literary magazine volume ten number two winter two housand fourteen
The VEG content
poetry H.M. — Eric Kilpatrick — 7 Egg — Laura Douglas — 13 JAGGED PINE — Eric Kilpatrick 14 Butterflies — Erin Masters — 15 Clear Fawns — Misia Robins — 16 LASCAUX — Eric Kilpatrick — 17 swelltides — Julia Isler — 18 Parliament Street — Miya Shaffer — 24 The turned-on man — Ian Lin — 25 Second-hand — Hilary Mutch — 27 Classics Minor Consolation — James Dunnigan — 28 Resolution — Caroline Neel — 35 3.0 Faithful after master’s death — Hilary Mutch — 36 3.3 Other faithful dogs — Hilary Mutch — 37 Eight of Swords — Fedor Karmanov — 39 On the eldest’s sixth birthday, a family portrait — Christine Klippenstein — 41
prose The Late Jump — Emery Fine — 9 The Lament of Rabbi Konigsberg — Emery Fine — 31
art Vivian — Mary MacIsaac — 8 untitled — Katie MacKinnon — 12 note takers — Josiah Henderson — 22 untitled — Kara Katon — 26 Oh, Girl — Mary MacIsaac — 30 JM — Mary MacIsaac — 38 untitled — Katie MacKinnon — 40
editors-in-chief Lucy Cameron + Christy Frost editors Hera Chan Jenn Jesmer Zain R. Mian Matthew Redmond Mark Weissfelner
design by Hera Chan
The Veg Literary Magazine is funded by the Fine Arts Council of the Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS) of McGill University and the Department of English Students Association. The content of this publication does not necessarily represent the views of the AUS or McGill University.
A few facts. 1. You are holding an issue of The Veg. 2. The Veg is not a vegetarian magazine. 3. That said, we condone the consumption of vegetables. 4. Like most vegetables, The Veg has a high nutritional content. 5. Studies* have shown that reading The Veg increases health and happiness in the average human being.
*The Veg is not tested on non-human animals.
H.M. ERIC KILPATRICK
“In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain operation in Hartford to correct a seizure disorder, only to emerge from it fundamentally and irreparably changed. He developed a syndrome neurologists call profound amnesia. He had lost the ability to form new declarative memories.” – New York Times Obituary like HM, you knew the one moment like a beatific vision like foresight like an angelic body you waited like HM who is the spirit you reach into with long poised fingers into HM’s missing nerve: the piece that unravels the first time and the kingdom come like when HM, too old to walk, didn’t know he was old and newborn looked at me like you did when you saw; and HM, like you, saw it, but didn’t know.
7
Vivian MARY MACISAAC
The Late Jump EMERY FINE
“It’s absolutely depressing,” Freddy said between bites of falafel, “watching comics fall in love.” Half-heartedly eating a forkful of potatoes, he waited for someone to prod the story he’d started along. John and Becky, who sat at either side of him at the long table we’d been occupying since ten-thirty, were too busy being social, in the online media way, to respond. “Is it all that bad?” I asked timidly, all too aware how grateful I should have been merely to be invited to their post-show feast. “And is it really such a, um, absolute thing?” “It’s pretty much basically the universe, honestly,” Fred shot back. “I only know depressing stories about comics in love.” “You only know depressing stories,” John muttered to get a laugh. He did not get a laugh. Across the restaurant, somebody tried to steal napkins. “Do any of you remember Lester Kelly?” Freddy asked. I remembered hearing the name I think probably in the backroom of a bar-show where I’d done terribly. The rest of us were listening now, and Freddy licked his lips. “Kelly was an old boy. He used to run between the two clubs before any of these new indie rooms were popping up—and I think he was the only guy who understood what we were all trying to do.” “Was he funny?” “Fuck you. Anyways, Kelly was pro—and I don’t mean pro for around here, either. I mean pro pro. We used to have headliners coming in from all over the place who knew him— although now that I think about it, I don’t think he ever missed doing a weekend here. Anyways, he was a pro.” “Was he a pro?” “Go fuck yourself. He was a pro. I used to think I could learn more about comedy from watching him do it than by doing it myself. He could work a crowd