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literary magazine

no vol 9 |

r 2013

te 3 | win

literary magazine vol 9 | no 3 | winter 2013

interview interview with Steven Heighton

COMPiLED By CHRiSTy FROST, TANyA KiRNiSHi + MARK WEiSS

poetry dream in ochre

RUDRAPRiyA RATHORE

weather those

CALEB HARRiSON

ovary act.

CALEB HARRiSON

The Country North of Wilmot

DAviD HELPS

First time with the sea

Profession of Chastity

JOSEPH KiDNEy

Palms That Glimpse Upward

DiANDRE PRENDiMANO

A Boy, College. (Decides Every Free Gift: His.)

D.W. LEE

the ROM

RiKKi GOTTHELF

“What Walmart Smells Like”

MATTHEW RETTiNO

Between the Trees

MARK WEiSS

Junkyard

MiyA SHAFFER

prose What the Shark Knew

CLAiRE WiLMOT

i’m Dying

MATTHEW REDMOND

Boston

TEFFER ADJEMiAN

Birthday Blues

JADE TREMBLAy

Sadness Outta Me

LUCAS N.M.

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editor-in-chief TANyA KiRNiSHNi senior editors GiLES AyERS ELizABETH WARiNG JiLLiAN zACCHiA editors LUCy CAMERON HERA CHAN CHRiSTy FROST LUCAS NAPiER MACDONALD MARK WEiSS design + cover credit HERA CHAN art contributors LAURA DOUGLAS, GABRiELA DOWLiNG KARA KATON, LiLy MACLEOD, MATTHEW RETTiNO

editorâ€™s note Spring comes late this year â€“ the earth is still hardened from the cold and even the early bloomers hesitate to break ground. Inside these pages however, there is a genre, defy form and play hopscotch across geography and boundaries. We have had an overwhelming amount of submissions for this spring issue. It has been a pleasure to read through all of the works and we are in awe of the creative forces that lend their words to Veg to offer a prize to one of our submitters with the hopes of encouraging them in their literary pursuits. may go on and savour the main course of this magazine, we would like to thank all of our submitters and readers for supportwould not exist without ing us. your contributions and enthusiasm. Enjoy the issue,

Editor-in-Chief

interview with steven Heighton For the past four months Steven Heighton has been the Mordecai Richler writer-in-residence at McGill University. His most recent ible, Workbook, and Every Lost Country. His poetry collections inStalin’s Carnival (won the Lampert Review editors’ choice; was a best of year choice in ten publications in ems and stories have received four have appeared in such publications as London Review of Books, Best editions of Best Canadian Stories. Heighton has been nominated for

Book Review.

—compiled by Christy Frost, Tanya Kirnishi + Mark Weiss

VeG | How might the writer’s or poet’s life be a dangerous one? steVen |

cial security or long-term stability—especially in Canada where there me, I have fairly low material aspirations, so I don’t mind living my life more or less like a college student. If that sounds dangerous to you then I guess the poet’s life is dangerous. But there are other dangers, and they’re the really interesting ones: as a reader or a writer, the more your eyes open, and that can be painful and even dangerous...I think that as most people get older, their natural trajectory involves a move away from spiritual and emotional intensity, toward a safer, more insulated life. But poets over time, if they want to keep writing stuff that’s worth reading, have to push closer to the heart awake and involved and vulnerable—without harming yourself.

V | What do you do to stay balanced? s | One thing that has helped me, I think, is having a family and taking on the commitment to be a good father, or trying to. What that means is that I have to be an adult a lot of the time, and of course as an artist I don’t want to be. Being an artist of any kind involves, among other things, a commitment to play—to shaping sandcastles out of clay or words or musical notes or paint, etc.—while as a parent you have to wearing a mask of responsibility—a mask that over time gets dermally absorbed, so that it’s no longer just a mask but a true layer of you—has helped me balance the time I spend in my head.

actually changed my writing or if it simply helps balance me, in the same way that being a father, or walking in the woods with my dog, ness of writerly work. When you’re writing, you’re ensconced in the verbal part of your brain, which unfortunately is also the part connected with neurosis, anxiety and overthinking. Singing with friends drags me out of that place, where you can get trapped. Note the contradiction in the two things I’ve mentioned: I said writing both are true. Writing is both enchanted play and desperate struggle, sometimes successively and sometimes at the same moment. balance yourself, and also to avoid the potential narcissism artists are subject to—I mean in terms of melodramatizing the struggle to make art. I went to a Buddhist retreat once, for three days, and caught a glimpse of the remarkable possibilities, and now every morning I wake up intending to start a meditation practice. But I’m too lazy. I check email instead—the very opposite of meditation.

