FALL 2012

Literary Magazine fall 2012 volume nine | number one

literary magazine Volume 9 | no.1 fall 2012

The promotion and study of literature today has become grossly one sided. The academic community and literati have become fixated on specific genres of literature and have thus ignored burgenoing movements with vast potential.

The Veg Magazine is dedicated to the promotion of the New Literary Underground movement and its community of writers. It is also a forum for up and coming writers to express themselves creatively, without any restrictions.

Š Veg Magazine 2012

The Veg is an homage to good taste and talent. If you’re in it, you taste good and you’re talented.

Lucas Napier Macdonald

I envy you. The Veg photographs experience, and you write every moment; I’m just an over-privileged observer judging every bared word and watching life flood from a title.

More meat, please.

Elizabeth Waring

I like The Veg when it makes me uncomfortable. I hope it makes you uncomfortable. My favourite Veg poem was about someone’s boyfriend with whom he or she thrice failed to have anal sex. I can’t find it anymore in any of my back issues. I’m worried I’ve made it up. If you have written a poem about anal sex for The Veg in the past three years please contact me.

Giles Ayers

When you have an exam to study for, a term paper to write and an eight hour shift at work, and when you get home and decide to clean your room - the kind of clean that involves pledge and a trip to get coat hangers - that’s when you find something, an old photo or five dollars in a pair of jeans, and that’s what The Veg is. We uncover the goods in the cluttered room that is the McGill artist’s mind, and we give them to you to both distract you from exams and papers, and, hopefully, to inspire you to share your thoughts as well. Enjoy!

Jillian Zacchia

In The Veg even small banal text message words become sharp and pointy (like your nail scissors the security guards confiscated in airport security). The Veg is a carrying case for those unexpected combinations of words that jab you in the fleshy underside of your thigh and make you sweat from your elbows. The Veg is proof that the pen is mightier than the sword, (if you stick it in the right place that is).

Christy Frost

what is the veg?

A note from the editors

I wake up, turn over, and see The Veg. I take a shower with The Veg, and then I hear it do awful construction out my window. I see Veggies walking through the street and one of them drives my bus and is kind of an OK person. The Veg serves me coffee, sometimes nice, sometimes gross.

Then I go and edit this magazine and the Veggies tell me why they are this way. Thanks, magazine, I get it.

We are a bulletin board overrun with scribbles and snippets. A bathroom stall with graffiti poems, indecent in their exposure. You might find us in the margins of your lecture notes, spilling out over Miltons and Eliots. Or on the back of a grocery receipt, unearthed from the pockets of your jeans on laundry day. We are the voyeurs of your late nights, publishing the daring exploits of your mind.

Nikolay Shargorodsky

Tanya Kirnishni

“The Veg is an encounter between extremes, the explosive middle-line crossing ecstatic intermesh by morose.

To ‘Veg’ (verb, informal) being ‘To relax to the point of complete inertia’ (OED) while, in our inert irony, propelling diametric dances over the drawing boards of fiction.” lol jks. The Veg is good stuff to read on the toilet.

The Veg has a shape that entices the most romantic of writers. These writers cannot help but type even the more furiously, projectile romance on the blank page. The Veg pulls at their heartstrings, making cellists look weak and concertos seem underwhelmed. It is its plan Jane, commonplace beauty that is most striking of all. Living in the new times, there is still something ancient about its completion.

Mark Weiss

Hera Chan

The Veg is cheap and tasty. When it’s good, it’s like “Degrassi” (it goes there).

Also like “Degrassi” it is Canadian, lowbudget, and can elevate to celebrity status random kids you once met at a party. It is the top secret content of the moleskines you see hideous strangers writing in but are too embarrassed to read over their shoulders.

Lucy Cameron

Send all submissions, questions, or concerns to:

veg.magazine@gmail.com For all news:

www.facebook.com/groups/vegmagazine/ thevegmagazine.tumblr.com

editor-in-chief

Tanya Kirnishni

senior editors

Giles Ayers Nikolay Shargorodsky Elizabeth Waring Jillian Zacchia

editors

Lucy Cameron Christy Frost Lucas Napier Macdonald Mark Weiss

design editor Hera Chan

cover credit

Hera Chan & Tanya Kirnishni

CONTENTS Danny

9

Laura Douglas

Windbreaker

11

Laura Douglas

Sun Poem

12

Laura Douglas

An Early May Sunset, Somewhere in Gatineau Hills

13

Conor McCarthy

Laurentian Fall

15

Christy Frost

After Breaking up

16

Christy Frost

Waiting Song

17

Hannah Murphy

Bipolar Wind

18

Rikki Gotthelf

XXXVIII: Daylight Savings Time

19

Rikki Gotthelf

The Land of Milk and Honey

21

Rikki Gotthelf

Crave.

