FALL 2022

LITERARY MAGAZINE FALL 2022

Vol. 21 No. 1

editors: Erica Brown Haider Ali Kate O’Connor Liam Foese Luke Schramm Olivia Shan Sasha Ross Will Barry Yuke Song

The Veg Literary Magazine is funded by the Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS) of McGill University. The content of this publication does not necessarily represent the views of the AUS or McGill University. internet veg.magazine@gmail.com instagram/facebook thevegmagazine tumblr vegmagazine

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Dear fall reader,

The stitching on the couch cushions is coming undone and the squirrels’ tails are heavy with snow. While you may curse the angels or your parents, this will not stop your dry hands cracking or your body vanishing when you slip on the verglas. If you start to muddle your lefts and rights, reach into the icy water and see how long you can hold your hands down before reaching up triumphantly into warmer air.

How curious it is to meet you here in this time of bodies melting!

Instead of trudging on, perhaps it is best to let us help you scrub the dead skin off with rougher soap. Remember: do not blow your runny nose too much with paper towel. We can offer you softer tissue before you peer into our treks down blustery roads. There’s no use in waiting – the soup on the stove will only get cold.

Onwards!

Kate + The Veg

Flutter Eye by Noemie Trudel

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contents Art Dissolve--------------------------------------------Grace Lindquist-----------outside cover ------------------------------------------------------Kasia Seta-------inside cover, 8, 15, 17 Flutter Eye-----------------------------------------Noemie Trudel--------------------------4 Sidedoors-------------------------------------------Emily Hardie--------------------------20 Lifeline---------------------------------------------Erin Springer---------------------------22 Potential--------------------------------------------Erin Spangler--------------------------25 Seeds------------------------------------------------Erin Spangler--------------------------26 Prose Snafu the Cat or, the Hopeful Student--------Adam Benzaari-------------------------10 The Bird House-----------------------------------Daisy Sprenger-------------------------24 Poetry The Light Intrudes--------------------------------Sam Wise-------------------------------6 Footpath-------------------------------------------James Jarret------------------------------7 Blunt Force Verglas-------------------------------T. G. Simon-----------------------------9 Fields------------------------------------------------Kasia Seta------------------------------14 Strip Mining---------------------------------------T. G. Simon---------------------------16 Lost Children--------------------------------------A. R. AlHudaib-----------------------18 Untitled--------------------------------------------Eilleen Grant---------------------------21 Things my Father Gave Me----------------------Gabrielle Cole-------------------------22 Three Steps Forward------------------------------Caleb Fenez----------------------------23 The Length of Stillness---------------------------Robert Shafer--------------------------23 Justification in Solidarity-------------------------Sam Wise------------------------------27

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The light intrudes Oh, impulse Will the writer of ineptitudes Stare at the sun And bath in the remnants of servitude And then go down the hall To bleed with everyone?

Oh, impulse Will, the priest, hang his hat Next to the dusty prayers In the corridors of sin to blame And restrain the impulse That refuses to tame?

Oh, impulse Will, the painter, drag his brush Along the sidewalk again And walk into the morning Eaten by the clock?

Oh, impulse Will the tireless bull Run over the hills Chasing a bleeding red moon Like it had before?

Oh impulse What do you want with my bones What will cement with the bricks From the toppled castle in my heart?

Why don’t you take the withered and raving Why don’t you take the vilified Why do you take the sanctified?

For you to wallow in their light For you to sulk in their exuberance And diminish in their immensity Oh impulse Will the castle you build Be on a broken mountain?

If I were a sailor, Could I sail out of your grasp? If I were in the ocean Would there be words for the surface? And would you appear In the clouds Dressed as a soldier in rusty armor With binocular eyes?

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Sam Wise

footpath

redbloom grassprint longtree barksigh skyfruit quietsmile handgrip handprint quietpath bloomtree longsky skysmile grassfoot handbloom pathprint longfoot longquiet longsmile longsigh

James Jarrett

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Kasia Seta

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Blunt Force Verglas The celtic lilt the cause of death just call if you have any more questions, ok?

