WINTER 2023

editors:

Erica Brown

Haider Ali

Kate O’Connor

Liam Foese

Luke Schramm

Olivia Shan

Sasha Ross

Yuke Song

e Veg Literary Magazine is funded by the Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS) of McGill University. e content of this publication does not necessarily represent the views of the AUS or McGill University.

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Dear Friend,

How honoured I feel to encounter you here, in the middle of our respective tragidramedies.

This volume’s monochromatic cover may make long-time Veg readers recall our pre-pandemic aesthetics; its contents similarly echo a present caught in memory. These pages collect a series of hauntings, of distantly roaring snow ploughs, of lingering glances, of selves living in pasts not yet past. But a winter’s austerity is never more beautiful than when it is not lived, only remembered. You may realize that you had found hints of relief after all— however brief and ephemeral— in ripped paper roses, in wrinkled faces, in cluttered rooms bathed in the warm nostalgia of an afternoon sun.

The romance of hindsight and imagination have immortalized these fragments in the volume you presently hold. Read on, and may the artists behind these fine works offer you a moment of catharsis from all of your adult anxieties.

Then let us meet again, my friend, in words not yet written and in springs not yet sprung.

To our future days.

Untitled by Ben Tannenbaum

Bathroom by Kaya Davies

Dinner is eaten against the window, bathed in lamplight, In the hush of snowdrift: Peas, sausage, baked potatoes. Later, febrifuge and Lermontov; Timberlands and no new mail. Itchy palms, discounted eggnog.

January: for dentists. The sting of a fluorescent sky— And in the evening the world is yellow: A horrible, suggestive light, Which bathes the lesions of yesteryear in vivid chemical, and does not lighten me Nor creep between the gaps in the radiator. In the night, the sound of the snowplough. It wakes me warm and thunderously—

Culminates, embraces, Tumbles down through the solemn lunar nightscape, Fading off into infinite silver streets, Indispensably human in its roar.

Jacob Sponga

Two Reflections on Anti-Nature

1/ Snapshot of Irony

On the muddy bank of Amazon a caiman is chewing A bird while a brilliant butterfly is drinking its tears

2/ Parallel in Solitude

Drifting alone in the indefinities of dark Matter, Earth never feels lonely, does it?

Living with myriad fellow humans, how Can we really suffer from solitude?

Glance by Ava Ellis

What is the romance of February?

The rain turned ice on Sunday and the sky is steel. I slip-slide the two-dozen blocks home, My hands deep as they can go in my pockets watching The line around the block at Florateria.

We sat together in the reading rooms, Socked feet brushing together. Maybe romance is February, spelled T-H-I-S, Icy sidewalks and pulling each other out of bed, Cold hands flickering towards ourselves.

I buy you a fake rose and we rip it to pieces, We watch Twin Peaks and sink into the down pillows. Luxury is bliss is the two syllables of your name, February graces me with you in the morning, You in the afternoon.

Nora Bartram-Forbes

My Three-Letter Valentine*

The Road

December 28th, 19—.

Present day

In narrating this anecdote, I ask that the reader consider the state in which I found myself on the fourth of December—and that is to say, a state of perfect consciousness and awareness. During no time outside my shed had I found myself deprived of proper sleep, sanity, or possessed by an atrophy of the mind which would explain the so-called delirium of which I may later be accused. You will see that no such apparitions—those that the mind usually conceives of, but never dwells on— could come close to what my companion and I had sighted.

December 4th, 19—.

Sunday was visiting day, and this Sunday marked my son’s first death day. My coachman had arrived. Seeing his figure through one of the frozen windows, I made haste to gather my keys and put on a grey-pelt jacket. I made my way out onto the pavement, frost crunching under my boots, and approached the carriage. One of the two horses exhaled heavily. I nodded to Mr. Thomas with a friendly grin. A man nearing his sixties, Mr. Thomas’s face was always memorable for its heavy eyelids, which, at some point or other, must have provided a great deal of comfort to those he knew.

I entered the carriage. A customary whistle from Mr. Thomas, and the horses went into a moderate galloping, kicking snow as the wheels left a straight trail across the road. We were headed to St. Paul’s Cemetery. Reaching into my mantle’s left-pocket, I pulled out a cigar and a match before rolling down the window. My ride was somewhat agreeable, despite the joylessness of my destination. My thoughts began to race, and, like every Sunday, I contemplated the passing fir trees to quiet them down.

