WINNER: Bedtime Routine
She lay next to her son, his body steaming like raw dough in the oven.
Issue 63: Fall 2023
Introduction
Listening to Austin
I first came to Canada when I was 19 years old.
Fiction Prize
RUNNER-UP: A Moment for Indra Singh
How I came to know that Indra Singh regularly went to other worlds was nothing more than a bookmark nestled in a Kurt Vonnegut book that came spinning out when I knocked the book off an end table.
Poetry Prize
WINNER: Praise Us, For We Are Dead
An imam shouts over bullhorn feedback, and broadcasts that we need to welcome and provide for a new Pakistani family in the area.
RUNNER-UP: inheritance
ACROSS: 2. shorn hair /one less thing to hold
Fiction
Stopgap Rhapsody
This goddamn song cannot be stuck in my head anymore.
Blood and Water
Giles woke to the sounds of screams being abruptly cut off.
Family Vacation
Four men, shirtless or in black, neoprene wetsuits, stood chest-deep in the water, assembling the last segments of a dock that reached out into the shallow lake.
Poetry
two poems
I would, I say. What makes you so good, / you say.
Essays
Heartwood
Mayday (Prunus padus): a flowering deciduous tree in the rose family.
Wobble | Fall | Impact
A former colleague of mine was a formidable chatterbox.
Interviews
Coming of Age: An Interview Between Sarah Feldbloom and Sofia Mostaghimi
Sofia Mostaghimi and I met back in 2019, when she edited my short story “Good Thing” for Broken Pencil Magazine, in which a young girl takes a 16 hour bus ride through the mountains to visit a lover she’s haunted by having left behind.
Reviews
Nasser Hussain’s New Collection Plays Love Games
Nasser Hussain's second book with Coach House opens with the abecedarian procession, "Sing // alove blove clove dlove / elove ... zlove".
What Happens Next—As If Continuously Reaching Elsewhere: A Review of T. Liem's Slows: Twice
T. Liem’s sophomore collection of poetry, Slows: Twice opens with an epigraph that is one part discomforting and one part expectant.
Of Grace and Cruelty: A Review of Burn Diary by Joshua Chris Bouchard
In his debut poetry collection Burn Diary, Joshua Chris Bouchard pieces together his memories of growing up in a small town in Northern Ontario.
On the Time We Forget in Olga Ravn’s My Work
When I work as an astrologer, I find that people are more comfortable pinning their personalities to constellations than they are asking their mothers about their birth times.
Rageful Laminations
Most of the stories we tell, we do so without realizing.
