jesus On the Dashboard (Stonehouse Publishing) came out in 2017. She is Director of Loft 112, a literary, creative space in Calgary’s East Village.

Jess Nicol is a creative writing PhD student who writes mostly short fiction and memoir. She loves cats and is managing editor for the Rejected McSweeney’s Lists website.

Rosemary Nixon’s latest collection Are You Ready to be

Lucky? was nominated for the IndiFab and the Frank O’Connor International Awards. Rosemary edits for Freehand Press and writes in Calgary.

Geoff Pevlin hails from the mauzy shores of St. John’s,

Newfoundland. He is a writer, an editor, a teacher, a traveller, a visual artist, and an uncle. His website sucks—geoffpevlin. com.

Nikki Sheppy is a poet and editor, with a doctorate in

English literature. Her poetry book, Fail Safe, was published by the University of Calgary Press in 2017.

Erin Emily Ann Vance’s work has appeared in nu-

merous publications, including CV2 and filling Station. Erin was a 2017 recipient of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Spring 2018 | 101

Young Artist Prize and a 2018 Finalist for the Alberta Magazine Awards in Fiction. She is a graduate student in English literature and creative writing at the University of Calgary.

For the Anti-Languorous Project, Aritha van Herk would like to claim that languor is a wonderful ruse. She comes by this position literarily, citing the immortal words of Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin: “I found D— at home, yawning, lounging, and dawdling, as usual, and pretending to be in the last extremity of ennui. He is, perhaps, the most really energetic human being now alive—but that is only when nobody sees him” (“The Purloined Letter”). Beware of languor; it disguises a powerful energy.

102 | The Anti-Languorous Project

Contribute to antilang.

What we’re looking for: Good. Short. Writing. Any form, any genre, as long as it is brief and of exceptional quality. Writing that draws on, is inspired by, adds to, reinvents, or reimagines traditions of brevity: see Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition,” Strunk’s The Elements of Style, and Munro’s comments on brevity in The Toronto Star, 11 Oct. 2013.

We look for a diversity of styles and formats that are creative and engaging: poetry, short/flash fiction, non-fiction, creative essays, ficto-criticism, photo essays, and hybrid/multimedia such as comics, postcard fiction, and collaborations across media. In the same vein, we seek a diversity of voices, perspectives, and experiences from all kinds of creative folks.

As we strongly support all writers—but especially emerging writers—we welcome and encourage simultaneous submissions (because you should have the opportunity to submit your work widely).

12 point Times New Roman, one inch margins. Please doublespace all prose. MS Word files (.doc or .docx) only, please.

(Seriously, no PDFs. We ignore PDF submissions because we want to be able to give you feedback via track-changes.)

Please send a total maximum of SIX (6) pages, regardless of form, genre, or number of pieces submitted. Please send all submissions via Submittable and include a 30 word bio (we are all about concision, after all).