Muscle Memory Muscle Memory Muscle Memory

By Ethan Shi

These days. My body remembers you

More than my mind does

In the late hours

My hands search for you

Like the way they reach for the light switch When night arrives

In the soft glow of the TV

My head no longer has a shoulder to rest on The empty space jolts me back to reality And I feel a bit colder than I did A moment ago

Our love was habitual And my body is still lost in its routines

Holloways Holloways Holloways

By Victoria Schroeder

In 1918, the Holloways did not cheat death.

(⅓ of a global population. One of 50 to 100 million deaths. I wonder if he spat blood-tinted bile or turned blue as the water filled his lungs. I wonder if he saw his sons before they died. I wonder if his wife held his hand.

I hope she did.)

My great grandfather, John, was not chosen to return with his widowed mother to England.

(Her father asked her to make a choice: which of your three children will you bring home?)

He lived through a depression with Sheila Dear, working the train lines. (He never went to war the way men his age did. A crucial job; don’t feel bad. But he did). John was Pop, and he died when I was three. He made people laugh.

I returned to Canada almost sixty years after the Holloways followed the trains south to the United States.

I am living through another plague in the frozen north. Am I that much older than the ancestors who made hard choices? I sit in Ontario unpacking my things, and wonder what my great-great grandmother thought as she packed.

(Did her to-be-orphaned children stare? Did they refuse to be in the same room? Did they know what she was doing, or did she wait to tell them?)

I wonder if she cried, if she thought about how things could have been different.

I know I have.