It's Cold, We WIll Sleep Now by Petra Alexson

It’s Cold, We Will Sleep Now

Petra Alexson

Lapidary rabbits create a curl

Of smooth, swept viridian

Fleece foliage

Shut eyes and pilose paws touch ear to ear

In thick, soft grass at the height of sticky clarity

Days of sleet

Mist feeding moisture, covering the star-sheet

They composed the whorl of the forest

Eternal as the cloud seep

Synchronized colour

We fall into sleep

Periodicity by Shenbei Fan

Periodicity

The bosoms of the universe

Spawn a watchful Clock

Eager to end all life

Scorch the Earth with fire

And butcher the soul of man

But it waits, ponders, waits…

The Clock will remain ticking

When evil deeds are done

By mortals upon mortals

Forgiving yet never forgetting

The atrocity of cellularity

The Clock will remain ticking

When lives are lived and wasted

On trite gestures and finite causes

The cunning maker of regret

With boundless room for “sorry”

Never forgetting yet always forgiving…

The Clock will remain ticking

When light becomes darkness

Becomes light becomes…

Like an eternal cyclic wave

Blind to the human psyche

And freed from mortal chains

Everything new will one day become old

And life will be un-born

Earth will be un-created

But the Clock will remain ticking

Gaps

Kira Bentley

“So… what should we do now?” 

His eyes were hopeful. She kept staring at the rubble beneath her shoes. Her sneakers were beat enough for the debris to jab through to her tired feet. 

“We? When was there ever a we?” Distaste coated her tongue like a glob of bubbling black tar. Tears began to flood her eyes, but they still chased the asphalt. 

He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t say anything. “There was you, and there was me. Never once was there a we.” 

Silence of dusk smothered her admission as a salt-water tear hit the earth with an audible smack. She began to step away, but he quickly grasped her wrist with a softness he never knew he possessed. 

“Please,” he croaked. Tears welled in his eyes as they fell from hers. It became hard to swallow. “I just… I’m sorry.”

He wanted to explain everything so badly; his father, the angriness below their feet, the blood in his veins. His chest was tight with the repression of his voice, but the words, the story, simply flew past him like signs on the highway. 

All he had left was his stagnant two-word apology, an old friend of his strangled tongue. Pathetic. 

She tore her wrist from his pleading hold. Frustration bubbled in her throat as palms curled into fists.

“I want to believe you. I want to believe you so fucking badly.” Her eyes scaled the evening trees and finally poured into his, her crestfallen glare a punch to his stomach. “…It just never ends.”

She was digging; clawing ever so desperately for the answers withheld beyond his soil irises. 

He could’ve sworn he was swimming in the Pacific. 

Hair Power
Endale Facil

For the longest time, I had my hair cut short, so I decided I needed a change. I then decided that it would best if I let my hair grow. The reason why I wanted to do this was because I always found it empowering to see my cousins with their natural hair. Subsequently, I started to think about growing out my own hair and looking for that empowerment in myself. That reflective moment guided my contemplation over the stereotypes of black males with thick natural hair. The stereotype was the affiliation with gangs because of how they looked (whether it was in cornrows, twists etc). Nowadays, if you see rappers or famous singers with braids or with an afro, they tend to sing about sex, drugs and money. Unfortunately, many people (of all races) will then copy and paste this image onto people who look or style their hair in a similar manner. Both of these images are portrayed in the media, but how did this come to be?  Black men have been growing out their hair for centuries, long before these artists even existed. They grew their hair out before the media was created and before gangs were even popular. From royalty to peasants, braids and lengthy hair were, for the most part, a normality. Take King Tewodros for example: This man was one of the most influential people in Ethiopian history. And guess what? He had cornrows! Imagine a black Canadian candidate with cornrows running for office as prime minister. Would you listen to what he has to say or deem him as unsuitable, simply because he doesn’t look professional? The point I’m trying to make is not whether it looks professional or not, but rather that these braids and hairstyles represent so much more than what meets the eye. They represent our history as black men and as black people. Needless to say, braids and afro-like hairstyles are important to me because they represent my culture and my heritage.

