(
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parenthetical thirteen
may two thousand and sixteen
featuring stories by
jacob wren
F jeff blackman farah ghafoor adam gregory couri johnson liza edwards-levin m. jia ted elliot angela penticuff melanie power allison jane smith josh stewart
with work from
l thanks!
ISSN 2368-0199 fifteen dollars cdn
(parenthetical) issue thirteen may two thousand and sixteen
(parenthetical) issue #13 © 2016 all copyrights remain with respective contributors ISSN 2368-0199 (Print) ISSN 2368-0202 (Online) fonts used include Kingthings Trypewriter 2 © Kevin King 2010 FFF TUSJ © Magnus Cedarholm 2009
www.wordsonpagespress.com words(on)pages is: william kemp, co-founder and poetry editor nicole brewer, co-founder and fiction editor michael brewer, director of business operations
contents - issue thirteen Note from the Editors
geography of an inlet bone poetry by adam gregory An Elegy for My Grandfather poetry by Melanie Power The Stormchaser poetry by Josh Stewart The Women poetry by Allison Jane Smith 13 adorable photos of the animals of the Peterborough Zoo as they learn your son has been born (Not pictured, the camels Zahra and Gobi—your favourites) poetry by Jeff Blackman Passing Fancy fiction by Couri Johnson This is the beginning... Monomaniacal Sixty Sentences three stories by Jacob Wren [Muddy Children Puzzle] poetry by M. JIA melting poetry by Liza Edwards-Levin Are You a Man or a Ghost? poetry by Ted Elliot Rejuvenation poetry by Farah Ghafoor end poetry by Angela Penticuff
L thanks!
year three: holy shit Somehow, we are heading into our third year of this absurd little venture we call words(on)pages. Probably at least once a month, we’ve considered shutting it all down—because who doesn’t think about it? Quitting, giving up. But then we produce another issue of (parenthetical) with another (approximately) ten incredible writers who trusted us with their words—and we are inspired and encouraged, because they are all so amazing. And then someone tells us, out of the blue, that they really enjoyed something from an issue or two ago, and we are heartened and our flat little egos inflate a little, just enough to eke out another issue. You are all the best, is what we’re trying to say, and we would never have gotten this far without you. So we’re changing it up a little: we’re making more room for stories and poems in our print issues, and moving our non-fiction and reviews to an online-only format. We’re also excited to be bringing one “featured” writer to each issue: a writer we think is doing really exciting work in the CanLit community, solicited by the editors. This is the only solicitation we ever do, and the rest of each issue will remain curated entirely from our submissions. Our very first featured writer is Jacob Wren, author of (most recently) Rich and Poor, published this spring by BookThug. You’ll find three of his stories in between these covers, and if you venture over to our online issue, you’ll also find an interview. We’re excited to have Wren’s scathing, quick-witted writing in our two-year anniversary issue, and we hope you love it as much as we do. Here’s to year two, to year three. Here’s to you. To the future, whatever it looks like. Cheers,
Nicole & William #smallpressrevolution
geography of an inlet bone
oh, connective tissue of an antler: brittle boyhood brittle boy this beauty will make you strong
adam gregory
An Elegy for My Grandfather
My sister said you had soft tufts of white hair, and when she’d comb it for you, it’d puff up like clouds from the Atlantic’s grit the breeze on the sea blew into it, until you’d say: “Dat’s enough now, b’y,” a trademark phrase. You rose before dawn, and every day tracked the direction of the wind, the course of cod in Capelin Bay, recorded it all in your personal journal. I scour your scrawl for a sense of you, but the words are heavy, hard, unbending. “Northwestern winds today. Cold. No fish.” I know dying makes a martyr out of people, but you weren’t perfect— the good days had you trading salted cod to the Caribbean for its liquor— a fish stew and some dark rum worked magic on your unremitting tongue. The bad days had you marooned alone on dock, Southern Shore wind blowing through you like a hollow house. I was the last of your grandchildrendid you know it then? Did you ever hold me did you learn to love me in my brash bawl, in my tentative crawl?
