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EDITOR’S FOREWORD BLACK VULTURES 34 SHOSHANA WALFISH FOREWORD

SOLILOQUIES 15 70

BOTOXIC 36 PAYAM MONTAZAMI DÉCARIE

FRANKIE BARNET 71 LE RECROQUEVILLÉ 44 ERIC SOAP & SANTERRE SEX

FORREST ORSER 72 DYPTIQUE 24A 46 ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ WHO IS THE OLDEST LIVING BEAR ACTOR? MADELEINE74LEE II; III 48 ALLISON MURPHY BLACK CLOUDS

JEREMY HANSON-FINGER 76 WINTER’S A BEACH 57 JESSICA SLIPP SUPPOSE YOU ALEX MANLEY 62

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EDITOR’S FOREWORD BLACK VULTURES 34 SHOSHANA WALFISH FOREWORD 70

BOTOXIC 36 PAYAM MONTAZAMI DÉCARIE 2

ANATOMICAL SCORE JESSE CHASE 4

VOID JESSE CHASE 7

WRITING POETRY I AM PICTURING IN MY HEAD A TELEVISION COMMERCIAL ON PAIN-RELIEF. GUILLAUME MORRISETTE 10

TOWER DEFENSE (OR OUR LOVE IS LIKE 9/11 AND I DON’T WANT TO JUMP JEFF BLACKMAN

FRANKIE BARNET 71 18 LE RECROQUEVILLÉ TERMINAL VELOCITY, ACHIEVED IN C# 44 ERIC SANTERRE SOAP & SEX VERONIQUE REAGAN-MARCHAND FORREST ORSER 72 20 DYPTIQUE 24A 46 MEMORY KEY ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ WHO IS THE OLDEST LIVING BEAR ACTOR? MATTHEW MACASKILL MADELEINE74LEE 22 II; III 48 SAID SAINT GEORGE TO THE MAIDEN: WAIT IN THE CAR ALLISON MURPHY BLACK CLOUDS REBECCA LEAH PÃPUCARU JEREMY HANSON-FINGER 76 24WINTER’S A BEACH 57 GORGEOUS RODNEY JESSICA SLIPP SUPPOSE YOU JOHN WALL BARGER ALEX MANLEY 26

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A (MOSTLY) MACARON-MELLIFLUOUS MORNING CANDICE MADDY 15

CASUAL ENCOUNTER — VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA CANDICE MADDY

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EDITOR’S FOREWORD BLACK VULTURES 34 SHOSHANA WALFISH FOREWORD

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FRANKIE BARNET 71 LE RECROQUEVILLÉ 44 ERIC SOAP & SANTERRE SEX

JESSE CHASE

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BOTOXIC 36 PAYAM MONTAZAMI DÉCARIE

FORREST ORSER 72 DYPTIQUE 24A 46 ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ WHO IS THE OLDEST LIVING BEAR ACTOR? MADELEINE74LEE II; III 48 ALLISON MURPHY BLACK CLOUDS JEREMY HANSON-FINGER 76 WINTER’S A BEACH 57 JESSICA SLIPP SUPPOSE YOU ALEX MANLEY 62

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EDITOR’S FOREWORD BLACK VULTURES 34 SHOSHANA WALFISH FOREWORD 70

BOTOXIC 36 PAYAM MONTAZAMI DÉCARIE

JESSE CHASE

VOID

FRANKIE BARNET 71 LE RECROQUEVILLÉ 44 ERIC SOAP & SANTERRE SEX FORREST ORSER 72 DYPTIQUE 24A 46 ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ WHO IS THE OLDEST LIVING BEAR ACTOR? MADELEINE74LEE II; III 48 ALLISON MURPHY BLACK CLOUDS JEREMY HANSON-FINGER 76 WINTER’S A BEACH 57 JESSICA SLIPP SUPPOSE YOU ALEX MANLEY 62

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GUILLAUME MORISSETTE

TELEVISION COMMERCIAL ON

PICTURING IN MY HEAD A

BOTOXIC 36 PAYAM MONTAZAMI DÉCARIE

FRANKIE BARNET 71 LE RECROQUEVILLÉ 44 ERIC SOAP & SANTERRE SEX

FORREST ORSER 72 DYPTIQUE 24A 46 ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ WHO IS THE OLDEST LIVING BEAR ACTOR?

PAIN-RELIEF.

WRITING POETRY I AM

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EDITOR’S FOREWORD BLACK VULTURES 34 SHOSHANA WALFISH FOREWORD

MADELEINE74LEE II; III 48 ALLISON MURPHY BLACK CLOUDS

JEREMY HANSON-FINGER 76 WINTER’S A BEACH 57 JESSICA SLIPP SUPPOSE YOU ALEX MANLEY 62

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womanless on women’s day. kissing my friends for anguish shame delight, their faces a hidden compartment to stash tapes of home-recorded flute songs whose lyrics articulate disjointed, taboo life outlooks. my ass is expanding to devour me, will grow to the size of a mediocre sunset whose picture will be used as someone’s wallpaper. the warm, subtle light rays of my ass obscured by a forest of desktop icons, shortcut links to secret folders a place to hide amongst unsent emails and reflect on why things do not matter, only their contribution to survival matters. praying by a small statue of myself for my friends to write not poems but essays on self-annihilation which is the same thing just more frantic, and then the unprovoked epiphany that my facebook account is a third-person write-up of myself. my ass is an irresistible force. the faces of friends are irresistible forces also. friends don’t kiss, continually resist kissing by having study dates on large tables to write papers on the relation between self-awareness and social value while knowing the size of the table prevents kissing.

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EDITOR’S FOREWORD BLACK VULTURES 34 SHOSHANA WALFISH FOREWORD

my job as a poet is to bore myself though no one ever helps the writer 70 which is okay BOTOXIC 36 since the writer’s primary motivation PAYAM MONTAZAMI DÉCARIE is to have better conversations with himself.

FRANKIE BARNET 71

fascination with themes and charactersLE RECROQUEVILLÉ 44 and never the abstract as attractive, ERIC SOAP & SANTERRE SEX the effect of googling obscure poets on the mind FORREST ORSER 72 and bundle their work together to discover the lone unexpressed sentenceDYPTIQUE in poetry 24A 46 which reads, ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ WHO IS THE OLDEST LIVING BEAR ACTOR? ‘I can never write a poem in french.’

MADELEINE74LEE II; III 48 ALLISON MURPHY BLACK CLOUDS

JEREMY HANSON-FINGER 76 WINTER’S A BEACH 57 JESSICA SLIPP SUPPOSE YOU ALEX MANLEY 62

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I dance a wall between us

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You call me mine 70 charge me, siege me, stoke me BOTOXIC 36 trample my ramparts PAYAM MONTAZAMI DÉCARIE trigger a device in my base, to boot

FRANKIE BARNET 71

JEFF BLACKMAN

AND I DON’T WANT TO JUMP)

(OR, OUR LOVE IS LIKE 9/11

TOWER DEFENSE

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EDITOR’S FOREWORD BLACK VULTURES 34 SHOSHANA WALFISH FOREWORD

out of windows LE RECROQUEVILLÉ 44 enflamed & falling— ERIC SOAP & SANTERRE SEX from the sixth parapet up a swish of matter 72 from the eighteenth, aFORREST figure twoORSER frames DYPTIQUE 24A a man gripping Orion, spread eagle, gone | from the penthouse, 46 an instant ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ

WHO IS THE OLDEST LIVING BEAR ACTOR? MADELEINE74LEE —gravity’s cowards II; III 48 ALLISON MURPHY how would you rather I BLACK CLOUDS go out flashbangburninginside JEREMY HANSON-FINGER 76 see what we made up

WINTER’S A BEACH 57 JESSICA SLIPP SUPPOSE YOU ALEX MANLEY 62

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laxity;

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CANDICE MADDY

BOTOXIC 36 lemony, my post-comatose countenance PAYAM MONTAZAMI DÉCARIE

MORNING

MACARON-MELLIFLUOUS

A (MOSTLY)

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EDITOR’S FOREWORD BLACK VULTURES We’d been mating in a meringue manner all 34 morning- stiff SHOSHANA WALFISH peaks until post-coital conversating uncovered linguistic FOREWORD

unsmiled itself into a pavlova poutFRANKIE Tim tongued in BARNET 71 all RECROQUEVILLÉ licking lingua franca LE 44 and I was marshmallowERIC SOAP & SANTERRE SEX mollified until

FORREST ORSER 72

DYPTIQUE 24A well-whisked, the want for words returned.

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ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ WHO IS THE OLDEST LIVING BEAR ACTOR? Give me the poetics of plenitude MADELEINE74LEE I pleaded, and Tim II;was III yolky with ums and ohs.

48 ALLISON MURPHY BLACK CLOUDS Give me tender truisms JEREMY HANSON-FINGER 76 I tried and Tim WINTER’S A BEACH folded in sticky syllables, a saccharine smile.

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JESSICA SLIPP SUPPOSE YOU ALEX MANLEY

Fine, give me some sugar 77 62 I ceded, in confectionery tones.

