(parenthetical)issue eleven

january two thousand and sixteen

Note from the Editors

honey skins poetry by A.E. LongLeech fiction by Patrick DoerksenKonkret poetry by Carter VanceSt. Richard poetry by Suzanna DerewiczPseudopomp fiction by James GuthrieThirteen Ways of Looking at a Poppy poetry by Nikita ShorikovSarvenaz photography and poetry by Miehelle Duquettesperlonga, naples poetry by Rebecca Maria Rose GismondiChocolate Chip Pancakes fiction by Steve Nolan

non-fiction—

No Work FiNished here: reWritiNg ANdy WArhol by Liz Worth— reviewed by William Kemp

contents - issue eleven

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soft-sky a pink blister colour,warmto touch. i soap my fingers clean withsoapsuds,soap acid-green appleliquid,cool and stinging. your footsoleshot and doughy,dull padsounds,closerbutterskins. Manuka honeyskins

steaming in the sponge air. purple-blue lovebites big butterfly bruisebites-butterflies on the back’s honeyskin. youreyes little ghost of jupiters,darkshines.in a black fridgeroom if you like,my body,it’s not for:fat crinkles,scabcrusts;not forcold smoothwhite in star-light,it’s theflushed,fleshy place a brain inhabits.

A.E. Long

honey skins

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Leech

Why do mom and dad shut their door every night? Liz says they do. I haven’t seen it. I go to bed too early. I wonder if they have one too, coming after them. I wonder if they know a door can’t stop it? I’ve never thought that maybe everyone has one. If Liz has one it would be something with wings. Liz spends all day with her friends in the tree fort. She likes to jump from the high dive at the pool. She says if she had one super power she would choose to fly. If I had a superpower I would fly too, but for different reasons. Mom and dad are in the military. It’s nothing to do with guns and bombs. Actually, it’s more boring than even being a plumber. I watched the plumber last week fix the sink. He seemed much happier than dad. Dad’s behind a desk and sometimes he doesn’t talk to anybody at all for a whole day, except on the phone. Mom’s behind a desk too, but she’s the opposite, all day she’s talking to people. She’s a chaplain. That’s probably just as boring. In the military you always have someone telling you what to do. Mostly they tell mom and dad to move here, now move there. We’ve moved twice in the last four years. This is great for me, it keeps me away from it. I don’t like to think what will happen when we stop moving. Liz hates moving, but maybe she should be grateful if she also has one.

I dreamed last night about a forest of bonsai. Bonsai are trees shrunken by a laser beam so that people can put them in their house. I don’t really believe that, but how else do they get so small? Dad says he has a friend with a shrink ray, and now we have a bonsai in the bathroom. I like to imagine an owl got caught sleeping when they shrunk the tree and woke up tiny and now lives on the sow bugs behind the toilet. In my dream I was walking in the bonsai forest trying not to break the trees. It turned out the whole world had become a bonsai. I could see everywhere, over mountains even, like I was looking at a map, and I could see it coming towards me. That’s not so different from what I imagine during the day though. When we’re in a circle and Mrs. Schulz is reading I look out the window and am afraid it’s there moving along the fence. A couple nights ago I imagined it wriggling through the muck beneath a river somewhere miles and miles away. It’s something like a slug or a leech, shot out from some weird place in the ground, or maybe from space. It’s very slow, and that’s my only hope. It takes an afternoon to cross a road, a year to cross a state. But it’s still scary because it never stops moving. It’s not annoyed by buildings or lakes or anything in its way, it just keeps going. It doesn’t need to sleep or eat. I don’t know where it gets its energy from. Everything needs energy to keep it

moving. Maybe there are things that don’t? Maybe it’s not doing the moving, maybe it’s being pulled, reeled into me like a fish. I’m not sure what happens if it catches me. I used to have nightmares of falling into a pit of leeches. Something like that I’m guessing. I tried to explain this to mom. She just kept asking me why I was so sure. But I’m not sure. I can’t be sure. So sometimes when I’ve been playing for too long with lego in the basement, or reading too long under the trampoline, I need to get up and go somewhere else, just in case.

