Catherine St. Denis reads “The Essential Involvement of the Harpist”

“Only pain is intellectual, only evil is interesting.  
This is the treason of the artist: 
a refusal to admit the banality of evil 
and the terrible boredom of pain.”
      — Ursula Le Guin


As a child, I thought acid rain would burn holes 
through my tongue. It was the older kids
who warned me. They told stories of a girl
who mangled her foot riding her bike 
with bare feet, a boy who suffocated 
inside his snow fort, winter wresting
the life from him like a child predator. Did we learn
this from our parents? Fear was an all-season attraction. 
Gore, a sideshow under thumbnail, a splinter jesting:
Only pain is intellectual, only evil is interesting.

I have learned to celebrate the certainty of lug nuts,
the sartorial elegance of penguins,
the swaying hips of drapes against the breeze. 
But, still, lug nuts threaten to work loose,
drapes become drab in airless rooms, 
penguins are always in peril. Every poet is part wrist— 
poised, graceful, split-skinned, bones churning 
inside like a sack of pearls. Nothing is interesting without
contrast. We want the killer and the harpist.
This is the treason of the artist:

to spoon the embellished world back into hungry   
mouths. Poetry MSG; nothing is new,
just more flavour-infused, more itself 
than it ever was. At twelve, I stood shoeless 
in our frozen gravel driveway, the world asleep,
singing softly to a god I had no faith in, upheaval
in my family, breath warming the light snow
that descended toward my face. I had been kneaded
and baked into the bread of repression, a flour weevil,
a refusal. To admit the banality of evil,

one must first steep in it. Consider the upskirt photographers,  
consider the god-complex nurses and the frenzied 
dictators, all their wicked dendrites, the draw of their maws.
Perhaps only the persecuted, the misused, the executed 
can lay claim to an indifference toward malevolence,
their tired bodies saturated with the filth of it, the strain.
It’s the poets who mend the feet of injured girls,
tend fires that light the mouths of our dead, 
unburden us from the heft of our apathy chains 
and the terrible boredom of pain.

Lise Rochefort on “The Essential Involvement of the Harpist”

In this poem, St. Denis has crafted a successful Glosa. Beginning with Ursula K. Le Guin’s four-line “cabeza,” it flawlessly incorporates subtle rhyme with artful philosophy. The work is grounded in strong, personal images, and precise diction to guide a reader’s reflections on pain, beauty and creativity and their roles in inspiring the poet, and artist, in society.

Bios

Catherine St. Denis

Catherine St. Denis is the winner of The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award for Fiction. She placed in Grain’s Hybrid Forms Contest, was a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize, and was twice a finalist for PEN Canada’s New Voices Award. Her work is featured in Best Canadian Poetry 2025.

Rob Taylor reads “Harrison River Valley, November”

First the salmon are a smell, then a sound, 
then dorsal fins: a symphony of miniature 
Jaws fast cuts. Eagles gorge upon the living, 
seagulls tug apart the nearly dead. Our children 
stand transfixed. We offer them our meagre facts. 
A belly-up chinook spasms back to life each time 
another salmon tries to pass. A whole life spent 
strengthening one muscle, and then you let it slack? 
Rain starts to fall. Its tiny circles meet the salmon’s 
thrashing and the wakes of milling gulls until the river’s 
current seems to flow all ways at once. We turn back 
past carcasses a recent flood tossed higher 
on the shore. The truly dead, plucked blind by crows. 
I ask the children if they think it’s strange, all this, 
but they’ve walked on ahead and do not hear. 
Fog descends until it disappears.

Dessa Bayrock on “Harrison River Valley, November”

Taylor leverages descriptive viscerality in this poem — an almost mathematical clarity that reminds us, like a sonnet, that math is closer to art than science. “Harrison River Valley, November” is a meditation on life cycles, on curiosity, on the patterns we follow both thinkingly and unthinkingly. It is also scientifically proven to make anyone who hails from British Columbia homesick, especially if they are as far from home as the salmon are.

Bios

Rob Taylor

Rob Taylor is the author of five poetry collections, including Weather and The News. He is also the editor of What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation and Best Canadian Poetry 2019. Rob teaches creative writing at the University of the Fraser Valley, and lives with his family in Port Moody, BC, on the unceded territories of the kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.

                    There is a saying in my mother’s language, wap pale franse
                    meaning, you are speaking french.
                    meaning, you speak of flowers with no stems.
                    meaning, I am suspicious of your language.

