Paul Vermeersch

From the editor

Dear reader,

“Writing is not therapy. That’s the last thing it is. I still have my grief.” —Alice Notley

As the editor of a literary magazine, I am generally opposed to the idea of a “theme issue.” Once you commit to a theme, it limits (or forces) the editorial decisions you have to make. You might have to reject a brilliant poem or story because it doesn’t deal with gardening or violence or water, and you might have to say yes to a lesser poem or story because it does. Theme issues are too frequently the enemy of literary excellence, and for this reason, The Ampersand Review does not attempt them.
Still, some experiences are so universal as to be unavoidable. Paige LeBlanc, our current editorial intern, pointed out to me how often the spectre of grief appears in this issue. We did not set out to make a theme issue on the subject of grief, but it is such a ubiquitous element of the hu man condition and such a constant undercurrent in all kinds of literature that you could call nearly any general issue of a literary magazine “the grief issue,” and scarcely anyone would have grounds to question it.
It’s right there in the title of K.R. Byggdin’s excellent short story “Grief Like a Fragile Egg.” Poet Richard-Yves Sitoski wonders “If every name / is a synonym for grief…” and Cassandra Myers writes “then Iulia says // this can’t happen // takes me by the wrist and walks my grief to the corner store like a goldfish // flopping in her hands.”
But grief need not be called by name to be present, or indeed, to be felt. In Rachelle-Anne Lawka’s fabulous poems, the recurring character of Wölf appears as an embodiment of both dread and grief. Simultaneously allegorical, iconic, and palpable, Lawka’s Wölf is both big and bad, and we begin this issue with her warning that “anything can be a Wölf if you’re not careful.”
Grief like a river, winding its way through the magazine. Grief like a cast of characters, or like a single shapeshifter changing its appearance from face to face. Or, as in Anne-Marie Turza’s poem “Top-Down Shooter Game,” grief like the indefinable sensation of being disconnected from language itself and, consequently, from the possibility of forming a meaningful connection with “the green unnumbered citizens / viewed as pixels from above in the game / of feeling wrong in language.” It is work like this that makes Turza, to me, one of the most exciting new voices in Canadian literature to have emerged in the last decade or so.
I cannot enumerate for you each instance of grief’s presence in the pages you are now reading. It accompanies us through non-fiction pieces by Murgatroyd Monaghan and sophie anne edwards, and it is present in our interviews and even in our book reviews. Grief is an uncountable noun. There is no one grief, no two griefs. It is everywhere. It takes every form. And in the hands of these talented writers, it is the (un)common thread of our beauty, our pain, our empathy, and, finally, the contrasting dark background against which the bright and colourful shapes of our joy can be discerned.
I hope that makes you happy.

Joyfully yours,

Paul Vermeersch
March, 2026
on the train from Toronto to Ottawa

Paul Vermeersch is the editor-in-chief of The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing

Rachelle-Anne Lawka

Borrowed Animatronic Meat-Suit

anything can be a Wölf if you’re not careful. a host of candles burning
at your father’s seance. two girls rising like stags on their un-legs

in your backyard. sometimes, the world stills between the gap of your
front teeth. this is a kind of magic. when you step backward over

the threshold of your childhood, curl into a cockle shell on your twin
bed of wet black mould and death cap, this is just another monday.

when you take off bloody, wash away the Wölf with irish spring
and a desire to return to september, this is just another body

reduced to a highway. you can try to learn how to dull your fangs,
but somewhere there’s an underground party where you fill

his mouth with holey, not holy, Wölf-teeth, and how easily these
small givings can turn to acts of taking if you forget to keep watch:

your indigo name on a stranger’s lips. a ghost sleeping above your
sweating brow, a fish, too ugly, thrown back into the ocean’s bloated-blue

belly. here, it is the bad side of the Wölf that gets you first. here, there
is no right word for temporary escape when what you really mean

is the long, scrubbed face of wanting, removed. now is your chance
to finally say something honest: blood is blue on skin under moonlight.

a Wölf’s bruise glows neon after dark. feeding the wild Wölf only
results in third-degree whirlpools. now is your chance to say something

dishonest: the borrowed animatronic meat-suit has loved you always.
the empathetic rancher cried tears of joy when his livestock was resurrected

the last time. the EMT poltergeist playing with the ouija board
in your backrooms sincerely missed you, and that’s why she brought you

back to life. none of this is magic. it is a failed medical response.
there are mornings when the lake near your house evaporates and you

pretend to be a fish drowning upward in air. sometimes, a kind hand
reaches in, pulls you back down. it never hesitates to throw you back in.

this has always been a mistake. sometimes, you open your mouth wide
enough to reveal two sets of Wölves breaking the surface of your skin.

