Piper Gregoire SOPHIE’S MONOLOGUE

It is me, I am Sophie Grégoire, the première femme, the femme de Justin Trudeau, your namesake. Before I danced on a national stage, before the feathers, and berets, and pantsuits, before I had to take my knickers from the bin, the bin of the underclothes of the femmes before me, I had my own show, I was a singer for cabaret, the marins would come from across the Atlantic just to see me dance, to hear my voice, throaty like a thrush. Even though I have the eyes of the North on me at all times, I miss being looked at with sailors’ dirt, that’s how I met my husband, before he was the Crown Prince of Canada—or so he likes to think— he was a longtime fan of my show. It hasn’t always been so easy, you see: back at boarding school, the nuns used to beat me terribly, they would lock me in a closet if—when I sang too loud, protested their beatings, or expressed my desire for fellow schoolgirls. But it’s the loose endless spirit of the Québécois-Franco-Ontarian woman, unafraid of the Catholic Church, words being sucked into her through the skin of her stomach, facing the world, and pushed back out diaphragmatically, coarse and loud, not coloratura, a Falcon, a dramatic Falcon, like in Robert le diable, these were all things I learned in my vocal studies at Schulich School of Music, my voice tightening inside of me and forcing its way out—no flexibility, not for the standard opera, but it sure contains a wild, untamed sensuality—it’s things like this that make us Québécois-Franco-Ontarian women so desirable to the rest of the world, even more so than French women, known for their spitfire attitude; if they were so willing to spit in the fire, they’d have conquered the New World, New France, and have gotten some blood on their hands, done the dirty work of the empire themselves, but they sent their brutal to Canada, leaving only the clean, meek women behind to shop at French shops and eat baked French bread, as docile and boring as any Bavarian housewife, none of the salivation of a sailor, smoking clean cigarettes that they do not inhale, no tar, riding around on trains and bicycles. The real unchained, erotic women are Québécois-Franco-Ontarian, since the pioneer spirit and past of violence and cannibalism unties them from the gender roles they heed like dogs in France, and it’s the supposed lack of knotting to this, and greater cultures of pure, limp women, that make French women so attractive, so imagine how the world will react when they meet me! Now the sailor’s knowledge is being transferred into great big computers, used for AI, drones, as weapons, so it’s only a matter of time before, while combing through an old sailor’s memories, they’ll see me, see me dancing and singing, and sending my rugged wildhorse wildflower dragon energy for the marins to see and remember, and they’ll surely create a projection of me to show on warships for the rest of Canadian history and finally, my voice will be flexible and thin, able to hit even the highest notes, like a coloratura, and they’ll invite me to be the queen of the robot kingdom deep below the sidewalks of Montréal. I remember making snowmen as a child with my friends at the convent school, I’d take the carrot and make it his petit Jesus, just for a laugh, of course, but it was unacceptable to the nuns, and as a punishment they’d make me take the carrot and eat it, frozen hard, meant, of course, as some sort of sexual shaming device; I only remember how horribly it would hurt my teeth to bite the carrot after it had been stuck in a snowman, in negative eleven degrees, Celsius of course; one time I took too long in the shower so they sent me outside and instructed me to hold up half my hair, still in my towel, and stay there until the hair stood on its own, then Sister Alix, the tallest and strongest nun, brought her metal ruler and struck it swiftly down the side of my head, an inch from my scalp, and the hair snapped and fell off, then Sister Alix crushed it with her boot heel and dragged it back against the coarse ice, ensuring that no strand of hair was left intact, a pile of ice chips, I asked if I could cut the other half and she said no, but I did it anyway, and her punishment was to cut the broken ice hair even shorter, creating some endless misery for me where my hair could never be even and could only get shorter, the Grégoire name comes from the Pope and the Romans and Jesus, but the nuns still used their metal rulers to break my hair off, too weak to warrant an icepick, but accomplishing the same goal, and when I stick my face in ice it only turns cold and won’t turn blue until I’m close enough to death to not feel cold anymore, it barely gets cold in France, only in Canada, only Montréal is a freezing cold cultural hub, but one day I’ll stick my head into the ice and find little bits of hair, remnants of my absolute youth, and I’ll take them like supplements to keep me fertile, cyclical, complete. Before I am overtaken by the maggots. And then I’ll have been everything.

Lily “Billy” Olson EMETOPHOBIA

Madeleine Eggen

The Highest Point In This City Is A Crucifix And I Am Looking At It

when it’s all over, this is how I want you: sunbleached, slouching, faceless, entombed, see mary and michael with their converging tilt, he is taller still.

mother’s memory is of a sacred father where everything is still, same, barren or cigarettes. see the belly of the sun scrape the knotted sycamore, flossing light through her knobby incisors, I would like to be the inner pulp. please bury me in faded carpet furrowed against the foot of a tree with death date rubbed blankly and tangerine melting, I sent rivers through her branches. still— they’ll say it was pockmarked and hills, fool’s gold valley of starved shadows and naked stone. kicking feet so it all comes up roses.

Emma Basco