(parenthetical) twenty: editors' (poetry) choice

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parenthetical twenty

editors’ choice: poetry

is that a word? yeah,it means kind of off to the side; part of the whole, but ultimately inessential.

so like poetry? yes - adds colour.

so like art. with thanks to siblings & friends writers & readers coffee & tea moms & dads ISSN 2368-0199 fifteen dollars cdn

(parenthetical) issue twenty editors’ choice: poetry

(parenthetical) issue #20 © 2017 all copyrights remain with respective contributors ISSN 2368-0199 (Print) ISSN 2368-0202 (Online) fonts used include Kingthings Trypewriter 2 © Kevin King 2010 FFF TUSJ © Magnus Cedarholm 2009

www.wordsonpagespress.com words(on)pages is: william kemp, co-founder and poetry editor nicole brewer, co-founder and fiction editor michael brewer, director of business operations

Y contents

sleevelike and quiet

by philip gordon

The Rose Left in the Bell Jar

by Jasmine Gui

Here

by Zishad Lak

Getting there

The Rape of Proserpina

by JC Bouchard

by Sara-Jane Keith

symbiosis

Walden Dreams

by Eric Schmaltz

by James Southcott

The Trees Meanwhile

The Underside of the Alphabet

(A Dream Abecedary)

by Jay MillAr

Westerly

plural: teeth

by Samantha Bellinger

Waxfact Haibun

1998

by JM Francheteau

Natalie Morrill

by Kaitlin Tremblay

visual poetry

Self-Portrait as Aesop

by C. Isa Lausas

by Reid Millar

Gender Blender/Eclipse of the Heart

Rejuvenation

by Ben Gallagher

by Ali Sohail

by Farah Ghafoor

geography of an inlet bone

by adam gregory

[Muddy Children Puzzle]

by M. JIA

Northland

by Laboni Islam

our poetry picks This is it: the hiatus is now upon us. We are so proud of these last two issues for a few reasons, not least of which is that the month of their release marks our three-year anniversary of starting this crazy venture!

It’s astonishing how much we’ve learned in those three years, from tiny design tricks (that make a huge difference) to grant applications to business bank accounts and beyond. More than anything, we are grateful for the hundreds of stories and poems that have come our way and broken our hearts, opened our minds, and changed our world. Narrowing down the submissions into a single issue was always the hardest part, and narrowing down those selections into these editors’ choice issues was damn near impossible.

(In fact, in order to accommodate as much writing as possible, we’ve forgone the space for contributor bios in the print version. To find out more about the writers within, visit wordsonpagespress. com/parenthetical.)

The poems in this issue are not necessarily the best we’ve published. They’re not necessarily our favourites, either. These are the poems that stuck to us, that have defined and represented us as a magazine, as publishers. They are poems that have pushed us outside of what we believed to be our editorial norms: poems we debated over, poems that forced us to grow. At every point in our journey so far, we have paid extra attention to the writing that sits outside of our own experiences, the writing that makes us uncomfortable, and the writing that made us start re-reading immediately.

There has been so much more to (parenthetical) than what makes it out in an issue. We started (parenthetical) as loudly as we could, pitting ourselves up against the establishment of CanLit. Along the way, we’ve had the incredible opportunity to meet and publish writers in all stages of their careers, from being a first-time publication to being just one on a list of dozens. We have met the quiet writers, the quiet publishers, and they are an inspiration—to us, and to Canadian literature. Loud is still good— we will always need loud writers, being the traditionally quiet bunch that we are—but right now we’re looking forward to stepping back and turning down our volume a little bit.

With that, we leave you with these selections from our previous eighteen issues. They are at once quiet and deafening, and they have lingered with us for—in some cases—years. We hope they stick to you the same way.

Nicole & William

sleevelike and quiet into the utter somewhere of you i (knowingly) extend my hand and (soulful) fingers clench certainly the breathtake of infinite wherever. onto unspooled hours i sit like the moon your skin i (hopefully, hope-filled) bathe in refraction, and the pluck of your lungs and (sunlight) lips i drown in my own darkness. together, yesterday becomes two bodies, hills that sway (sweetly) in often flowers, in (indescribable) flowers; (in) resoundingly (flowers). to you, i dedicate the world, and play it (lowly) like the violin tomorrow; one note, birthed from an (unnameable) everywhere; resonance i shall call by your name.

philip gordon issue one

the rose left in The Rose Left in the Bell Jar

i would like a bell jar and a screen before you leave, it gets cold. under glass an excuse waited. clenched roots. broken light particles pretending strength, false. brilliancestubborn eternity. but the truth is i have been afraid. the air has become stale here, a shallow of laboured breath. to live here is to die waiting. i know now, diamonds cannot keep light, only refract it.