22 Adrianna Szenthe

Remembrance Day

23 Laurence Labelle

hard haul

24 Caleb Harrison

Theology Minor

25 Matthew Redmond

How Pleasant to Know Mr.Lear!

26 Matthew Redmond

625 Milton - An Ode

27 Mark Weissfelner

Living History Tours, NY

28 Douglas Gordon

After the Concert 30 Zoe Hoskin

submissions

Danny Laura Douglas Only twenty-two, he's already faded ink black on gold weathered green like the money he stole with a threatening tip of a knife less sharp than the pencil he stabbed into my arm when the teacher's back was turned.

Round shoulders rock hard apple smooth, and rolled back past his ears Letters loop illegible and curl across stretched chest sunburned leather skin raw. “He's got a weight on his shoulder,” she said “not just a chip.”

I can picture it there, heavy, just above the puffy little scar where someone's Bic roasted a nickel pressed it against his skin for Morning schoolyard show and tell.

9

Lily Macleod

Windbreaker Laura Douglas You look like the middle distance. Vision splits, and I can see between you, but I want to be able To stare into that space comfortably for hours, follow the cat dust through the air, wandering eyes looking at nothing, hollow and open for the whole world streaming through, filling me up like a set of beakers scientifically proving that i can contain multitudes sometimes all at once because i am made not of thick skin but thin: translucent, unbreakable, semi permeable, an egg shell.

And if i think unchecked by reason i can’t think really of you, your reasons seep through.

And did you know? all we would have said if you’d arrived was when we waited we were waiting for you?

And all the poetry of the moment was lost in the folds of your windbreaker so I’m writing it here on the translucent page at the back of this library book, and dropping it into “returns”

11

Sun Poem Laura Douglas Sun filters through low grey clouds and touches light fingertips to the fields at my parents’ house.

I remember how your hair falls in thin gold rays caressing shoulders freckled from hours spent in the sunlight that streams through filters like coffee the hot mug heavy in my sweating palm bare feet gritty on the tiles of the roof shingles we roasted our skin replacing last summer I curl my toes, scrape bare knuckles against the brick red shelter: this moment, before the house wakes up above the sleepers, I am a cat, silent as the still-cool sun drifts slow across the fields.

An Early May Sunset, Somewhere in Gatineau Hills Conor McCarthy Streaks of red stretched over the rapidly darkening hills like the hand of a vengeful god. It was dusk, and somewhere in the trees, a figure slowly rose from its slumber. It stood and stared upwards at the ominous shade in the sky for a full three minutes before beginning its nightly routine.

It crouched and lethargically gathered up the assortment of clothing it had used as a bedroll, clothing that had once belonged to hikers who had now been missing for two weeks. After stuffing the clothes into a dusty backpack, it began to work at disassembling the shaky lean-to under which it had slept; first removing the thick tarp, which was neatly folded and placed within the pack, and then destroying the frame of dead branches with a swift kick that sent them clattering into the brush.

It then stood without moving for several minutes. It peered into the trees and listened. After much indecision as to which direction it should begin to trek, the creature sat on its hunches and pulled out a flimsy home-rolled cigarette. It took a few paces over to the circle of stones in which it had a lit a small fire in the early hours of that morning, knelt down and sifted through the loose dirt and ash with its long fingers until it found the solitary Red Bird match it remembered having dropped hours earlier, but had been too exhausted to retrieve. It lit the match just as the first boom of thunder sounded overhead. Rain quickly followed.

It finished its cigarette huddled under a pine tree. It regretted disassembling its lean-to. When the cigarette burned out, it simply sat, leaning against the tree for some time. Its hands rested lifelessly on its knees, backpack between its legs, and its eyes gazed sightlessly before it. It sat in this manner for what seemed like an hour, until its head perked up at the fleeting sound of squealing brakes and crunching metal. It looked in the direction of the sound for a moment, though it could see nothing of interest. It was now quite dark. Finally, it stood up, gathered its pack and headed towards the noise at a brisk jog, lumbering clumsily through the brush and ignoring the stubborn branches that scratched and tore at its pale skin.