V | You say poetry can become narcissistic, do you believe poetry can also be compassionate?

Writing is both enchanted play and desperate struggle, sometimes successively and sometimes at the same moment.

s| short, straightforward poems that could induce waves of compassion in a psychopath. One of the staple insights of all poetry is that everything is connected, and while in many poems this insight is only implicit, in Nhat Hanh’s work it’s right there on the surface—his unmistakable theme. (Nhat Hanh is also a famous meditation teacher, to get back to that topic—and now it occurs to me that close reading and close listening are akin to meditation. So maybe people too lazy to meditate, like me, are actually engaged in a form of the practice any time they read or

compassion and empathy by making the reader identify with characters who love, suffer, and sometimes die in a time sequence—in a narrative—poetry works in a more instantaneous, non-sequential way, using imagery and word-music to re-enact the interconnectedness of all things.

V | How does sharing your poetry affect your relationships? s | When I was starting out, I’d take it personally if someone disliked readers didn’t like it then they didn’t like me. Now I realize that any one poem or story represents only a small part of my character—maybe short piece of work—so I don’t feel it represents me in my larger being. Not even close. I mean, different parts of me are writing on different days. Sometimes I don’t even like the part of me that’s writing, but I’ll think of it, the unlikeable stuff is often the most interesting. about half of the second or third drafts I show her, whether poems or stories, so I’ve gotten used to harsh judgments. You live with someone for a long time, they’re going to be honest. I think of that New Yorker cartoon where a woman holding a fat manuscript is standing in front of

V| s| material will naturally come out of your life, but you shouldn’t have advice to writers is this: If something obsesses you, keeps coming back, won’t leave you alone, then write about it, whether it’s a familial relationship or inner compulsion or whatever. In all of us somewhere there’s a molten pool of personal obsession, and you have to locate it mysterious to you. So I say, Write what you don’t know and learn about it in the act of exploring.

rience into the realm of the familiar? 9

s| of my last two poetry books are made up of free translations—or approximations, as I call them. For me, each translation of a poem I love piece, sometimes for months or longer, draft after draft, I get to know the original poem better than my own poems. It’s like I’m taking a masI published felt like a kind of graduation—after all that work, I knew I’d become a better translator, poet, and reader of French.

V| s| and after a certain age you don’t get smitten in quite the same way by any one writer. You’ve found your voice, you’ve formed yourself, and constantly discovering my new favorite writer and reading all his or her works, and that was a wonderful phase, a full decade of falling in love smaller way now: in the last two months I’ve fallen for the stories of

V| s| ten state I was just talking about—who are discovering new favourite writers all the time, who are developing their technique and their voices at an exponential rate. Frankly my poetry-writing class here at McGill would be a plagiarist’s paradise—so much verbal energy and inspired written very little over the past four months—but when the class ends I know I’ll emerge re-energized by the students and their work.

V | What do you think makes our generation interested in poetry when our lives are so fast paced?

s | I would guess you’re probably drawn to it for the same reasons as my generation. I mean, it seemed equally impractical then. Some of us idea of pragmatically, unpassionately following a conventional career path that in the end would provide nothing but a secure retirement. I feel the same way now—though I hear that for your generation there’s more pressure than ever, and maybe more reason, to get on that career track. I don’t know. In every generation there’ll be a posse of quixotic people who want to follow impractical dreams. If you love poetry, you’ll have to write it or you’ll end up resenting your life, your choices. On the other full-time, decent-paying job while also writing. In fact, if you write only poetry, you’ll have to do something else to live, at least part-time.

Veg tradition we have to ask: what vegetable would you be?

s | Um, maybe an aubergine? If only because I love the word. Gormother was Greek and cooked with eggplants all the time.