Today Mom did something she’d never done before. She brought back a map and a big sheet of paper from work and spread it over the kitchen table. Where did you see it last, she said. When we were camping by the lake near grandma and grandpa’s, I said. It’s summer time and I do a lot of exploring. I collect things. I was climbing a tree to get this huge pinecone when I thought I saw it across the lake. How long would it take to get from the fridge to where I’m standing, mom said. Half an hour, I said. Mom wrote all this down on the paper. I stood on my tiptoes watching her write down numbers and cross out numbers. Eventually she circled one big number at the bottom. I’ve calculated it out, she said. From the lake to us it will take a year and three months. I looked at the paper but it was just a bunch of numbers. Are you sure, I said. I’ve used math, she said, and math is the surest thing in the world. I’m not sure I saw it at the lake, I said. Mom grabbed up the paper with the numbers and crunched it into the garbage. She was mad. I’m sorry, I said. I didn’t know she was going to do all that work. She had her hands all tangled up in her hair. The only sure thing is that it always moves towards me, I said. She sat down at the table then and told me to sit down too. I want you to imagine something for me, Hans, she said. Imagine it showing up right here in our kitchen, right there on the floor where the carpet becomes tiles. It’s so slow, you could leap right over it! You could even tap dance around it if you wanted! I’d be too scared, I said. Then I’d help you scoop it up into a box and ship it to Africa, she said. When it arrived there it would just start crawling back towards me, it wouldn’t even be angry, I said.

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We could send it into space, she said. No we couldn’t, I said. We could confuse it, she said. Maybe it was tracking me by my hair, maybe we could cut off my hair and send it to uncle Bernie out east and make it go there? But we can’t confuse it, I said. The only way we could confuse it would be if I died. I didn’t say this though. It was a new thought.

Last night mom and dad were yelling with their door closed. I only know because I couldn’t sleep, I was thinking the new thought again. I was thinking that maybe if I did kill myself it would finally get annoyed. But when I try to imagine it out there, growing slack and stopping under some rock, not moving at all, I can’t. It’s like it needs me. To be itself. It would be like if a rock were falling and suddenly the whole earth disappeared and the rock was left with nowhere to fall. Is this what would really happen? I feel weird when I think about it, because I can never know. It’s set up that way. If I die I won’t be able to watch what happens, but if I don’t die nothing different will happen.

Today Liz told me that we were going to live with grandma and grandpa for a while. Five minutes later, mom told me the same thing. I’m really scared. Mom didn’t make any calculations for that. It would reach me much quicker, I can’t say how quick, but a lot quicker, since I saw it out there when we went camping. I told mom that I wasn’t going. She just hugged me and kissed me again and again on my forehead. Please mom, what should I do, I said. I was crying. Mom was crying too. I’m laying a spell on you, she said. She was still kissing me. What does the spell do, I said. It’s so that it can’t touch you, not for moment, she said. If you see it, if it comes to your door when you’re in bed, don’t be scared. How long will the spell last, I said. Two days, she said. That’s not very long, I said. It’s the best I got, she said. But I will renew it every two days. I will never let it expire.

I’ve been at grandma and grandpa’s now for five days and I haven’t seen it. Mom’s come twice, dad’s come once. I’m not sure kisses are enough to stop it. I’m not sure because Mom kisses Liz too and Liz is starting to get really sick. I think hers is getting really close. Everyone has one, I’m pretty sure of that now. I’m telling mom and dad we need to get Liz back home, we need to or something horrible will happen, but mom and dad don’t understand, they just keep kissing us like that will make everything OK.

Patrick Doerksen

Humdrum humming of gradient steel,chewing gum pavement, cut with lye glass,Radioshack mock boomboxes blaring deep housein past-work hour mocking a fool’spanoply of bright-checked shirts, stetsonwhistles and views of billboard bylines,gave you some placement, anchor intwo-slice five-dollar ticket counters,the hard-sell donation box merchants,the 888 Craft Market lead paints fumes.

But I can’t fault it,

when I fell back on despondent’s jeer,pretended sophistication for someone used tofacade accents, half-stories of life, embellishments,to get through the morning’s perception,to get past an urge of collapse.