RAchelle-anne lawka

(she/her) is an emerging Canadian poet living in Ontario. She is currently a candidate for the University of Guelph’s MFA in Creative Writing.

Richard-Yves Sitoski

Mountain Lions

The thought of them makes me panic. Of all the ways
to go, the dirtiest. Life ripped in chunks from the body.

The thought of you in bed makes me panic.
Your breath so shallow it wouldn’t flutter goose down.

I never knew sleep could be so total,
learned the hard way the first time I shook and

shook you, my heart pounding with disaster.
One night you said a thing you couldn’t walk back.

All next day it stalked me through town,
slinking around buildings on silent pads.

It entered Coles and snarled through the stacks.
It sat at my bedside, eyes glaring night-vision yellow.

This in early spring, around the time we learned
that you and the cat were both diabetic. Each

on your own was serious, but two at once
was almost funny in a Looney Tunes

anvil-drop sort of way. The cat was pissing
on rugs and sofas and if it used the box would put

its front half in and let the business end piddle
weakly on the floor. You were more bedridden

than normal, ate nothing, faded over Netflix
till the Jardiance kicked in. I realized then

what the Fates have in store. Knew straightaway
that Atropos will shear your thread

quick and clean while you sleep, all so I can count
the empty hours till she hacks at mine

with the butter knife of heart disease. I learned what
every Instagram poet has been saying for years,

that I mustn’t hold grudges longer than cats given
needles. Or else I’d be mauled by a hundred pounds

of mange, ticks, and worms, be shredded
by broken fangs in a mouth reeking

of abscess, be carried off by hostility with
a northerly blowing through its gaping ribs.

So I beg your indulgence. If every name
is a synonym for grief then

let us shut up and dance in the kitchen,
ignoring domestic atrocities.

Let us sway, Kelly and Charisse, cruising
the toast crumbs and sand of an unswept floor,

you holding the cat while I hold you
until it squirms to be set down.

Look at it, frisky on insulin, its old self,
writhing on its back for attention.

How gentle it is now it’s decided we’re worth its trust,
as if it knew, somehow, it is we who keep it alive.

Richard-yves sitoski

lives in Owen Sound on the lands of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation (treaty territory 45½). He was the 2019–2023 Poet Laureate of Owen Sound. His work has appeared throughout Canada, including in The Antigonish Review, Arc, CAROUSEL, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, PRISM, and Train. His works include the fringe show Butterfly Tongue, the chapbook How to Be Human and the full-length collection Wait, What? His collection A Current Through the Flesh is now out from Ronsdale Press. He was the artistic director of the 2023 Words Aloud poetry festival and works as the marketing and publication coordinator for Kegedonce Press.

Cristian Ramirez Rodriguez

Rubidium 87

Here at last
is the most indivisible:

A. a population?

B. a voting bloc?

C. one universal wave function
encompassing what was
and forever will be!

All that is real finds form from this deception:

A. Marigolds on the altar
beside the sweetbread?

B. Eternal love
professed by Rocío Dúrcal?

C. The trail beside the road
leading to my current
place of residence
where the power
outage transforms
from little “Apagóncito”
to “El Apagón”!

In the days after the harvest moon
but before the election
vehicles of various fuel efficiencies
slow down beside me.
Some form of atomic cooling
typical of reactive alkali metals
facing the light that travels
at the same speed as the rays
illuminating my face
just enough for the drivers
to see me and scream
about the effects of rain on my back.

cristian ramirez rodriguez

(he/him/él) is a twenty-three-year-old Venezuelan-Canadian poet based in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, on the traditional, unceded, and unsurrendered territory of the Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) peoples. He is the winner of the 2026 Stacy Doris Memorial Award, the Quantum Arts prize in Literature from the Canadian Association of Physicists and the 2025 Spanish language poetry contest from the Oregon Poetry Association. He is currently working on his debut poetry manuscript. Connect with him @pray4cristian on Instagram or via https://linktr.ee/cristianramirezrodriguez.