Or did you puff your pipe, ornery, while the ladies swooned? Were you really crooked as sin, or do you, too, love the way cold light couches in a wave, think maybe beauty like that has a better chance than God at saving us? I walk the tarnished floors of the home you built—you are always here, hovering in air like thick salt that sits atop the sea, coating skin in saline film. Is that how you say I love you— in these carefully buffed blocks of wood? in the pattern of the kitchen’s tile? in the insulation lining the walls that still keeps us warm? or is your love as essential and unremarkable as the connective tissues of this shack that hold it upright still? And what of my poetry? It is the crack between us I call into, Poppy— and I never got to ask, but is it alright
L
if I call you that?
Melanie
Power
The Stormchaser
l thanks!
Josh Stewa rt
the science of the human senses hold your breath and count one mississippi two mississippi the distance between lightning and thunder speaks to you in cryptic silence to tell you if it is advancing or retreating an ancient form of sonar developed when we still shivered in caves as fire flinched in the wind but many things are measured by the distances between them the duration of their silences like a page ripped in half i see the lightning spark and fork in your eyes i hold my breath and begin counting
The Women
The women are not the same here. They circle their prey (their most willing prey) mouths open ready to strike. They are dressed to kill. Here the women pretend a predator can’t be a victim something is better than nothing and something doesn’t have to mean anything at all.
Allison Jane Smith
13 adorable photos of the animals of the Peterborough Zoo as they learn your son has been born (Not pictured, the camels Zahra and Gobi — your favourites)
The rhea is stunned you went natural. Suspended, the lemur is not surprised—he will shake your hand. The white-masked squirrel monkey, his hands & feet pollen-coloured, shimmies into view. Though he worries he’ll disturb he must see. The lynx? She is rolling in her snakeskin—she can’t even. The Sichaun takin turns a notch, visage suggesting pride. He too is pollen-coloured. The wallabies keep to the shade—they’ll call later; they appreciate the way the day ticks towards dawn. The sloth backs out his barrel to eat his ferns, one red eye on you like gentle surveillance, lazily daydreaming not the death of all things but a nap. The yak has no time for dreams. She roots at the grass—like your son, infinitely tougher than fine eyelashes suggest.
l thanks!
The two servals had no idea, and though their clearing’s fenced, infinite sky lands upon their spots. The Barbary sheep studying you wonders if you’ll cope through the night but the other Barbary sheep (also pictured) is indifferent on her cairn, recognizes you’re here—you’re standing. It takes four professionals to lift the boa. He cranes his head and acknowledges he is a monster but compensates grandly becoming garlands on his attendants’ shoulders. The macaws will tell everyone. As for the otter, contemplative at the pool’s edge? Yes even he must remind himself he can do this. And the grand camels, why aren’t they pictured? Is it they are in quarantine today, being needled and groomed? As Andrew was kept for thirty-six hours’ observation, were Zahra and Gobi getting a similar deal? You know the thing about camels and people? Both are proud and stubborn, but both excel at helping people. Andrew yelps now as the animals of the Peterborough Zoo continue in their rhythms. Tomorrow, everyone gets enough to eat.
Jeff Blackman
Passing Fancy A daydream got me pregnant. Pa didn’t believe me at first. He pulled me out of school, and whooped me good. Afraida’ what would be thought. Afraida’ what I’d done. “Who,” he kept demanding, o’er and o’er again, as if my belly were swelling with the name, and it was just waiting to burst out. But all I could tell him was I used to see this small bit of glow in Ma’s eyes when she was washing dishes. When I got to fussing she used to sit me down and tell me, not about the world as it was, but as it should be. When she died she gave me this trick to help me make it through. And one night, when I need so badly to make it through, the world as it should be took to flesh and sunk in me. We had pantries that never went dry. Books jumped right into your head with just a glance. Wallets filled their own selves whenever they were opened. My teeth were straight and white as picture book fences, and my freckles were finally cute. But I couldn’t even manage telling Pa that much. Wasn’t till the night of the birth that he would even think to listen. Spent the night heaving on a pile o’ towels like an ol’ mutt. Felt like e’ry one of my ribs split in two making way, and that ain’t even the worst of it by far. At the end, tween my legs came this strange little twitching ball of light, like a small sweet egg about to hatch. Glowing as if there were a lightbulb inside. I saw it shine and nearly wept. Pa pushed my knees aside to take it up in his own hands. As he peered at it, I watched it flicker between that lightness and death. Watched it dim between his fingers. Anymore, I don’t weep or dream so much.