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EDITOR’S FOREWORD BLACK VULTURES 34 SHOSHANA WALFISH FOREWORD

CANDICE MADDY

FRANKIE BARNET 71 LE RECROQUEVILLÉ 44 ERIC SOAP & SANTERRE SEX

BRITISH COLUMBIA

CASUAL ENCOUNTER —

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BOTOXIC 36 PAYAM MONTAZAMI DÉCARIE

VANCOUVER,

FORREST ORSER 72 DYPTIQUE 24A 46 ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ WHO IS THE OLDEST LIVING BEAR ACTOR? MADELEINE74LEE II; III 48 ALLISON MURPHY BLACK CLOUDS

JEREMY HANSON-FINGER 76 WINTER’S A BEACH 57 JESSICA SLIPP SUPPOSE YOU ALEX MANLEY 62

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Thirty-six to eighteen, he found she in Casual Encounters at two-eleven AM (was supposed to be tweaking the levels on the last of the New Balance campaign shots) Don’t be more than ten years older than me -her ad’s disclaimer (hardly look thirty, he reasoned; sent low-res reply: a shot that managed to make him look both younger and more handsome than he wasclicked send, thought he among us who is not guilty of a little best-foot-forward photoshopping cast first.)

Two days and three emails later a four PM terrasse meet-greet granted.

He enters, an early three-thirty: dog-eared copy of Scott Pilgrim badly tucked into dust jacket of Politics of Postmodernismartfuldodgers her question “what are you reading?” (last syllable’s punctuation a chipped-polish pinkie, gently bit) she slipping quarter-past into seat opposite, nose-wrinkling-under-constellation-of-freckles smile, no sorry-I’m-lates, cashing on pretty as apology-currency accepted by men everywhere, he thinks answers, “one of those books people mean to read and seldom do.”

(Inward review: inadequate, farcical, even.) “pretty serious mister,”

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EDITOR’S FOREWORD BLACK VULTURES mister 34 fully-loaded in her mouth, SHOSHANA WALFISH FOREWORD

“are you 70sure you’re twenty-six?’

BOTOXIC

36 hard-swallow silencePAYAM MONTAZAMI temperature in his cheeks risingDÉCARIE fast, still twenty degrees BARNET slowerFRANKIE than the temperature in his pants71 (she has a body worth lying for) LE RECROQUEVILLÉ 44 “It’s the glasses, probably.”

ERIC SANTERRE

SOAP & SEX FORREST ORSER 72 DYPTIQUE 24A 46 ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ WHO IS THE OLDEST LIVING BEAR ACTOR? MADELEINE74LEE II; III 48 ALLISON MURPHY BLACK CLOUDS JEREMY HANSON-FINGER 76 WINTER’S A BEACH 57 JESSICA SLIPP SUPPOSE YOU ALEX MANLEY 62

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nose wrinkling again, shifting freckled little dipper

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VERONIQUE REAGAN-MARCHAND

ACHIEVED IN C#

TERMINAL VELOCITY,

EDITOR’S FOREWORD BLACK VULTURES public void KeepTryingFunction(int A) 34 SHOSHANA WALFISH { FOREWORD

Console.WriteLine(“English in C#”); 70 Console.WriteLine(“Unambiguous logicalBOTOXIC thought,”); 36 life of words”); Console.WriteLine(“Striving to capture the PAYAM MONTAZAMI DÉCARIE Console.WriteLine(“within A.”); FRANKIE BARNET int B=A; 71 Console.WriteLine(“If A is a failed attempt”); LE RECROQUEVILLÉ 44 Console.WriteLine(“Then the functionERIC must continue”); SOAP & SANTERRE SEX Console.WriteLine(“Rationally until it succeeds”); ORSER 72 Console.WriteLine(“to B and notFORREST 2B”); DYPTIQUE 24A int C=B; 46 Console.WriteLine(“Syntax structured lines”); ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ WHO IS THE OLDEST LIVING BEAR ACTOR? Console.WriteLine(“Equivalent to closed form scheme”); MADELEINE74LEE Console.WriteLine(“If A can equal C”); II; III Console.WriteLine(“Can’t this be poetry?”); 48 ALLISON MURPHY if (A==C) BLACK CLOUDS { JEREMY HANSON-FINGER 76 KeepTryingFunction(B); WINTER’S A BEACH } 57

}

JESSICA SLIPP SUPPOSE YOU ALEX MANLEY 62

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MATTHEW MACKASKILL

MEMORY KEY

EDITOR’S FOREWORD BLACK VULTURES the key is memory 34 SHOSHANA WALFISH a point of reference in which toFOREWORD base decisions chronological or random sometimes painful not to be confused with dreams

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BOTOXIC 36 PAYAM MONTAZAMI DÉCARIE

FRANKIE BARNET recognition of that known 71 how to play the guitar – each finger in the right place LE RECROQUEVILLÉ 44 unknown ERIC SOAP & SANTERRE SEX the time McDonald’s stops serving breakfast FORREST ORSER 72 & what we wish we could know the rules for Texas Hold’em – Does a DYPTIQUE full house 24A 46 beat a flush?

ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ her name our anniversary the first time

WHO IS THE OLDEST LIVING BEAR ACTOR? MADELEINE74LEE II; III 48 ALLISON MURPHY BLACK CLOUDS JEREMY HANSON-FINGER 76 WINTER’S A BEACH 57 JESSICA SLIPP SUPPOSE YOU

& the last time – longer ago than I’d like to admit those who have passed Johnny Boedker from grade twoALEX MANLEY he’s much taller now, 77 62 and while the facial hair threw you off CONTRIBUTORS THE BULGARIAN ORTHOGRAPHIC the dimple under his left eye REFORM OF 1945 remains RUSSEL HELMS their faces etched out of the last moment you saw them but time changes it

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warps it

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the key, forgotten

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69 And the theory! You couldn’t moveEDITOR’S in their bedroom for the theory!

FOREWORD

BLACK VULTURES

34 My mother’s books on top of the dresser, SHOSHANA buttressed by ferns: Fat Is a Feminist WALFISH FOREWORD Issue. Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Passages. Roots.

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REBECCA PÃPUCARU

WAIT IN THE CAR

TO THE MAIDEN:

SAID SAINT GEORGE

The Joys of both cooking and sex.

BOTOXIC 36 PAYAM MONTAZAMI DÉCARIE

My father’s sock drawer: coins from the Old World. Nail clippers. Bullets in an old lozenge tin. Suppositories. Condoms, FRANKIE pre-tubal ligation.

BARNET 71

LE RECROQUEVILLÉ

44 Mother’s sock drawer: queen-size pantyhose. Reinforced toes. Bridge Mix. ERIC SANTERRE Chocolate-covered jujubes, murder on theSOAP teeth. & SEX

FORREST ORSER 72

Said father to mother: Wait in the car. First recorded in ‘67. Parked outside RoDYPTIQUE 24A barts Library on St. George Street, Toronto. Said46hero to maiden: wait in the car; ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ I’ll be back in a second.

December twilight.

Engine off. Maiden rubs bare hands WHO IS THE OLDEST LIVING BEAR ACTOR? together, wishes for radio, Look magazine, Oh Henry! bar. Two hours later hero MADELEINE74LEE returns, unconcerned.

II; III 48

ALLISON MURPHY Anecdote told to daughter in responseBLACK to why him?

Question asked in emergency CLOUDS room, Saturday afternoon.

JEREMY HANSON-FINGER 76

WINTER’S A BEACH Answer: Lady’s fur-lined leather gloves. From Eaton’s.

57 JESSICA SLIPP SUPPOSE YOU

Father’s fist breaks glass shower door. I take sister to neighbours. Orthodox Jews.

Won’t call ambulance on the Sabbath. ALEX MANLEY 62

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Nerve damage, damaged nerves. Physical therapist on Fridays. Father calls her CONTRIBUTORS THE BULGARIAN ORTHOGRAPHIC REFORM OF 1945 his Girl Friday, his Sabbath Queen. When she leaves father says: now there’s a RUSSEL HELMS good girl. Doesn’t talk back.

When she leaves father says: if she were my daughter, I wouldn’t need her.

Point taken, duly noted, etc.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Divorce. Mother becomes pronoun with no antecedent. In other words, it.

It screws my uncle, gets lawyer, goes back to its father. It gets tattoo, small dog, evicted.

Written from my one-bedroom apartment on what would have been your fortythird anniversary, Mother and Father. A blessing on your separate abodes.

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JOHN WALL BARGER

GORGEOUS RODNEY

EDITOR’S FOREWORD BLACK VULTURES He read me 1001 Nights at his kitchen table.

34 SHOSHANA After sketching me he said he would never fuck me WALFISH FOREWORD

in one million years. He had silky black hair.

70 I liked to watch him walk. On a Friday BOTOXIC 36 after drama class he yelled, Scheherazade, vamoose!

PAYAM MONTAZAMI & let me go in a grocery cart from the topDÉCARIE of Hawthorne Hill. Alakazam! He liked my squeals.

FRANKIE BARNET 71 Years passed, which sucked. He lost oneLE eye RECROQUEVILLÉ 44 drunk-driving. A biker poked out the otherERIC one SOAP & SANTERRE SEX with a cigarette, in a bar. I hate how I just stood there, FORREST ORSER 72 watching. He worked his old job again, DYPTIQUE 24A drug dealing at the border. His barncats spoke 46 ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ the words of Plato. Misquoting, he said.

His dogs WHO IS THE OLDEST LIVING BEAR ACTOR? learned to talk from avalanches. HisMADELEINE new trick, LEE 74 he said, was speaking in thunder, but I never heard him II; III do it. I can still see him, blind as justice & the48 ALLISON MURPHY CLOUDS future, on the bridge with his white BLACK cane in the sun, JEREMY HANSON-FINGER walking toward the checkpoint, a bit cockeyed, 76 up his ass a Kinder Egg of heroin.