of ten people like it was a fucking stadium.” I grinned at this, as I was still pretty proud of the response I’d got from the 34 people we had that night. “And after every show, he’d drink gin, shake some hands, and fuck the prettiest person in the room.” I laughed. To avoid explaining my laugh, I ate pita. “So, naturally we were all looking up to Kelly. I was opening for him at Chuckles – and this was back when it was on Chester Avenue, by the way— and I killed. I walked off there like I’d found out a way to win at comedy. Kelly goes on after me and makes me look like a hack for forty minutes straight. “After the show, Kelly and I are at the bar, and I can see that he’s about to finish his gin, so I ask him, like good-naturedly, who he’s thinking of taking home that night. Now, the club had emptied out faster than usual, so the pickings were slim, but Kelly just says nothing and nods over at a girl getting money from a bank machine. Personally, I didn’t know what he saw in her. Personally, she was too tall, but her hair was too short. I mean, I don’t want to start objectifying women or anything”— Becky snorted, because we
9
10
all knew that he did— “but I’m just saying there were other women in the bar. Anyhow, he goes up to her. They start talking. Two minutes later—two fucking minutes later—they’re walking out together.” The admiration gleamed in Freddy’s eyes the way the spotlight at the ComedyHole used to shine before they switched lightbulbs. After swallowing something, Freddy went on talking. “So Kelly takes the girl home. I go home too and jerk off because, hey, it’s the weekend. Two weeks later, Kelly’s hosting the open Mic at Barney’s. I’m there too, to close up the show, but I can’t concentrate. All night, during the acts, Kelly’s outside the club calling the same number over and over again, like an idiot. I can barely believe it when he actually comes up to me after the show for advice. He starts in general, like he’s talking about math or spelling. Right away I can tell he’s asking me about the girl from two weeks ago. I tell him I don’t know. I never met her before. I never talked to her. How am I supposed to know why she wouldn’t call him back? He went home alone that night, if you can believe it. “I didn’t see him around for a month after that, although looking back I probably should’ve.” Freddy paused to check his phone. “Anyways, next time I see him it’s at the eight-thirty Friday show at Chuckles. He kills. I don’t. Big whoop, who’s surprised? We have about half an hour before the late show starts, and— I swear to god— Kelly spends the whole time whining to me about this girl! Like I could give a shit! Go out and kill the crowd, I tell him. You’re the best comic in this fucking city, I tell him. “So Kelly goes out and kills again— for a crowd of drunk dockworkers and a table of college douches tripping on mushrooms in the front row. After the show, Kelly takes a shot of tequila and hands me this.” Freddy pulled out his wallet— a fake leather monster that looked like a really very bad wallet— and showed me a napkin with some unintelligible scribbles on it, “It says, ‘She never called me back. I think I need to kill myself.’ Can you imagine this sappy bullshit? The guy was like, a year off from doing Late Night and he starts thinking he needs to kill himself! I’m a decent person, so I ran off after him. No fuckin’ trace of the guy. It’s like he stopped existing the second he walked out of the club. It’s cold out, I think it was actually snowing, so it takes me a while to think of where he was going. It takes me— I swear— three minutes to realize he was heading to old Carlington Bridge— y’know, the one those protesters blocked off last week? Between Kelly and me, we probably knew fourteen people who did or at least tried to jump off that thing. Personally, I think the city should just fucking move it away from the river at this point.” “Freddy—” “Fuck you. So there he is. I tell him to stop and right away the idiot jumps. I watch for him to hit the water and I’m like, standing there for five minutes.” In my head I noted how that was exactly how long my set that night was, I could’ve done six, but I was still nervous about going over my time. “And he never hits the water. He’s hanging off the bridge by his coat, swinging around like a loose mic. So I rush over to help him back onto the bridge. I’m