The Bellwoods maples, whacked togetherhammer-chisel with art pattern invisibility,with white fence sophistication, never dida great deal more than sights of entangledarms on Church St. alleyway bottles,

but, then, for you:

I fall hard, I fall fast

Konkret

Carter Vance

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This school (playground) wasn’t accurately named but mistakenlyafter a poor orphaned English boy.

(mis)Understood by some to be saintly y’know?We never knew this place to be saintly though.

It’s ’98 and the girl with the straight, dark bangshands my friend an opened Doritos bagsprinkled with rocks.and smiles.

I take him –My friend –Bleeding mouth out to the fringes of the property to prayagainst stone remnants that used to befoundations of a farm house.

Together we sing hymns against these pillarsspringing from the earth like Spartans from this sad middle-class soil.

I tell him St. Richard used to be a farmer.

Seventeen years cause six packs of portables to first be emptied out thengrinded downreminding us that the children who used to live here,the purple-stained popsicle kids arenothing but ghosts.

St. Richard

Suzanna Derewicz

Seventeen years seen through bits of baseball diamond wire coming off in placesbroken bottles from varying other kinds of six packs sprawled across first base gravel.

Seventeen—a drinking problem.Seventeen—a birthday party and arock hard surfacecause my friend to die.

And feet to this newly placed asphalt, all I can think about is how they never botheredreplacing the basketball nets after all.

And how if Richard was around now, if they knew him personally they’d seehe’d probably be really bad at basketball.

And they would seeHow the new generation of popsicle kids puts stones in his mid-morning snack, andmakes fun of his teeth.

In his second grade classroom Mrs. B smiles warmly telling him togive thanks.

He waitschoking terrorfor the bell to ring. C

Pseudopomp

I didn’t think about the tree much, when it was standing. It was an obstacle during baseball, having been planted right where third base should’ve been (its trunk was on third – its branches jutted well out into the infield). It was a target when we were bored and/or all our balls and kites and Frisbees were stuck up it (a target for stones, bats, feet, sticks). You couldn’t climb it really. At least not comfortably, the way you would a maple. It was some kind of pine, and it was prickly as hell. The only time I ever really appreciated our prickly fixture was after a snowstorm one morning when I was eight or nine. A mess of perfectly sticky snowman-snow stuck to its branches and bent them right down to the ground, sculpting an enormous dome of snow. I dug a little door and crawled inside and it was like my own private fort or cathedral or duotone big-top. (The sun turned the snow bluish in the thinly caked places.) I played in there for the better part of the morning, until the sun started to thaw my hideaway, so I quickened the process by jumping and crashing through the branches, knocking all the snow off and fluffing the tree back up to its boring, everyday shape. Then I went inside. After that, the tree was pretty much just there, until this one miserable March Break, when I was eighteen. There weren’t many parties that week (not many I knew about, anyway), so I was staying in for a few nights. This sounds blissful to me now—staying in and watching television with family—but of course being a typical teenage whatever, I was being mopey about it. The weather didn’t help. It was stormy this particular night, and you could only really half-watch a movie when the weather was bad. Whenever it stormed, we either lost the satellite or the power went out. Sure enough, about halfway through The Aviator, the lights went off. “Is it ever windy,” my Dad said, peering out the window. Then our like fifty foot pine came crashing down by our back door. It landed somehow smack in between the carport and the house, crushing only an old wrought iron railing rather than half our house or two of three cars. (“Was that ever lucky,” my Dad said, hurrying back inside.) The next day, as they sawed it up and carted it off, I thought of all the times I’d kicked at its trunk, its sappy mass a stand in for bullies and backstabbers. I thought of the pong and scrape of rubber boot tread on bark, and I thought of how impervious the pine felt, like slapping a pillar of stone. Yet there it lay, twisted, snapped like a wet stick. My non-reaction to the whole thing was fairly fitting. I remember thinking our yard felt peculiar afterwards. Not really worse. Just yeah: peculiar. I wandered around the bare