                                            *

נקב
nqb

1. to perforate with more or less violence

/

In ancient Hebrew script, words were recorded solely in consonants,
the omitted vowels allowing     space for / slippage / intersection.
From a single sequence came forth an endless network of meaning.

and tell me

what is the meaning of my body?
this / hole / ?
I begin my mother’s / cavity /
and I am / cavernous / ,
I am / perforated / , I am
/ drilled / through made / hollow /
I am / pierced / through the / belly /
I am / cursed / ! / cursed / ! / cursed / !
I am / designated / for / striking / with
/ more or less violence /

2. a [woman]

*

אֲדָמָה
127. adam/ah
feminine noun

      from the earth
      you are made, adam(ah); red, ruddy, Maroon
      sculpted from dirt, from breath,
      from blood you are
      scion of the human
      of the is/land
      of the land

               *

kann
n.

   sugarcane;

      The thing is that we do not begin here.
      Or rather, we have been here since the beginning
      but we are not made of this soil;
              our roots wait
      headless somewhere in the passage
      from Papua to Senegal

      We rise not from the is/land but from the sea
      our bodies liquid and uncountable.   Yes,
      there was dirt and blood and zo bones
      but first, you will find, there was       /       I was
      mostly water

                     *

παράδεισος
paradeisos

      when translating the book to Greek, the great thinkers
      sought for a word suitable for the Garden and settled for this

      Paradeisos—from old Iranian pairidaēza:
      a zoo a royal (enclosed) park where wild animals roam free.

      and of course, this was a strange freedom, as it had limits
      and surveillance and walls. but you will find that at least it was
      honest

                         *

bagasse
from baga·zo
baga (berry) + zo [os]

      crushed sugarcane remains.
      “steal a piece of sweetness from your father’s garden crops and laugh in secret
      with your sister. the grass is tall and green and infinite    —she will hide you.
      eat with your teeth. tear at the flesh bark. gnaw and suck and spit the excess; my god,
      ambrosia can be turned to dust grass, like meat to bone to marrow”

                         *

               paradise
               nom masculin

                     You will find that the french often confuse heaven and paradise;
                     we do not say heaven on earth, but paradis sur terre
                     and this is meant to mean the same thing
                     as if the skies could exist on land, and paradise was not already there.

                     in this sense, god could reside on earth, and muddy his feet
                     and seem much closer to his people

                     in this sense, humans could imagine they were godly

Bios

Cassandra Eliodor

Cassandra Eliodor is a second generation Haitian-Canadian writer from Ottawa. She was the 2024 winner of the McNally Robinson Booksellers Poetry Award, with work to appear in Prairie Fire in the summer.

Ellie Sawatzky reads “On Crete”

Dad and I are sweet to each other, knowing
Mom’s not here to be our mediator. We’ve never
traveled just the two of us. Every day

dark clouds rove the olive groves outside
our Airbnb. The cold, chemical-bright surface
of the pool jumps at the invasion of raindrops,

raises helpless fists. The neighbour brings us
fresh eggs, jugs of sour wine. We pass time,
side by side in silence unfurling laundry

onto a drying rack under the carport. What
does he think of my unfurling? My panties
on the line like wet leaves. The unavoidable

intimacy makes me uneasy. Does he see
himself in me? Greek radio and cowbells clink
in the next valley, tinny reminders of those

warm bodies. Dad and I don’t speak about
my grandmother, his mother-in-law, who’s dying,
but she passes between us like the shadow

of a branch on cobblestones. And Mom, who was
supposed to be here, who insisted it was fine, go on
without her, anyway, there was nothing we could do.

When we get the news, the loss echoes in a distant
valley. Dad and I go for a walk, watch our guilt
float away into the olive trees on a floral, 

chlorine breeze. My parents were here together
thirty years ago, before they were married. I know
he’s thinking this isn’t how this trip was meant

to be. When I was in love I made symbols of things
like yarn and spruce trees, circled them repeatedly.
Still do, even in my loneliness, love being the stronger

feeling. I wonder if this island is like that for my dad,
a place he touches in his mind to find it. Look at the moon,
he says. Behind the clouds like a smoke ring. I wonder

if he would agree with me that this is lovely, despite
everything. I wonder if he’s thinking of the time
he almost died, and we all flew across the country to say

goodbye. What does it mean to return from that
barbed darkness, in what ways does death dig into
the living? Trauma primes the body for deeper

trauma, I learned recently, an old story
looping in the adrenals. Dad is still afraid
of falling. We’re both afraid of hard feelings, 

so we don’t speak about our sadness,
Mom’s sadness, how he should be
with her. He cries quietly watching Queer Eye

on the Airbnb TV. He likes my Instagram photos
at night from his bedroom down the hall. Outside, rainfall
pins the full moon to the bottom of the pool. Finally,

on our last day the sun reappears and I navigate the way
to the sea. Dad wants to find the black sand beach
from his memory. Familiar names like Kissamos

and Elafonisi. Back home in Winnipeg, Mom
is making phone calls, planning freesias for
the funeral, folding down the back seat of the sedan

to fit the casket. A little further, Dad says, as the road
turns to dirt. I remember this, this is where we were. Sea
frothing green. He says, Yes, this is it. Their love is here,

a stone he can pick up and take home and give to her.