2am echoing ring my sister’s voice a daffodil wilting sudden chill chiseling my name onto paper tombs my heart rattles like teeth in that wooden box provinces stretched like a gutted deer a carnage of sinew mother mum mom mommy

because one needs to be official in these things because of endearrogance because you can’t be a pussy because

the first step maman fait attention tout est couvert de verglas tout est couvert de verglas.

T. G. Simon 9

Snafu the Cat or, the Hopeful Student A little bit before 9h30 on weeknights, Malik usually stopped studying.

It did not matter whether he had finished his work or not, and although he did not follow this habit on the daily, notably during exam seasons, it usually allowed him to rest for about an hour and a half, or two, before sleep. After putting the pen down, he would connect his phone to the kitchen speaker and play tunes as he started to cook. Malik did not favor a precise genre but since his early twenties, jazz had become the anthem of his evenings. Bill Evans’ my foolish heart, Charles Mingus’ goodbye porkpie hat and Ryo Fukui’s rendition of early summer complemented his every day.

He was a rather mediocre cook, but his diet was quite healthy. Pasta, rice, fish, chicken, and vegetables were all he really needed. He did not think much of food and his maigre appearance confirmed this indifference. His late sister always used to dictate an appetite on him, which lasted until his early teen years when he almost mechanically ate three light meals each day. Nutrition represented a mere necessity, a consequence of every day’s continued progression. However, after dinner Malik would usually drink tea which, unlike food, he took some pleasure in making. His favorite kind was a peculiar blend of mint with milk along a modest selection of spices, sometimes cinnamon but usually ginger. The odor consistently attracted his cat, Snafu. He would always jokingly tell him, -Tomorrow you shall have some tea, just wait one more day.

If school’s fatigue remained moderate, Malik would read while he sipped his tea. But tiredness from his studies often took a toll on his ability to focus that late at night. Almost gruesomely, he would turn on the television and play diverse installments of sitcoms or documentaries. Snafu seemed to prefer the television.

The gray feline would sit by Malik’s thigh, and fanatically focus on the screen for half an hour, that is how long it took for Malik to find sleep.

Oftentimes, Malik would pass out on the couch. Snafu really did not appreciate that for some seemingly egotistical reason. It was probably a territorial dispute as the couch was where Snafu sat while Malik was out during the day.

Despite these border tensions and the typical pretentiousness of domesticated cats, Snafu truly seemed to understand anguished Malik. When he came back from the university, Snafu would slither around his roommate’s legs, Malik smiled. But the despair could not be cured by mere touch. He was a post-graduate student in physics and had been living in the city for well over a year. He liked the neighborhood and his tiny Plateau apartment, the same way a prisoner felt attached to a cell and window. Physics was a passion of his but knew that life was more than going

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back and forth between a few classes and a cat. Every day, dullness felt more and more like sorrow.

That October night, Snafu laid down on his lap while Malik smoked.

He asked Snafu, -Will mornings and nights ever be richer than this mundane everydayness? Will love and laughter ever rise from the dead? Will I ever be onto something? Look at me, rambling to you Snafu, as though I were Iona from that Chekhov story. Snafu glanced profoundly at Malik and climbed on his stomach.

A few moments later, after Malik finished his cigarette, Kino went back into the apartment and sat on the couch waiting for his roommate to come back in. Almost magically, Snafu spoke.

-I understand, you are unhappy.

-What? How did you? But! What?

-I know, I know I’m a cat, we should not speak but I may explain.

-Wait, I mean, what?

-But you’reSnafu interrupted him again.

-Yes, I am much older than you think. Also, that Chekhov story is titled Misery.

-Wait so how old are you?

-You adopted me when I was about 5, in human years, then you started to care for me, having lived on the street for those first 5 years I didn’t speak proper English of course. I could understand a good part and meow some words here and there but nothing too fancy. My first week here, I noticed you pressed on that red button to turn on the TV. Snafu briefly demonstrated his remote-control skills before finishing his explanation.