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just there, the birch rises bare as bone under a halogen light

BRANDON HALLER

WHO CHECKED OUT EARLY

FOR MY GRANDFATHER,

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EDITOR’S FOREWORD BLACK VULTURES 34 SHOSHANA WALFISH FOREWORD 70

BOTOXIC 36 PAYAM MONTAZAMI DÉCARIE

the trunk riddled black with cysts that suck marrow through sapwood its branches uncoil red tendrils that finger the sky, inhaling carcinogens further into the rotting heartwood

FRANKIE BARNET 71 LE RECROQUEVILLÉ 44 ERIC SOAP & SANTERRE SEX

FORREST ORSER 72 DYPTIQUE 24A 46 ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ WHO IS THE OLDEST LIVING BEAR ACTOR?

like cigarette lungs, the canopy corrodes slow, until a stray ember burns it all to ash.

MADELEINE74LEE II; III 48 ALLISON MURPHY BLACK CLOUDS

JEREMY HANSON-FINGER 76 WINTER’S A BEACH 57 JESSICA SLIPP SUPPOSE YOU ALEX MANLEY 62

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CONTRIBUTORS

POETRY Jesse Chase Jesse Chase folks through life reading, writing, rapping and singing his songs on an acoustic guitar. Over the past 3 years he has been gathering research to compile a project mapping the ecological acoustic properties of a linguistic Babylon. He is from Cornwall, Ontario.

Jeff Blackman Jeff Blackman co-founded The Moose & Pussy, Canada’s premier sex-lit mag, with his partner Kate Maxfield, and award-winning writers Jeremy Hanson-Finger and Rachael Simpson. Jeff was recently featured by the In/Words Reading Series and VERSeFest, Ottawa’s trans-genre poetry bash. He’s been banging out poems about maturity and Mario 3 (Nintendo, 1988) for a project tentatively titled “Oh, Thank Heavens I’m Back To My Old Self Again!”

Guillaume Morissette Guillaume Morissette writes poetry and fiction and emails.

He is a Creative Writing major at Concordia University, which is probably the closest you can

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get to majoring in sadness. His work has appeared in Lickety Split, Synapse, Papirmasse, and other places. He lives in Montréal.

Rebecca Leah Pãpucaru Rebecca Leah Pãpucaru is an internationally published poet, and currently a PhD student at the University of Montréal, Canada. Her poetry and prose have been shortlisted for a number of awards in Canada, including Arc Magazine’s Poem of the Year. Her poetry has been anthologized in the 2010 edition of The Best Canadian Poetry in English (guest editor Lorna Crozier and series editor Molly Peacock), and in the Headlight anthology of emerging writers. In Canada, her poetry has appeared in Prism International, The Antigonish Review, Acta Victoriana, and Existere, while both her poetry and prose have been featured in The Nashwaak Review. In the United States, her poetry has appeared in The Orange Coast Review, The Emerson Review, Kestrel, and Caesura: the Journal of the Poetry Center San Jose. In Ireland, her work has appeared in Crannóg. Moreover, she is the

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EDITOR’S FOREWORD BLACK VULTURES installment Education Chair of the League 34 of the PILOT ReadSHOSHANA WALFISH ing Series. Until now, Matthew of Canadian Poets.

FOREWORD Candice Maddy Candice Maddy has graduated from Concordia with a degree in Creative Writing. She has previously been a special fx and prosthetics makeup artist, a made-to-measure suit specialist, a French teacher, and a Jew in a Catholic school.

has remained70 an unpublished CanadianBOTOXIC author due to a 36 of timbrophobia. severe case

PAYAM MONTAZAMI DÉCARIE FRANKIE John Wall BARNET Barger 71 John Barger’s second LEWall RECROQUEVILLÉ 44 book, ERIC Hummingbird, is forthSOAP & SANTERRE SEX

coming with Palimpsest Press FORREST ORSER 72 He divides his in Spring 2012.

DYPTIQUE 24A year between Halifax, Nova 46 Scotia and Tampere, Finland.

ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ

WHO IS THE OLDEST LIVING BEAR ACTOR? MADELEINE74LEE II; III Veronique Reagan-Marchand 48 ALLISON MURPHY Veronique is an undergraduate BLACK CLOUDS Brandon Haller

in Honours English Literature JEREMY HANSON-FINGER 76 and Creative Writing, whose WINTER’S A BEACH goal is to coin cyber fiction and 57 JESSICA SLIPP cyber poetry as proper genres.

SUPPOSE YOU Her interests lie in the realms ALEX MANLEY of cyberspace, language, and 77 62 communications. She lives with CONTRIBUTORS THEand BULGARIAN her fiancé Arturo, their two ORTHOGRAPHIC REFORM OF 1945 cats, C# and Java whom they RUSSEL HELMS pwn every day. She someday hopes to visit the UK and Australia where she plans to master 64 both accents.

CONTRIBUTORS

Matthew Macaskill Matthew Macaskill is a second year Creative Writing Major at Concordia University. He’s a born and raised Montréaler and read live at the November

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EDITOR’S FOREWORD BLACK VULTURES 34 SHOSHANA WALFISH FOREWORD 70

BOTOXIC 36 PAYAM MONTAZAMI DÉCARIE FRANKIE BARNET 71 LE RECROQUEVILLÉ 44 ERIC SANTERRE SOAP & SEX FORREST ORSER 72 DYPTIQUE 24A 46 ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ WHO IS THE OLDEST LIVING BEAR ACTOR? MADELEINE74LEE II; III 48 ALLISON MURPHY BLACK CLOUDS JEREMY HANSON-FINGER 76 WINTER’S A BEACH 57 JESSICA SLIPP SUPPOSE YOU ALEX MANLEY 77

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DOWN THE DIRT ROAD: A NOTE FROM THE EDITORS

“Watch that poetry reading thing. Most poets can’t read at all. Most can’t write. Not saying you. But the reading can apt to be a thing where one puts the ego out on a string so the people can touch it easier.”

— Charles Bukowski

AND SLUNK NAKED,

YOURSELF IN VANCOUVER

SUPPOSE YOU TOUCHED

Art

Soliloquies 15 is a collection of poetry, fiction and art. Whatever that means. What is “art”? What constitutes good writing? Is it controlled movements of one’s fingers on 69 BLACK VULTURES a keyboard? Is it reading the right authors, following the right conventions, being the master of a particular form? Though SHOSHANA we cannot answer these questions, we can tell WALFISH you that our writers will make you sympathize with characters you wouldn’t necessar70 with after class. We can’t tell you ily want to sit next to at the bar, or share a cigarette whether these writers have mastered a formBOTOXIC or if they have created their own. We can PAYAM only tell you that their work will resonate withMONTAZAMI you. Their pieces will keep you reading and rereading. This is the slimmest issue we’ve ever published, as our eye was on 71 not only quality, but on curation. We’re proud to say that Soliloquies is in its fifteenth LE RECROQUEVILLÉ volume, and although it has been a bit of a foster child, hopping around from parent to ERIC SANTERRE parent, it has still, somehow, made something of itself. Soliloquies is still here to publish work by new, young, and innovative talent. Talent which you likely would not have 72 otherwise come by. We’re still student-run, but for this issue, for the first time, we have DYPTIQUE 24A spread our wings, and have invited American students, Maritimers, Edmontonians, ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ Torontonians and the like to fly around Montréal with us.

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Though our authors may or may not have much II; III in common, the works in this volume have something in common, a connecting sentiment.

These writers are eminently ALLISON MURPHY able to share their characters’ insights on sex, people, intimate moments; insights that 76 honest thoughts that people think are non-conventional. These are the dirty, painfully WINTER’S A BEACH about each other, about themselves, about the world, but do not say out loud. These JESSICA SLIPP are the feelings and actions of the lonely, horny, heartbroken, momentarily satisfied, scared and jealous that ring so thoroughly true it is hard not to feel the writer has written it about you. These works capture a feeling that, like the moments within them, are 77 fleeting. We’d like to encourage you to read beyond the text.

CONTRIBUTORS

And of course, we would like to thank C.A.S.E., A.S.F.A. and the entire English Department for their funding and support. Thank you to the talented and kind-hearted professor and editor Karis Shearer for writing our foreword, and to Sina Queyras for her words of advice and insight on the current publishing climate. Thank you to Sean Yendrys for his artful design that so perfectly captures the sentiment of our magazine.

Thank you to former editor-in-chief Deanna Fong for her words of encouragement and role as Soliloquies historian. Finally, a gracious thank you to Jon Paul Fiorentino for teaching us the difference between foreword and forward—may he have a prosperous career in copy-editing student anthologies.

Best, Lizy Mostowski on behalf of the Soliloquies Editorial Board

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Art

This 15th issue of Soliloquies is timely. Collected here are poetry, prose, mixed genre pieces that touch the so-called timeless literary topics of romantic relationships, unrequited love, and the role of the artist. But I introduce this issue of Soliloquies not as “timeless,” but timely. This is unquestionably 21st- century writing.

FOREWORD KARIS SHEARER

Rather than perpetuating old forms or repeating stale tropes, the best pieces in this collection are stylistically innovative and/or challenge received ideas about social norms.

There are poems here that acknowledge the digital age in which they are written: some 69 written in programming code (Reahave titles like “Memory Key” (Macaskill); others are BLACK VULTURES forms to explore serious gan-Marchand). There are prose texts that adopt unconventional topics: Alex Manley, for example, uses SHOSHANA the genre of theWALFISH exam question to weave a complex series of hypothetical scenarios before asking “you,” the reader, for a half- page response.