Char Harrison on “On Crete”

This poem speaks to the emotional distance often present between Boomer dads and their Millennial children, who grew up in a time of more openness around mental health topics, and perhaps with better language available to communicate sadness and grief. Small domestic moments, such as folding down the back seat of the sedan to accommodate a casket, show the father striving to be present in his own way, while others–the narrator hanging underwear on a rack to dry–reveal the uncomfortable chasm that neither knows how to cross.

Bios

Ellie Sawatzky

Ellie Sawatzky is the author of None of This Belongs to Me (Nightwood Editions, 2021). Her poems have appeared most recently in The Walrus, Canadian Literature, and SAD Mag. She lives in Vancouver, where she works as an editor and poetry teacher. Find her at elliesawatzky.com and @elliesawatzky.

“I have heard in the voices of the wind 
the voices of my dim killed children… Believe me, I loved you all.”
      — Gwendolyn Brooks


My mother was born to a wayward tribe 
of women whose hands were always 
in the shooing motion, and who were rumoured 
to shed their minds the minute 
their bodies wilted into sixty— 
and so when she foot the brake too late 
into a black stray dog, not a quarter kilometer 
from home, her behavior made us believe 
the losing had come two decades early— 
I was with her when it happened, the shadow made 
matter from the evergreens, the sudden breed 
a damp pulp before the arrested 
engine, its heart tapping scrawny at the ribcage, 
as blood escaped the open damage, fell in drippy 
tributes from the bumper. Unable to stomach 
the sounds, my mother wheeled over the wild skull. 
A quiet followed the crush and one 
question: what is a life resigned to whimper? 

But the hound stayed alive, exhaling a frequent 
heat against her nape—she was swatting it away 
even after my father had shoveled the food 
of its body off the road, and rain had made 
the smudge a memory. What started the worry 
is when she claimed to see the dark 
fur fuzzing everything, smothering drains, 
chewed in the callaloo and clung to her 
clothes, released in clumps in her combing 
fingers—we, the family, found that red 
herring nowhere, and she found it everywhere, always 
cleaning, correcting, seeking forgiveness from the animal

she had ushered unto peace. After years 
of swallowed calm, a smaller mammal moved 
into the roof, as if replacing my father, 
the pitter-pattern hanging above her 
blooming superstitions, our guesswork at madness. 
When she called me to free it, or free her 
from it, I asked if she recalled the roadkill, 
but the triggers had long gone gray, 
like she never endured the dog at all. 
She waved that guilt away, one last time, 
then confessed to me her first, foetal 
mercy, her next breath needing a new burden removed.

Bios

Georgio Russell

Georgio Russell is a Bahamian poet and graduate of the University of the West Indies. He is the winner of The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award for Poetry (2025). His poems have appeared in Frontier Poetry, The London Magazine, and Nimrod, among others.

Andrea Scott reads “Saucer Magnolia”

I marked my lost pregnancy and my last one, all in one shot.

Out front I planted a sapling—magenta saucer magnolia—and, beside the root ball, the 
living baby’s placenta. The midwife said her husband wanted it out of their freezer, 
and sooner than later.

My preteens played “For Our Fathers” on the fiddle. They hadn’t yet learned a tune about 
mothers or babies. A neighbour leaned out her window for the free concert. I didn’t make 
eye contact. She retreated when I stooped to empty the meaty contents of the bag into 
the earth.

I thought the magnolia would be the next best thing to having fresh tulips in a vase for 
weeks on end at the bitter end of winter. Cupped, waxy hands ready to catch whatever 
fell from the sky. Grief, goodness, persistent rain.

I wanted to ask the midwife if I could call my back-to-back pregnancies a Super 
Pregnancy, add up all the weeks of growth, plus the small terrible break, into 
something that rivalled the gestation of a dolphin or a horse. The midwife was busy.

The placenta is a superb thing. Was this one mine or my boy’s? Ours? I thought it would 
be offering enough for the tree to thrive.