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spot, enjoying not having to duck, and I decided I would imbibe a little that night, not because I was bummed or shaken up or whatever, just because why not. There was nothing else happening. I had four grams of shrooms I’d planned to space out over the break. (I don’t know if this is a laughable amount to those stoners among you, but I was young, keep in mind, and I was doing them by myself, so I wanted to be cautious. I liked my parents, and I didn’t want them to come downstairs and find me rolling around the kitchen, mooing like a cow. My modest chemical experiments were always about the sort of mind-expansion/neo-hippy kick I was on when I was younger. They were never about rebellion. I wasn’t a typical teenager, in that way.) I’d only ever taken two grams before, and two had ruined me. Knowing my limits, I was going to take one gram, watch a movie maybe, nothing crazy. The rest I would save for the party that was bound to come up in the next day or two, when there would be friends around to keep my mooing in check. My parents were still awake, still watching T.V., when I ate them (the mushrooms). I didn’t have any chaser, and I didn’t want to go downstairs to get something, so I counteracted the foul saltiness of the shrooms with a packet of Rockets that’d been in my backpack since Halloween. (Imagine a dried cow pie with chalk on the side. Then imagine some like nice lemon or something squeezed over it.) One gram didn’t do anything except leave that horrifying taste in my mouth. (It was a bit like chewing on tree bark, I thought. It was like eating the body of my freshly felled friend.) I waited an hour then went downstairs when the coast was clear and channel surfed a bit. Nothing doing, I took a second gram (no Rockets this time). An hour later: still nothing. Since I knew one gram didn’t do anything, I figured there was no point in leaving only one gram. So I took the last two, and I waited, grouchily. Heavy Metal was on the movie network. This will jive well, I thought. When the zombies showed up, my hair started to melt. I remember brushing a strand off my face, and where my fingers touched my skin luminous blue streaks appeared, streaks seen from inside my head though, my vantage point having suddenly retracted to a spot behind my eyes, back by the occipital lobe, appropriately. This luminescence, I surmised, was molten hair. I was fairly calm about this, I felt. I brushed at my face a few times, trying to extinguish the strands, but each swipe ignited another blade of heatless blue flame across my forehead and down my temple. Somewhere amidst the swiping, I glanced up at the television. The zombies were coming toward the front of the plane, drawn, it seemed, by the light from my hair. This I wasn’t so calm about. Back upstairs, the door locked behind me, I turned the lights off and hid in my bed. I had one of those old wood panelled televisions with the nubby little wheels on the bottom. I dragged it right up next to the bed, right next to where my head was. I intended to put something comforting on, some

movie or concert I had on tape, but the static on channel 3 was as far as I got. In my reverie I recalled a bookmark I had from the Ontario Science Centre that said 1% of the static on television was energy left over from the Big Bang. One side of the bookmark showed a head silhouetted against some static, à la Poltergeist. The flipside showed the Cosmic Microwave Background, which looked like the static on television, only times a trillion and made of blue fire. As I lay in bed, blanketed in the white light from my T.V., I watched quarks and protons and gluons and whatnot flicker and recombine into an unending array of crystalline bric-à-brac, into all matter, I supposed, potentially. And I couldn’t breathe. “Śmierć means body,” someone said, emerging. “Śmierć means me. You gagged on my hymenium.” Her white hood rippled. Then it enveloped me. I was back in my dome of snow, my private little domicile. Our friend had been unfelled, somehow. Reconstructed. “Seems roomy in here. Cozy.” She was finger painting streaks of bluish snow up and down the walls. “The arches are blown blue glass, actually. Trick’s to make them look like snow.” Her fingertips traced the final streak. Then she stepped back, admired her work. “Fickle though, these arches. Snap with one good gust.” I thought of my parents finding me there a week or two later, in amongst the broken branches and shards of blue glass. I thought of them prying me out of the ice with like shovels and snow scrapers. Then when they got me loose, they’d have to wait for the ground to thaw. I was struggling to breathe again, so she bid me come in close to her, in under her vaulted lamellae. We would huddle there until the power went out. “Gimme a Rocket,” she said. “I can taste myself.”

In the morning, I hugged my mother. She squinted at me and smiled. The back window was brighter, I felt. I asked my father if he wanted to go throw the ball around, now that third base wasn’t back in the bush. He didn’t, of course—it was like seven in the morning—but maybe later, when I was feeling better. Outside in the frozen brown grass, by the warped and toppled wrought iron: a dusting of white sawdust. With my rubber boots I kicked a clump of it into roughly a diamond shape.

James Guthrie

IIn empty fieldsThe spirit sways,Like poppies,From distant thunder.

