Returning home from an interview, in a suit that I buttoned myself into and let hang on my gaunt frame, I was faced with the prospect of being trapped in a temp-to-perm situation at a sketchy staffing firm. My roommates let me change before telling me more bad news. The landlords were raising the rent for all of the apartments in the building.
As the sun set over the distant Owyhee Mountain range,
Beth and I played “New Kids”.
We tumbled
perilously down the green hillside, summoning our saviors for suburban-themed tragedies.
breath held behind a
medallion of death
woven in and out of containment a
divine frenzy of strands
And so it’s been. Smiles all around, a fecund feel, someone
ending up in the ditch, all of us filling an open space.
Which is how we rode out the wind shifts,
even traveled to wherever this is.
The garden wall is high. How did she get in, and how will she
go home? Birds fly through the auburn sky, white as sparks. As a child I was instructed
to believe my soul was shelved within until released by death. But my spirit feels too big, she
overflows the dark cupboard of my being.
100 WORD FILM REVIEWS / Kurara: The Dazzling Life of Hokusai's Daughter
The great Japanese artist Hokusai (36 Views of Mount Fuji) had a daughter who was his apprentice and later his nurse. This recent film shows how she struggled to find her place as a daughter, artist, and woman in The Floating World of Ukiyo-e , 18th century Japan. The Japanese dialogue is wonderfully sparce but rich. Directed by Taku Katô—using lovely, saturated cinematography which gives context to the great acting in this film—Kurara illustrates how love, and art, and family do not go gentle into that good night.
It's hot everywhere in America, too hot. Things seem rather bleak, but now it's hard to remember a time when they didn't. What can we do really? We can rage against it, but it's also important to remember being gentle with ourselves. I hope this letter is finding you in a gentle moment.
One day, on my way to school, I caught fire. I noticed the flames didn’t take up much room. Of course, I had some qualms, but I didn’t want to become sidetracked. It’s good to be quick, but slow.
As long as he doesn’t talk about it, it may have not happened. It has happened but also it hasn’t. Right there in the middle is the place to be, the safe place he longs for, like in an REM song, even in their happy songs there’s an irony, like yeah, we call this happy, but is it really? Is it ever?
While his veins melt back into nourishing streams,
I’ll delicately trace the soil of his flesh, dirt clumping beneath my nails.
The flowers on his skin will be withered and ripped
So, I’ll pluck tears from my eyes to water them.
The fictional death of the play had morphed into real death, palpable and present. We all felt it. That weekend, Grim meandered around the dressing room, curious about our costumes, our make-up, our rituals. It picked things up, looked at them, put them back down. Smitten with my containers of fake blood, Grim grinned and licked its lips.
You told me not to and I did, not
spiting you but proving me
now I am dancing skin in the falling
evening under branches spinning
If I could place one to the left of my breastbone,
live with its meaty core and thistly flower,
it’d choke something saline out of all of us.
The last of the food joints closed about a year ago. Most of the shit in this mall is closed. There’s a record store, a department store, a leggings store and a vape shop. I might be forgetting something. I like the record store. I also like taking the escalator to the second floor, or, rather, I like walking up the escalator that hasn’t run for a few months now.
FILM / Captain Canada's Movie Rodeo / July 2022 / Gabriel Ricard
Gabriel Ricard discusses sex in world cinema and more in this month’s Captain Canada’s Movie Rodeo!
FILM / Symbolism and Intertextuality in Baltasar Kormákur’s The Sea: Ancient Fables and Dramas Reborn on Screen / Judit Hollós
As elegantly as the camera wanders through the picturesque but merciless scenery or the reindeer herd blocking the wintry streets, this complex and bold, 2002 paraphrase of several themes from Shakespeare's King Lear to the Parable of the Prodigal Son carefully balances over the borders of various genres of black comedy and powerful, bitter family drama, following at the same time in the footsteps of Henrik Ibsen and Ingmar Bergman, urging the audience to "se sanningen i vitögat"—face up to the harsh reality.
But mostly, I try to read
a book, recall how language
once lived in me, too
seedlings of vines
reaching up for sunlight
through my throat
Reginald’s stare was unnerving, and then he made an observation that seemed to put the lie to my last statement. “If you only get ‘joy’. . . ‘from doing the best you can’ and ‘from the finished story’ why send it to be published? Wouldn’t you get as much ‘joy’ from leaving it in your desk drawer?”
Against my closed eyelids I see us young and in love. We are riding off into the English countryside to our newlywed bed at a cozy B&B in the idyllic market town of Oundle, where a single road winds through old stone row houses and small local shops, about an hour from Cambridge University. Our cheeks are rosy, our eyes twinkling.