Earth, from you may my heart brown in the petaling shadows of volcanoes. may i feel for once a rainstorm of ash. may i shed my claws when i shed my beauty. (they have strengthened me although the tigers never came) hug the loose earth now unrigid spine. death is crumbling light and heat.

i can finally hear the parting boasts of stars i am

i am

i (a)m mortality.

Jasmine Gui issue t wo

Here

“Where is here?”- Northrop Frye It’s hard to pronounce the Z, she says It’s your letter I know but…

Wrong arrangement Why aren’t you wearing a burqa? she asks French flowing fluidly like the waters in Niagara Immeasurable She lets the tongue touch the palette And suppresses the Gaspésie in her mouth Dismembered Catapults it all the way over the Atlantic And the absence of something that was never there A burqa Denudes me My body My face And in my sweat I Frye-d North of everywhere Where is here?

Music…can I have some music? ‫چهره به چهره رو به رو‬ 1 Qurat-al-Ayn m’entends-tu?

I dashed your name ‫نکته به نکته مو به مو‬

‫گر به تو افتدم نظر‬

‫شرح و دهم غم فراق‬

—Wow, beautiful brown eyes —I know honey, aren’t they?

—Smile!! They’re customers I smiles Aye —Her teeth are yellow Her belly is covered in lipstick —How dare you? My husband is Lebanese It’s all that diet coke she’s been chugging Where is here?

1

Iranian poetess executed in 1852.

zishad lak Zishad Lak

issue t wo

Getting there

doesn’t reveal anything: a home staged in furniture indecisively spaced. There is always a place to go & build in your fingers— hold the moon, falling, tethered to a beach ball a punk bites into & pops, masking his face.

The lilac trees are cotton candy in the stage light.

If only pushed like a kid in a stroller from tightrope to grassy lull, amazed fingers can flick, ask for silence, keep moving at all.

If you could dissolve yourself in seed & roll into the storm, fold yourself in the origami crane a cashier makes & suddenly throws away.

JC Bou c hard issue t h ree

symbiosis

Eri c S c hmaltz //

is sue t h ree

The Trees Meanwhile Somewhere in the middle of the line there is this word: begin.

And so I walk outside to think about that for a while, as darkness falls upon all the houses and the people who live among their frames. Across the street the Lithuanian man with the moustache and the interesting lisp appears and sits on his porch chain-smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, admiring late afternoon traffic. I am thinking about beginnings, amazed that I am amazed by so many words, little things that pop into my head like they were quietly meditating upon me and cause me to differentiate. These are the lyrics to your next hit single: there’s a lake, a road, and a bunch of lonely trees that stands together in solitary solidarity. Somehow, it has been given to you to be someone I will think of while I am writing this poem, a poem in which I will state: “Life is too short to have many days like this.” I will go outside, if only to lambaste myself against the ghastly face inside of which there is a tiny brain that malfunctions thoughts about beginnings, saying things that in no way resemble my conditioning. No one would ever know that in the middle of this poem I drove all the way to Brantford to take in a baseball game. But I did. And back there, in the space before I left, I would say that in truth I am light, and quiet, and brooding, and realize I should take the time each day in the darkness to clearly picture the face of every person I have ever known.

Which isn’t easy, given their limited vocabulary. I think of their faces because it’s easier than having to deal with them in person. Why do you think of their faces? What can you read in them except “eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hair, skin,” and some form of etcetera you can’t place? But once I got to the game I could see how well being part of a team works: no matter what you are part of the team. Outside the cicada

sing about the failure of summer and I feel their dying need to confess. Today I would like to be happy willingly, yet the Gods of poetry have willed it I should say nothing of myself, only quote others in the framework of belly spilling over into the glorious qualm that is time passing – I am emotionally charged and I’m not sure what to do about it.

I wonder what the economy of poetics will do about it – the half-life of information will spare me the details, I’m sure.

I’ll be dead before my writing forgets me. I have only an inkling of anything you’d dream of beginning with an idea of the local.

Jay MillAr issue fo ur

Westerly Samantha Bellinger issue five Forest grounded with dirty knees, ringlet-ed hair, zero control and my sun-ripening smile, I stride up towards and bound to my sky north, high north allotment without you, without anyone, just

space to breathe.

Here there are garden plots and off-leash vermin, thickets, rambunctious bushes, squat shrubs and needle-work pines.

I’m going running there.

You can watch me in the distance while you sit on the parched leaves.