Cassandra Myers

Pleasure Cruising

there was a marriage where even the wet outline
of orgasm would bring me pain, in theory

on the boat, we have private cabins, and yet
I am a coward. To touch myself would be to admit

I couldn’t touch myself before, and still, cannot
While swimming naked, a jellyfish humbled me

to the hot white nerve. I was a precautious child, my mother reminds me
when I come home from my trip to my childhood bed where once

a duvet folded between my legs, a door without a lock.
thrill without fear is a mythos, Atlantis even in my dreams

anxious is what the gynecologist tells me, forcing the speculum
Like a dorado, thrushing the surface for dear life. What death

follows so closely behind, it tenses the body into an impossible climate
Try to relax, the pelvic physio therapist tells me, the chiro tells me, the
massage therapist tells me, the captain tells me—correcting my posture

bodygrotto, bodycenote, bodyeels, body, and its urchin hives

salt-lubed on my private shoal, without hands to rush me ~ she arrives

and never stops arriving. Gentler than my own hands, rushing the timer

I lose ending in the wave pattern as the world deadliest sea snails crawl
over my hands unknowingly. And when the water and I make our pact

I contribute to our volume.

cassandra myers

(My’z) (they/she/he) is an award-winning poet, performer, dancer, illustrator, and counsellor from Tkaronto, Ontario. As a queer, non-binary, South-Asian-Italian, crip, mad, survivor of sexual violence, Cassandra’s work has won national literary and spoken-word titles including the National Magazine Gold Award in Poetry and Champion of the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. Find them @cass. myers.poetry or at cassmyers.com.

Anne-Marie Turza

Top-Down Shooter Game

I’ve auto-joined the green unnumbered citizens

viewed as pixels from above in the game
of feeling wrong in language. My companion’s

a medieval dog named Beste-of-All
with a beard of skeptical bullshot.
We’ve levelled up in talking:
I talk to ants with roses, and ants talk
to my dog in proffers. It works like this:
To say to ants, tell Beste-of-All his name, I offer

rose seeds. Trees burgeon woodenly. They aggro
flower, unfolding like exploding linen napkins! Some ants

appear. Animated dark marks like hyphens. And something—
something sensory with motions and feelers,
something further, happens.
To be honest it’s beyond
an Ant-Rose-Dog native speaker’s
understanding. It works, Ok! And is the alchemy

of every true adventure.
I wear a cotton coverall. My name per Beste-of-All—

I think, translated via several species—is:

Specific Cheerful Cotton Skin Stink. I am armed,

typically with brandy. I can throw a drink on anyone’s old
impressive wound to make it sting. The problem is:

too many thousand players, the sentient wind,
900 km per hour, a blinding orbit, audacious
mission, a planet mistaken for a star. And stars mistaken
for grenades. I say with scattered rose seeds, specifically:

Why language?,

trees blasting into orange and yellow flowers.
Ants alpha-release the whole game with brazen sensitivity.
No one knows the roses from the question marks.

Anne-marie turza

is the author of two collections of poetry, The Quiet (Anansi, 2014) and Fugue with Bedbug (Anansi, 2022), and the chapbook Slip Minute (Baseline, 2018). She was a finalist for the Bronwen Wallace Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and won the inaugural Writers’ Trust Board Fellowship (2026) for her body of work.

 Aaron Kreuter

Colby’s Paradox

It was the night the coral were supposed to release their yearly gamete bundles into their glass bathtubs. A controlled and monitored version of the frenzy that would soon overtake their cousins out in the reef. The same every November. People started arriving at the windowless laboratory around seven thirty. At eight o’clock, the fake sun started to fake set. The project leaders, scientists, undergrads, and various assorted switched on their headlamps, held buttons till they glowed red, whispered reverentially over the gurgle of the tanks, pointing and speculating. The red lights milled around, shone into the water, waited for the coral to set, for each of the thousands of tiny polyps to produce a hard little nub. A biological precursor to release.
By eleven, an eternity of waiting, it seemed unlikely there would be any action tonight. A hundred red lights bobbed toward the exit.
“Not to worry, it’ll definitely be tomorrow,” Thomas said to Anna-Maria.
“I just have to get something from my car, meet you at the dorms,” Clare said to Colby.
“Good night, sweet things,” Olatokunbo said to the tanks.
The door shut on the coral, leaving them to their simulated night.