Couri Johnson
jacob wren
“
Capitalism is not the simple desire to make a profit. Capitalism is the fantasy that growth can continue at a consistent rate indefinitely. When a child is young, it cannot yet imagine being an adult, so it thinks it will keep growing forever. The fantasy that you can grow forever is exhilarating, one of the many aspects that make children seem so alive. We live in fantasy, all of us, all of the time, to a greater or lesser extent. from Rich and Poor (BookThug 2016)
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three stories This is the beginning... Monomaniacal Sixty Sentences
This is the beginning... Anything is possible, but not everything. Thinking you know exactly what is going to happen next is the easiest way to be wrong. Of all the things that are possible, among which we might even include many things that are relatively impossible, rather few are likely. It is possible that the next sentence in this text will be about dinosaurs, while it is likely that it will not. It is possible that human beings will become extinct much sooner than was previously thought. Of the things that are possible, it is difficult to arrive at a percentage that might be generally understood to be desirable. If human beings were to become extinct, it might be said, from differing perspectives, to be both desirable and undesirable. After you, as an individual, are gone, why would you exactly care what does or doesn’t happen? But it is possible that you do. Or at least a part of you does. What might be the best way to understand this particular part? Desire can be understood in terms of sex, but it can also be understood in terms of everything else. For example, the desire to be alive, or to continue living. The desire for the impossible, far from being a contradiction in terms, is in fact extremely common. Things that I desire that I am frequently, or at least implicitly, told are impossible: an end to war, an end to capitalism, powerful people treating those they have power over with enormous kindness and generosity, etc. But, of course, all of these things are essentially as possible as anything else. I see no proof otherwise. It is possible that one thing causes another, but it is equally possible that it does not, or that we have the cause wrong. However, whether the cause is clear, unclear, or misleading, the desire to find and know the cause for any given thing is not difficult to understand. Every moment is a mystery waiting to be solved. Or a pleasure screaming to remain unsolved. A pleasure screaming to remain lost. Understanding everything completely and perfectly is the death of all pleasure. Fortunately this is impossible, and there is also of course great pleasure in learning, in coming to understand something. As every conspiracy lover knows all too well, almost everything happens for a reason, but then, every now and again, something beautiful happens for no reason at all.
Monomaniacal Twice in the past month someone has called me monomaniacal. I believe it was the first two times I ever even heard the word. I barely noticed it the first time, it was only the repetition that caught my attention. Basically, what I think they both meant is that I’m completely focused on my artist work, that my relation to it is a kind of tunnel vision (which isn’t necessarily the technical definition of the word monomaniacal.) Others have certainly complained about this to me in the past, and I’m sure it’s something I admit to from time to time, but for the most part it’s an aspect of my life I do my best to hide. I definitely feel there’s something shameful about it, that it doesn’t reflect particularly well on me as a human being. I also feel I must somehow be admitting to it more frequently these days. Maybe it’s even becoming more true over time. Part of this is a particularly intense feeling that I will die soon, and I should finish up these last few projects before I go. (I don’t have a fatal disease or anything. It’s just a feeling that I’m getting closer to the end. Perhaps only wishful thinking.) (Even more often I have the feeling that I’ve already died. A ghost wandering through a world that no longer concerns it.) As I get older, it also becomes harder to pretend that I’m interested in things when I’m actually not. I still feel an enormous curiosity about art and the world, but at the same time it does seem that certain matters are more or less settled (i.e. I’m not suddenly going to develop some great interest in basketball, or cooking, or other people, or have a desire to own a car, or want children.) Then I shift to another register, since the word ‘monomaniacal’ reminds me of other recent, prominent dilemmas. This feeling that I would like to be doing less, but actually can’t stop, keep doing more. I’ve started saying I’m semi-retired and yet, at the same time, it seems to be less true than ever. (I just finished one book and already I’m half way through the first draft of another.) I wonder if being over-productive is only a bad habit. In this sense, this word ‘monomaniacal’ hits me like a punch. As I’ve frequently written: I have this overwhelming feeling of failure, and often wonder if this feeling of failure is the main engine driving me. Over-production, failure, bad habits, ongoing personal and artistic history. Ambition and the desire for success. Hunger for praise. Talent or the inability to do anything else. Full of questions and doubts but nonetheless going with things that seem to work. Full of doubts but doing things anyway. A need for money, living hand-to-mouth. Not knowing how to do anything else and realizing that now, in the time that’s left, I will most likely never learn. Also, I do still seem to have a great deal of free time.