-While you were at the university during the day, I would watch television and with some time and dedication I picked up English.

-How long has this been going on?

-It depends, what you mean, this is my first time speaking to a human, but I’ve been mumbling along with the TV for quite a while. I would say that I have gotten fairly decent at it.

-Indeed, you have. And I have gone mad.

-You are lost in despair, and this is an interposition from the above, the omens.

-What do you mean?

-It need not be clear, very few things are. You are unhappy and may I ask

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you why?

Malik calmed down, sat on the beloved though disputed couch. Again, almost magically, he answered with the honesty of a prophet.

-Indeed, you have. And I have gone mad.

-You are lost in despair, and this is an interposition from the above, the omens.

-What do you mean?

-It need not be clear, very few things are. You are unhappy and may I ask you why?

Malik calmed down, sat on the beloved though disputed couch. Again, almost magically, he answered with the honesty of a prophet.

-I find happiness to be a fantasy or even an insult. What could possibly be enough for happiness? Physics, history, and everydayness prove this to be the case.

-Thus, you desire despair, sadness?

-No honest heart consciously seeks anguish or misfortune.

-Then why the disbelief?

-I find happiness to be insulting to you, them, and I. Souls are oceans for which both the storm and the sun create the sublime depth.

-I am afraid you shall be obliged to bear with me. What is it you are so deeply attached to conveying? Snafu asked.

-You, wise cat, define happiness!

-I shall not do so until your perception is released.

-Have it your way! Just as you are, I am full of wounds but persevere.

My childhood was a nightmare of darkness and humiliating memories worthy a beaten stray dog. Adolescence, a solely unfortunate sequence of buses, trains and the death of a beloved sister who once allowed for my mother’s early departure to be compatible with the present’s constant. And then, my early twenties were spent between libraries and the bloodstained front. But after it all, today I speak to you, with words of modest hope, along a morbid smile. That very notion of hope, my beloved cat, is at the root of my belief in a woundless and bloodless tomorrow, henceforth, impossibly composing the defined notes of happiness. And that is my perception. It is hope which paves the way, and an unreachable possibility of happiness which leads us.

-Tell me about hope.

-To define it one must understand that very few things are ours, maybe kindness, hope, laughter, or love. All independent goods are mere subsets of these virtues.

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Snafu ecstatically replied, -And you do name them to be virtues! If hope and virtue live, lest joy die.

Silence prevailed, darkness invaded the room, Malik woke up on his couch while Snafu laid on his lap, snoring, with somber hope forever alive, keeping the dullness of the everyday well into the abyss.

Silence prevailed, darkness invaded the room, Malik woke up on his couch while Snafu laid on his lap, snoring, with somber hope forever alive, keeping the dullness of the everyday well into the abyss.

End.

Adam Benzaari

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Fields Here, not there Acceleration on point Track the magnetic field It is simple Very simple Big in radius It is made of metal, You put it inside the hole Remember, it has a thickness to it And this is hollow inside A magnetic field pointing downward To the hidden region Warmth radiating Pulsating like a star Acceleration, acceleration I calculate the rotation of Your curve In red and put it here Two ends One positive on the left One negative on the right A magnetic field between these two halves grows At this time Steady expanse Sudden collapse.

Kasia Seta

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Kasia seta

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Strip Mining Removing layer by layer it makes sense doesn’t it there is less expense and what is more important in the end?

What else to do with well-rounded Appalachian hummocks.

The mountain top cropped nibbling further down past the surface mounds into the succulent deposit.

There is no real health concern.

Once the hill is retooled, the time is ripe for regrading and revegetation.

If you cannot handle the overburden fill the valley with spoil.

These razed beds are more fertile for frequent grazing the argument goes.