Colby sat on the rocking chair behind the research centre’s dorm rooms, watching the rolling ocean. She had had one too many pulls from Helmut’s absurdly massive bottle of vodka, was trying to clear her head and take a break from the raucous reunion vibes inside. She could see Olatokunbo with some of the undergrads down in the surf. They were swaying and shouting their promises into the salty air, the sky above them smeared with clouds and stars, sex, drugs, rock and roll.
It was a charged happening, this annual gathering on the sea edge. Except for Thomas, they all came from elsewhere. Britain, Nigeria, Chile, Finland, America, Canada. To this research station on Australia’s northeast coast, to catch the corals’ rose-hued sexual discharge, separate sperm from egg, play mad scientist.
Clare clattered out of the dorms, sat on the step beneath where Colby was rocking. She was still wearing her white peasant skirt, even though she had spilled salsa all over it. They watched Olatokunbo pick up one of the undergrads and twirl her around, her bare feet raised behind her, scalloped with sand.
“Anna-Maria and I think this is going to be the year,” Clare said, as if picking up a prior conversation. “We’ve mapped out enough couplings between northern and southern species that we should, hopefully, hit gold. Hit pay dirt.” She was tapping her fingers along the wood of the step, each nail a different colour: coral blue, coral pink. Chalk white. “Hopefully,” she repeated.
Everybody here had their reasons, their story: why they fell in love with the ocean, with the wrack. The reef. And that was Clare’s: having made her escape from a suffocating evangelical childhood, she now pursued the need to save these bright, cathedral-esque life forms with intense, nearly religious zeal, to crossbreed and crossbreed and crossbreed again, under various and mounting stresses, until a new species evolved. Anna-Maria was the world-renowned scientist, the project leader, the one who conceptualized augmented evolution to begin with, the one who won the grants. Thomas, founder and head of the Reef Revitalization Nursery and Laboratory, was the disgruntled son of the second-richest coal-mining family in Australia. Through RRNL, Thomas was going to keep the reefs alive, to do what he could to undo the planetary damage his family had wrought. For Olatokunbo, it was the science of it, the symbiotic attraction between coral polyp and algae, the mystery of Darwin’s Paradox—how could such life thrive in the nutrient-starved waters of the tropics? He brought infectious joy to everything he touched, kept undergrads enthused and donors pleased. Then there were the non-scientists, the hangers-on of various stripes. Helmut, who, along with his parents and six brothers, worked at his family’s tabletop game company, Elämää Games; their forest-ecosystem game Boreal! was a massive sleeper hit. He arrived at RRNL three years ago to research for a sequel based on the mind-bogglingly complex ecology of the reef and had been back every November since. Jana was a video journalist—though as she told anybody who would listen, she was actually a failed novelist—making a self-funded documentary on Anna-Maria and her noble attempt to save the coral, sticking herself and her camera into everybody’s business.
And then there was Colby. Why was Colby here? She wasn’t exactly sure. She didn’t even like the coral, not really, not like the others. In fact, it terrified her, had since she first watched Finding Nemo with her sister. But, still, she found herself majoring in biology, doing a master’s in oceanography, and suddenly there was Anna-Maria in her lab offering Colby a cushy three-year contract as her assistant: she’d be based in San Diego, travel the world, the yearly pilgrimage to Australia. So, Colby said yes. And, for some reason she didn’t quite understand, she excelled at it, was, as Anna-Maria never failed to mention, “indispensable”; it was that very word, indispensable, that accompanied a picture of Colby in National Geographic, posing next to a tank of orange coral, a pipette in hand, a confident yet—to Colby, at least—slightly sour smile on her face. The more time she spent with the corals, the more obsessed and repulsed she became, the more unsure she became of this project she was enmeshed in, the more alien the reefs grew—their symbiosis, their unearthly cityscapes, their communal sexual explosions. But, as Helmut said the morning of his arrival, the two of them half on the bed, half on the floor: anything that is not human seems alien. Colby responded that sometimes humans seemed like the most alien species on the planet. Steadily dreaming our anthropic dream.
“I think Jana wants to sleep with me,” Clare announced.
Olatokunbo and the undergrads were walking up the beach, almost at the dorm steps. Clare waved and smiled at her boyfriend, who bent down and scooped her up, whispered something into her ear. Watching Clare and Olatokunbo, Colby thought of Helmut, inside with his vodka bottle, probably getting bored of waiting for her. He had asked if, since her contract was over anyway, she’d come back to Finland with him; she had told him she was going to the kitchen for a beer.
Over the sea, the red blink of a satellite carving through constellations.

