A sister in place of a father wasn’t an exchange. I’d had twelve years with a father and none with a sister, and I’d preferred it that way.

I protested with my body, such as it was. I felt the need to explain. “I’m staging a protest.” I fluttered hard. The foe smelled of gas.

The Gemini

It would be a lie to say I always went to bed with one brother
and woke up with another—that at night he placed pomegranate
 
seeds on my belly, making constellations on my

I sip red wine and weed / and deface anything that looks like me

Had a little accident last night Stevie, my boss yells. Tote fell over in the back of a truck. Someone's gotta clean up all that fish. I turn my head from him. Stare off out passed the end of the harbour. Where the horizon and Lake Eerie meet. Dissolve into one another. The breeze in my hair. Thinking why me?

It’s enough just to know that they’re out there. .

People became a mob and the mob circled her, gnashed their teeth and lashed their arms as if to say, Dance! Dance! Dance! They wanted a concert! Another song! Dance, Connie, dance!

montreal

in the seventh month of winter
my hair was orange, an apricot
graffiti zig-zagged along broken
threads you parked on atwater
avenue and screamed at your
hooves, rubber hands

Tongue hasn’t left its .276 square foot efficiency studio apartment in three weeks. To discourage visitors due to lack of space, this space was rented. Tongue is going through a break-up. This

There Never Was a Mainland

We burned fast that summer. The boats had stopped coming. The water kept us there. That’s the thing about islands.

We bathed at low tide. We ate shells and weeds.

In the bag the child swam and twirled and stopped long enough to meet the eyes of the camera. 

After I finished the reading, I waited a couple minutes, browsing books, until I left the bookstore - alone. All the women who’d watched me, who were so supportive, so attractive, were huddled in a group. They were friends, they were a community.

Thank you for calling that curiosity “innocent.”  I like the sense of “innocent" as “guileless,” rather than “not-guilty,” since the poems sketch both our ignorance and our complicity.  I

Toronto-based writer Sennah Yee’s first collection, How Do I Look?, is quick-witted, lucid, observant and constantly rewarding. Though her book is technically classified as poetry, her pieces feel more like vignettes to me, mini-stories and personal anecdotes that seem to be examining their feelings in real time, tackling in the process a wide range of topics such as mythological figures, the movie Mulan, The Sims, sexual awakenings, microaggressions, Grand Theft Auto 5, being Chinese-Canadian and much more.

My sheets got dripped on. We didn’t finish all of it. I fell asleep with the taste of it dried around my lips. Sweet, for a little.

Suggestion

new boyfriend says he’s worried. new boyfriend says i should stop saying credit cards are just free money. new boyfriend says i should stop telling strangers at the bar lyme disease

I finally tore Bluets in half @ 12:50 a.m.
I had had enough of it, of its blueness…
I had begun to loathe its preciousness, its precision
What it represents -
Its fans, the copycats

Chicken à la King

I bit. We bred a snoutless dog to lead
us to the prize. We groomed ourselves
with yearning floss. You swam
through scum in the retention pond
and called it flamenco.

Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere: in Laura's 6th grade locker with her roll-on deodorant, in Dr. Davidson's walk—slow and tight-calved, in Mr. Robinson's guitar—Cat Steven's "Wild World" each afternoon before the bell, in Mrs. Roger's wavy, knee- length red hair—smelling of Wella Balsam and cigarettes. 

now the poem is a woman

On November 13, 2012, Hugo Dos Santos awoke shortly after 1 am with an urgent need to urinate. He got up from bed and took two steps out into the hallway when he saw three small creatures in

The Record
Fear
Label: Slash
Released: May 16, 1982
Length: 14 songs, 27 minutes

This is about a dead guy. But it’s 1995 and the dead guy isn’t dead yet. He’s driving. A black

reach inside the incision
up the stomach from the asshole
ribcage gristle light brown mound of heather memory

spill oddities, like miraculous whole red berries
feel for the heart with two

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
~ W.B Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’

One day, your borders shall speak;

Indignant birds will shit on your

Under the cruel glow of inquiry, I want to tell her that the party is over.

By the time I arrived at the Phoenix airport the next summer I was thirty pounds heavier. I’d spent the previous nine months eating vending machine moonpies and packaged cookies in my dorm room.