Galloping legs, true-wild and thick,

bucking it all off, shaking, sucking in air.

Stay where you are.

I have told you time and time again: no, no and never.

Unsaddle me please.

Politely, divinely, let me run, alone and fast.

Waxfact Haibun After Dave Currie & Chris Johnson Here’s a bird fact. In late fall, the Bohemian waxwing eats semi-thawed red berries, just like we did during the rolling brownouts when grandma got sure her hoard of suspended Thanksgiving trimmings would all come suddenly of age. When the berries don their little helms of ice they begin to ferment, lighting up birdbrains with firecrackers of daydrunk. Whole families get fucked up on them. Flying with one wing tucked, they corkscrew into windows, topple off branches sunblinded and belligerent.

In November, the Yukon forests are tackily carpeted with dazed waxwings. In November, while we wait for TV to wake up, grandma pours warm white wine that melts us to the couches and tells nice family stories: I remember Ferne, I remember her; life was horrible for her with her eight kids in a shack. She would sleep on the floor when he drank. The only time life was good for her was when she was elderly out in Calgary with her daughter Dorothy, and she was taken care of and she was treated well and that was the only time in her life she ever was.

She is very nearly singing so we gotobed. Foxes waddle, contact trashed from gorging on felled birds.

Parks people, nice people, tread carefully through the new snow, stooping now and then to pluck trembling grey bodies from the cold. They hold the waxwings cushioned in the dark until the light no longer hurts, until it’s safe for them to care about themselves and eggs again.

Nature was not unfair before this, our gentlest gift, our concept “Fair”

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JM Franch eteau issue six

KCA RC - KCIRC

KCA RC - KCIRC

KCA RC

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KCA RC - KCIRC KCAIRC

CRACK

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KCIRC

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KCA RC

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Gone the yell-ow birds

CRACK

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KCA RC KCIRC

KCA RC KCIRC KCA RC KCIRC KCA RC KCIRC

CRICK CRACK

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walls

CRICK

started

CRACK CRICK

it cannot be contained

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CRICK CRACK

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KCIRC

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C. Isa Lausas // issue seven

darkness [k]no/w’[h]ere here.

Gender Blender / / Eclipse of the Heart

In the swamps of the Southern U.S. male frogs have been developing ovaries not the way teenage boys imagine having breasts in the shower or Arnold gives birth in “Junior” but thanks to runoff from the herbicide Atrazine and consequently there are fewer frogs in the way these days it seems there’s fewer of everything living except us and our electronics and the stock market.

I imagine these frogs confusing the lady frogs and themselves too although perhaps they’re happy eating flies, I’m projecting onto them my own confusions which are caused less by herbicide than by silence, silence being my word for the dark place inside I can’t admit to.

Although I drew a map to get there when I was nine and I could grow up to be a cowboy or a princess or an astronaut, running around with only a papier-mâché hero mask

over my little boy face like an eclipse made permanent but not real, the moon behind its shadow crying into the pillow of stars.

I need to believe we’re each of us planets in orbit and alone simultaneously circling the light of our desires.

Light being another word for acceptance, the light touch of the wind for example blowing over the frog ponds every year saying goodbye to more frogs and hello to something else, probably something with greater resistance to toxins, toxins another word for humans sometimes.

In the documentary of my life that’s taken twenty-nine years to film thus far this is the scene where my eyes contain a sudden revelation although nothing much has occurred except perhaps the eclipse is ending, I step forward in a sundress to feel some emergence, some return.

Ben Gallagher is sue e ig h t

The Rape of Proserpina Bernini, 1622 The seismic pressure of her rigorous wrist against his holy temple, where the slow silo bones of her articulated radius-spine find their origin and insertion twisted into the angle of beseeching.

She is a silk kite wrestled from the wind into vacuity, into black hole, into alabaster devouring Tartarus.

His triumph—a brimful of rosehip in weighted hands tucked maternal into his swollen chest, that she might not slip down his slick plane or fly away like sweet disembodied petals.

Still, he will nurse the grave embers with baby breath and whispers, burning low inside the hollow he cracked open in her tectonic sternum to the point of melting milk and phosphorescence.

Already her hard skin gives in like ripe fruit.

Sara-Jane Keith is sue e ig h t

Walden Dreams

Beside that lake, away from parents and occupied strangers – strange and tall – with a penchant for bottles and their drooping cigarettes, and cooing, so much like the ripples they dip their toes into, and out of, drying on rocks, or tossing them up, and laughing like early rain.

We were standing there, Charlotte, don’t you remember?

You plunged in naked. It was cold. And dipping yourself like a string in wax that came out just as bright.