They truly were a wonder. The reefs. Home to endless varieties of fish, urchin, clam, shark, octopus, crab, sea star, sponge, oyster, turtle, celled life singular and multiple. The plasticene wonder of it. The colours! Orange, gold, and brown. Fuchsia, pink, and teal. Yellow, blue, and green. The corals themselves built drip by drip, nib by nib, over tens of millions of years. But now, it was a race against rising ocean temperatures, against coral bleaching. Against death. A race to breed a new coral that was more heat-resistant, that didn’t expel their algal counter parts at the first sign of trouble, that could live in an altered world. As Thomas liked to say, if the coral goes, the entire script of the ocean will be rewritten. The entire script, period.
The second night. The air of the sea lab murky with expectation. Thomas’s husband, James, had just arrived from Melbourne, had his headlamp on the regular light setting until Jana whispered in his ear and he fixed it, Jana returning to panning over the tanks that simulate ocean conditions in twenty years, in fifty years, in one hundred. Anna Maria stood by the stainless-steel lab tables in a white lab coat, clipboard in her hands, a mother unhappy her brood were not performing.
Around ten o’clock, one coral let out a pip of gamete. Otherwise, nothing.
“Somebody get these guys some oysters,” Olatokunbo said.
Midnight: a river of red toward the door.

Colby ended the call from Toronto. She was standing at her dorm room window, watching the feral pigs rooting in the dumpsters; her sister had just informed her the cancer had metastasized, was back. Watching the pigs, she thought about how mammals many times larger than humans don’t have higher occurrences of cancer, even though they have thousands of times more cells. Peto’s Paradox. Elephants’ recompense for never inventing the oil derrick? Colby had stayed away from Toronto for three years, but her contract with Anna-Maria was over; there was no reason not to return home.
Downstairs, the dorm kitchen was full of people. Everybody was drinking, telling stories, laughing. The undergrads came in, hysterical, spooked by the pigs. The talk turned to roadside wallabies, the scourge of the cane toad, the fires that, not even three years ago, had killed a neat billion. Colby and Helmut chipped away on their nightly group project of the vodka bottle.
Jana turned her camera on, asked if it’s actually even possible to save the coral. Colby stared at Jana’s earrings, two house keys, one gold, one silver. What doors did they unlock?
“Yes, but augmented evolution is only one piece of the puzzle,” Thomas said, leaning back. “We need to slow the heating of the ocean. Brighten the clouds, block the sun. Pump in cold water, deploy robots to reseed damaged reefs. Anything and everything.”
“As long as it’s scalable,” Anna-Maria interjected.
“Yes, yes, of course. Scalable. The latest euphemism for money.” Clare had told Colby that Thomas’s parents had recently cut him out of their will; if it wasn’t for Anna-Maria and her grants, RNNL would be shuttered. “The only truly scalable technology is human beings. But if we can buy the corals twenty, thirty years, maybe we’ll have come to enough sense.”
Colby watched this exchange through slitted eyes.
“I wish somebody would do some augmented evolution with me,” Clare sighed. She was curled up with Olatokunbo on the futon, but was looking at Jana, who was filming James brag about a fishing trip he had just come back from in Canada’s Northwest Territories, the amphibious vehicle they had rode out into the frothing lake, fish the size of compact cars.
The undergrads turned up the music, started dancing.

Later, Anna-Maria was loudly fighting with Thomas about the Fermi Paradox. Everybody had paused to watch.
“Either interstellar travel is impossible, or there is no other life in the universe,” Anna-Maria stated in her determinative way. “I tend to the latter.”
“Bullshit!” Thomas said, nearly yelling. Colby had never seen him so animated. Clare often said that Thomas had had his blood medically replaced with liquified self-importance; Colby had never seen it, not until now. “The universe is big enough for trillions of advanced civilizations. They just haven’t gotten to us yet. I have to believe that. Otherwise, tell me, please, what’s the point?”
Olatokunbo tried to break up the argument. “Maybe they’re waiting for us to solve our own problems.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
Don’t hold your breath.