Veg Literary Magazine Quarry Magazine what Canadian literary magazines would you recommend?

, , , Prairie have all been especially welcoming to new writers over is increasingly important now, because in a time of diminishing critical coverage for poetry, it tries to review as ,

that Fire, and

of the mailbox and tore it open. I was expecting yet another rejection stood staring. We are very happy, I thought—man, you don’t know the meaning of the phrase!

heirloom KARA KATON

dream in ochre RUDRAPRiyA RATHORE

i met myself emerging from knotted trees across old and new air where the banyans were familiar her honey voice a stranger and her thighs draped in white and gold gauze i rubbed my hands with her feet her toes bound in camel leather while my guilty graves slept beneath the dirt and the earth which had steeped her roots in umber i tasted her bitterness of cumin seeds and broken mothers she was preserved, a grain of saffron in dusty mercy and thunder, in desert water which quenched her â€“ the spice drowned me â€“ the trader bleached bark and cracked earth lost new and old colour our ashes swam together 13

weather those CALEB HARRiSON

and still I wonder whether those whom we remember are trying to forget us as we are them

ovary act. CALEB HARRiSON

Your glum gut grows, pulls at your back, tears you hunched, passers-by mumble maybe maudlin maybe babe by this belly no, none. You starve, clutching your roomy womb, wool pulled across your skin, your skin pulled across your skin. I have patted down the clay, put my face to the barren earth, held stillâ€” No sound, only the lonely beat of a single heart.

the country north of Wilmot DAviD HELPS

White arcs split by snow-shuddering rooftops Of Old Macdonald farmhouses

Marvellous red and stitched brown Fight For prominence in the horizon. Pastoral settings of my birth Exhaled in every crisp breath, Cast up in every chimney stack. I am these winters. We were born in the woods Will be just insincere promises to ourselves, Pleading with ourselves that we are more

I will make no apologies, I was born in a woodshed in February

I will be exhaled by some great, thundering smokestack. Not of an abandoned tannery on the Lachineâ€” Who sprinted to the city lightsâ€” But of the farmhouses of my youth. We were born in the woods,

What the shark Knew CLAiRE WiLMOT

huge bay window that overlooked the sea. You lowered yourself to your knees and shifted your gaze so the line of the water in the jar matched the horizon. For some time you watched its frantic search before rising the glass with a muted tapping sound. and I searched around the room for a silver body, but the thing was sea, and I like to imagine I was happy. Later I would learn you released it in the middle of the night; the tapchased away sleep, so you wandered, jar in hand, into the moonlight and released my captive into the shallows at the end of the road. I imagined weeks of freedom drifting lazily in the grey-blue shallows. Its mouth grew row upon row of tiny serrated teeth, its eyes became large and black. Our neighbor, an old man with a steel wool beard and a cadenced voice, told me he watched it grow throughout the fall, watched its scales to explore the silent depths of the Puget Sound in the winter months. Circling occasionally around ships too large for it to swallow, the shark waited in the deep until the sun began to linger long enough to melt the snow that clung stubbornly to the shoreline. killed an old woman, whose picture was printed in the paper. She had islands spotted the shattered wood and sodden white sails billowing of blood. between the two times remains elusive in my memory. Even after my

terrible, coercive weight of it. In the beginning, the people who swam around me as I waded through the days would breathe empty comforts into my searching ears, speaking as though the universe somehow owed pain before and could feel nothing but raw. continuity I can trace. Your golden hair now lies plaited upon the mahogany of your dresser, and I think itâ€™s growing a small fetal body. I am suspended in awe, here, cradled between concrete towers like a wind carves through the cityscape like a glacier through mountains. I lie in wait though the days do not, growing ever shorter as the snow piles voices, clinking glasses, soft jazz, the clip of a high-heeled shoe, the

my mind. +++ shut, the hallway lamplight dimmed, the drawing back of the tide. Mist rolls in on the back of the wind, moving upon the crests of waves and winds its way lazily through the darkness. long. Perhaps upon my return I will have an ending blocked out, ready no other ending that makes sense, none I know how to write. 17

First time with the sea

You see me with the sea Itâ€™s beautiful, you think With your half drowned legs Inside a small wave pool Because it will be very cold Fingertips soon.

untitled GABRiELA DOWLiNG

i’m Dying MATTHEW REDMOND

the street with her head down and was demolished by a speeding car. Experts found that she had died almost instantly, and everyone who broke the news to friends and family never failed to point this out, because it was a comfort. Eventually, her younger brother Pete was contacted several times about the funeral. No one told him that she was dead, per se; they all assumed that he knew by now.

hole in the sheet. Wile E. Coyote, who didn’t know yet that the cliff’s edge was behind him, and could therefore stand on thin air, glared at Ruth with hungry, bloodshot eyes.