Sixty Sentences In entertainment culture, superheroes become dominant during times of war. Agent provocateurs promoted violence, which was in turn used to justify greater state repression. I feel extremely alienated by the dominant discourse, but I also feel somewhat alienated from a long series of other, less dominant discourses. Like planting a flag on an artificial moon whose purpose is to host flags, and now it’s all just covered in flags. Someone becomes an artist because at some point in their life someone, implicitly or explicitly, gave them permission to make art. We need an accurate analysis of the situation to proceed, but the road to an accurate analysis leads only to further debate.
Be the elephant you wish to see in the room. And free love made a non-alignment pact with jealousy. The autodidact is often marked by a fondness for quotations. The feeling that the poor weather is a direct result of environmental calamity mixed with the feeling that one is in a bad mood because of the poor weather. Anti-capitalist artist seeks wealthy patron. When inhuman things become legal, commonplace and generally accepted, there is no limit to the hell we are capable of. The knight who comes to slay your dragon turns out to be another dragon. The tendency in conceptual art to foreground intention.
After your presentation, during the questions, at the end of each question, simply admit that you don’t know.
When nothing is finished, everything is possible.
When you’re born it’s real, when you die it’s real, everything else is a mix of reality and conventions.
Either you’re with us or you’re with someone or something else that might be equally worthwhile.
Some police play the protesters while other police play the police.
Freedom of speech is most often the freedom to be celebrated for saying things that support
the status quo and to be ignored for saying things that challenge it. Instead of freedom of speech, freedom to establish a more egalitarian alternative to capitalism. In my two year attempt to write a kind of strange, fictional-autobiography I now realize the block is very simple: I don’t want people to know about my life. Jealousy of other artists is perhaps the most natural part of being an artist.
It’s going to get worse before it gets even worse. Remembering that neoliberalism began not with Thatcher but with Pinochet, and suspecting it will return to its roots. The best thing to do is apologize, but one should perhaps not already be planning one’s apology before one does the bad thing. It seems everyone needs an other against which to compare, but some of us find this other within.
Artists should have honest discussions about ambition.
Markets will self-regulate themselves into ever increasing, more volatile speculative bubbles that sporadically crash.
Having the courage to be very briefly arrested for your artistic convictions.
If there really was a free market it would collapse of its own accord.
If there was no capitalism I would still have desires. But what would they be?
When working on a new project, for me the hardest question is always when to fight and when to compromise.
The feeling that I’m trying my best mixed with the feeling that my best isn’t actually very good. Time before clocks.
All the artists I admire are such a strange combination of completely open and completely stubborn.
Christmas is proof that the dominant culture is in fact dominant.
There are already so many books and movies and songs and wars: why make more.
Vulnerable paradoxes.
The importance of writing books that are compelling in such a way that they will never be nominated for any awards.
Mohammad Mosaddegh, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, Patrice Lumumba, Salvador Allende. It is completely possible for an argument to be both brilliant and wrong.
I feel like other writers are trying to write the perfect book while I’m trying to write brilliantly imperfect ones.
I’m hopeless but not without hope.
Keeping art boring in the name of artistic excellence.
Reinventing the reinvention of the wheel. Letting things not work. Emotions, one might suggest, are always left unfinished. During the final game of the world cup, the star player decides to score on his own team’s goal as an act of treason. Solitude versus loneliness. Desire without expectation. The assumptions that are in a discipline’s blind spot are in fact the same assumptions holding the discipline together. Money is the lie that makes things possible, so possible we could weep. Feeling desire is beautiful. But acting on it requires a certain degree of ethical reflection. If there wasn’t a heaven why would anyone bother dying? Men emotionally recounting how when they were younger they were repeatedly told not to cry. Posting the same thing over and over again seems, to me, the more I consider the matter, to be the true essence of the internet. A feeling that the things I’m most interested in generally don’t exist.