IIWatching the lapping of waves,I am somehow reminded ofCold, white hills,Where there was once a poppy.

IIIA foggy morning.A poppy claws the dirt,Struggling to the light.

IVFallen into sleep, sprawled on my side,I dream of rusted shipsBeneath a macabre rising sun,And I, like Morpheus,Upon my poppy bed.

VA hawk carries a poppy,Or perhapsThe other way around.Won’t you carry me too?

of Looking at a Poppyfor Wallace Stevens

Thirteen Ways U

VIA poppy floats down the stream,Gently, peacefully,Like a corpse.

VIIIn the darkness,A field mouse whispersThe sound of the poppies.

VIIIPoppy! Poppy! Poppy!Ha ha ha,A smoky Chinese laughter fills the roomAlready filled with drifting bodies.

IXPeck peck.A nearby poppy towering.

XRed paint poured along the walls.The artist, shocked, looked at her hands,And then the poppy,Torn between the spaceAnd its reconciliation.

XIA vase of poppiesOn a windowsill.The view is closing;Thunder not far off,And a percussion:Ta ta ta.

XIIA pool of redIn the corner of my eyeI saw my friendsBut it was just a poppy.

XIIIA poppy is blooming,Petals wet with rain,The scene its own apotheosis,Its sound the silenceof the shining cedar-limbs.

NikitaShorikov

L

Michelle

that night i chattered like a bird and wore bruises under my skirt

how do i get out of here?

Duquette

based on the painting “Les baigneuses” by Pablo Picasso

you almost drowned that day as we drank

in the sun by the coast. I mistook your flailing

arms for ones of praise, for the ocean smelled like safety.I was selfishly tempting the rays to coat

me with a new skin, while she braided her salted hair and you inhaled mouthfuls of souls lost at sea. When rescued,all you said was:

“What a day.” And yes, the sand absorbed with ease between our toesand the waves’ tantrum ended – but it was the day. We became women who had to put on sunscreen

and eat three full meals andlie in bed for a day after heartbreak.My skin was coated with rules and remindersand her hair was braided with questionsand your lungs inhaled fear.We were different.

sperlonga, naples

Rebecca Maria Rose

Gismondi

*

Chocolate Chip Pancakes

On top of it all, there was the fucking stork. The last day at the sawmill, and the fucking stork. Phil swears up and down that he saw the thing perching on the top of the tin roof of the plywood building just waiting for them that morning, but how could Phil even see that goddam high up. They had told everyone a few weeks back that the plant was closing, couldn’t afford it, recession, they said a lot of reasons. No one was listening at the meeting thing because everyone knew. Lumber had been shut down a few years back, quietly except for that episode with that young guy, Darcy, yelling at them about his job and all. Phil still doesn’t agree with Darcy’s methods but he meets up with him for breakfast at Mel’s once in a while. Four years out and Darcy still wakes up at 4 a.m., can’t help it. So Phil will eat with the guy, reminding him each time over pancakes that he doesn’t agree with his methods but he still respects the man. As Phil tells it to Darcy the morning after, he saw the stork up there, first thing in the a.m., backlit by the sunrise. “Perchin’ just like a big ol’ fuckin bird,” Phil says. “Could tell by the look in its eye that it woulda been shittin’ on us if we hadn’t already had our hard hats on. God that thing looked like a shittin’ bird if ever I saw one.” Phil then relates all the various sadnesses of the previous day, shutting down the machines, prepping them to be dismantled in a few days, locking up the offices. Darcy half listens while he moves those fancy chocolate chip pancakes all around in his mouth, tasting the hell out of ‘em. He figures he might as well treat himself out of solidarity with the plywood guys. He knows how it feels, and he knows that the little things help, like these delicious chocolate chips spread unevenly throughout the pancake batter. He already knows the boring parts, the sad parts, the parts where men say goodbye to the machines they’ve worked with for decades, it happened to him just the same. Darcy puts down his fork when Phil nears the end of the day. Darcy has heard that this is where the story gets good. “So anyways, then we’re all coming out kinda in our little groups, chatting about old times, some fellas angry and others just kinda upset about it all ending, and we notice something about our cars. The something is that a bunch of the windows are smashed in. Not like, all the windows or nothin’ but a good 70 percent of the windows, I’d say. And before anyone can even start throwing blame around someone yells ‘Aw damn look at that!’ and there’s this big old stork pounding away at Bill’s truck’s back window. Close as we can figure goin’ at its own reflection.” Phil looks up and Darcy nods, fork dangling between index and middle finger, syrup dripping onto the red checkered tablecloth.