A violent rattle snapped me from my reveries; the cigar nearly fell from my lips. The coachman had halted his horses. He must have encountered a stretching mirror of ice. In such a case, Mr. Thomas usually slowed. Our arrival at the cemetery always coincided with my finishing my smoke; I would then head towards the cemetery gates and snuff it out in an abandoned ashtray. Seeing my cigar halfway burnt, I was overcome by a vague sense of dread. We can’t have arrived. Something was wrong.

I stuck my head out and yelled, “Is everything all right?” And thereupon my inquiring, a freezing breeze lit out my smoke. I poised a hand on the handle and, strange to say, faltered. Should I risk exposure to whomever, or whatever, was blocking us? For a second, I remained seated, but having shouted from the carriage, I had inadvertently exposed my hiding spot to a danger that was yet unknown to me. Be it a thief, he would most certainly rob the inside of Thomas’s carriage first.

The realization of my being a sitting duck settled my decision, for I exited my lair, and was blinded by the sharp powder of a gathering snowstorm. “Thomas?” I yelled again, eyes averted and approaching his seat. I squinted to see the face of a man consumed by fear; a face discoloured, whose paralyzed contortion no other face could have made. Thomas’s eyes were now lidless, whiter than snow, his pupils infinitely shrunk. He looked as if he were about to cry, or scream, but kept trembling. “Thomas.” I followed the direction of his gaze, and saw it too. And then it was as if my chest had sunk into itself, for I felt a violent contraction in my ribcage. A heart attack, caused not by malnutrition or disease; it was nothing of the sort. It had been struck by that same fear; gut-wrenching, and then my body grew numb, like the numbness I felt on that first Sunday—my very first visiting day. My peripheral vision was blurring. The world was distorting. Once more, there were the gravediggers, the black chasubles of priests and their brandishing censers, and a sung panegyric, after which the coffin was lowered. The snowstorm ceased as the illusory veil dropped. Behind it, there stood a little silhouette with its arms stretched out, holding forth a rose in one hand, and some black disk—a platter? No, an ashtray—in the other. The little boy—for I could see that he was one—was grinning, impossibly wide, from ear to ear. And his skin, colourless like tolling bells on rainy Sunday. And his teeth, so eerily white—oh, my beautiful child—proudly showed. And you should have seen his hair! blonde, ashen blonde. And his glasses, his glasses! How small they rendered the whole of him, how bright they made the gaunt little figure look! My child, my son! For the first time, it is you who has come to me!

December 7th, 19—.

I awoke in my chamber.

Mr. Thomas was sitting on the bedside, silently drowned in concern. I grunted to get up, and felt him approach almost immediately.

“Sir! Are you all right?” He helped me up on the bedside and gazed at me. There

they were, those emphatic eyes. I stood there, pondering before nodding.

“Have I dreamt?” I found myself asking.

No, because Thomas would not be here if I had. “You must be starved,” he said. I shook my head, and he offered to prepare tea.

When we were both seated, mugs at hand, he explained that I had fainted after getting out of the carriage. A snow pile had been blocking our way, and when he had made a comment about its not being as bad, I had dropped like a dead bird and remained unresponsive until now.

“Three days,” I repeated, dismayed.

“Yes. I had brought in a doctor from town to make sure it wasn’t a coma. He concluded that, seeing as your body had been demanding it, you’d needed the sleep. I kept leaving and coming back, but nothing.”

My gaze shifted to my vase near a table. Inside it was a bouquet of red roses. And then a click went in my head:

“The flower . . . I forgot to bring one,” I said while rubbing down my forehead. It was the first time I had forgotten to bring one. And then a second click,

“Thomas . . . are you all right?”

“Yes, sir, why do you ask?”

“On the road, when I had gotten off the carriage and come to see you, that very moment, you were—” I could not shake away his look from my head.

“Yes?” Thomas persisted curiously.

“You were frightened. Why?”

I wanted him to see what I had seen. I wanted to hear how he would have described my son. I needed him to believe that those who cross a certain threshold can uncross it, and that we are never abandoned.