a decent person. I start shouting at him, telling him what he almost threw away—you know, all that sincerity and realness shit. Anyways, he starts to look like he’s getting the point, because he finally gets his coat back on properly. And then I fuck up. I admit it. Like a moron, I tell him how stupid he was to get all worked up over some chick. Right back over the bridge he goes, and I watch him go. This time, the schmuck almost tears his coat off on a loose nail, but there’s still enough to pull him up with. Right away I punch him. I have to. And he probably has to slap me right back. So we fight. It’s all very romantic. And then, like a fucking holy miracle, the chick shows up. ‘I got your text!’ she’s screaming. ‘I saw you jump!’ she’s screaming and hugging him. There’s this dopey grin on Kelly’s face, like he’s the good guy. He looks at her and says, ‘So, you’ll give me another chance?’ like he did something to deserve it. The chick must have been as stupid as he was, because she starts kissing him and rubbing up to him and not thanking me for saving his life twice…” Freddy checked the time on his phone. “And she was sobbing at him. But then he looks at her—like with his eyes he’s looking at her—and then he asks her the most perfect question he, or any one of us, could’ve asked. “‘Wait a sec,’ he says, his face full-serious, ‘did you see my early jump or the late jump?’”
11
untitled (top) untitled (bottom) KATIE MACKINNON
Egg LAURA DOUGLAS
* when the tree branches were bones white in the afternoon moonlight reflecting off the salt-stained street I came to borrow an egg and you answered the door with fingertips stained gold * before humans got big and carved homes from the ice a golden egg held— earth, the yolk, and clear liquid the heavens and when it hatched the shell dust and sharp fragments, the stars. one day there was a rip in the fabric of heaven so the first man took it to the first woman’s doorstep for her to sew. she looked at the fabric and saw through his pretext, wrapped it around his body and the ragged edges tickled her hand as she touched his skin * soft gloves, the egg slipped from my hands and froze on the cold grey, winked up at me a golden eye through the cloud of my breath with egg on my boots and too proud to knock again.
13
JAGGED PINE ERIC KILPATRICK
a pine tree erupts from the top of a stone hill for seventy years
14
ERIN MASTERS
A network of empty chrysalides have taken up residence in the crooks of her solar plexus. Shredded papery homes hang there thrusting dust up into her lungs. She hums a sad song about the butterfly graveyard. I listen and stare at her baobab hands as she fixes me dinner. My tongue is dry and gritty from cashews when I ask her about the box in the trunk. She gifted me a Toyota in light blue Because the silver in her eyes has tarnished Because drivers are crazy these days Because the road is much longer than it was before. Her tongue is dry from the routine of age when I ask her about the box in the trunk. She lays a heavy hand on her naval, blinking slowly “That’s where all the butterflies went.” On my way to the border, I send my grandfather’s ashes over the falls Because everything should return to the ocean. Because he should fly once more before he does. Because I won’t be caught trafficking human remains.
15
Clear Fawns MISIA ROBINS
Up ahead, fawns. Clear the way. It’s that time of year. New life in pastel palette, the road still slick. Did you read about the man in what might have been Wisconsin? He fucked the carcasses of does and bucks. The state tried to charge him. Lock him up for bestiality but an animal is a living thing and necrophilia only applies to human corpses.
16
The road is still a saltlick. I swerve around carrion flattened to pavement by previous trucks. Nothing sexual here, no violent fucks, just dead deer. I find my sensuality in lakes lapping the shore gentle, gentle, shaping the land, smooth stone curves, this intimate road through Ontario’s contours. I would trace the veins along your inner thigh as you lie outstretched and quivering, gentle. gentle. In my rearview mirror clear fawns, motherless, lick salt from blood-stained roads.