T. G. Simon

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Kasia Seta

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Lost Children I try to not let my mind travel far When I see pacifiers, I think about the children that I lost And have to hold my mind back again To not think about the future Table for one Apartment in the building next to my sister’s house I make dinner for two Just for myself You talk about loneliness I tell you it makes me feel less whole I still wake up late and stretch my arms across space That never was there You talk about loneliness And it makes you feel less whole I worry about the future and the silence it will bring

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The ceilings I’ll spend nights with my face pointed to God, I think there’s something that I’m missing Good friends on the next block still in high demand And I’ll think about the children that I lost Pacifiers reminding me of another life I forget how to exist gently, just move through world No memory of the other side, but if death is here Then the offer is good Pass the time of my life waiting for the bell to ring Table for one, yes madam It’s just me No children

A.R. AlHudaib

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Sidedoors By Emily Hardie 20

Untitled that winter was cruel she took the light from your eyes every morning i would shiver when you entered the room when spring bloomed tears spilled so plentifully i took you to the orchard and you were so pale i held your hand we gathered colourful fruits longing for that effortless vibrancy reminiscent of your eyes all those months ago i watched you silently hugging the basket of fruit close to me i told you i loved you and all at once spring became summer as the sunshine returned to your sweet eyes the next day we had breakfast together and you told me to stop talking because i was making you laugh while you were eating the juice from the orange slices dripping down your chin was the same colour as the leaves which fell from the trees that autumn i wanted to tell you but maybe you wouldn’t remember after all, you didn’t see the smile on your face such a pretty smile that day when you were just so giddy i’ve never seen orange the same way

eilleen Grant

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things my father gave me Alanis Morrissette. A frightfully bad temper. The ability to clean a house the way nobody else can. The Black Keys. The script he wrote in college (he doesn’t write anymore). Midday outings to Ikea for the seventy-five cent hot dogs. The Catcher in the Rye. My first bike. A bad hairdo, when my mom went on a work trip over the weekend. Florence + The Machine. A fascination with F. Scott Fitzgerald, for all that’s worth. Bloody toenails (he used to cut them too short). Long silences on the other end of the line. Loneliness too big to deal with. Friendship, most of the time.

Gabrielle Cole

Erin Spangler, ‘Lifeline’. Materials - abortifacient plants (like queen Ann’s lace, yarrow, rue, etc), sand, wood, resin. About 30 x 12 cm.

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Three steps forward Woah!

I was sitting cross legged, a second ago, now look, I’m a melting pool, -pot-, thinking about love, (for this whole spot), and that time I called, 911 because, I thought the phone was off, funny how it goes, when bodies, disappearing, and your self ’s a part of, everything

Caleb Fenez *** the length of stillness *** the mouth opens to speak holds-time-still-expectation what to do with absence? (it is there) the ocean is forever found, tomorrow or the other side of time where? the thirst of salt calls me forth Speak! not me what? not me ***

Robert Shafer

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The Bird House Maisie Zanger lived in a bird house. It wasn’t as if she necessarily WANTED to live in a bird house, but through a series of unforeseeable, not all together terrible, but neither quite preferable circumstances, she found herself living in a bird house none the less.

Now, there are many different types of bird houses. There are those little bird houses that are merely decorations, more wind ornaments than true ornithological abodes, and then there are those boxy but charmless things that, while plenty roomy, have about as much attractiveness as a big box store descending upon the outskirts of a national park. But Maisie Zanger’s birdhouse was neither of these unfortunate varieties. She had the good fortune to end up in not only a rather sizable bird house (fortunate, not least of all because despite being some what twiggish in appearance, she was, still, a full sized human woman), but also one that defiantly had class.

If the birds minded their unexpected homo Saipan companion, they at least put up a show of indifference. Indifference, in the case of your common wood sparrow and blue jay is no less noisy than one might expect, but Maisie didn’t mind at all.

In fact, she rather enjoyed living in the bird house. At first she had feared that it would get old quickly; but as the days past, she found herself not in the least bit tired of her new dwelling.