“Frightened? I do not recall seeing anything.”

Thomas kept me company until the night, and then took his leave. Soon, my thoughts raced again; the rose, the ashtray, I could not tell what it was about them. But it was him. I know it was him. I know that now. He is not gone. Perhaps he had noticed a flower missing on his tomb—one that should have been there—and a cigar which should have been snuffed out at the gates. Perhaps he thought I would become lazy, forgetful, and inconsistent. The day my son had not seen a dead smoke, he had grown impatient, and when I had forgotten his weekly flower, he himself had brought me one from his tomb.

December 28th, 19—.

Present day

Delirium, you must think. Either that or some other term. But delirium has nothing to do with it. I have not told this story with hostility or agitation. To this day, I cannot say his name; the pain is, well, you know. But the fact of the matter is that I am not alone. Sometimes, he visits too. Sometimes his branch-like arms knock on my window, begging to be let in. During snowstorms, his footsteps on the roof make the ceiling creak. But then he would scurry away. At night, when I lie, he sneaks into my bed, and complains about the coldness of his own. In the morning he is gone, and the sheets smell like overblown honeysuckle. I have not seen him for two weeks now. I keep on visiting; he is quiet. But he will visit again. Why would he not? Any time now, a door will open, an object will shift. A bird will drop dead.

César Al-Zawahra

Fish by Harper Ladd

A cynic is sent to a meditation retreat by force. She holds her breath in protest ‘till she faints.

“I do not need to be reminded of my own existence,” she says. “I do not need to breathe to prove that I am here.”

There is an article in The Guardian entitled Eating people is wrong, but is it against the law?

A dead fisherman’s family is suing his travel companion for eating their relative.

I have a hard time believing the world is not an awful place. You’ll have a hard time convincing me it is.

I’ve tried to breathe and run and talk and scream

But the words burn through my lungs like kerosene.

I am a cynic at a meditation retreat.

I am a fisherman eyed hungrily by my travel companion. Across from me in our worn wooden boat sits the girl I could have been,

And she is unhappy with what I have become.

A Song Called Frank

smokey desert dive bar

ghost town

it’s really nice to be here even if your paper mask is melting tears are waxlike

milky falling on these cigarette ash floors

body falling tumble

cackles friendly as a little lighthouse bird eyes dilute you down to body fluid

dripping apple-blossomed cheeks

dappled pixie lipstick smearing on a face distorted

smiling sneering and those eyes

those paint by number eyes were watching icy farewell fellows hang like tire swings

feet crashing into synthesizer knobs while bathing bee-stung blue and tulip’d ladies held your hand in cold calm empty alleys you stood out there staring seeing something wholly cherishable in me more than bits of bone and skin

but all I saw in you was fancy fascination you came crashing in an unpronounceable wave

showed up on the shore like some beached deep sea anomaly

engrossing and incomprehensible captivating me like Christmas you were wrapped so tightly I had to force you had to shake your box for secrets were inside but when the box was opened all the bits inside were broken

pieces that I didn’t have the eyes to even see I saw the way you wavered fidget twitch

Gia Grillo

saw the way your hands so anxious turned into themselves to hide

I took all your hiding sorrow so for granted and never saw the heart exposed was you your face there all along in all those around you staring out from your parent’s eyes in the lips of your lover like an open wound in my own smiling mask

Lauren Nordstrom

Irony. Paradox.

Media for Thought Pattern]

There’s neither egg in an eggplant Nor ham in a hamburger Much less any pine or apple in a pineapple

Just as English muffins were not invented In England, so French fries did not originate in France

Likewise, a guineapig is neither From Guinea nor is it really a pig

While boxing rings are actually square Quicksand always takes you down slowly

All writers do write, but fingers never fing A teacher must have taught, while a preacher could never Have prought; a vegetarian eats vegetables only And a humanitarian eats nothing but humans?

Changming Yuan

TOWNSCAPE 48

Reinforcing metal, upheld links. Waves freight gusto in rushes.

All-glass edge.

Photocopy of collar-slipped tabby...

Where Sedna’s mush crimsoned.