LASCAUX ERIC KILPATRICK
Needles glow and pitch their limbs into black ribbons. Smoky sap. They sit in groups of threes: one by one by one, until they slip out of the earth and find the stags extinct, the equines extinct, the bulls extinct. And nothing changes on the cave walls. No child is born. Despite it all, I can’t imagine them as they saw themselves: no faces, limbs strapped to sticks, penises dangling.
17
swelltides JULIA ISLER
18
Blueblind eyes by hklj;kjkj hightide swerve verde jkl;jkl;kj gris grey up and klj;kjkj inwords to tell jkl;jkl;j but not utter fdjkljkl a swell
This is not the catalyst. I am merely observing.
19
Happiness fda fdafdfasf akin to rain fdasfdsafdsafsafsafs fdcgfsadf or even the moment fdasfdsaf dfasdfsdafadf right before fd the rain
20
What is important fdasfdsafdsafsdafdsaf is fdasfdsafdsafdsaffasf that in fdasfdsafsdafdasfsadfafa goldhazed parks fdasfsdafsadfsdafdsaf in frostlipped fdasdffd fdsadfsda blueblack alleys there is a chance of some fdasfdsafsdaf smallanimal fdasfsdafsdafsadf of some inarticulate fdasfdsafdsafsadfsafsaf squawk of mischief
incestuous brother
(a breezebreath daffda would fdafdasfasfadsfadfafdafda upset the fdafdafdasfasfsafsadfsafsaa balance) fdafadfdafdfff
surely
in someplace we were born
21
a two headed monster
note takers JOSIAH HENDERSON
Parliament Street MIYA SHAFFER
Six-Dollar Mangoes Smack the curb outside their All-Natural, Fine Foods home To be picked at by pigeons and Crushed by the call girl’s run
24
The turned-on man IAN LIN
The turned-on man wishes he could insert himself into everything. He is afraid as well so he lives in savory sadistic mode. He tapes the moments he converses with humans and plays them selectively sometimes in his spraying thoughts, those liquid laces so viscous in his turgid mind. Odd, when he speaks he knows the sound in his throat but it filters like through a veil into his ears. Everything loses a sort of immediacy that the man believes himself trickling into nearinsanity. It’s worse when the scenes have passed. He thinks then: how did they happen? why did they happen that way? Then, the man unravels around each single words he had said, coming undone like bandages, the possibilities of beauty and certainty of ugly like wounds still in heal. Take the most shameful memories: when he replays them they detune more and more sharply by quarter-tones. Surely music is not comparable with medicine but the turned-on man has no pedantic qualms like that. Aye, he does not.
25
untitled KARA KATON
Second-hand HILARY MUTCH
All this perfect crust the city spits up Yeast in the eaves and hidden glass decaying cardboard abandoned two by fours Friction and then, Crumbling. A sour smell in the morning and bright neon bones as the sun darkens Over our fluorescent focus The crack of weeds and pavement The constant tension between the heat of the metro And the suffocation of January. In summer the insects sing harmonies in clouds; an oratory. As we ferment ourselves and begin to hear whispers of The blaspheming patron saint poets Singing down from their towers and Top floor balconies While in the kitchens bottles of red wine roll off the table And sputter hot and sticky onto uneven floorboards. It’s autumn and I’m riding down the Lachine canal Like a seam stitching together the relentless solitudes In this city of fault lines and fences It is sleeting leaves A code of cuts against my shoulders Veins and stems framing factories and the frozen muck Enfolding around the foundations Of this perfect, orphaned civilization We build ourselves into this landscape Nailing clapboard on the tectonic breaking down.
27
Classics Minor Consolation JAMES DUNNIGAN
The grin of the woman you’ve brought me, Anicius Manlius, is too stern. Her waist is stiff with bindings, metal on silk: Phi, Rho –altered, fie! Woe, man-forged, on nature’s spindled weaveries. She is not like this one, loving verse, her fingers having strayed so long in the crotches of books, which, word-strained, ink-reeking, I hold against myself in thoughts of further holding. She etches all my mornings and my evenings.