There was a slight sense of discomfort however, faint though it was. This discomfort (an “anxiety,” if you were to put so fine a psychological point on it) wasn’t to be counted amongst the garden-variety concerns: boredom, loneliness, lack of sustenance for brain and body. No, Maisie Zanger was troubled by a more an existential, creeping sort of fear, that by living in a bird house, she would inevitably become a bird.

This fear used to wake her up in the middle of the night, and she would raise her spidery fingers in front of her face, asking herself it they looked any birdi-er than they did yesterday. And her r ever spinning mind would proceed to wonder whether or not it even mattered. “And if I were to change, would I even be able to notice my new found ornithological state of being?” She query herself with her already papery voice growing raspier by the day by general disuse. She had no answer to this question that bothered her, and only the soft rushing hush of the tree branches above her head would eventually lull her back to sleep.

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During the day, Maisie would occupy herself by counting. Her birdhouse had an excellent view of the entire neighborhood block, and though it wasn’t really anything too special of a neighborhood block (a bit suburban, a bit rundown, but also a bit nice in its own inexplicable way), there was an entire world of rich happenings if one only took the time to observe.

First she would count rather silly things, like the cracks in the pavement, and the number of cars that went by in a morning. But as the days went on, and descent from the bird house seemed less and less like to Maisie, she started getting more complex in her counting. How many squirrels ran up a tree in the same time it took for the blue sedan to travel from one end of the block to another? (5) How many pebbles could she spot in the span of holding her breath? (24, but the number increased every day) How many children with red hats walked by? (an alarming number of 7 one day, and then a shocking 10 the next, settling down into a nice even lull of 3 the following, before Maisie got bored of that particular observational track). She invented new

ones as quickly as she grew bored of them. The one thing that Maisie did not count were the days.

Every so often, the bird seed feeder would be hoisted down, no doubt by the owner of the bird house, refilled, and then hoisted back up on a complex pulley system that Maisie had thought to herself early on in her stay, resembled a sort of dumb waiter that one might find in an old fashioned mansion. This amused her so greatly for at least a couple days, that she couldn’t help but picture herself and the birds who stopped by as the lords and ladies of just such a mansion, and the owner of the bird house as a mere servant. Even so, Maisie instinctually feared of this “servant” and was always careful to hide in the shadows when she heard the foot- steps coming to refill the bird seed.

But oh what bird seed! The most delicious morsels of seeds and little chewy fruit things and smoother oily grainy some- thing or others that were all together absolutely delectable! No wonder Maisie felt like the lady of a manor house. The rain water that collected in the riveted roof was sweeter than any wine, and the sound of the trees, rustling along the block was to Maisie’s ears, the most delicate of string quartets: an inexplicable melody that she would never grow tired of. Such was Maisie’s satisfaction, that she very quickly forgot why she was in the bird house in the first place. But it didn’t matter.

The bird seed came, and the rain sated her thirst, and even after a while, Maisie almost completely stopped worrying about what her indefinite stay in the birdhouse was DOING to her (on a moral/existential/ontological level). After all, it felt silly to worry amidst such luxury.

Daisy Sprenger 26

Justification in solidarity Justification in solidarity Oh undulating sapphire sands of expanse Carry my body through the night Oh saddled mule your eyes are thick With sand and living.

Bear my weight, and I will bear your sorrow Oh long death, free my youth The smells of the market Have long fleeted, here in the desert Where only sandstorms suffocate the senses A land with repent.

Let us erect a monument For the stars Let us endure the unforgiving core Let us endure the innermost desolation.

Let us trudge on from dawn to dawn With the sand clogging my skull Stuck in my nostrils Let us reach this promised land.

Oh saddled mule Should I deliver this message Or bury it in the sand?

Should I abide And pretend Is everything justified?

Sam Wise

Erin Spangler

‘Potential’. Materials - dirt, roots, rebar, resin. About 100 x 100cm.

‘Seeds’. Materials - dozens of varieties of vegetable seeds, fake fingernails, soda pop tabs, paint, resin. It’s about 90cm tall, 45 wide.

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