Our ribs warmed by want, and a layer of dirty towels.

Lazily I might return there a bit too often.

You chide me for my foolishness.

What a bed we rest in, make

James Southcott issue eight

The The Underside Underside of of the the Alphabet Alphabet A, en-dessous: Silent with umlaut.

In Seville, we see it grafted onto the names of classical composers killed in bullfights.

B, en-dessous: Unpronounceable disaster of a letter.

On the tongue it should feel like a lozenge of packed peat.

Clot the ink and let it blot the paper: thus, this letter.

C, en-dessous: In the form of two freckled wrists reaching down through water, and written in cream-coloured ink, necessarily.

Derived from the Synesthesian wamb, the flavour of drowning.

D, en-dessous: Often used to denote the sound of children bathing; cloven in two pieces, one at either end of a line of text.

Each piece resembles, in profile, the face of a person the writer remembered unexpectedly.

E, en-dessous: If written on crêpe, it should be pronounced “-yg” (partly choked); if written on stone, it is not a letter, but an accident of glaciation, and pronounced “öhj.”

In either case it is framed to the left and to the right by quiet breathing.

O

(A Dream Abecedary)

F, en-dessous: Twist the lips into a canoe and pronounce by whistling through the teeth.

Inscribe this letter with a heavy hand: inaudible if erased and re-written.

Z, en-dessous: Traditionally added to any word the speaker pronounces while drunk; written with a dull pencil, slant-wise.

Often crossed out, in which case it should be voiced (whether jovial or tragic) with a hiccup.

H, en-dessous: Controversial.

Linguists point to its application in Flemish chorales and propose that it be pronounced liltingly, as if by a flute; others, noting its form, argue that it be classed as pornographic marginalia, and erased.

I, en-dessous: Like a trout darting among reeds through angled light: the beautiful letter, spoken in an unconscious flicker of the eyes.

K, en-dessous: An anti-letter.

To write, dribble water over printed text.

Pronounced in scalloped paper, rings of ink.

L, en-dessous: An inversion of the throated “ng”; requires that the speaker have a full set of teeth.

Written, the letter is more forgiving, and resembles a reiterated Ω.

M, en-dessous: This letter has no known use apart from its inscription on parcels, the delivery of which it seems to expedite.

N, en-dessous: Once, having just returned from a trip through China, by the end of which I hardly knew myself, and with the city honeyed by afternoon glow, I passed my brother’s apartment on the 44 bus and it seemed appropriate that I should pull the cord, push through the rear door and run up to his buzzer which I’d press, and he’d answer, and we’d boil spaghetti and enjoy each other’s adult voices, but instead I stayed in my seat; I went home and didn’t speak to him that week, or again at all until his birthday – this letter reminds me of that time.

P, en-dessous: Voiced in C sharp; if flat, the letter becomes a vowel.

Some say its form mimics the borders of the ancient Carthaginian Republic while, in truth, the Republic apes the letter, which has atrophied over centuries of use – some doubt that it survives at all.

S, en-dessous: In season April through June, during which time it lends a sweet lime flavour to any word that takes it.

Out of season, the reader finds herself wearied on seeing it; she closes her book without thinking; she turns to look outside and pronounces this letter in thin, hungered sighs.

Natalie Morrill //

is sue nine

y

plural: teeth

in the teeth of, (I don’t know about you but I’ve never heard this one before):

in spite of,

contrary to,

directly against, closely related to: set a person’s teeth on edge is this like: you get under my skin, in more ways than one, so I, with my teeth, (in the teeth of ) bite through your skin, not just to muffle screams, we have far more effective plastic toys and leather straps for that, but to let you know that I am here I am here I am here these teeth marks are identifiable, my fingerprint on your skin, a branding, to get my teeth into, a way to devout myself entirely to you.

That was foolish, I know.

My teeth marks will disappear from your skin, covered in layers of clothes and a good lie (you were always so good at making me believe those obvious lies), so yes, my bite will fade but I will still be left with the taste of your blood in my mouth.

Kaitlin Tremblay is sue t en

1998 I will finish this poem one day.

I will also die one day.

The two won’t happen consecutively, but both will mark the end of an energy.

The energy of putting my pen to paper.

The energy of my parent’s sheets.

The energy of thought.

The energy of love.

My wrist is tired.

I am tired.

The love that made me capable of thought that has made me capable of poetry has made me capable of fatigue.

This poem was written the instant my parents separated in exhaust.

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Reid Millar is sue t wel ve

Self-Portrait

I place my words

on the wind− paper boats on water

-

*

as Aesop

As if in my mind

an auditorium burst into applause & the wooden panels peeled off its walls collapsed

to a great oak, all the lost forests & let go all sound back to the world.

to lose their way to you.