28
Roman, you speak from jailbars into the wider realms of even-numbered eras. What you say has been heard by others before me, just as when I speak, I speak in words your language gives to me. It is not half as wry for half of half its age.
She was (for others before me as well) the same, you’ll tell me. My fortune admittedly stems from idleness in sheets and fingerings that cannot last for she will run them everywhere. She will not stay in the same place always, it’s true. Her hands don’t linger in my pockets. She prefers to move them inward. And when she doesn’t, she moves them on nights with too much beer onto another man’s receipt and folds it into a flower and gives it to me. She folds everything and this.
29
Oh, Girl MARY MACISAAC
The Lament of Rabbi Konigsberg EMERY FINE
Hey, listen, why don’t you? Come on! Sit down, ya putz! I haven’t seen you in years, and now you just show up to my party? Come. Remember when we took that same walk to the schoolhouse together? Schmuck! Let me tell you a story! Come on, give me a few minutes of your precious time! It’s a good one, and it’s all true if you can believe it! Come on. Here, let me top you off there… I couldn’t make friends too easily, y’know, when I was just a little boy, so whenever I finished school for the day I would always be running to my father’s barbershop. I would stay there all day, reading those comic books you could buy for a nickel if you polished it off real good first. Sometimes I had to talk to the older experienced men while they waited for their shave. Sometimes I had no idea what they talked about, but I valued the company, and for their part I like to think having a young shmendrick like me around to talk to kept them in good spirits long enough that so they should forget the disasters waiting at home. So, most days after school, I would sit on the bench inside the little storefront my father rented along with his two barber friends. These two men had come here so recently from Poland they’d make always the same grunt in surprise whenever I told Dad the latest English phrase I learnt from the dope peddlers who worked the street outside our apartment. My father was born here, but he’d forgotten to raise me English, you understand, so I had to go to English school with all the little boys who were born in the old country. Anyways, I was becoming quite the fixture at the shop. Whenever I walked in, Chaim the locksmith—who came in for his shave twice a day, if you can believe it—would look me up and down and say, “Hey, Morty! Why aren’t you out there chasing the young girls? Look at you, handsome like an actor on Broadway, you are! Buy a lock from me why don’t you, eh? Get a sweetheart and then buy her a lock from me!” I’d laugh, and he’d pretend to be upset. They were real kidders, my dad’s friends. There was this one guy, Moishe, who always brought one of the Yiddish-language newspapers into the shop with him, even though my father left a stack of them by the door. “Look at this, Avrom! Words on the paper! What madness have we come to in this country! It’s even worse with the English papers, Avrom. They’re talking about putting images next to the words even!” he’d rasp, handing my father the jar of jam or pickles he’d promised to bring the week before. “These people aren’t sane! We need to get out of this country!” Whenever Moishe got worked up like this, Abraham and whoever he was cutting at the moment would begin to debate him ferociously. “What do you expect, Moishe? That the newspapers should be blank?” my father would say with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, and his fellow would respond, “Of course they should be blank, Avrom! How else should Moishe be expecting to wrap things up in them! Keeping fish fresh on newsprint? Feh!” My dad
31
would laugh so much! Sometimes Moishe couldn’t take the ribbing and would walk out without getting his shave, and we would have to find someone else to shave in his place. What’s even better was when Isaac the chicken-maker would come in. Isaac was a cynic, to be sure, but they say even cynics like to laugh. Me, I think cynics seem to laugh more than anyone else. My father once invited Isaac to stay behind after his cut so that they could discuss a recent horse that had walked into the town. Isaac immediately put out his excuses: “You know I have to dress my son, Avrom”; “You know I have to mend the ladder, Avrom”; “You know I promised Schulman’s wife I’d make them a new pair of chickens, Avrom.” On and on Isaac could make excuses! Anyway, my dad looks him over for a good minute before he says, “You know, Isaac, _____________.” And right away Isaac says, “You know I could never turn down one of your invitations, Avrom.” My father, to be sure, was good with his words. I had been in my father’s shop for about one hour one afternoon. The talk had centred on Rabbi Konigsberg, who no one had seen since the previous Wednesday.