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BOTOXIC Other pieces put new spins on old conventions or ideas of romance. Candice Maddy’s highly alliterative, rhythmicalPAYAM poem, “A (Mostly) Macaron-Mellifluous MornMONTAZAMI ing,” captures a post-coital moment through the cloyingly sweet imagery of the me71 talk super-saturated with sugar for ringue, rendering the often-romanticized bedroom LE RECROQUEVILLÉ ironic effect. Constructions of gender are also questioned here: in Forrest Orser’s short story “Soap and Sex,” a male narrator challenges society’s troubling double-standards ERIC SANTERRE for women when he confronts his male friend’s attitude toward women and casual sex: “Women should be able to do whatever they72 want. We can. You can screw lots of women and no one will ever call you a DYPTIQUE whore.” The 24A story, thankfully, avoids being ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ overly didactic and the narrator, despite his willingness to challenge his friend’s stance, is left unrecognized by the woman in question.

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II; III In our contemporary age, the ways in which we write and read are changing faster ALLISON MURPHYpoem, “Terminal Velocity, than ever before. Veronique Reagan-Marchand’s remarkable Achieved in C#,” foregrounds technologies of writing in the digital age. Entirely com76 posed in the object-oriented programming language, C#, the poem explores the limits WINTER’S A BEACH of poetry produced within the hyper-rational language and logic of computer programJESSICA SLIPP ming, ultimately asking “Console.WriteLine(“Can’t this be poetry?”)”

Writers in this issue of Soliloquies also take up questions of ethics and art. Mad77 eleine Lee’s short satirical piece reporting on the life of Benjamin the Grizzly, “Who is CONTRIBUTORS the Oldest Living Bear Actor?”, appears to be loosely based on the case of an acclaimed film artist and raises important questions about the ethics of an artist’s life and the brilliance of his or her art. If an artist is convicted of an abhorrent crime, can or should the genius of his or her work still be recognized? To what degree do we as readers allow our knowledge of an artist’s life influence our understanding of his or her art? Audiences were confronted with a similar question in the 1940s when Ezra Pound was brought back to the United States under charges of treason: should such a person be awarded the Bollingen Prize by the Library of Congress, as Pound was amid much controversy in 1948?

Lee’s satirical use of the “bear actor” to revisit the relationship among life, art, and ethics makes the familiar strange, inviting readers to reconsider their position on this topic.

In Soliloquies 15, writers take on serious topics with innovative forms and radical perspectives that do justice to the complexity of the age in which they write. In turn, their work demands careful, engaged reading and re-reading, so ... time to get started!

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DÉCARIE FRANKIE BARNET

Art

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The doorbell rings and it’s my friend Marty, who lives all the way across town.

“I took a cab,” she says. “It cost me seventeen dollars.” Her eyes are all puffy.

Marty hasn’t been over since we painted the walls. Me and Becky. Marty said she’d help but she didn’t. “I live all the way across town,” she said, “and it’s raining.” I don’t like being stuck with Becky 69 in these situations. Becky got BLACK VULTURES very angry that Marty wouldn’t come.

“It’s that guy again, isn’t it? She’s with him.WALFISH She’s probably not even with SHOSHANA him; she’s probably sitting on the couch waiting for him to call. Was she cry70 ing when you talked to her?”

BOTOXIC “I don’t know.”

PAYAM MONTAZAMI “She’s always crying! She was crying wasn’t she? She was waiting for him to call and crying because he wasn’t calling.”

71 RECROQUEVILLÉ “Yeah,” I say. That’s usually allLE I say.

There is never very much to add.

Becky is right, it’s pathetic.

ERIC SANTERRE 72

We have been friends for years, Marty, Becky and I. Nowadays, we have DYPTIQUE 24A less in common than ever but we like to try and stick together. For old times’ ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ sake I guess. Sometimes Marty will come over and we won’t have anything to talk about at all so she’ll say, “Let’s just sit outside and watch the Décarie.”

74 II; III I’ll say, “Ok,” and we’ll go out to the back porch and pass a cigarette back and forth.

ALLISON MURPHY We’ll point at the cars and say things like, “That man is a professional 76 taxidermist and he has a dead grizzly bear in the back seat.”

WINTER’S A BEACH “That woman hasn’t swallowed a piece of gum in eight years.” Things JESSICA SLIPP like that.

When Marty comes to the door I ask her77 what’s wrong.

“Did you go to his house again? CONTRIBUTORS Did you do something bad?”

She has been seeing him for a few months now. He works at some place that pays him a lot of money and he has a car. If you Google his name an ad on the Internet comes up with a photograph of him in a suit.

“No, it’s not an ad,” Marty said, “it’s a profile.” Some magazine profiled him as one of the city’s top bachelors. She showed us the picture. He is handsome, really handsome, like the kind of thing you’d see in a movie or something. “Have you ever fucked someone with a picture in a magazine?” March 2010. His favorite pastime is hiking. He drinks Guinness and his ideal woman is someone that is confident and classy.

“Except that he’s not really a bachelor,” Becky said. And it’s true.

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Art

Marty found the engagement ring in his sock drawer a week ago. What she was doing in the sock drawer doesn’t matter. That was last Monday. By Wednesday it was gone.

“What were you doing there on Wednesday?” Becky asked later when Marty told us the story, on Thursday morning. Usually he only agrees to see Marty once a week.

“I invited myself over,” she says. “I was drunk or something. I don’t know what I was thinking. I just went over there and called him. I said that I had to tell him something.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him I had to see him. I was outside his building, I told him he had to come down. He came down and I told him I had to come up, he told me I was drunk and called me a cab. I started to cry. I racked my brain for something to say that would make him stay with me. I told him I was pregnant, it was the first thing I could think of. I told him I was going to keep it and he was the father.”

“What did he say?”

He said, “‘How can you be so sure it’s mine?’ Something like that. Can you imagine? I started to yell. I said fuck you! The doorman was staring at us. Have I told you he has a doorman? Have you ever fucked someone with a doorman? I kept saying it, ‘I’m pregnant and you’re the father,’ I think by the third or fourth time I really believed it myself. He told me to be quiet. He said I had to calm down. He said I could come upstairs for a glass of water.

So we got upstairs and he told me to lie down on the couch. He went into the kitchen for the water and I ran into his bedroom, for the sock drawer. The ring was gone. He came in and said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said - God I can’t believe I said this - I said, ‘Why don’t you just punch me?’ And he said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Punch me in the face.’ I told him to punch me in the face.”

“Did he?”

“No, of course not. He told me to lie down. But I wouldn’t. I just told him

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to punch me again, but this time I was yelling, ‘Punch me, punch me, punch me.’ He looked at me like I was crazy. I think I just wanted him to touch me. I don’t know. I was drunk.”

“Marriage is so archaic,” Becky says.

Marty picks up my laptop from the coffee table and types his name into the search engine.

“Do you really think that’s going to make69you feel better? What’s wrong anyway? Did something happen?” BLACK VULTURES “The walls look different,” she says.

SHOSHANA WALFISH His picture comes up. He is wearing a black suit with a grey shirt. The 70 first three buttons are undone. His leg is up on a chair; his elbow is resting on BOTOXIC his bent knee. He is twenty-seven years old and his dream vacation is a beach PAYAM MONTAZAMI on the south of Italy. “Food, wine and a beautiful woman.”

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LE RECROQUEVILLÉ “He’s gay. He has to be. A big gaymo,” says Marty.

“You shouldn’t talk like that,” I say.

ERIC SANTERRE “Why? You should hear the way he talks to me.” She digs the back of her 72 head into the couch and groans.

DYPTIQUE 24A “Will you just tell me what happened?”

ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ “Nothing,” she says. “Nothing. Nothing happened. Can we just sit outside and watch the Décarie?”

74 II; III A truck zooms south. “He is going way too fast,” I say.

ALLISON MURPHY “He is going to see his wife. He’s not in love with her any more.”

76 “Why not?” I ask.

WINTER’S A BEACH “Because he’s in love with someone else. A younger woman. She is JESSICA SLIPP Puerto Rican but she speaks English perfectly. She makes him feel young again. He’s going to tell his wife he is leaving her.”

77 “Why is he in such a hurry?”

CONTRIBUTORS “Because he’s not in love with her anymore and wants the rest of his life to start right away.”

“Does the Puerto Rican know?”

“The Puerto Rican knows everything. She studies psychology and can tell what you are thinking just by looking at your eyebrows.”

The ring was engraved. “My love forever, Chantal.” Chantal, that is her name, can you imagine? Marty has shown us her Facebook profile picture.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” And it’s true, she is. She is standing in front of an evergreen tree in a long skirt and no shoes. They’ve been together three years and she’s French, like French from France – this is something that really puts Marty in a mood.

39 67

FRANKIE BARNET

DÉCARIE

Marty won’t tell me what happened. She walks past me into the living room and sits down on the couch.

“Do you want a glass of water?”

“Becky’s not here is she?”

“No.” Marty is tall which makes you think she wouldn’t have the types of troubles she does but she does.

“I’m hot,” she says and takes off her sweater. Her skin is all red. “It’s hot in here, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” I say, because I haven’t been thinking about it.

“She lives near you, somewhere,” Marty said to me.

“How do you know that?” asks Becky. “How do you know any of this?”

“Because of this one time I fell asleep on the orange line,” said Marty. I had heard this story before but didn’t say anything. “I don’t remember where I was going. And it’s funny. I was having this dream about him where we were holding hands on the beach and he told me he loved me, except that we weren’t speaking English we were speaking Cantonese and it wasn’t really him it was Robert Downey Jr. And then I missed my stop completely. We were all the way at Vendôme but I looked up and I saw him, really him, on the next car. He was carrying a bouquet of flowers.”

“How do you know they were for her anyways?” Becky asks. “There could be more girls than just you.”

I give her a look.