He didn’t move, but she could tell that something, like vomit, would escape sooner or later, and decided to wait. Finally, he rolled over and the stairs to my room and call my name in hoarse whispers until I ran to her. ‘I’m dying, Peter,’ she would tell me, breathing hard, her eyes screwed up with pain. ‘I don’t have much longer. But I want you to know that I’ve aland collapse into tears. Even after she’d done it many times, she knew that if she was persistent, my small mind would fail me and I’d cry and cry. Not that I blame her, you understand. Children are constantly swinging back and wanted to say more, but couldn’t think what. Ruth stared at him, then at the clock on the dresser: one-thirty-one. Could voice was soft; when he looked up, bewildered, it became almost pleading.

once to rub his eyes and curse the slow burn of summer colds. It was too late in the season for such a dull, hot morning. Far too late. 19

Profession of chastity JOSEPH KiDNEy

If not goodnight the meaning follows. Let spread-armed morning catch and cradle what will be our fallen good. When the hour’s quiet as skin, your ear would be the wick for all my thoughts. If not goodnight the meaning follows like an Orphan frightened by his given name, desires deterred by invitation, or the accomplished god of a broken species If not goodnight the meaning follows unless we speak of what we’ve left, cover this mute palm, sweating like an unmade bed. Show the struck know how to strike and if not, goodnight.

Many nights I dream of my blood’s desertion, gargling out to cure the stale thirst it starts, the same that needles when I pass windows stuffed with brandy-amber light where wife makes brother son, sister makes wife mother. scatter its fractions like the vows of every tourist who admires in windows like: not until you lock the door will someone knock.

Surely I cannot be alone in writing this. If not goodnight the meaning follows. But when you refuse, phrase it memorably, so that I might sing it back on the walk home if only to feel your words with my tongue.

fig. 2

fig. 1 Parsley Bysshe Shelley fig. 2 Charles Yam fig. 3 Samuel Taylor Cabbage

fig. 1 fig. 3

vegetables of the Romantic MATTHEW RETTiNO

Palms that Glimpse upward DiANDRE PRENDiMANO

palms that glimpse upward in wonder and whisper why are hardly ever prepared to trance into the evening under the wind so soft, gentle in a suburban walk theyâ€™ve never tried before to board a convenient train that goes beyond a sagging wooden balcony, the coldness since I last saw you a fever, a memory the courtyard where I waited in the dusk on the steps again and again with palms that glimpse upward in that all human upward

boston TEFFER ADJEMiAN

night and I stand cold on the bridge overlooking the ice after they have time-stopped arc of petals. When spring comes the petals sink and rot to silt but now they are suspended lovely. white curtains. He admired my colours. I was leaving. We held each other and the geraniums watched us tumble and I felt mildly whorish in their vegetable gaze. We never got farther than shirts. I ate a peach in his lap. We were kids. We were ambivalent but we were both there and when he rolled me over in the grass he snapped a green glass bangle off my wrist. I had left and would be leaving again. When the autumn swung around and the geese raised their heavy wings gers and the students hurrying to and from class but no one sat at the zenith and watched the river empty. I had left and the geese had left and their green shit was all over the riverbank. 23

A boy, college. (Decides, every Free Gift: His.) D.W. LEE

in juvenile kingdoms. Lazy manchild, needing opulent pleasures, useless, vacuous whiner. Xenophobic young Zeus.

the rom RiKKi GOTTHELF

We are packing up and moving to Museum, for a lifetime of learning

believe! such unreality in all things marvelous? Fossils are concepts to grasp to trust You must un-remove yourself to be moved.