Steve Nolan

“So then Bill of course, bein’ Bill, he runs off right at the damn bird. Now this bird is like up to your shoulder, we ain’t talkin’ about any quail or nothing here, this thing is a monster. So Bill’s running after this damn thing and I don’t know if it can’t fly or it just don’t give a fuck, but it’s kind of hopping along in front of him, wings kind of flapping and keeping just ahead of Bill, and you know Bill’s a pretty big fella and he ain’t that fast.” “Ok so sometime in the middle of all this while Bill’s tryin’ to chase down this fucking giant bird monster thing, which took a while, Kevin comes running up out of breath. He like had run off to his truck to grab the Sibley’s Bird Guide and he was flipping through it and showing off to anyone that would listen that the fuckin’ stork wasn’t even a bird that was supposed to live around here. Like it was a zoo escape or a fluke or something. Bradley kept doing that thing he does where he knocks on his hard hat three times and sighs.” Phil knocks a bit on his head, lightly, and Darcy nods. He knows. “So whenever Bill finally gets ahold of this bird it’s by the feet, and at this point the bird is freaking out and flapping all around and sinks its pecking bill right into Bill’s shoulder and that gets Bill riled, you know, so Bill goes and snaps the neck of the bird real quick and easy, pretty damn impressive if you really think about it, then pumps that thing’s body over his head and goes off walking back into the plywood mill. Like yelling something and waving his arms around and it seems like he thought we were all followin’ him in a big rally or whatever but none of us did. He’s all leading an empty march, blood all over the place, hard to get behind that kinda thing when your truck window’s all fucked up.” “So we hear Bill’s voice echoing around in that giant tin room from outside and some of us decide to go have a look at what he’s doing. Something about his bouncing voice really rubbed me the wrong way, all those machines sitting quiet. I always need ear plugs within 30 feet of that building and now I can hear fucking echoes, tell you what. So we’re sort of peeking around the corners of the big main door and we see Bill.” Phil pauses here and shakes his head. “Now keep in mind here that I don’t think Bill’s crazy or nothing, we had all had a really long day that day and ain’t gonna judge no man for what went on. But Bill’s just standing there on the scaffolding in front of that big window where the managers used to sit, and he’s rubbing that body of the stork all up against it, smearing it in blood, and kind of smashing it to bits. Excuse me for bringing this up while you’re eating. I think I’ll just leave the story there.” Darcy says “Whmmm mmm,” shakes his head slowly, and brings his fork to his mouth. “But the brains, man. And like whatever it ate and its lungs and shit. You imagine things like this as just blood, but it’s all these parts you wouldn’t even know were inside that stork just oozing around right in front of everyone.”

K

reviewNo Work Finished Here: Rewriting Andy Warhol

Liz Worth

BookThug | Fall 2015 | 456 pages | $20.00

Liz Worth’s No Work Finished Here: Rewriting Andy Warhol is, for the whole five of you reading this that don’t know, an admirable attempt to rewrite Andy Warhol’s novel a, A Novel—a Roman à clef novel in which Warhol transcribes conversations overheard in his factory between 1965 and 1967 and shapes “an uninterrupted twenty-four hours in the life of Ondine, an actor who was famous mostly as a Factory fixture.” (Thanks, Wikipedia!)

And calling No Work Finished Here an “admirable attempt” may sound like a pejorative way of coming at Liz Worth’s attempt to rewrite Warhol’s work—the faintest, most non-commital praise one can give a project that unquestionably required a whole lot of work and effort regardless of what one thinks of the actual quality of the resulting work produced. And rewriting Andy Warhol’s 400-some page a, A Novel is quite an undertaking. Even more of an undertaking is reshaping the work into an entirely different form: poetry.