“Look at him go,” Marty points to a small car heading north. “He is going to visit his sister,” Marty says, “she’s sick in the hospital. Cancer.”

“Uhuh,” I nod.

“And all she does is masturbate, all day long, even when he visits, and he says, ‘please, please stop fingering yourself.’ And it barely even feels good, because she’s so wacked out, her fingers are tired but she’s like, ‘fuck you I have cancer and I can do whatever I want.’” Marty passes me the cigarette, “she’s going to be ok though, don’t worry.”

“That woman,” I point to a minivan, “only sleeps with one pillow. She used her other pillow to make her Halloween costume. She was a cupcake.

She went to a party where she didn’t know a single person except for the friend who she went to the party with.”

“Did they have a good time?”

“The cupcake lady did but she doesn’t know it yet. She met a man she’s going to fall in love with, but she won’t fall in love with him for another ten years. She’s going to fall in love with someone else first, and get her heart broken. But then she’ll meet this man, this man who was dressed up as Indiana Jones, they’ll meet each other and probably never even know that they were at the same Halloween party, ten years before.”

What neither Becky or Marty know is that I’ve seen her, Chantal. Walking down Sherbrooke. She was wearing leggings and a heavy scarf. It covered most of her face but you could tell from how shiny her hair was that she was beautiful. I followed her for two blocks. Why not? It was a Sunday and I didn’t have anything else to do. Marty is my friend. I wondered which one of them loved him more. Chantal walked into an apartment building and I went home. When I got home I drew myself a bath but the water was too hot. So I sat naked on the bathmat and waited. I picked nail polish off my fingers and

40

thought for a long time about what it would feel like to be that beautiful.

“Do you think she knows about me?” Marty asks.

“Probably not, if she’s going to marry him,” I say.

“Who am I for them to even talk about me?”

I can see her point.

“They are both too good looking to even69consider my existence.”

BLACK VULTURES “Marty, you are pretty. Really. You are really, really pretty. It’s not worth getting this upset over. You can doSHOSHANA way better than him.”

WALFISH She turns to me with this look.

70 “Shut up? Just shut up ok? It’s not something I would expect you to unBOTOXIC derstand. You don’t get it. What it’s like. How I’m feeling. I need him. I need PAYAM MONTAZAMI him to touch me or I don’t know, I don’t know. I need him to fuck me and it doesn’t matter how much it hurts. When he touches me something happens 71 LEbody RECROQUEVILLÉ and it’s like I’m not me anymore. My is melting away. I’m no one, I’ve disappeared.”

ERIC SANTERRE 72

A Volkswagen Beetle merges onto Sherbrooke.

DYPTIQUE 24A How did he ask her to marry him? Surely this is something we have both ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ thought about. Maybe even Becky. Did he get down on one knee? Did he rehearse the speech in the mirror hours before?74Is he nervous? Is he sweating?

II; III Did they fuck afterwards?

I lie in my bed and think aboutALLISON this. Marty has passed out on the couch.

MURPHY No, after he proposed to her they did not fuck, they made love. Making love, 76 being in love, love forever, Chantal. The most beautiful woman in the neighWINTER’S A BEACH borhood, maybe the whole city. How long are her legs exactly? How much JESSICA SLIPP does he love her? To the moon, to the moon.

My breath gets slow. Yes, Marty, you were right, it is hot in this apart77 ment.

This isn’t me. This is somethingCONTRIBUTORS I rarely do. I rarely even think about it.

How long did they make love for and which shapes did their bodies make? Does she tie her long hair back or keep it loose, tickling his chest as she gets on top of him and they rock back and forth. Something you’d see in a movie, I’d imagine. He runs his fingers along her body. What am I doing? This isn’t me. This isn’t something that I ever do. And with Marty in the next room.

Imagining someone else’s hands on my body. Imagining it wasn’t my body at all. Imagining it was Chantal’s body. These were her legs and her stomach. Her breasts. And it wasn’t even my hands touching her, they were his hands. His hands on her body. Is this how it goes? The feeling of somebody loving somebody else, being desired. Her nipples harden in between his fingers. Are you going to make me disappear? Chantal, Chantal, Chantal. She

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FRANKIE BARNET

DÉCARIE

Art

Art

“That man is an American.” Marty is talking about a blue sedan. “His favorite president is John Adams but he doesn’t know why. He has a silver dollar collection that he doesn’t like to talk about. The best time of year is the beginning of Fall, when the nights start getting cool.”

She passes me the cigarette. I only smoke when she’s around.

“Somewhere someone is in love with him. Somebody cries about him, somebody is crying about him right now. Somewhere someone is seething mad at all of the other people who get to see him, the mailman and whoever he rides the elevator with. Who get to look at him and smell him and don’t even realize that the greatest thing in the world is happening right in front of them. It’s silly, because he’s just some guy, he’s probably going to go bald soon and I bet he picks his nose when he thinks no one is looking.”

I look at Marty and neither of us say anything for a little while. It’s dark outside and I itch a mosquito bite.

“I’m sorry I didn’t help you paint the walls that one time,” she says.

“That’s ok,” I say, because it is.

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BLACK VULTURES SHOSHANA WALFISH 70

BOTOXIC PAYAM MONTAZAMI 71

LE RECROQUEVILLÉ ERIC SANTERRE 72

DYPTIQUE 24A ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ

FRANKIE BARNET

DÉCARIE

arches her back. This is what you are doing to me. Driving me wild. Yes, there, deeper, deeper. Is this how his hands work? Fingers through her hair, he whispers in her ear. Yes. Yes. Let’s disappear. He reaches inside of her as deep as he can, to the right, to the left. Yes. Higher, higher, yes. Chantal, Chantal.

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II; III ALLISON MURPHY 76

WINTER’S A BEACH JESSICA SLIPP 77

CONTRIBUTORS

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SOAP & SEX FORREST ORSER

Art

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Measuring laundry detergent always reminds me of casual sex with a woman named Paula.

“Paula seems nice,” I said to Dave.

He said, “She’s a whore.”

“Don’t call a woman that.”

“Before I met her, she slept with all my friends. After I met her, my friends told me that she’d slept with everybody.

69 And she knew they told me.

BLACK VULTURES And then she slept with me. Wouldn’t you call her a whore?”

“I’d say she likes to screw,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with that.

SHOSHANA WALFISH Women should be able to do whatever they want. We can. You can screw lots 70 of women and no one will ever call you a whore.”

BOTOXIC Not long after that I ran into Paula at the Cosmopolitan Club and PAYAM MONTAZAMI said, “Hi, Paula!” I was glad to see her.

She glared at me. It made me mad then, but looking back on it I 71 LEand RECROQUEVILLÉ think she was probably mad at Dave was rude to me because she thought I was Dave’s friend. He’d probably been rude to her, he’d probably treated her ERIC SANTERRE like a whore.

72 A month later I walked into the Regent Street Laundromat and there DYPTIQUE 24A she was, waiting for her clothes to dry. She smiled at me.

ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ I wonder now what would have happened if I had smiled back.

But I didn’t—I ignored her. I was still74mad at her for being rude to II; IIIme though because I put way me at Cosmo. I guess her being there unnerved too much soap in the washer. Back then, I didn’t measure the soap, I just ALLISON MURPHY poured it out of the box and guessed how much I needed. It usually worked 76 fine. But not this time. When I went back to the laundromat an hour later, my WINTER’S A BEACH clothes were coated in suds from being washed in too much soap.

JESSICA SLIPP And Paula was gone.

I ran my clothes through again, they were fine.

And now, 35 years later, every time I77 measure soap for the washing CONTRIBUTORS machine, I think of casual sex with Paula.

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BEAR ACTOR? MADELEINE LEE

THE OLDEST LIVING

WHO IS

Art

At 36, Benjamin the Grizzly is the oldest living bear actor, if he is still alive at all. His most famous role was in the 1977 film Heartless, based on the infamous Black Bear Trials of 1962. Benjamin played an innocent bear who found himself at the centre of legal conflict after a young woman was found dead, mauled by a bear. Critics praised his complex, finely nuanced portrayal, and Pauline Kael even proposed that he be long-listed for an Acad1 emy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.

69 Benjamin seemed destined BLACK VULTURES for greatness.

But in 1979 he was charged with second-degree SHOSHANA WALFISHmurder for mauling a 14-year old girl at a party that took place at Jack Nicholson’s house in Los 70 Angeles. This was a few days before he was to begin shooting a picture with BOTOXIC him in a star-making secondary role. Not wanting to indict the entire bear PAYAM MONTAZAMI community,2 he willingly went into exile in Canada, where he knew he could 3 not be extradited.

71 RECROQUEVILLÉ Modern opinion differs onLE Benjamin’s culpability. Some, particularly members of the Hollywood establishment, see only his (considerable) ERIC SANTERRE talent and praise him highly, turning a blind eye to his crimes. Others label 72 him a “brutal savage” and think he should be tagged and captured immediDYPTIQUE 24A ately, periodically circulating petitions demanding the cooperation of the ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ Canadian government in forcing Benjamin back onto American soil where he 4 can be captured and tried.

74 II; III however, interest in the For most of the non-film historian public, over 30-year old case has faded, andALLISON the nameMURPHY Benjamin the Grizzly has largely diminished from the public consciousness.

76 Today, Benjamin remains at large and untagged. It has been WINTER’S A BEACH rumoured that he has since become friends with Atom Egoyan and Guy JESSICA SLIPP Maddin and made cameo appearances in their films,5 but these reports are 6 unsubstantiated.

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CONTRIBUTORS

1. Unfortunately, the incident was still too fresh in the public’s mind for the Academy to even consider honouring a bear, let alone a bear acting in a (otherwise sensationalist) reenactment of the incident.

