Issue 151

FOUND IN TRANSLATION:
in which we write poetry in a South African hideaway, find untold clarity in sobriety, chase trees down our street, and trace our history in tattoos.

FICTION Katherine Barrett, Ami Sands Brodoff, Halle Gulbrandsen, J.L. Orchard, Patricia Robertson, Rebekah Skochinski, Jessica Westhead ESSAYS Leonarda Carranza, Mel Carroll, Karoline Georges, Katia Grubisic, Ashley Hynd, Sally Ito, Helen Knott, Hege Jakobsen Lepri, Sadiqa de Meijer, Jessica Moore, Maša Torbica, John Vardon POETRY Ashna Asim, Joanne Epp, Susan Glickman, John B. Lee, Stephen Maude PLUS Ayelet Tsabari translates poetry by Maya Tevet Dayan

“She has three months to revise the current draft and compose the six new poems her editor felt would round out the collection. Six! She chooses an orange ballpoint and a post-it note: ninety days divided by six poems plus twenty-eight revisions. Two and a half days per task. She has given herself a few days to settle in, find the grocery store, sort out the alarms and security service. That period is now up. Helen, she says to herself, We’ll call this Day One.“

– Katherine Barrett, “Skin”

“I spent the days before trying to locate men who had known me when I was human. When I was sober. Men who had fallen for me when I was feminine and tender-hearted. Would they even recognize the woman I had become? I thought I could compel them to take care of me by appealing to their better nature or their long-standing urges to sleep with me. I would slip into arms that I knew could never hold me at my best. At the rate I was going I knew I couldn’t possibly take care of myself. I was terrified.”

– Helen Knott, “The Dreamless Void”

“Not one of my tattoos were planned, but their lead up was always the same. I grew up on a small Island and my closeted lesbianism left my insides smashed on the rocky shore. I’d rush into the one parlour we had in town, next to the porn video store and off a side alley on Collegiate Avenue, flash an ID, point to a sample on their wall (a turtle riding a wave? Why not?), lie down, get tagged and released back into the wilds, all for under eighty bucks.”

-Mel Carroll, “Algorithms of Suicide”

$10 plus HST