It’s an ugly thing to follow a woman along the street but this is what I did. She was a copy of Patti Smith during the early Mapplethorpe years, before Horses and Mineshaft and all the BDSM, when they…
We arrive in the raspberry fields when it’s dark. It’s dark when we pile out of our secondhand pickup. My father, my mother. My brother and me. It’s dark when we start walking the rutted, sopping dirt road that…
Gordon Bishop, fifty-six, is a one-eyed, one-legged, one-breasted single father. He is a native New Yorker who shares an antique-filled one-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen with his teenage daughter. Every night, Gordon sits at his desk wearing tighty-whities and…
When my mother died, I inherited a sizeable goldenrod-coloured envelope; inside, I discovered birthday cards given to me from family members throughout my childhood, handmade get-well cards crafted by classmates upon the occasion of having one of several surgeries…
BAŅUTA RUBESS pioneered feminist theatre and contemporary opera to national renown in Canada and Latvia. She has lived in four countries and writes in two languages. She has written plays, libretti, radio drama, television biopics, stories, and…
It’s all a blur. It can be separated into two five-year periods: using alone and using with Haley. Haley had piercings everywhere: the bridge of her nose, her septum, her nipples, her belly button. She had stretched lobes—one had…
Content Warning—suicidal ideation The story I tell goes something like this: Did you know I once helped a boy escape from a mental hospital? When I tell it that way, people start imagining things: guns blazing, alarms blaring,…
Content Warning—child sexual abuse Tansy My sister, Liberty, tells me I need to exercise, that it cures all ills. Well, I don’t see how swimming cures hers. All it does is dry out her hair. Jolee, my youngest…
All spaces are haunted. In a way, all spaces are about memory. In A Summoning, “a conceptual, psychological experiment focused on memory,” Nicole McCarthy invites readers to sit and feel and think and remember. Throughout this fragmented collection, McCarthy…
I found Brittany Ackerman’s piece “Mia’s Birthday” in Forever Magazine in the summer of 2021, in the midst of an intolerably painful breakup for which I was wholly to blame. Asked to write an introduction for our conversation, I…