Christopher Barnes

Hidden Manifesto of Stability vs /wen/

These two nouns are mutually translatable

Between English and Chinese, there’s No doubt about that, but no translator Knows the most fundamental difference deeply Rooted between two civilizations:

In English: only when you’re able to join the table Can you make sure something remains stable Whereas

In Chinese: to achieve /wen/ or stability means to Produce grain in a hurry, or the other way around

The Scarp

Towering on a precipice over a lake sibylline

The Eerie, the Arcane, the Covert, pool in steady, dark, and emerald streams of rainwater (which drizzles, and then pours) into the Basin of the shattered Earth. The gulph rages; tempests storm against a celadon sky beating its showers onto the black sands of the cape. Dig soles into the moss Wonder against the tectonics

Which shot from stable ground this scarp into the storm; listen to the downpour for when the rough maxims of Delphi become too loud to ignore.

Jacob Sponga

Disguised as a blank aimed at my own palms and I know it well the creaking in the kitchen the lights on. The blow dryer in your ear never seemed to bother you as it did me. The composting age where everything little melts into a melancholic rot where you can’t kill me and I can’t kill you. Some histrionic way of revolving, I say

Let’s just move on to this next thing: where I no longer disagree with the clock reflexively and without remembering you and the timely manner in which you greet me all smiley, ready to talk

I’m on Ortega Avenue again, looking away from the road how I shouldn’t when there are kids around running in the park where I officiated a wedding between snails. I get sentimental like this—that night our room filled with smoke

choking, please smother me somehow. When I woke up, the bed was made and tucked under my body. Tense up when the cat in my ear tells me to build some foundation elsewhere, bedrock, I know it well, Potrero, the hill where it started I don’t mean to love in that way anymore

A drink I swore never to drink is staining my teeth

Kaia Hobson

Technosis

our body electric is dysmorphic penetrated by neurotic electronic erotica the paranoia bug, the dependency deepening the algorithmic rhythms of getting offline again going analog: cassettes and cigs and smith-corona the bucolic rolodex does high-latency lunacy persists posthuman? the last sickness? our last fugue?

Jacob Sponga

Kaya Davies

tell me again how my taste is wrong how it is not venom, only sugar how it must be my tongue that’s wrong how there is only sweetness coating your cheeks and blowing a kiss how i mustn’t be so bitter as to ruin this for you how it is my mouth who deceives and not your own I would clench my jaw for a moment alone And spit out the bile you made me swallow

Gaëlle Perron

Long before I was ever made privy to methamphetamines and fringe ideology, I was a horribly precocious teenager and an irritatingly-outspoken apostate Roman Catholic—two conditions which I now believe particularly conducive to my descent into demonology, New Age vampiric sects, ISKON, and ufology, the latter of which I am, to this day, obsessed by; moreover, my devout teen atheism and high-school-senior biophilosophical treatise titled “The Rhizomatics of Malabsorption: Deleuzeans Living with Gastrointestinal Conditions” seem, to some extent, directly culpable for my madness, as it was through the publication of “The Rhizomatics” in Le Journal de la Philosophie Satanique that I took up correspondence with one Colette R. Blanchet, both of us then nineteen, and steeped in theory, and ready to blow. “I liked your article,” she wrote. “Coffee sometime? I’m also Montreal-based. And based-based.” Our first few dates were awkward and careful. We tiptoed a lot. She was unsure if I was still a Marxist and I was unsure if she was serious about machine elves and ketamine therapy. As she tipped back an espresso, I noted the early-onset signs of nasal perforation. We discussed Sadie Plant, Xenofeminism, and Fanon with a mutual apprehension. We always left without paying, at her insistence.

After these first few dates we ran into each other at a rave. Colette was wearing a ghillie suit and I was on P.C.P. This was it, I knew, and we ended up back at my apartment. She asked me to read from some Bataille I had on my shelf as we fucked. I obliged. She told me she was a masochist and believed in predestination. In the same breath.

“You’re the real deal,” she said afterwards, surveying my bookshelf with a mug of yerba mate. “Do you know anything about consciousness expansion?”