King Tewodros

A's and B's

Ben Elhav

A’s

1. If I could tell you something that you already know, I would tell you that I love you.

We both know the definition of this love has changed and mutated into a subconscious feeling which may no longer exist in a conceivable or comprehensible form.

I once thought that admitting this would be shameful, yet perhaps it is braver because I have the audacity to create the feeling of love through my admission of it.

With shame comes vulnerability, yet perhaps I am anything but vulnerable, because through this admission I become the creator and destroyer of worlds. My feeling is reality which is reality because I say it is. Every possibility and door which has yet to open or can be closed is at my discretion. I take pride in the fact that I am shaping reality and creating truth by holding my subjective understanding of the world (and of you) as objective fact.

2. If I could tell you something that you need to hear, I would tell you that I think we’ve been drifting apart.

I feel as though you’re stuck in a pattern of rush and excess, and when I’m around you I accomplish nothing but enjoy everything. I think we just view these things fundamentally differently and maybe I am a workaholic, and vain, and a hypocrite in thinking that everything must have meaning when I myself create that meaning and it has no intrinsic value. But if we can’t create meaning, does anything matter? Does it matter if nothing matters? I think it matters to me. I don’t think it matters to you.

You crave the rush of sugar and the rush of a pointless rush which makes you rush for more. I crave fulfillment. I crave the illusion of closure. Go ahead, mock me for craving an illusion, yet the illusion I chase is more tangible than the nothingness with which you are so content.

3. If I could tell you something irrelevant, I would tell you that I was wrong to love you.

We are on opposite ends of the platform looking in opposite directions. I think it is best that we remain this way, for I once came down to meet you, a deer in the headlights already resembling flattened roadkill.

And that was before the train hit!

---

B’s

1. Strong.

I was once there, 6 to 16, bags in hand, laboring up the endless flights of stairs to my house and the endless stairs away from you and from each house to the next. I then confronted each doorway - each world of endless possibility a vast and terrifying chasm of the unknown - and yet I labored on. Over the stairs, and through each doorway, and into the room where I left my brain, and into the room containing your heart. There I found nothing but darkness and when I turned to leave I noticed that the door was locked. The true terror is not of what lurks beyond the open door but what is kept away from the one that is shut.

2. Wise.

As I was born I knew every detail of the world, but in waking lost my knowledge, that familiar world changing before my very eyes. I became a hermit, collecting passages from designated texts and relics from designated persons, truly believing I was a worthy curator of a world too vast to fully inhabit or comprehend. One day I came across a passage I could not read and yet I read and read and transcribed my findings with great confidence and apparent comprehension yet was proven wrong when that which I had written was re-written by the pesky hand of time. The etchings on the cave are now meaningless scratches with the same value of etchings in flesh in providing the same amount of displeasure.

3. Good.

Begrudgingly accepting the unwritten contract I had been handed by those who begrudgingly wrote and rewrote it to their liking, I stumbled and fell onto the beaten path with a reluctance which I mistook for elegance. I must have fallen on my head because at once I had a perverted desire to tear up the godforsaken covenant for the sole purpose of feeling the intangible paper tufts between my claws. But once I felt instead the tearing of flesh and blood and tasted iron and salt I ran and fell and stumbled away from the narrowing path ‘till I was consumed in earth.

From Your Son

Spoken by his daughter

I only wish

You smelt the air

That time

the trees caught

Fire.

Maybe then

You’d have

        Sh

           ak

              en

Awake

In time

To taste the

    Ashes

And hear

The crackling

Before

The light

      Faded

               Fa r    a w   a    y

On the Writing of Sonnets for a Grade
by Alexa Veldhuizen

It seems to me that high school English class -
Designed by teachers who once too were youth - 
Should not require me to make an ass
Of myself writing sonnets wrong, forsooth!
It's bad enough we read outdated plays
Without having to write poor poetry,
So why should we be forced to waste our days
Unfairly earning grades below a "C"?
I'm fascinated by the study of
Linguistics, and by language as a whole,
But English class destroyed that muddy love
That had been blossoming inside my soul. 

In honesty, it could be a lot worse

Than having to write poems in rhyming verse