Do you remember us as children?

By Urooj Salar Illustrated by Montana Barry & Abby White

“Do you remember us as children?”

I don’t either, not entirely.

I stood on tables, singing, screaming poetry, so you must have been the quiet one.

Now, turmeric stains my sleeves, and they braid dandelions around my fingers. Now, you’ve been experimenting with facial hair, and I’m too cautious to comment on it. Now, you are the old folk song, the lullaby, and I am the silence between tracks.

Soon, we’ll watch sitcoms in English together, and you will yearn for the sun.

“Kingston is warm,” I’ll say, but I’ve known worse winters, snow like salt. You’ll say, “The sun thawed our bones in the mountains,” then we’ll rest by the fire, backs to the cold.

The lands on which we found joy and creative energy are not ours. Let us acknowledge that Quilt lives on Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territory–we live in debt and in gratitude.

Afterword

“I love them for finding what I can’t find, and for loving me for the line I wrote, and for forgetting it so that a thousand times, till death finds them, they may discover it again, in other lines in other happenings.”

From “The Secret” by Denise Levertov

Masthead

Co-Editors In Chief

Sam Goodale, Fiona Mulrooney

Copy Editing

Samantha Vacca, Head

Katerina Bovos, Caroline Gao, Natalie Stevenson, Katherine Weidemann

Editorial Board

Urooj Salar, Creative Manager

Sapphyre Smith, Ben Wrixon, Claire Matthews, Michelle

Zeng, Audra Crago, Madeleine Vigneron, Victoria Zeppieri, Daniel Green

Annalynn Plopp, Academic Manager

Caroline Abouchar, Erin Gilbert, Catherine Marcotte, Suzy Leinster, Sofia Mancini, Eleanor Daley, Makaila

Atsolongo, Mariel Matsuda, Sam Russell

Design

Abby White, Head

Audra Crago, Karen Au, Jade DeLuca-Ahooja, Lauren

Bale, Foster McAffee, Montana Barry, Ella Bigras, Anna

Sum, Catherine Marcotte

Logistics

Cristina Soares, Head

Rose Wagner, Alana Lambert-Dias