13

Laurentian Fall Christy Frost It is grey sky that makes the red fire flaming trees burn.

The small lake is the grey eye of the land.

My boat, the pupil, my face— the reflection of the sky.

15

After Breaking up Christy Frost You never saw the colour— the streaked with blood saliva when I floss for the first time in weeks.

The straight white line driving into my gums like fish hooks, my face lit by the single bulb, flickering over the sink like a dusty fruit.

Tucked into swollen down pillows, my teeth discover red, the sharp taste of myself— I do not spit out but swallow.

Waiting Song Hannah Murphy I am the friction between your fingertips Ridges of your prints rubbing I am the vein of your forearm Liquid, firm Protruding when you flex I am a decorative fence Mediator of the common and the forbidden territory I am the claw of the arcade Slippery, grasping in the hands of a joystick I am the bulb that spots you in muddy light, Just enough to see the outlines ahead I am a temple A whore to all who want love, forgiveness, silent ears And a dog Trailing, running, sleeping Your humble servant But I’m Edna by Chopin I beat still in the dead past, waiting for home.

17

Bipolar Wind Rikki Gotthelf Even in a life where the apples are always peeled and it never rains, the animals are leash-less and no room is wanting windows time strapped wrists sway at our sides and there is still a need.

XXXVIII: Daylight Savings Time Rikki Gotthelf At this juncture we must invent roman numerals, because counting up to infinity is tedious and the poems will continue to spring forward.

The warm weather cannot convince us of anything but uncertainty and uncertainty is certainly the only certainty at this juncture.

People are potential, people are children, children of potentially powerful women.

This is not a feminist poem. This is not even a poem. This is daylight savings time.

Last night I lost an hour to the universe (I didn’t even dream) and in that hour I must have transitioned from a child to an adult because I’m mapping out my future while my towels dry and the tea steeps. My bed is made and my bathroom’s clean, my shoes are tied and my lunch is packed, my phone is charged and my bills are paid and look, Mom, I am you.

19

Tanya Kirnishni

The Land of Milk and Honey Rikki Gotthelf and I like it: tight teeth and a hand raised in the distance a full tank and a paper cup filled with jewels legs crossed your sleep dented cheeks and the faintest smell of hot sugar somewhere cigarette smoke from foreign tongues always bargaining for the understanding heavy bags but barefoot on magnetic beaches moods tidal and timeless as the ebb and flow night heat hovering scooters on sidewalks sandy piers and souvenirs for just a taste of the land

21

Crave.

Adrianna Szenthe I have seen it, your skeleton of longing.

Measured time in the beats of a heart they say is failing.

(What is it, they ask, that you are so afraid of feeding?)

A hunger that slinks silently, buried between bones excavating.

Can you learn to track a sickness whose only sound is a vanishing?

I have seen it, the sorrow of storms.

There is safety in this disappearing into absence.

There is power in sickness.

(What is it, they ask, that you are so afraid of needing?)

Remembrance Day Laurence Labelle

It’s been twenty-five years, now, and what happened a decade ago is becoming blurred. People whose names I thought I would know forever are no longer part of my mental registry. Friends to whom I made solemn promises, who handed me their deepest secrets in crystal globes, are far away - or still close by, for what it’s worth. As I learned to decrypt the dizzying possibilities of my native city, I started to sink into my own melting pot of memories.

Picture yourself in a canoe at the center of a lake. You stop rowing to marvel at the mountains surrounding you. The weather is so calm that within seconds, the water is a speckless mirror, a near-perfect inverted image of the landscape. You’re alone, but it doesn’t matter because no one is there to witness it, and you might well have been here since the beginning of time, never knowing what it could be like to live otherwise.

Suddenly, a loon spills its cries out of a wooden flute, smooth and accurate. Your eyes focus and you breathe deeply, noticing the living presence that accompanies you. You don’t see it but its there, hidden, and it exists only for you. You’ve known it for a very long time, that unacknowledged dimension behind your every action. It animates the objects and places that form the background to your everyday unconscious existence. You turn all your senses toward it, allowing it to fill your whole body.