2. As per the laws set out following the Black Bear Trials (J. Lazarus v. Bear Zero 1962), if one bear is guilty of a crime, then the entire bear community is held responsible and will be punished accordingly. Because of his fame, Benjamin knew there was no way he could avoid this.

3. In northern Ontario, where bears tend to stay away from human settlements, local laws surrounding bears are more concerned with population preservation than with criminal activity.

4. As of publication, the Government of Canada has continued to decline comment on the affair and their plan to handle it.

5. As recently as May 2007 it was rumoured that Maddin had shot footage of Benjamin for The Saddest Music in the World (2003), but that the film had been destroyed in a freak hair dryer accident.

6. As recently as September 2010 Egoyan repeatedly denied even the knowledge of who Benjamin the Grizzly was and told the author to “quit bothering [him] and let [him] walk down the [expletive deleted] street in peace.”

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BLACK CLOUDS JEREMY HANSON-FINGER

Art

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When the glaciers receded, they left behind boulders that now rise from the middle of the river like God’s own teeth. Most are spread out, at least twenty feet apart, but some of them are impacted, jammed together, forming a cave the river flows through.

We went to the cave that fall to make a movie. The script was inspired by an idle fantasy I’d had about a girl and the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. I mean, the fantasy was about a girl, and the other inspiration was Sartre-–his play ‘No 69 BLACK VULTURES Exit,’ the one with the line “Hell is other people.”

I think I’ll talk about the fantasy first. Sex over Sartre makes a pretty good mantra, especially when you’re SHOSHANA WALFISH seventeen.

70 Let’s call the girl in the fantasy V. One drowsy morning, I imagined myself BOTOXIC and V naked in the cave. I’d been there once before with some other people– PAYAM MONTAZAMI -not V or the film club boys, Aidan and Nagendra-–and none of us had been naked. Still, I could extrapolate.

71 LE RECROQUEVILLÉ The cave was white with foam from the snowmelt-swollen river.

“It’s like we’re standing on a cloud,”ERIC I saidSANTERRE to V while we still had our swimsuits on.

72 “It’s beautiful,” she said.

DYPTIQUE 24A “Like heaven is really underground.”

ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ “That’s such a poetic way to describe it.”

“If heaven’s underground, we’ve got to rethink a lot of other things too.”

74 III do we get to heaven? Is it by I leaned against the cave’s inside wall. “Like, II; how being good? Or,” I leered, “by being bad?”

ALLISON MURPHY That stunned her with my edge. Sure, any asshole who hit the gym could 76 be a tough guy, but I had just shown her I could handle real hardship, the uniWINTER’S A BEACH versal questions of birth and death and how to behave in between.

JESSICA SLIPP “Well,” she said. Her lips twitched upward and her gaze focused on my mouth. “By being bad of course.”

Then I moved in for the kill by bringing up sin 77 and the ways we could commit CONTRIBUTORS it. Which we then did, of course, repeatedly and with great abandon.

Of course, the fantasy never actualized. I couldn’t have just said “let there be sexual intercourse after a really weird philosophical run-up” and gone at it unless I spent my time sitting on a cumulonimbus, hurling lightning bolts and grinning through teeth as big as boulders.

The script for the movie explored ideas of the afterlife and sin and V was in it. I conducted myself with the utmost decorum, however. I didn’t tell Aidan or Nagendra that my fantasy had inspired the film and I certainly didn’t tell V. When I pitched This Last of Meeting Places to everyone, I just said it had come from reading Sartre and Eliot, and V would be perfect for the female part. I mean, she was a talented actor. It was an unremarkable choice. My decorum was so absolute that I even had Aidan act in the movie, not me.

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Art

Aidan and V stood on the floor of the cave with the water up to their shoulders. The spray soaked my script as I directed from a rock outcropping. I shouted into a bullhorn so everyone could hear me over the sound of the water.

The microphone was oval and white so it looked like I was yelling at an egg.

Although the actors’ voices were clear in Nagendra’s headphones, there was too much background hiss to keep the audio. We’d have to dub in all the dialogue later.

Nagendra’s pants were rolled up to his knees and he’d set two legs of the tripod in the water. He also behaved with total decorum. I trusted his shot composition followed the rule of thirds and didn’t just creep on V’s body at 32X magnification.

Not that I would’ve been jealous. It just wouldn’t have fit in my overall plan for the film, which was far more philosophical than sexual. My interest in V was only an idle fantasy one morning. She took everything far too seriously for me to even bother trying.

Aidan was telling V how this cave didn’t match his idea of the afterlife, just as the script directed him to.

“It’s so beautiful down here,” he said. “But why is heaven underground?”

He shivered a little. “And why is it so wet?” The water had started to cool again.

It was September and the sunlight hours were diminishing.

“I don’t know. Maybe God lives underwater,” said V. “Maybe,” said Aidan. “In Genesis, right at the start, it says something about how when God made the heavens, he divided all the water on the earth in half so some was below the heavens and some was above. So maybe God does live underwater. Maybe we’re in the water above the heavens.” He looked up at the ceiling of the cave.

I’d thought about including the landscape outside the cave in the film as well, but the river ran through a steep canyon, so there wasn’t really anywhere to put the camera for a good ground-level establishing shot. And at the top of the cliffs, watching over the cave, was a film studio that the builders had never finished. There’d been a fire or something and the company went bankrupt.

Having it in the frame would have ruined the whole “alone in the afterlife” concept. It was creepy, this Gothic house overlooking the ravine, and it made us nervous, unsure of ourselves. We felt naked before its eyeless gaze.

We just felt naked, though. Nobody was full-on au naturel, even if the characters were supposed to be to get the reference across. Decorum was observed-–I’ve said that already. I wore Hawaiian-flowered shorts, orange ones. Nagendra wore rolled up Levis. Aidan wore black swim trunks. And V wore a black bikini. We didn’t know V well enough to ask her to take it off, and

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anyway, like us, she was seventeen.

It’d be a little sketchy making a film with a naked seventeen-year-old girl. I mean, what would we do with it afterwards? I had high hopes of film festivals.

In the end we decided we’d just edit the black fabric out in post by making it match the colour of the water.

“I wonder what happens next?” said Aidan.

“Next?” V said.

69 VULTURES “Floating in this cave. Staring at BLACK the walls.

Next?”

“I’m hungry.”

SHOSHANA WALFISH Aidan told her they didn’t need to eat; their bodies were somewhere else.

70 It was like how amputees sometimes feel a phantom limb, except now they BOTOXIC were phantoms themselves. And anyway, she couldn’t starve to death, not PAYAM MONTAZAMI here, since not being able to die was part of the definition.

“Well, what about the water?” she said. “That’s not part of it either.”

71 LE RECROQUEVILLÉ *ERIC * * SANTERRE 72

V turned her body to face Aidan, diverting the foam that swirled around DYPTIQUE 24A her into a new, curvier path.

ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ “Either way, let’s assume we’re going to be here forever. Do you remember The Time Machine by H.G. Wells? Will our brains 74 atrophy like the Eloi? There’s II;it, III here, to keep us keen, and–-” no ‘grindstone of pain and necessity’ as he put She stopped because apparently the ALLISON line sounded forced and unnatural coming MURPHY from her character.

76 “Cut,” I said. “V! Why didn’t you tell me that before? Like when you first WINTER’S A BEACH read the script or when we did all those rehearsals?” I didn’t actually call her V. JESSICA SLIPP I used her real name. Each syllable was a chunk of soft pear sliding along my tongue, even though I was very angry.

“I’m sorry.” She shrugged. “When we did 77 those rehearsals in McIntyre’s CONTRIBUTORS classroom it was hard to get into the right frame of mind with all the hackysack kids watching us through the window. Now we’re in the water, I’m really sensing my character on a whole new level. I just don’t feel like she’d rattle off a quote there.”

I told the others I needed a minute to think, then took a deep breath of mostly spray and coughed it out again. ‘Grindstone of pain and necessity’ was the best line in the film and V wanted to take it away from me.

When I’d been writing the script, hunched over my computer and ringed by dirty plates, I’d remembered Wells saying that in a perfect utopia, natural selection would favour the weak over the strong. I’d spent an hour looking for the quotation in the library’s copy of The Time Machine while old men had thumbed through old newspapers at the table next to me, and when I’d found

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it, a surge of heat had rippled through my entire body: an immaculate, intellectual orgasm. Now I felt the opposite. Cold waves lapped against the fleshy stalagmites of my organs.

“I always thought that bit drew attention to itself,” said Aidan, “but I didn’t want to screw with your vision.” He rubbed his arms, trying to rally the blood cells that had retreated from the water.

“Nagendra?” I could rely on him. We shared the same image of the completed film–-we had reached Gleichschaltung, a term McIntyre had explained to us the other day. Without the fascist connotations, of course. (Originally the word referred to the use of a mechanical clutch to make machine parts spin together; the Nazis had co-opted it to describe a policy of “forcible-coordination.”)

“It’s a really neat idea, though if you want me to be honest–-” “I do.”

“Well, it just seems like it came straight out of a philosophy textbook.

Nobody talks like that, with handy bite-size quotations, unless they’re giving a presentation.”

“Fine,” I said. “Fine.”

“We’ll lose that section. So then it’ll just go–-” I looked down at the script.

“Well, the next four lines all have to do with The Time Machine, so from V saying ‘What if it’s not the end but the start? What if it’s a new Eden?’ to V saying ‘Do you not want to talk anymore?’ That won’t work. We need that part or it’ll mess everything up.”

