[audio mp3="http://www.queensquilt.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/i-will-raise-my-Babygirl.mp3"][/audio] As a child, I would cling to her arm. Both my hands wound tightly around her muscle; skin that sunk and sagged from gravity fifteen years too early. My dad looks at photos of her from their twenties and tells me, “This is how...
[audio mp3="http://www.queensquilt.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/redamancy.mp3"][/audio] They marry on a Sunday evening, with no witnesses but the birds in the trees and the stars in the sky. The valley is quiet. A soft summer breeze ruffles the leaves of the willow tree the pair has found shelter under, the brook murmurs...
[audio mp3="http://www.queensquilt.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/year-of-the-rat.mp3"][/audio] They burrow too deep within the earth to know nothing, says the rat man. He wears on him the appearance of the witch Rasputin, and it is witchcraft indeed that he performs. The rats had for a time forced me to divert from my...
I have recorded a love blind as faith opaque and unwavering. Love – she simmers out of sight while devotees come to her doors. They’ll call her forth: knees purple, heads drawn to the floor reverently. Rooted in rows as the play of sacrifice drones on at the altar, an evisceration of...
Tonight, a buzzing, tingling, familiar fear takes root in my abdomen and shivers up my spine. The moon outside is creamy and dapples the insides of my eyelids with twinkling white lights. She is woeful: that single, bright eye, harbour of the listless and witness of secrets, But...
In “Diving into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich and “Pearl Diver” by Mitski, the speaker narrates a deep-sea dive during which the diver undergoes a shift in identity as a result of a quest. The speaker in each text describes the dive, drawing lines of...
He never walks by. He could always walk by. I don’t forget that. Behind the curtains, my mind runs his voice through my brain. This street is empty, and I am pale behind my curtains. He never walks by, but he’ll never see what’s in the...
There by the wind-wake and diesel fumes, peeling off the road I can chase a younger version of me to the playground It’s dark; I can barely see the swings, but once I’m there I’m a ghost a dark sweatshirt on a pendulum, a metronome of flesh and bone...
While popular music is dominated by artists embracing party culture and —in the view of neoliberal morality— its subsequent vice of drug use, Kid Cudi’s 2009 hit “Pursuit of Happiness (Nightmare)” examines the subject as a complicated matter. In collaboration with Ratatat and MGMT, the...
my nonna was the last to eat in her family, scooping bowls of pastina soup for her husband and children, hovering over the table in case there were pleads for more parmesan or pepper, serving seconds before she got her first; a comforting lunch turned lukewarm by the time she sits in the...