When the breeze picks up, you don’t truly feel well. Well is when all is set in stone and a paved road is laid out to be followed. Standing, back straight and head held high, boxed in left and right by boys just like you. Soon to be men whose eyes never lie upon each other, or worse, upon themselves. Men who look straight to their one true guidance, she who always led the way unquestioned. It may be that your legs are shorter than your neighbor’s, but with each step you reach farther, or hold back a bit longer to feel your pace align. Your outfits are identical: an ironed white shirt tucked into navy pants, with heavy black boots laced tightly. It makes you feel strong, and proud. A child hugging his mother’s leg on the side of the road has his bright eyes stuck on you, and you know he’s picturing himself in a few years standing in line, marching to the sound of the snare and cymbals, all eyes now upon him.

23

hard haul Caleb Harrison

If we could have just done something so dreadful and Father said That’s sad too people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today and I said, You can shirk all things and he said, Ah can you.

-William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury He put down his knees and brought up the dust stirred mud with his brow sweat tilted his chin dropped wet from the hard haul He sank in his hands hard earth did he upset down with the settled dust he stirred still drawn of his last drop I see the dry turn his face still …

And a grain where the wet was. …

And a drip where the dry was.

Theology Minor Matthew Redmond All she did was ask the boy beside her whether they were near Cademus St. yet. But he looks up from his tablet slowly, eyes wide with questioning desire, and the old widow finds herself ill-prepared for what he has to say: “Oh. Well, it’s funny you should ask... See, Nicodemus was, before the Passion, a pious, troubled Pharisee whom Jesus warned of the necessity to be born again. After the Passion, this same man is mentioned accompanying Joseph of Arimathea to the tomb, carrying a jar of herbs and preservatives weighing about a hundred pounds. And yet, in all four gospel accounts of the Saviour’s public death, his name is nowhere to be found.

“So what happened to him? Well, supposing pure irony to be a direct line of communication between God and man,” he continues, after a thoughtful pause, “I have my own ideas. The Sanhedrin calls an emergency meeting to decide Jesus’ fate, right? Surely Nicodemus was there.

So he would have heard Caiaphas, the high priest that year, deliver the most astonishing argument for prosecution: You do not realize that it is better for you that one man should die for the people, than that the whole nation should perish. Of course, the effect of these words upon a man like him would be impossible to tell for gifted scholars—let alone people like us! But the way I see it, Nicodemus breaks off suddenly from the learned crowd, hurls himself past broken remains of the marketplace, into the heart of the Holy Temple, and there throws his crooked body down before an empty censer, weeping bitterly but otherwise completely still, as though his last intact desire was to be preserved and overlooked, like the dead stones beneath him...”

He must have misheard, she thinks—not for some time, though, not until his left foot misses the sidewalk, drowning in a pothole full of spring rain. At which point she also spots a street sign and discovers that her stop was ages ago. Oh well. Boo-hoo. The public transit system isn’t perfect, but there are much worse things.

25

How Pleasant to Know Mr.Lear!

Matthew Redmond “Hello! Yes? Hello! This is Mr. Lear,” says Lear. The line is dead. He doesn’t mind. No time for family drama once you retire, whether to this abandoned glass house in its near-perfect field, or elsewhere. Eavesdropping doesn’t exist there—nobody to hear, and no way you could miss them if there were. He spots his neighbour, Miles Away, lifting some horse-faced girl across the threshold. Take them both beyond the walls of town, and stone to death! Once he watched his dog run off for two days, free and clear.

In his private moments—men who live alone still have their share—he forgets things, anything at all, except that he forgets. It’s not so bad, but when it is he looks around and clucks his tongue and wonders in a fog of self-recrimination why Cordelia doesn’t call. Or does she? Sometimes he forgets things. Time is longer than it was. Much longer now, I fear.

Never mind, dear. Hell, it could be worse. At least there’s room for us here. Now then, where did we leave off? Oh yes. First, put some clothes on. After that, we’ll see what we can do about the damned ringing in your ear…

625 Milton - An Ode Mark Weissfelner “All the sad young men...”

Nah, fug it “We’re brave!” just so.

We: literarians, astrologers and assholes, corner greasy Greek pizza Breakfast.

Pig skin playbacks rolling through dense mornings, black coffee and frying pan sizzle over steaming conversation.