A friend had her placenta fried up with shallots and she glowed, but it sounded too 
savoury, too animal for me. Chronically low on iron, I now know it would have been just 
the right amount of animal.

I was too busy nursing the boy to water the tree. It withered and the neighbour tsked. 
She didn’t note my boy’s impressive growth.

Her beloved vinca crept under the fence in my direction. The vine, she said, was part of 
her heritage. When I pulled out the dead magnolia, the vinca moved right in.

I consider what it is to miscarry. To wrongly carry. To have designs come to naught.

Sometimes my boy asks about the baby who didn’t make it. A ghost of a playmate. 
He’s alive because that baby is not. It’s part of his heritage. 

Out front, it's all purple stars on a quilt of emerald green. The vinca, it turns out, is 
perfect: blooms all summer. Only stops for frost.

Kevin Matthews on “Saucer Magnolia”

Life’s most intense passages hint at depth of meaning that invites but usually thwarts articulation. Terribly heaviness slips nonetheless through our fingers. The elegance here is a deliberate, clear voice in natural, speechlike stanzas, within careful attention to structure. It presents a speaker simply too occupied caring for the living to shoehorn meaning into the ineffable loss. Lives are exigent; a poet and mother must express economically, accept, and move forward.

Bios

Andrea Scott

Andrea Scott’s poetry has appeared in various literary journals and public projects. Scott won the 2024 CV2 Foster Poetry Prize, and the 2022 Geist Erasure Poetry Contest. Scott’s first chapbook, In the Warm Shallows of What Remains, won the 2024 Raven Chapbooks Poetry Contest. She lives in Victoria, BC.

Everyone has a bat story, but Aaron’s is the one 
that haunts me most. One night, his mother forgot

the sheets on the clothesline and they turned 
into moonlit caves, or marble eaves, or attics

full of pearls—places darkness likes to perch— 
and three bats slept there, three lightbulbs of dusk

hanging from a white ceiling, until she woke up 
at dawn, suddenly remembering, and ran barefoot

across the wet grass to sweep up in one movement 
the whole monument of it, coming back in

with an armful of bright ruins, crumbling. 
That morning, Aaron’s father found the first bat

in his shirt pocket, sleeping, a pen full of soft ink. 
His mother found the second bat as she put on her bra

and felt it fluttering, a dark heart, against 
her chest. That night, Aaron shook his pillowcase

and the last bat flew out, a perfect metaphor 
for a nightmare. What haunts me about this story

isn’t the ruined laundry, it’s not a kind of puritanism, 
or the image of the bats hidden in the sheets

like seeds in a slice of translucent pear— 
it’s that the bats went to sleep in what they thought

was a home, as animals in a cave, and woke up 
as a pen, a heart, a nightmare in a boy’s head.

Bios

Dominique Bernier-Cormier

Dominique Bernier-Cormier’s poems have won The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Contest, The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award, and Arc’s Poem of the Year. His most recent book Entre Rive and Shore (icehouse, 2023) was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Prize and won the Fred Cogswell Award. He teaches Grade 9 English in Vancouver.

Isak stops me halfway through the brief history 
of my electrocutions to tell me

that I mean shock. Electrocution is death by electricity. 
What you mean is shock. Yes, what I mean is shock.

The first time: sparks on the basement carpet 
like tiny blue insects. Brief deaths, brief verbs of light in the toes.

The second time: sixteen and bones full of vodka, my wrist 
caught in a fence; snow whipping from neuron to neuron. 
Later, puking pink in a bank.

The third time: a translation—my hand on Kate’s hand touching 
the brass plate of a boiler, a weak ghost jumping into my body. 
For her, a glove of velvet pain.

Electricity wants to stay home, Isak tells me.

It will only move from wire to vein, from fence to bones, 
if it is forced to, and I know 
now that we are not talking about electricity anymore,

but exile, which draws the same branching pattern: 
cedar leaf, delta, coral. He tells me that in Icelandic,

the word for echo means mountain language. 
He tells me that a human body

is generally not a good home for electricity, even though 
our hearts and brains are full of it.

What he means is shock. What he means 
is he misses home, where the mountains are full of language.

I tell him that wherever we walk, we carry electrons 
on the bottom of our feet, we carry them 
from room to room, all our lives,

a static potential. That at any moment, it could happen, 
it could happen any day:

you grab a doorknob and feel alive again.

Bios

Dominique Bernier-Cormier

Dominique Bernier-Cormier’s poems have won The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Contest, The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award, and Arc’s Poem of the Year. His most recent book Entre Rive and Shore (icehouse, 2023) was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Prize and won the Fred Cogswell Award. He teaches Grade 9 English in Vancouver.