Colby was with Helmut at the kitchen sink, filling their mugs with water. She leaned into him as they let the water run cold. Helmut was a big guy, with a big beard, big eyes, a big brain, big appetites.
“Have you thought about it?” he asked. Colby took a step back.
Finland.
“Seeing you once a year is no longer enough,” he said.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Colby was stunned at her own words.
Helmut took her by the waist. “I need your expertise with the game. Plus, my brothers are dying to meet you.” The game. The game! For Helmut, it was easy. You did this, you got this in return. You picked a card, you got a reward. Augmented evolution. Put the right egg and sperm together, make something better.
Colby took a drink of the lukewarm water, flavoured with the faintest hint of sulphur. She knew she didn’t want to go with Helmut, but why not? They had fun. The sex was great. She had nowhere else to be, not really. Except for Toronto, her sister. The disease.
“Sometimes, I hate everybody,” she said. “Everybody, and everything.”
“What?” Helmut asked.
“I said, I hope your brothers agree with your new idea for the reef spawning mechanic.”
Helmut’s face was a mask of Finnish fortitude.
Colby scanned the kitchen. The undergrads had found an ancient Twister mat, were contorted into unnatural shapes. Olatokunbo was sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring at the wall. Clare and Jana were no longer present; Thomas had reamed Jana out after discovering that she was planning on using her documentary to get funding from Silicon Valley, and Clare had escorted Jana to her dorm room to comfort her. Olatokunbo jumped up. “The night, she is young! Who wants to go for a swim?” The undergrads collapsed, laughed, jumped up, followed Olatokunbo out the door.
Colby took Helmut’s hand.
Time for bed.

Shortly after lights out, on the third night, it happened.
First, there was a spitting. Then, a sputtering. Finally, a storming, the tanks clouding with red. Cheering and high-fives. The lights went back up. Anna-Maria and Colby rushed around with their clipboards, their lists of the desired pairings. The undergrads helped Olatokunbo and Clare catch the gamete slicks, sieve out the sperm from the eggs, transfer the sperm into buckets, send the buckets to the appointed workstations. The two of them joking and laughing, holding hands. Jana everywhere with her camera; she had removed the key earrings, two little nubs where the holes in her skin were already beginning to fuse. Helmut, for the first time Colby had known him, seemed out of place, his big blonde bulk removed from the action.
They worked into the night. The dorm rooms forgotten.

Colby stood with her feet in the chilled surf, the sky beginning to boil with the dawn. The team had only just finished pairing the coral. Now, we wait. Colby’s role in this experiment was, at least momentarily, complete; until Anna-Maria sorted her latest grant, Colby was a free agent. Her small white duffle was packed and waiting for her by the brown rocking chair. Shortly after Helmut had wandered off to bed, around four thirty, kissing Colby on the forehead and saying he’d see her in the morning, she had slipped out from the frenzy, ran to the dorm and booked a very expensive flight to Toronto. She had hastily packed, had every intention of getting right into her rental car and driving to the airport, but felt compelled to say goodbye to the ocean.
Colby let the sunrise sting her eyes. Tomorrow, nearly everybody else would be leaving, headed back to their wired corners of the globe. She tore her eyes from the new day’s succor, looked up. Pictured airplanes in the sky, their trails of exhaust criss-crossing, expanding, melting into the air.

Aaron kreuter

is the author of six books. His most recent poetry collection, Shifting Baseline Syndrome, was a finalist for the 2022 Governor General’s Award, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Raymond Souster Award and the 2023 Vine Awards for Jewish Literature. Aaron’s first novel, Lake Burntshore, was released in spring 2025. He lives in Toronto and is an assistant professor at Trent University.          
            