V pushed her red-brown hair out of her eyes. “What if Aidan just doesn’t say anything between those two lines? I feel like that’s even more powerful than the one-word responses he gives me in the script.”

That was true. Aidan’s stony face could carry the meaning just as well as his bottomless voice.

“Fine,” I said, just once. My Bic ripped right through the damp paper when I crossed off the lines.

“Take it from ‘What if it’s not the end?’”

Aidan slipped his arms back into the water. “Let’s do it.”

The actors composed their faces to represent the puzzled melancholy of those who found themselves alone in a surprisingly wet afterlife following the end of the world.

Nagendra bent down to the camera. “Rolling,” he said.

I looked up at the skeletal studio. What masterpieces had the filmmakers there dreamed of that would never be realized?

“Action,” I shouted at the egg. ***

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Now we were coming to the embrace.

“Remember to keep it platonic and spiritual,” I said.

Nagendra smirked. “Let’s just check how it looks on the screen. Make sure we can get both of you in the shot.”

“All right, if you think so. Let’s run it from ‘Who are we kidding?’ Ready?

Action.”

Aidan’s granite face softened and crumbled.

69 “Who are we kidding about BLACK VULTURES all this-–all this–-I’m terrified.”

V’s arms rose serpentine from SHOSHANA the water. Droplets shimmered on her skin, WALFISH dew on summer fruit. Her fingers skimmed Aidan’s neck and she stepped 70 towards him, her movements slow and blurry as the river resisted this ineviBOTOXIC table coming-together. He put his hands on her shoulders, held her in place a PAYAM MONTAZAMI chivalrous distance away.

“Can you get pregnant in heaven?” he said.

71 LE RECROQUEVILLÉ “What!”

“No, I didn’t mean it like that, notERIC how it applies to us. How it applies to SANTERRE heaven. If each couple had only one child--does time pass? Wait, does time 72 pass?”

DYPTIQUE 24A “It doesn’t matter.”

ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ “We’re here for eternity.”

“Well, we have eternity to find out.”

74 II; III him, wrapped himself around “Come here,” he said. He pulled her towards her long dancer’s body.

ALLISON MURPHY She put her head against his chest and her hair floated in the current like 76 auburn seaweed.

WINTER’S A BEACH “Okay, cut. Get back to your places and let’s do it for real,” I said. “Then JESSICA SLIPP we’ll move on to V’s close-up.” Just three chaste embraces till the end of the day.

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CONTRIBUTORS ***

Nagendra suggested Aidan and V head back to the van to warm up even though we still had to shoot some cutaways of the foam and the rocks and then pack up the gear.

Aidan had turned ghostly around the lips, so I threw him my keys once he’d towelled himself off and the two of them began to hike up the path, past the abandoned film studio toward the logging road. V was rubbing Aidan’s back to help restore his circulation as they left, which seemed reasonable.

Nagendra got carried away with one shot where the spray refracted the sunlight coming in through the tiny holes in the ceiling, and he wanted to use it as the opening for the film, so we stayed in the cave for a while longer. By the

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BLACK CLOUDS

Art

time we arrived at the trailhead, where the river reached the road, my whole body was buoyant. The city’s independent festival would screen This Last of Meeting Places for sure. I mean, it had a brilliant script, heartbreaking acting and a location that was both ominous and sublime. My vision had-The van was rocking rhythmically and condensation obscured the windows. Nagendra started to laugh. He dropped the camera case on the ground and clutched at his stomach.

“Oh man,” he said. “In your van too.”

I raised my hand. Black cumulonimbus clouds scudded overhead. A million flashes of lightning made my face harsh and terrible as I slid open the door. Aidan and V were naked, truly naked, no post-production needed. I grabbed Aidan by the hair and dragged him out. V followed him, hands placed chastely to cover herself. Aidan stood limp and exposed. Bolts arced and sizzled all around them. They squirmed and contorted to avoid each jagged flash. I controlled the lightning, placed each bolt just so.

Terror was sacred. Death would be a cop-out. My decorum was absolute.

One of the pine trees burst into flame, barring the way back up the path.

Smoke drifted around us. A faint smell of lemons mixed with the ozone tang of electricity.

“Get out,” I said. “All of you.”

“How will we survive?” said Aidan.

“Till the earth. In sorrow. For the rest of your days. And you--” I looked over at Nagendra, “you’d better crawl.”

And so they slunk, naked, down the dirt road. I lowered my hand. The lightning stopped. The clouds dispersed, revealing a rich cerulean that the river mirrored in its smooth, slow surface. A wedge of geese flapped past the burning tree, gaining altitude in the heated air.

Then I rested. And it was good.

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BLACK VULTURES SHOSHANA WALFISH 70

BOTOXIC PAYAM MONTAZAMI 71

LE RECROQUEVILLÉ ERIC SANTERRE 72

JEREMY HANSON-FINGER

BLACK CLOUDS

Art

DYPTIQUE 24A ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ 74

II; III ALLISON MURPHY 76

WINTER’S A BEACH JESSICA SLIPP 77

CONTRIBUTORS

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Art

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BLACK VULTURES SHOSHANA WALFISH 70

SUPPOSE YOU ALEX MANLEY

BOTOXIC PAYAM MONTAZAMI 71

LE RECROQUEVILLÉ ERIC SANTERRE 72

DYPTIQUE 24A ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ 74

II; III ALLISON MURPHY 76

WINTER’S A BEACH JESSICA SLIPP 77

CONTRIBUTORS

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Art

Suppose you drop six hundred dollars on supplies and convert your ex-roommate’s ex-bedroom cum ex-girlfriend’s ex-jam space to a little studio. Suppose you decide to filter Picasso through Mondrian and polish the product with Warhol. Suppose you are pretty enough to take a picture of and forward-thinking, too. Suppose the Internet helps you to get famous, that there is a buzz and a word of a mouth and suppose you go viral.

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Q: Suppose you have already decided to be dead.

Suppose you have gotten that part out of the way with. Suppose you’ve fixed it in your mind, like a bathtub drain you can slowly circle, choked with someone else’s hair.

Suppose you haven’t told anyone. Suppose you haven’t bought the gun; suppose you haven’t had the prescription filled. Suppose you haven’t written the note, updated your will, planned it out. Suppose you haven’t had sushi for the last time yet. Suppose you have a season left of The Wire to watch.

Suppose you recant. Suppose the kindness of a stranger—a closing door held, a dropped glove returned—sparks something in you. Suppose you decide instead to be a genius painter, the next Rothko, the next Newman.

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II; III you’ve never even been Suppose you wouldn’t cheat at all. Suppose kissed and that’s why you wanted toALLISON die in theMURPHY first place. Suppose you wanted to be an astronaut, little cliché that you are. Suppose the idea of all 76 that emptiness was reassuring to you, in the way people just like to do things WINTER’S A BEACH alone, if only to have a kingdom over something. Suppose you move to a JESSICA SLIPP cabin in Ontario for a summer, three months of nothing, just your thoughts and the heat and the deer flies. Suppose you’ve never seen Into the Wild and 77 don’t know any better. Suppose you wear buffalo plaid unironically. Suppose that is what is beauty to you, feelingCONTRIBUTORS the axe hit the bark, feeling the tug on the line, feeling the warmth on your palms from the fires you build as the sun dips below the treeline. Suppose you don’t even keep a diary because your body is a page and the hairs growing inexorably from your skin are words enough for anyone to read your story by. Suppose you come back in September, and everything is different—but not a bad different.

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SUPPOSE YOU

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VULTURES Suppose you are less ambitious BLACK than that.

Suppose you decide to move to a mid-sized city in Italy, get a job as a tour-guide because your English is SHOSHANA WALFISH impeccably not-Italian, brush up on all the landmarks, and grow a garden 70 on your balcony. Suppose you find a beautiful man to love whose faults you BOTOXIC will not see until it is too late. Suppose you have your parents’ ideas about PAYAM MONTAZAMI divorce, and you vow to stick it out. Suppose you return home to Wichita, for the holidays, alone, and spend a night making out in the back seat of a 71 LE RECROQUEVILLÉ ‘78 Camino, drunk on Canadian Club, with your high school crush, Ryan.

Suppose that trip to the early ninetiesERIC is what keeps you going when you get SANTERRE back to your garden and the cat your husband bought for you while you were 72 gone, which you leave unnamed. Suppose you can handle sleeping in sepaDYPTIQUE 24A rate rooms, so long as he’ll still do the dishes, clean them until they’re barely ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ even there, and he’ll still fuck you after the fights.

Art

Suppose you go on a game show and place dead second. Suppose you get a job working for a funeral parlour and find someone who shares your balloon fetish online. Suppose you make a meagre living selling t-shirts with cats on them to grannies. Suppose you get down on one knee and you can see it in her eyes that she’ll need a day or two before she’ll say yes. Suppose you convert to Buddhism the week after you cave and start eating meat again. Suppose you start a band with your best bud from back in the day, and you let him have creative control. Suppose he names it something stupid, like DJs, but his twin sister blows you on her sofa after your second show. Suppose your youngest cousin gets an agent and there’s a minor bidding war for his feature film debut. Suppose you are just a boxing match between Jesus and a drug cartel. Suppose your wife wins a million in the lottery and leaves you, and you never find out that she took Ellen, who used to babysit the kids on the weekends, down to Punta Cana with her. Suppose your drinking is beginning to be a problem. Suppose you just seem to get sad in the winter.

Suppose one morning you uninterestedly masturbate for the last time.

What then?