This feeling that I’ve never been in more intense despair, a feeling I’ve certainly had before. Racism and sexism are the gasoline of capitalism.
[Muddy Children Puzzle]
At the end of your playing, there is a voice, which is the voice of your father. The three of you, staunch and indignant, having just exited the plum-rain season, stand there watching his face. He says, at least one of you is muddy. You look at the other two, who cannot see that they both are muddy, and besides that, drenched with rainwater. But you see it. Father says, who knows whether or not they are muddy? No one says a word. Father asks again. This time, the other two both raise their hands, looking at each other. Then Father grins, and they all go inside. Later, you realize this meant you were clean.
M. JIA
melting
i was born olive-green like my great-grandpa, born into skin my sister used to half-tease, “tough enough to grate carrots.” they were saving the name glinda for me before i was born, you know. they had set aside my grandma’s old fairy-wings and her training wand too— but i was born instead with one eye polished as a telescope and a knack for staying dry in rainstorms. i grew teenage wolf-herding and monkey-trapping while my sister spent her friday nights out past curfew learning to make her kisses glow, mornings in tireless routine attempts to rosebud her cheeks.
s!
l
a th
nk
no point in chasing peach-soft skin when you’re green. no point in grasping for her cherry pocket lips or sapphires of eyes when i promised myself a long time ago never to chase anything i couldn’t catch and time flies at twice my broomstick’s speed. no need to file my nails when the whole west lies spread at my fingertips, when buckets of water demand filling without touch and i am always busy sidestepping puddles of lost hours— when baths are out of the question. when i was born already melting.
Liza Edwards-Levin
Are You a Man or a Ghost?
Black coat on sugar mountain heights—your brain turns to jello. Blue shoes on Christmas morning, warm kittens tear holes in your couch. There was but an orange mist when I tasted your perfume. Mothers read the latest New York Times bestsellers as their hair gets done on chairs so soft they forget their crying children begging for love. It shouldn’t be this hard to figure out where you belong in this world, darling. Snow turns to slush (on the corner of Côte Vertu and Décarie) This is an apt image. Crimson waterfalls cascade down your face when you smell the sunset. My pen is running out of ink.
Let’s reminisce about the simple things in life (over filter coffee and bad poetry) as if no one can see our vagrant glances we do share. I teeter on the edge of the bricks, you smile, waiting for the kiss. Don’t go down South. “There ain’t no work on a Mississippi railroad.”
So, you think you know me now?
Ted Ell iot
Prognostication reads silver and gold.
Rejuvenation
the cycle of unhinging my collarbone from a cloud before the storm: the gap-tooth space between the rain and the rainbow, a delicate desire for acknowledgement. here lay the trembling passivity of droplets on bare skin. there are flowers blooming out of your mouth and it seems that I am destined to water them out of love out of love, out of love the sky empties itself to feed you.
Farah Ghafoor
end
lying in the black curled on my heart side, hair falls across my cheek. the snuffle of your sleep snore warmth from your body, inches away. here the knowledge of no longer being loved, as tangible as water.
l th
an
ks
!