32
“He’s out there again, in the lake. You know how he gets distracted with those heavy questions.” “Heavy questions? What kind of heavy questions does Konigsberg let himself be bothered with?” “You’re forgetting his wife, Moishe” “Isaac! Feh! You should be more careful throwing that sort of talk around!” “Why? We’re all thinking it, aren’t we, Mordechai?” Isaac said, looking at me. I got nervous and looked to my dad, who was still busily cutting Moishe’s hair. “And what should I tell them, Dad?” Everyone laughed, and once I got over my embarrassment I laughed a little too. “Mordechai, you have to stop hanging around here so much. You should go with the boys your own age. Avrom, what are you telling your son that he wants to spend all his time here?” “You should stop telling Avrom how to raise his son, Moishe.” “Just because you’re jealous that Avrom should have a son, Moishe, while all you have are your twenty-three beautiful daughters who everyone in the town wants to meet!” “Beautiful? Feh! Every one looks just like her mother. Oi… If I had only known!” I was just about to reply—something witty, too—when someone walked into the shop. I did not recognize the man, mostly because I couldn’t see past Isaac’s broad shoulders, but my father warmly shouted out: “Eh, Rabbi! So you’ve come back to see us!” Konigsberg slowly, quietly sat down next to me. I would have said hello, but he seemed completely unaware that I was in the room. My father was always saying Rabbi Konigsberg just didn’t see children.
“Oh, Avrom. Oi, Issac! Oi… Moishe!” “What is the problem, Rabbi?” “Oi, that I should have such a problem!” said Rabbi Konigsberg, “I’m a wreck! I am afraid I have become a bunch of cubes!” The shop was silent. I looked the rabbi over to see what this meant, but he still looked like the lean, skeletal figure he always was. His beard may have been a bit more unkempt, but nothing about him struck me as particularly cubic. “What do you mean, Rabbi? You don’t seem too bad to me.” “Moishe, if you only knew. I’m just on my way to Dr. Cohen to make sure. But I know! I’ve become a bunch of cubes!” “Rabbi, you’re talking a bunch of nonsense. Trust us, you are not cubes. You are a rabbi still.” “I’m cubes, Avrom. Look at my arm!” Konigsberg stretched out a naked arm. Although it was hairless, and a bit yellow, I didn’t see a rough edge on it. Cubes it definitely wasn’t. “I don’t see it, Rabbi. But I’ll trust your judgment on this. What happened?” “If God would only let me know!” The rabbi stood up and sat down. “I woke up last Sunday. I reached out, to get something to throw at that stray cat that’s been hanging around my window, when I noticed my arm. It’s entirely cubic, like one of those dolls they cut out of wood over in the other town!” “We could get Daniel the carpenter’s son here to shave your edges off, Rabbi!” “I’ve already tried! There’s deep cuts all over my back now! Oi! If only I knew what I had done to deserve this!” I felt bad for the rabbi. As much as I feared and respected him, I could sympathize with the anguish. “Have you changed your diet, Rabbi? Maybe that could be the problem?” “Changed my diet? And what then would I eat to incline myself to become cubes, eh?” Isaac suddenly stood up and shook the rabbi’s hand. “Perhaps you have been eating an excess of cubic meals, Rabbi,” Isaac solemnly said before walking out the shop. “That Isaac can never learn to keep his cynical, incredibly wise, smart mouth shut!” I heard Moishe say. Distracted by this outburst of invective, father cut some of the wrong hairs of one of his haircuts. “I agree!” he shouted ironically. Rabbi Konigsberg was still distraught. “What will I tell my wife, that I should be made into a cube?” “You should tell her nothing of it, Shmuel.” “What will I tell David? Hello David, my only son, my seed. Your father has become cubes!” “Rabbi, you are being a schmuck is what you are being! Don’t go around scaring your son.” “Don’t tell the rabbi what he is being, Moishe! You are making to sound like Isaac!”