* I am stilled by surrender

my body I surrender it its simple function of living

what isn’t I surrender & all that is mine.

* I am the crow in the my hard lump

parable

thirst-pruned− brail to the seeping night stones that blunt my beak &

add only

distance.

*

-

Words like stones that raise and if not drop

& break you.

Ali Sohail issue twel ve

Rejuvenation

the cycle of unhinging my collarbone from a cloud before the storm: the gap-tooth space between the rain and the rainbow, a delicate desire for acknowledgement. here lay the trembling passivity of droplets on bare skin. there are flowers blooming out of your mouth and it seems that I am destined to water them out of love out of love, out of love the sky empties itself to feed you.

Farah Ghafoor is sue t h irteen

geography

of an inlet bone

oh, connective tissue of an antler: brittle boyhood brittle boy

adam gregory

i ssu e t hir te e n

this beauty will make you strong

[Muddy Children Puzzle]

At the end of your playing, there is a voice, which is the voice of your father. The three of you, staunch and indignant, having just exited the plum-rain season, stand there watching his face. He says, at least one of you is muddy. You look at the other two, who cannot see that they both are muddy, and besides that, drenched with rainwater. But you see it. Father says, who knows whether or not they are muddy? No one says a word. Father asks again. This time, the other two both raise their hands, looking at each other. Then Father grins, and they all go inside. Later, you realize this meant you were clean.

M. JIA is sue t h irteen

6

Northland Ours to discover, at 90km/h. Barrie. Gravenhurst.

Bracebridge. Huntsville. North Bay. A break scheduled for 2:30pm—the bus driver repeats this word: scheduled. Tim Hortons will quench us, as we wheel through Shield country. Snow flurries the ridgeline. A row back, the grad student and the girl snack loudly. Thus begins a dissertation on Frito Lays, their taste, their texture, the degree of satisfaction in the caloric crunch. He’ll prove himself like a thesis. At each station we accrue more passengers, the bus expanding like a definition challenged by new discoveries. Couples begin the slow walk down the aisle, searching for double seats. This is not what the driver would call a scheduled break, but smokers see a glint in the granite, alight and inhale nicotine.

Breath clouds as it hits the dew point. -17⁰C. Earth, at its perihelion, closer to the Sun than in summer.

Earphones leak one-hit wonders and one-hit wonders to be, syncopate hospital calls about loved ones faring better. Ten rows up, the kid who flashed her ticket with Olympic pride, parrots some profanity she’s learned at home.

In the rear-view mirror, her mom’s face, a mood ring shifting. Outside, trees demonstrate their yearly resilience against Winter. Not all conifers are evergreen.

Tamaracks dress likes pines but shed like aspens, sun siphoning chlorophyll till needles turn golden, fall. One can’t fault this, really.

Everything wanting to appear stronger than it is.

Laboni Islam //

is sue s eventeen

—see you later alligators.

colophon

This publication—issue twenty of the literary magazine (parenthetical)— was published by words(on)pages in the month of May in the year two thousand and seventeen.

It was designed, printed, and bound in Toronto, Ontario, by words(on) pages co-founders William Kemp and Nicole Brewer, who used Adobe InDesign for layout, and was typeset and designed using Kingthings Trypewriter 2, Adobe Garamond Pro, and FFF TUSJ. It was bound by hand with paper, thread, needle, and patience.

Front and back covers were printed by Sebastian and Brendan Frye at Swimmers Group in Toronto. (parenthetical) could not be produced without the support of Michael Brewer, words(on)pages Director of Business Operations.

For this issue, we were unable to pay a proofreader, and don’t like asking for free work—please forgive any inconsequential errors.

Y including

Westerly | Samantha Bellinger Getting there | JC Bouchard The Rose Left in the Bell Jar | Jasmine Gui Waxfact Haibun | JM Francheteau Gender Blender/Eclipse of the Heart | Ben Gallagher Rejuvenation | Farah Ghafoor sleevelike and quiet | philip gordon geography of an inlet bone | adam gregory Northland | Laboni Islam [Muddy Children Puzzle] | M. JIA The Rape of Proserpina | Sara-Jane Keith Here | Zishad Lak visual poetry by C. Isa Lausas The Trees Meanwhile | Jay MillAr 1998 | Reid Millar The Underside of the Alphabet | Natalie Morrill symbiosis | Eric Schmaltz Self-Portrait as Aesop | Ali Sohail Walden Dreams | James Southcott plural: teeth | Kaitlin Tremblay