The first time we made it out into the woods it was October, and it was cold. Colette was telling me about why she refused all four of the écoles normales supérieures. She wasn’t enrolled at McGill or UQAM or anything; “I’m nomadic, now,” she claimed. “Put on the blindfold.” The scholarship she was conducting independently was on “apophenia”: seeing connections, and ascribing significance to things of “secular-rational insignificance,” so she put it. “This is adjacent to the schizophrenia,” she said, “in L’anti-Œdipe and Mille Plateaux.” Something about multiplicitous modes of interpretation. Something about destabilizing Western ocularcentrism. The idea was you’d go out in the woods at night really high and unable to see and would learn to interpret auditory, tactile, and olfactory (ideally not gustatory) sensations. This would exorcize your secular-rational, Western desire to exorcize. “Learning to live with the ghosts,” she said. I obliged. This was not a steady time in my life. I was planning a trip to the Richat Structure in the Sahara. I was in correspondence with John McAfee.

The first few times we tried to induce apophenia in the forest nothing really happened. I had drunk a mystery solution of various dissociatives and other hallucinogens. We stumbled around for a while and became mud-ridden and eventually fell asleep about two-hundred meters away from each other, in the nooks of oak trees. “We’re not doing enough,” said Colette, noting the significance of the trees come morn. “We are returning to the wombs of arborescence.” She was always wearing Gogo boots.

It all changed when Colette—a woman of sundry connections—acquired a tank of dental-grade nitrous oxide. I had my wisdom teeth taken out in the eleventh grade and thus felt qualified to speak to the numbing giddiness of nitrous. I was wrong. The first time we took hits in her garage she greened out, badly. I had to hold her above her toilet while she mumbled something about Dasha Nekrasova. So, we learned to dose. We discovered the threshold. She convinced me to drop out of school and I obliged. “This place is ready to blow,” Colette claimed. “We need to conduct our research and GTFO.” We looked at maps of Montana and took an introduction to Mandarin class. She was hung up on Neo-China. Around this time, I took up a position working at this local anarchist bookstore called Liberazione. Colette didn’t need to work; she had aninheritance. I sold Kaczynski and the SCUM manifesto to wolf-cut students Colette called “glowies.”

As New Year’s rolled around we prepared for a serious attempt with the nitrous. We fasted for several days. We abstained from sex, drank a gallon of water every night, and dressed in black. We slept for two hours each night for seven days. We were on the brink of total nervous collapse. I stopped showing up for work; we weren’t supposed to leave our bedrooms. Psychosis was conducive to ascension.

“Lo,” said Colette, one evening, “we have reached the edge of the precipice that towers over the nonhuman mere.”

“Let us jump.”

On the fourth of January of that year I had the Encounter. This was one of the coldest days on record. The snow was truly ice and the city was ravaged by winds. We took an Uber as north as possible. The driver didn’t say a word about our ceremonial garb. Colette had shaven her eyebrows. The nitrous tank was in a backpack.

The energy upon which we fell was maniacal and arcane; the forest was throbbing with life. It was a place from a dream. We both took as many hits from the canister as possible. We also brought whipped-cream chargers; “Our boosters,” said Colette. We put on our blindfolds and immediately something changed. I felt the pulse of the earth.

“Real deal.”

It’s hard for me to describe the next few hours which proceeded. It requires, from the reader, extensive credulity. It required, from myself, a certain resolution in my soul to retain all earthly parameters of selfdom. I was near dissolution. In my ears were trumpets: initially, I took this for some eschatological harbinger. Yet my Abrahamic conceptions were subverted by the presence of tactile sensations that suggested I was atop some strain of marine life; the hard ice on which I split open the side of my head gave way, beyond the blindfold, to a vast, suspiciously viscous body of salt water into which I plummeted with alarming speed. The sounds of the forest submerged were ravishing. The hands which brought me back to air me were hominid and hirsute: I felt five thick fingers coated with a coarse coat not unlike a horse.

“Who’s there?” I tried to ask, but no words came out. The temptation to remove the blindfold was strong, but I did not give in. The voice which spoke to me was baritone and somewhat resemblant of Elvis Presley.

“You’re injured.”

I had some notion that I was still suspended in air. “Where’s Colette?” There was a sound I can only describe as painfully quiet followed by a sound which was painfully loud. Multiplicitous modes of interpretation, I told myself. I sought connections.

“Put me down.”