birthday blues JADE TREMBLAy

It’s my birthday today and, to make it worse, I don’t have a razor. snaked around my neck like they had been trying to strangle me in my sleep. Nor was it the fact that sometime during the night I had fallen off

uplifting but turned out to be depressing. No, don’t get me wrong; the worst part about today is that I don’t and the whole time the guy was holding a gun up the nose of some other greasy-looking guy, all I could focus on was a photograph of Elizabeth smiling back at me. Can you believe it? Sometimes you have to be told where to direct your attention and what irrelevant details you have to learn to ignore. ing on a canary yellow dress only to realize that it might have used to look good on me, but now when I put it on it kind of looks like a cross between a bowl of urine and egg yolks. Note to self: don’t ever go shopand accentuates your less-than-pearly set of old men’s teeth. No, the worst wasn’t when I unplugged the hair dryer and accidentally gave myself a mini-electrocution. Or that I had an allergy test after school, and now have prick marks up and down my arms like a junkie. What I am supposed to do with that kind of information, I have yet to that I stole from my mother’s closet when she napped for seven days nitely more condescending and it isn’t her birthday. I look under the bed for my jewelry box because I am told that this to it, by some freakish cosmic coincidence, a shot glass with Prince William’s face on it that I got in London. I take two shots—one because it’s 25

jewelry and I’ve always felt that red lipstick makes you look more serifunny business. I pick shoes that will make me too tall and a coat that look bulky. On my way out, I attempt to do a handstand against the wall. any bubble bath like there always is in the movies, so I can see her tiny breasts and the dark inverted triangle of her pubic hair through the water. She gargles black coffee out of a glass. I ask her for a twenty.

My mother picks at her teeth and nods like she’s on drugs.

hanging off the towel rack. My mother started using plastic bags instead of purses when she turned forty-six. I grab a twenty from her wallet. I can tell my mother has just farted due to bubbles emerging from her crotch area. I don’t answer. She is slurring her speech, again. I notice the empty bottle bobbing in the toilet bowl, and wonder whether the coffee is actually rotten wine. Of course she doesn’t notice that I’m wearing her dress. Or that Regardless, there are worse things today. For example: it’s my birthday and I don’t have a razor. So when I go to my surprise party and pretend to be over-the-roof surprised, I won’t be able to lift my arms in the air and do a big cheer like I’ve always wanted.

“What Walmart smells Like” MATTHEW RETTiNO

an empty chill. Freezer coolant. Your aunt’s strawberry scented candles. Your mom’s cookie dough. Freezer coolant. Sweet bread, pastries, cinnamon buns in the bakery, with carrot raisin

with carcinogenic tobacco smoke, converging and stale fructose; Like when solid candies melt together, or you spill a dead Sprite, and one week later your boots are still sticky books, laminated, smelling like bathrooms, baskets, and cotton mats, homely enough to carry some memory optics. Electronics out of bubble papered cardboard boxes. Unwrapping acetate-cased silicon chips, perfume of static and cologne. Or dampness under jackets, when they cross you in the aisle. in the cleansing section sterilizes the senses of the one who senses the sterilized. 27

between the trees MARK WEiSS

everywhere

who remembers no names but your order and face sweaty, screaming sprinters smile back nothing and loving it My friend, the mystic, who I believe may be a prophet but is missed because she is a woman Romanians in general, fond of life and ever so strangely numerous in MontrĂŠal who acts like someone else to make someone else feel better still dark and uncertain but kicked at by questions who cares what even the idiot has to say who cares what the teacher has to say Squirrels of the city â€“ chirping encouragement at Fall-time bench-readers before anointing their heads with branches and shit this assembly swaddles in.

Old cars still rolling alongside the swervy, indistinguishable plastic bumperless aliens occupying the road

encourage those tripping beside them to look to both and keep walking and people who do not know how to Fuck, but instead caress gently or roughly depending on mood and moment, asking questions giggling into silentexpanse expanseof of starlit starlit forever, it be questions andand giggling into thethe silent forever,whether whether it by or or book be bybedside bedside book and therefore You â€“ Reading â€“ at once.

Junkyard MiyA SHAFFER He makes you feel like those eyes your mother has Sitting tarnished in the moving crate

untitled LiLy MACLEOD

living room LAURA DOUGLAS

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