[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...
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...
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...
I let’s say: you are walking you are walking & you see exactly where the sidewalk stops & this is perfect you know exactly where one feeling end s & ano ...
“Do you remember us as children?” I don’t either, not entirely. I stood on tables singing and screaming poetry, so you must have been the quiet one. Now, turmeric stains my sleeves, and they braid dandelions around my fingers. Now, you’ve been experimenting with facial hair, and I’m too cautious to comment...
When I was born I changed my mother’s hair (What happens to a body is a daughter’s fault). I drank salt water mixed by a propellor On the back of a boat, Ate grapefruit my grandfather bought accidentally, Took a 500 a month stipend And some bullet points, Pushed on the doors I...
my first is perhaps the most foreign, yet it is the one of home. Cantonese. She lights the path forward, a promise of return, a call of the motherland beckoning us on. She brings home wayward sailors paddling peeling kayaks packed with families, Canadian-born. Almost at the shore, upset, upstart, unsure, the...