Worth doesn’t so much reshape Warhol’s work as she expertly sculpts it into something simultaneously entirely new and still so undeniably a, A Novel-esque. In the same way that I was mesmerized by (and honestly, kinda jealous of ) Jimmy McIness’ ability to transform Barack Obama’s seminal “A More Perfect Union” in A More Perfect [, I was mesmerized by (and honestly jealous of ) Liz Worth’s ability to truly rewrite a, A Novel.

contributors

Suzanna Derewicz is a poet, playwright, and independent theatre producer. She has had the pleasure of being a featured poet at various Toronto and Glasgow based reading series. She has recently been published in The Quilliad and untethered. Her play Getting There is being published under the title Maggie Monologues in Fall 2016 by words(on)pages. Recently produced plays include Bear (House of Rebels Theatre) and Getting There (London Fringe Theatre Festival), which received Best of Fringe in 2014.

Michelle Duquette resides in Gangneung, South Korea. She is an English teacher by trade and a poet and portrait photographer by passion. Her poetry has appeared in Anthem Magazine, In/Words Magazine, (parenthetical), the Charlatan, and various works from Hurtin’ Crüe Press. Find her online: michelleduquette.wordpress.com.

Patrick Doerksen is a social worker armed with degrees in Theology and English Literature. He lives with his wife in Victoria, British Columbia, where flowers bloom as early as January and it is very difficult to be unhappy. His fiction and poetry have featured in The Bond Street Review, Presence, Frogpond, Lyrical Passion, Ancient Paths Online, A Hundred Gourds, and Contemporary Haibun Online, among other journals.

Rebecca Maria Rose Gismondi is a Toronto-based poet, screenwriter, and playwright. Recently she directed and wrote her first short film, Souvenir, and was published in Wax Poetry and Art Magazine and The Peculiar Mormyrid Journal. She studied poetry in England and Portugal this past summer, and is currently working on her second short film. Her poem “pork rinds” will be featured in the upcoming issue of Cede Poetry Magazine.

James Guthrie’s work has appeared in The After Happy Hour Review, Molotov Cocktail, Red Savina Review, and is forthcoming in Apocrypha and Abstractions and Hart House Review. He lives in Toronto with his wife and three chinchillas.

A. E. Long lives in London, studying English Literature, Philosophy and Maths. She received first place in Creative Writing at the 2014 Korolyov Space Olympics, and was commended in the 2015 Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award. She loves dystopian novels, science non-fiction, and walking aimlessly around the city at dusk. Sometimes she puts bits of writing on ae-long.tumblr.com.

Steve Nolan is a creative professional born and raised in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and now living in New York City. After spending years experimenting with different media, he’s come back around to where he started: the written word.

Nikita Shorikov is a Russian-born Canadian fiction writer, poet, and aspiring video game writer living in Toronto. When he is not lost in deep contemplation of the absurdity of existence in the society of the nouveau bourgeois, or outrageously busy hand-crafting delightful memes to peddle for kopecks on the internet, he is most likely experimenting with language and dreams, enjoying trees and sunsets in the city, admiring seagulls, and completing his third year of York University’s Creative Writing program.

Carter Vance is a student and aspiring poet originally from Cobourg, Ontario, currently studying in the Social Work program at Algoma University in Sault Ste Marie. His work has appeared in such publications as The Baird’s Tale, The Penny Dreadful, and F(r)iction. He received an Honourable Mention from CV2’s Young Buck Poetry Prize in 2015. His work also appears on his personal blog Comment is Welcome (commentiswelcome.blogspot.com).

colophon

This publication—issue eleven of the literary magazine (parenthetical)—was published by words(on)pages in the month of January in the year two thousand and sixteen.

It was designed, printed, and bound in Toronto, Ontario, by words(on)pages co-founders William Kemp and Nicole Brewer, who used Adobe InDesign for layout, and was typeset and designed using Kingthings Trypewriter 2, Adobe Garamond Pro, and FFF TUSJ. It was bound by hand with paper, thread, needle, and patience.

Front and back covers were printed by Sebastian and Brendan Frye at Swimmers Group in Toronto.

(parenthetical) could not be produced without the support of Michael Brewer, words(on)pages Director of Business Operations.

For this issue, we were unable to pay a proofreader, and don’t like asking for free work—please forgive any inconsequential errors.