33
“Oi! Oi! Oi! What will I tell someone, when they come up to me and ask me ‘Rabbi Konigsberg, why did Moses not fear the mountain?’ or ‘Rabbi, Rabbi! What was Ruth’s favorite colour?’ What can I tell them—that a man what isn’t cubes can’t answer better?” I watched the tears stream down the old man’s face and resolved to speak. “But Rabbi, couldn’t a man made of cubes be considered wiser than a man of flesh?” Everyone in the shop stared at me, the young boy who had so recently learnt to stay quiet. “Mordechai! Go home and help your mother set something edible on fire!” my father roared. As I was leaving the shop, I heard him speaking to Rabbi Konigsberg “I am sorry about Mordechai, rabbi. He thinks he is so wise just because he spends all his time here instead of playing with the other boys.” “Feh! This is what all the little boys do…” I heard the rabbi as I slowly walked too far away from the shop to hear them talk, “Say, was it not Solomon who tells us the cubic man is elevated above…” I heard nothing else as my ears were confused by the sounds of dogs barking, children being called in for dinner, and shops being shut up.
34
Resolution CAROLINE NEEL
When our house of split-lip and cedar burned down you built us a new one of glass. there we slept in the constant sun our faces pressed into guilty mattresses each day we woke up on the wrong side. our opinions differed when it came to stones your fists clenched them to dust my pockets filled heavy cracks were inevitable. ruined for a second time I lay in our bedroom glass shards like spun sugar on my skin. I wait for you to come home and fix this.
35
HILARY MUTCH
capità n with his heels dragging along the grass of the pampas the diet of wilted roses and worms armadillo meat scraps from the pelados suffering the thick pollution of night air and the granite chill, waiting hachiko is anxious for the night train’s arrival customers click heels, late for connections swimming against the crowd of furious feet he has a schedule without knowing the time he waits
36
heidi dug her devotion into that drop crouching in the stiff moss of the crevasse becoming a cairn for her master shivering and cradling in the highland rain and waiting theo, shuffling through sandstorms devotion scarred into a long face trying to dismantle a thousand years of insurgency is impossible alone and so his heart collapses onto the clay of kandahar
3.3 Other faithful dogs HILARY MUTCH argos waiting twenty years struggling his sore bones on the rock of ithaca the smooth surface of fat olives break and drop oily to the ground, fermenting collapsing in the manure of the stable in a cradle of fleas more faithful than telemachus he waited and died it’s all verified that this is where animals go
37
JM MARY MACISAAC
Eight of Swords FEDOR KARMANOV
She kneels still, spills secrets on the table, sipping bitter loose leaf tea; a fable of lipped linoleums covering the carbon stains of moistures sputtered from a homely hearth. There a corner cobweb spider sitting still spills bars of silky secrets on the sills. Her words get caught in doorway screens: extruded nets brought forth from spinnerets. Hands, eyes— in concert, moving as she mutters clinging to a cross, her sweaty hands grind sharp a dye-cast flesh, indigestible tin can dinners, cereal breakfasts washed up in starched plastic wraps of baking powder. Her eyes: bulbs of onions sprouting roots in dark places. 39
untitled KATIE MACKINNON
CHRISTINE KLIPPENSTEIN
The ponies have arrived, drooping on the muddy lawn with flowers wilting in their saddles The eldest daughter picks one, white and tan, and stands smiling with her hand on its flinching shoulder Mother over by the fence counts down for the photographer while behind him waits the youngest with her tangled hair
41
e: veg.magazine@gmail.com t: @veg_mag f: facebook.com/thevegmagazine t: thevegmagazine.tumblr.com