The hominid obliged and I smelt something like an old book. This scent, fearsomely pungent, triggered a bout of weeping, the tears of which promptly coalesced into one aggregate body of water that began to wax and wane at my feet. Here was an island entire of itself; here, Robinson Crusoe was to drown. I understood. The annihilation of the self would begin with Defoe. I considered a purely fungal

existence. Concluded it wouldn’t be so bad. I speculated as to how Colette’s evening was proceeding.

The hominid leant over my face—I felt breath on my forehead and cheeks. Breath—the word—and, suddenly, I was in the backseat of a grandparent’s car, and I was marvelling at the crank windows, and I understood—that this hominid was with me, then, and I hadn’t realized—and returning to the woods, with its breath in my face, I heard a sort of wailing, far off, that couldn’t’ve been Colette; the hominid heard it, too, because I felt it turn its head to look behind itself. And I said to it, when it was turned around, “Can I have a photograph?” and I was compelled to remove the blindfold.

The mud in my toes and the blood trickling on my head became immediately apparent. Moreover, the massive wall of hair which stood in front of me was instantly a subject of rapture. I wish I could detail the proceedings which followed, but my memory of them—if there are any memories at all—has been largely obfuscated by a horrible descent into a months long Demerol binge and a bout in Portland writing “theory fiction” for a zine called Ps3ud0x3n0. But to this day there is no doubt in my mind I encountered something forbidden and esoteric that evening beyond secular-rational sensibility.

Colette moved away that spring. I think she went back to France, but I can’t be sure. We no longer have any correspondence. She told me it would be for the best.

Jacob Sponga

TOWNSCAPE 50

Spiral tilting.

Macromolecules in vine, fictile. Undefined, dolouring expanse.

Greyhound yowls through Renault window... Where Metzli grabbled haar for poise.

Christopher Barnes

The Flies

there is a mass of them clustered in the corner of this brutalized bench clotted mascara in the crease of an eye they float around the feet of those waiting on trains waiting on buses waiting to start fights with the porter or transit authority security guards clustered in the corner of the room around their police dog like a blue bottle in the corner of God’s eye

the flies respecting no one jewels all reflecting early evening landing a moment then spinning away they are my neighbors as i wait for my own train that i arrived too early for i watch them itch after them

Gia Grillo

Refuge of Sinners by Michele Fu

We Cannot Go to Magrathea

- For Nico

her heart is far too hidden from us know so many have tried that her sky is is polluted with whales some of them plummeted to her surface of course scattered so many cage bones standing each a monument festering with flowers but not all fell some learned to fly and are filling the atmosphere like birds like blimps like herds though i recall the correct term is pod and the flowers too not just petunias not all of them cracked their pots against the rocks some grew out of them bloomed out of them like exotic parrots cracking from eggs all different kinds field after field of them in the sky and the whales crashing through them like waves

we cannot go to Magrathea we’d never get there the bodies floating heavy and heavenly would never let us through

Gia Grillo

Where do they come from?

if i had to guess

i’d put my money on the appendix

the vestige bored hanging useless collecting all of my body’s loose change and forgotten pits gum and coins and memories like a magpie starts secreting words pushing them up backwards through pathways back of the throat

so they can knock on my skull in the middle of the night

sharpening an egg tooth on all of the rough thoughts keeping me awake tick under the skin

i’m just trying to hatch it push it out laboriously but it’s breached and wrong

panting and strangled in an umbilical of every doubt every worry

i’m exhausted by the contractions

if i had a knife strong enough i would cut it out

carve a hole big enough to reach both arms into the elbow double myself over and pull

Gia Grillo

Preemptively, June ‘23

I swam in the mouth of june; Its warm breath pruning my skin, And it bit me; bleeding, I bled into silky pools of saliva All while lamenting May, Until August crept in like creepers do.

But tender September held me, And scratched the yellow from my skin; I bought him a record that never came So he played me the album from his phone: Men I Trust —

Are few and far between but he is one.

And I sank into October, And slunk through November, And I allowed for the snow to freeze my hair, Until I cracked.

April rolls the tongue back — It trills it fills the mouth with floral promise because june will arrive again, I swear.

And this time, I will learn to kiss it! Show me how

To dull its teeth with my tongue brush them away if they happen upon my bare skin they open like a flower or close like a fist as all the bodies shift and shuffle swat and brush their huddled bodies away

Stevensen

Zosia