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A: _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 69 _______________________________________________________ BLACK VULTURES _______________________________________________________ SHOSHANA WALFISH _______________________________________________________ 70 BOTOXIC _______________________________________________________ PAYAM MONTAZAMI _______________________________________________________ 71 _______________________________________________________ LE RECROQUEVILLÉ _______________________________________________________ ERIC SANTERRE _______________________________________________________ 72 DYPTIQUE 24A _______________________________________________________ ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ _______________________________________________________ 74 _______________________________________________________ II; III _______________________________________________________ ALLISON MURPHY _______________________________________________________ 76 _______________________________________________________ WINTER’S A BEACH JESSICA SLIPP _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 77 _______________________________________________________ CONTRIBUTORS _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ ____________________________

ALEX MANLEY

SUPPOSE YOU

Or suppose the pull inside of you was for dollars instead. Suppose you grew up poor, no name shoes, no name foods, all purchases on sale or couponed. Suppose all your friends were rich because of the schools you went to, and the people you gravitated towards. Suppose you got sick of being the poor friend at some point. Suppose you were working jobs when everyone else was still writing poems or playing guitar. Suppose eventually your income outstripped their allowance. Suppose you didn’t buy yourself nice clothes and kept letting them pay for lunch. Suppose you didn’t even put it in the bank but just kept it in your room in a folded manila envelope under or behind or inside something. Suppose you would go to sleep holding that money in your mind, pressing on it with your thoughts until you could feel it, until those bills were all nerves in a phantom limb, glowing, glowing in the dark. Suppose one day you give it all away—not to charity, not to anyone.

Suppose you leave it in a public place where someone will find it—in a shopping cart in the supermarket parking lot, or maybe on a bench uptown, on an empty, rainless day, and return through the inscrutable November night to your one-bedroom, that pain in your gut not gone but rearranged a little bit.

Suppose that lets you live.

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REFORM OF 1945 RUSSELL HELMS

ORTHOGRAPHIC

THE BULGARIAN

Art

Terence stood on his head in the corner. He used to make soup for the homeless.

Amelia lay in bed bleeding. She wasn’t sure from where. She worked at the Green Stamp store near the bridge. Rain blew in the open window.

“Help me,” said Terence.

“I’m pregnant,” said Amelia. “The sheet needs washing.”

Under the bed, Terence saw a steak knife, a sock and balls of pink fuzz.

69 said Amelia.

“I’m bleeding. The bullet hole is weeping,” BLACK VULTURES “I thought the bullet hole was okay,” said Terence. He felt a warmth gathering in his beard.

SHOSHANA WALFISH Amelia scanned his smooth legs and swollen face. She saw the bottle of 70 vanilla extract on the floor. It was easier to steal than whiskey. They were broke.

BOTOXIC He had colon cancer. She missed her piano lessons.

PAYAM MONTAZAMI The weight of Terence’s body drove his face into the floor, twisting his ropey neck. Foam seethed between his loose teeth. 71 RECROQUEVILLÉ Amelia figured her fistula was LE how Terence had gotten her pregnant. But the redheaded woman Gina next door had shotSANTERRE her husband Andrei right about then.

ERIC The bullet had blown through his cods, burst through the plaster in Amelia’s tiny 72 bedroom, nicked the music stand on the piano, pierced Amelia’s secret place, and DYPTIQUE 24A zipped into Scarlet’s apartment next door. Scarlet worked nights and had a heart ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ condition. The paper probably mentioned it.

Amelia inched her way to the side of the 74 bed, a glow rising in her chest. She II; ankles III pulled Terence’s tattered underpants over his and forced the little brown bottle through tangled hair rimmingALLISON an orificeMURPHY tattooed like an eye. She was going to be a mother after all and hopefully Terence was the father. Their neighbour 76 Andrei was a conniving Commie linguist with coke-bottle glasses. He deserved to WINTER’S A BEACH have his cods shot off. She peeled off her fake mustache. Maybe things would work JESSICA SLIPP out after all.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Forrest Orser Forrest Orser has had 11 poems and one short story published, as well as one short story accepted for publication. Since 1978 he has worked first as a reporter and then as an editor for The Daily Gleaner, Fredericton’s newspaper.

Madeleine Lee Madeleine Lee is from Toronto. She studied Creative Writing, Linguistics, and Film Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. Her favourite famous bear is Paddington Bear.

Jeremy Hanson-Finger Jeremy Hanson-Finger attended Carleton University, where he wrote his MA thesis on dirty bits in postmodern American novels. He now lives in Toronto, where he is the co-editor of Dragnet Mag (dragnetmag.net). He is currently working on a collection of short stories entitled Airplanes and Bad Things Happening to Women.

Let it be known, however, that he likes women and doesn’t want bad things to happen to them”

Frankie Barnet Hailing from Edmonton, Alberta, Frankie Barnet is a young writer currently living in Montreal. She attends Concordia University in the field of English Literature and Creative Writing.

Alex Manley Alex Manley is a 22-year-old Creative Writing major at Concordia born and bred on the island of Montreal. He is currently the Copy Editor of Concordia’s The Link newspaper, which was kind enough to publish some of his short fiction prior to his tenure there.

He’s approaching two years as a vegetarian, and recently converted his star sign from Virgo to Scorpio, describing the results so far as ‘promising.’

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BLACK VULTURES SHOSHANA WALFISH 70

BOTOXIC PAYAM MONTAZAMI 71

LE RECROQUEVILLÉ ERIC SANTERRE 72

DYPTIQUE 24A ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ 74

II; III ALLISON MURPHY 76

WINTER’S A BEACH JESSICA SLIPP 77

CONTRIBUTORS

Russell Helms Russell Helms is the Managing Editor for Jelly Bucket and has recent stories in Assembly Journal, antiTHESIS, Qarrtsiluni and other journals, and a story in the fiction anthology a la carte (2010) from Main Street Rag.

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BLACK VULTURES SHOSHANA WALFISH 70

BOTOXIC PAYAM MONTAZAMI 71

LE RECROQUEVILLÉ ERIC SANTERRE 72

DYPTIQUE 24A ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ 74

II; III ALLISON MURPHY 76

WINTER’S A BEACH JESSICA SLIPP 77

CONTRIBUTORS

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BOTOXIC

LE RECROQUEVILLÉ

PAYAM MONTAZAMI

ERIC SANTERRE

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DYPTIQUE 24A ADRIAN BRACISIEWICZ

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AUTHOR

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III ALLISON MURPHY

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CONTRIBUTORS

Adrian Bracisiewicz Adrian Bracisiewicz was born in Warsaw, Poland. He arrived in Canada when he was 9 years old. Adrian went back to live in Poland from 2004 to 2008, where he had the opportunity to travel around Europe. He studied Cinema, Fine Arts and Photography at CEGEP Saint-Laurent and Dawson College. Adrian is now an undergraduate 1st year student in Art Education at Concordia, where he wants to combine two of his passions, Art and Education.

WINTER’S A BEACH JESSICA SLIPP

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Payam Montazami Payam Montazami is a Montreal based artist who graduated with honours from Concordia University’s Faculty of Arts with a minor in Electro-Acoustics. His first love was with the world of electronic and digital arts. His minimalistinteractive installation pieces were exhibited at shows such as the Montreal S.A.T. Interactive Arts Exhibit, and nominated as best of show on numerous occasions for being innovative, inventive and entertaining. In 2008, he decided take a break from the digital world and concentrate on traditional arts. Completely self-taught, he has since been working on his surrealist mixed media series entitled Slices of the Perverse.

Allison Murphy Allison Murphy was born in 1990 in Nova Scotia, Canada, of Welsh descent.

She stuttered through Nova Scotia private schools until graduating from boarding school in the wilds of New Brunswick. She is currently pursuing a degree in English Literature with a minor in Russian Literature and World Cinemas at McGill University in Montreal, where recollected spirits of Celtic mythology and the sea still throw long shadows across francophone city blocks.

Eric Santerre Eric Santerre is a self-taught artist whose passion for art manifests itself in many forms. In 2003, after years of drawing, Santerre started using the medium of paint to communicate his thoughts.

Though challenging at first, his infatuation with expressing himself through acrylic painting forced him to persevere with the task at hand. He discovered techniques of conveying his emotions and thoughts on canvas that in the past he had never been able to artistically capture as accurately. In his Montreal studio, Santerre continues to explore various facets of his universe and transmitting his findings on canvas. His language is unique and emotionally charged while his topics cover a broad range.

Jessica Slipp Jessica Slipp has recently completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography at Concordia University in Montreal. Her work is inspired by her inherent connection to landscape and the environment.

The piece, ‘Winter’s A Beach’, is part of her latest series titled, ‘As Is: Simple Observations and Interesting Findings,’ which plays with notions of human interaction with the environment and the underlying narratives contained within each image.

Shoshana Walfish Shoshana Walfish is a Montreal based artist working mainly in painting and illustration. She is currently completing her BFA at Concordia University and working as a freelance illustrator. Her work is fueled by her fascination with human behaviour, social/societal norms, her obsession with the human/animal connection as well as a trace of plushophilia. Upon graduation, she plans to travel the world in search of hairless guinea pigs, cinnamon buns and high speed trains.

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SOLILOQUIES 15 FALL 2011 Soliloquies c/o Concordia University, English Department 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West Montreal, Quebec Canada, HG3 1M8 soliloquies.concordia@gmail.com Find out about submission deadlines, keep up-to-date and watch for our push online at soliloquies.ca Follow us on Twitter: @_Soliloquies Graphic Design Sean Yendrys — seanyendrys.com

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Printed in Canada by Rubiks ISBN: 978-0-88947-484-3 Copyright © Soliloquies 2011

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