Angela Penticuff
contributors Jeff Blackman’s poetry has appeared in periodicals such as Blacklock’s Reporter, In/ Words, and the Steel Chisel, the anthology Five (Apt. 9 Press), and Best Canadian Poetry in English 2015 (Tightrope Books). He keeps warm in Ottawa, Ontario, with his growing family. Visit jeffblackman2001.wordpress.com for poetry and downloadable chapbooks. Farah Ghafoor is a fifteen-year-old poet and a founding editor at Sugar Rascals. She believes that she deserves a cat and/or outrageously expensive perfumes, and can’t bring herself to spend pretty coins. Her work is published or forthcoming in Alexandria Quarterly, alien mouth, Really System, Moonsick, and elsewhere. Find her online at fghafoor.tumblr.com. adam gregory is a student at the University of Toronto. His poetry has been published in the Hart House Review, as well as its winter supplement. Couri Johnson is a graduate of the North Eastern Ohio Master of Fine Arts. Recently she has relocated for the time being to Marugame, Japan. Her work has been published by Print-Oriented Bastards, Demois Ezine, among others, and she has a chapbook coming out with Dancing Girl Press in the Spring of 2016. She can be found on Twitter at @a_couri. Liza Edwards-Levin is a student in Chicago. She has been published in her school’s literary magazine, in (parenthetical), in University of Chicago’s Blacklight Magazine, and in the Chicago area Poem-A-Day Project. She has exhibited her art- and creative writing based-zine, Creative Evolution, at the Chicago Zine Fest for the past three years, and it has been distributed online at Sweet Candy Distro as well as in several local bookstores. Additionally, her writing has received a Gold Key in the Scholastic competition. She has attended the UVA Young Writers Workshop and the Write to the City camp. For the past two years, she has participated in Chicago’s slam poetry competition Louder Than A Bomb. Ted Elliot writes from Montreal where he’s pursuing a degree in English Literature at Concordia University. His poems start out mostly as scribbles in worn notebooks. He is often found perusing second-hand bookstores, looking for new additions to his already colossal home library.
M. JIA is a halfway decent jazz singer who is currently looking for a job. You can find her most recent publications in Room, Vinyl Poetry, and Petrichor Machine. You can also email her here : themarchlandhare@gmail.com. ( Strangers welcome; bonus points for sincerity. ) Angela Penticuff has a Masters of Arts in Teaching from the University of Central Missouri, as well as a Graduate Certificate in Creative and Life Writing from Park University in Kansas City, Missouri. She is a content editor for the literary magazine Blue Monday Review. Five years ago she founded a writing club for the students at the school where she teaches. Her fiction has appeared in The Scribe and is forthcoming in Aethlon and Riprap Journal. Melanie Power is a writer from St John’s, Newfoundland. She has been published in the Soliloquies Anthology issue 20.1. Allison Jane Smith is a freelance writer, communications consultant, and sometimes poet. Her writing on politics, culture, and travel has appeared in the Washington Post, The Ottawa Citizen, and The Rumpus, among others. She is a contributor to Travelife Canada. Follow her on Twitter: @asmithb. Josh Stewart is an ESL teacher in Mississauga. He’s written two poetry chapbooks, Temptation as a Technical Difficulty (Anstruther Press 2015) and Invention of the Curveball (Cactus Press 2008). His work has appeared in magazines such as Descant, The New Quarterly, CV2, Carousel, Prairie Fire, Grain, and The Antigonish Review. Jacob Wren makes literature, performances, and exhibitions. His books include: Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, and Polyamorous Love Song (a finalist for the 2013 Fence Modern Prize in Prose and one of the Globe and Mail’s 100 best books of 2014). As co-artistic director of Montréal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART he has co-created the performances: En français comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize, Individualism Was A Mistake, The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information, and Every Song I’ve Ever Written. Connect with him on his blog (radicalcut.blogspot.com) or on Twitter @everySongIveEve.
colophon
This publication—issue thirteen of the literary magazine (parenthetical)— was published by words(on)pages in the month of May in the year two thousand and sixteen. It was designed, printed, and bound in Toronto, Ontario, by words(on) pages co-founders William Kemp and Nicole Brewer, who used Adobe InDesign for layout, and was typeset and designed using Kingthings Trypewriter 2, Adobe Garamond Pro, and FFF TUSJ. It was bound by hand with paper, thread, needle, and patience. Front and back covers were printed by Sebastian and Brendan Frye at Swimmers Group in Toronto. (parenthetical) could not be produced without the support of Michael Brewer, words(on)pages Director of Business Operations. For this issue, we were unable to pay a proofreader, and don’t like asking for free work—please forgive any inconsequential errors.
is that a word? yeah,it means kind of off to the side; part of the whole, but ultimately inessential.
so like poetry? yes - adds colour.
so like art.
w i t h t h a n k s to siblings & friends writers & readers coffee & tea moms & dads