Poetry Contributor
Mahaila Smith (any pronouns) is a young, femme writer, living and working on the traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg in Ottawa, Ontario. They are one of the co-editors for The Sprawl Mag (thesprawlmag.ca). They like learning theory and writing spec poetry. Their debut chapbook, Claw Machine, was published by Anstruther Press in 2020. You can read more of their work on their website: MahailaSmith.ca
Jennifer Skogen
It was a good memory: visiting Norway,
staying on a farm with my husband’s family,
eating waffles with cream and jam
cooked over a fire on the banks
of a fjord, like I’d stepped
into my own bloodstream and followed it
back in time to where my father’s family lived
years ago, one hundred years at least,
maybe more,
before I appeared on the long chain
of miracles that blood can perform:
love chasing us children down the years,
demanding we exist
despite distance
and time. Despite the great sea
that separated my mother’s ancestors
and my father’s.
It isn’t that I belonged to the cold
Nordic air that carried
sparks from the fire and held the perfect
scent of waffles overflowing the iron,
turning golden and decadent.
My last name couldn’t buy me passage
back to another life
any more than I could stop time
from sweeping me into another decade
past that memory on the beach,
with the grief and joy that rode
in the implacable current beside me.
All this to say
that I ate the waffle
they cooked for me,
jam dripping down my hands.
All this to say that we can live
through miracles.
Fiction Contributor
Emma is a mother and English teacher. She has poetry published with and by: The World’s Greatest Anthology, The League of Poets, The Lake, The Beckindale Poetry Journal, Dreich Magazine, Drunken Pen Writing, Porridge Magazine, Visual Verse, Littoral Magazine, The Pangolin Review, Derailleur Press, Giving Room Magazine, Chronogram, and for the Ledbury Poetry Festival. She also has published a number of short stories and her first novel, Shelley’s Sisterhood, is due to be published shortly.
Faith Allington
We met on Bonfire Night
before the seasons turned
too likely to ignite.
The stars were affixed
to the velvet dusk
while flames blossomed
on our cheeks.
Bright sparks of laughter,
the arc of your smile,
and dark rich scent of apples
rising from the cup.
We offered the fire
our twigs of hawthorn.
I thought we were gold,
even knowing Robert Frost’s
admonition—
nothing gold can last.
But in that night we remain
etched in firelight,
flickering selves that never
break or rust.
Robert Okaji
The hill’s shoulders, slumped under the sky’s glare.
Hardscrabble and brown grass, insects chirring.
Voices in the still leaves.
I ask the boy if he would like water,
some bread. Fruit. No, he says, I must go.
The sun flares on the barn’s metal roof. A history
of stray thoughts, of complicity and calloused hands.
One tired cloud lingers overhead.
I sharpen my knives, think of cold beer.
Of finding home where no one knows me.
Where snow falls and wood burns cool.
And other incessant dreams.
Maggie Frank-Hsu
Often hard or poor soil
is a fragile, complex mix.
a single season of flood
makes for wild
hurried blooming,
the rare chance
to be too much
before drying to stiff
bayonet-like leaves
that catch fire and burn easily;
a bell of sacred smoke
seen from a straight-back chair
beside the bay window
where nobody ever sat.
I have asked for so little, just
a drop in the dry season
to take hold on the soil surface.
Mahaila Smith
People are setting fires because they’re frustrated, angry, hopeless. They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.
—Octavia E. Butler
All of your objects will outlive you.
Here they are:
haunting your line of sight.
So set them aflame.
As in:
The whole world will outlive you
As in:
You are a dying god.
As in:
Welcome to Ragnarök,
welcome to the burning of the world.
A layer of ash coats the sides of trees,
cars, sidewalks, schools, deer,
lungs, arteries.
It is a dry summer.
There have always been fires,
they say,
These are no different.
They start with a spark of static,
a misused chainsaw,
a lighter
a can of gasoline
a metal shovel striking a rock.
We stay inside for days.
The burnt wood floors
and walls and wires
desensitize our noses
to the smell of lilacs.