Coffee cup clouds condensed like thought-bubbles, and illustrated eyes go fixed on American football giants.

“And I mean, we are playing the same sport.”

“Just fuelling up before the game - “ but ours, in platefuls is of all of an other sort.

27

Living History Tours, NY Douglas Gordon

Zuccotti Park is not a park. People who aren’t from New York don’t know that. I would have named it Zuccotti Square, or even Zuccotti Plaza like its European cousins. There is no grass. Just stones worn smooth by the eternal bustle of infernal businessmen and then scuffed again by the tents of the resentful protestors. The Occupiers renamed it Liberty Park. Unfortunately for them, a few months of Liberty turned out to be too much for the city to handle so the protestors were forcibly removed and the name Zuccotti was reinstated. Unfortunately, the responsibility of appellation is rarely granted to sensible, thinking men.

Take my place of work: Trinity Church. Specifically the graveyard of Trinity Church where I (used to) lead tours. I hate the word graveyard. It doesn’t give any real sense of the spirit of the place. Grave is such a serious word. And yard! Why not garden or lawn? A yard is what my parents made me mow every weekend when I was growing up.

So what does that mean? That a graveyard is a serious place of work?

I’d really like to ask the guy who named the first graveyard what he was thinking. It makes the PR so hard. Hard, but not impossible.

Eliza Jumel lived April 7th 1775 to July 16th 1865. She wasn’t always called Eliza. Phebe Kelley Bowen worked as a prostitute in Providence until 1804 when she got married to a Mr. Jumel. After that, she was no longer Phebe Bowen the common whore, she was Eliza Jumel the daughter of a French naval officer, “born on the high seas, raised as an aristocrat.” A few white lies, one divorce and one marriage later she was a notable New York socialite and wife of former vice-President Aaron Burr.

Quite an inspiration. And I get to walk past her grave every day!

Like Eliza, I found that the first step to success was simple renaming. The key was to eliminate all the talk about death from the tour.

For whatever reason, when people think about their inevitable doom and the pointlessness of life they tend not to spend too much at the

gift shop. When I started using terms like “passed away” and referring to graves as “memory tablets”, keychain and coaster sales rose by 20%.

That’s no coincidence. Changing names is one thing (I have been calling our graveyard tours “Living History” tours for the past six months) but, like Eliza, I had to be a little bit more flexible with the truth to really make an impact.

I started taking better care of the graveyard by removing some of the smaller, more decrepit headstones of our less distinguished residents. It made the whole area look neater and provided a little extra space for picnickers to enjoy their lunches. That combined with some re-turfing and the lemonade stand I had up during the summer greatly improved the number of visitors. (Between you and me, I also started offering “night tours” that summer - $1000 dollars for unlimited access to the graveyard on a night of your choice. They were popular among a certain type.) People came from all over the city to hear the spiced up versions of our residents’ lives. Was Alexander Hamilton secretly buried with his mistress? Who’s to say? It was so long ago.

Each choice had positives and negatives. Trinity lost a lot of business from the morbid crowd who liked the run-down state of the old graveyard. A lot of old men in cheap suits used to wander around the graves, eyeing them enviously. I didn’t miss them. The pastel clad, smoothie sipping families were a welcome replacement. They reeked of life and vitality.

Talk about the morality of my decisions all you want, the visitors were happy, I was happy, and nobody got struck by lightning so I guess God wasn’t unhappy either. Unfortunately, that’s not how the Rector saw it. He demoted me to grave cleaner. I’m not too beat up about it. That’s the business cycle. What else you expect of a church on Wall Street?

29

After the Concert Zoe Hoskin After the concert, In the evening parking lot Monkeys looping on back with their families; Orchestra musicians being swung From ankle and armpit By mum and dad

I like The Veg because I think that veganism is on the right side of history. Spreading the word about sustainable, vegan lifestyles is the most important thing I can be doing right now and I’m so glad The Veg gives me that opportunity. Vegan news, vegan recipes, vegan events, vegan friends: The Veg has changed my life!

TEA swift

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The Veg Literary Magazine is graciously funded by the Fine Arts Council (FAC) of McGill’s Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS) and the Department of English Students Association (DESA). The views expressed in the magazine do not necessarily reflect the views of the FAC, AUS, or DESA.