Issue 148

THE WEIGHT OF STORY:

in which we find a tempest in a real estate deal, discover the devastation a razor blade can wield, find new ways to revive a marriage, and explore atheism in a synagogue.

FICTION Shashi Bhat, Sandra Cunha, Grant Munroe, jp rodriguez, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Brent van Staalduinen, Katie Zdybel POETRY Frances Boyle, Maya Keshav, Tanis MacDonald, Catherine Malvern, Jesse Matas, Suzanne Nussey, Matt Rader, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Rob Taylor, Anne Marie Todkill, John van Rys, Cynthia Woodman Kerkham, Terence Young ESSAYS Sharon Bala, George Elliott Clarke, Maria Meindl, Meaghan Rondeau, Maureen Scott Harris, Ayelet Tsabari, Emily Urquhart, Betsy Warland

“When I tell people I don’t practice Judaism, ‘I’m naturally good at it,’ they laugh. It is a joke that only works outside of Israel, because in Israel you don’t need to do anything ‘Jewish’ to be Jewish. On occasion, I call myself a bad Jew, which gets a few more laughs. Bad because for the first few years in Canada I’d sometimes let major Jewish holidays pass by without acknowledgment. Because the one time I fashioned a menorah out of a piece of wood and plastic bottle caps, I nearly burnt down the house.”

– Ayelet Tsabari, “Bad Jew, Good Jew”

“Eunice is the youngest person in the band. She’s been taking private lessons forever, so was let into the Platinum Band a year early. She’s the kind of person a teacher would miss in a headcount. She walks with a hunch, though she is maybe five feet tall, and would look like a figurine of an old lady except that her face is perfectly round – a child’s face. She talks incessantly about her private lessons and sometimes disagrees with our band conductor on things like whether the timpani is in tune, which is uncomfortable for everyone. One time our history class visited the Alexander Graham Bell museum in Cape Breton and she lagged behind taking photos of the info plaques. They’re probably in a scrapbook now.”

– Shashi Bhat, “The Most Precious Substance on Earth”

“We were poets on a campus that prided itself (and still does) on being the avant-garde of technology – the cutting edge of computer science, mathematics, engineering. For the technocrats and scientists who commanded the university, we were about as relevant as flat-earthers. Poets? Hah! 

– George Elliott Clarke, “Reading Rienzi Crusz: An Elegy”

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