Murgatroyd Monaghan

Island Girl

1998

There is the sound of a swing. Damp sand sits crystallized curiously against my teeth. An upturned garbage can leaks its contents over my skin. I wonder why I cannot smell it. I notice the smell, but I cannot smell. Just as I cannot taste the sand in my mouth or hear the swing that is creaking above me. The sensation should scare me, but it doesn’t. Nothing scares me. I feel nothing. My favourite rainbow crop top is flipped up to my shoulders from when they grabbed it, I know it is, but my hands are not mine to move. I am floating somewhere off in the distance. My breath is catching from the stomping on my back. I see red blood on my hands. I send my brain around to feel for any pain that might be responsible for the blood, but it finds nothing.
Someone’s feet have righted me and carried me across the playground. The feet are at the ends of my legs, I can see this, but they are not connected to my nervous system. All of my thoughts seem brought in by satellite, or maybe by freighter or helicopter, the way they bring things in back home. The most important incoming thought is the need to rediscover reality and place myself back there. Palms press into eyes, nails scratch thighs, teeth bite tongue. Sand. There is the taste of sand. Spit. Good. Keep going. The body is the mainland, but I am far away.
Six birds perch on a wire above me. Eight now. Twenty-seven leaves lie on the ground beneath this bench. The bench is brown, browner than me. I am sitting on it. My feet swing. They swing sixty-five times. Hands pinch body parts. Sounds are louder now. I remember I know how to check the time. It is five-thirty. Dammit. I have to go.
I practise what I will say.
“I fell off the swing. Stupid mistake, really. I’m fine, I’m fine. What’s for supper?”
That sounds good.
My mother wouldn’t want to know the truth. She wouldn’t want to know that I am not adjusting to life in Canada at all, and that I’d rather do anything than leave my apartment and face other kids. Everyone loves a success story. No one wants to know the truth: the bullies make me hate myself. I definitely don’t want my mother to know that it’s her fault. She has enough of her own troubles.
I sling my backpack over my shoulder and begin my short walk to the bus.
My mind has begun to detach from my body a lot more readily, lately. This is a skill I have learned to master just like the other skills I have learned to master since arriving here. This is how I cope with the memories, the insults, the constant fear. I have become, not a Canadian girl, but an aspiring chameleon, a people-pleasing actor—a lie.
The world around me is real enough now. Walking helps. My mouth tastes the sin of its difference as I force it to form English words the way the other kids do, without my foreign accent; without the familiar vocabulary that makes the world make sense for me. I need to be normal and I don’t feel normal. I practise with song lyrics: “All I can say is that my life is pretty plain. I like watching the puddles gather rain,” I mouth. I don’t, though. I hate puddles. I can learn to like them, I guess. That band is Blind Melon. Another popular one is Smashing Pumpkins. I wonder why people here garner so much satisfaction from damaged produce. No matter. I can learn to like that, too.

2002

My mother takes me home on the TTC on Tuesdays. She can’t find a job, so she’s home all the time. Back on the island, my mother was the charge nurse on a burns unit. My grandmother and grandfather were born and raised in India, where my grandfather founded a hospital that still bears our family name. I come from a long line of medical professionals. Here, though, my mother can’t even get an overnight cleaning gig. We live in an overcrowded, derelict housing project that smells like pot and piss. My mother drinks and yells at my new father a lot. They blame “the system” for everything. I think Mum’s problems are her own fault. She doesn’t even try to fit in.
I am reading The Princess Bride as we sit together on the 39 Finch East. I am not so much reading as pretending to scan the pages while I actually use all of my senses to scan the environment around me for potential threats. I know as much as it is possible to know about every stranger within a fifty-metre radius of me, while at the same time, I go to great lengths to avoid potential interactions with them. There is a good reason for this. Speaking in front of kids is asking for trouble. But the adults are worse. Every adult’s response is inevitable:
Hello.
So cute. Where are you from?
Where is the bathroom?
Oh, where are you from?
Excuse me please, I’d like to get by.
Ha, where’s that accent from?
One day it’ll be, HELP, I’M HAVING A HEART ATTACK!
Aww, omggg, where do you come from?
If I have to hear that question one more time, I think I’ll scream. Anyway, it won’t be like this much longer. I’m starting a new school in September for the seventh grade, and I’ve been perfecting my Canadian accent. I’ve also been straightening my hair and using a different name. I almost look white, and I almost sound normal. The plan is for no one at the new school to ever know I’m different.
The biggest flaw in my plan is my mother. She is on a mission to humiliate me. As she begins to yap genially with a man across from us, I tense. I see the question forming on his face. I knew it. Right there. Here it comes. And I don’t want to hear it. Placing my hand on my mother’s knee and looking at the man, I say clearly and perfectly: “Please forgive her. My mother has a speech impediment.” The man smiles awkwardly and stops talking. I go back to my reading. My mother takes the high road and waits until we are alone to whack me upside the head.
“Oww!”
“Don’ be owwin’ me, ye daft shite scunner or ah’ll gie ye summit ter greet aboot. Da leik o’ dat. Ahm at doon-drappin wi’ ye. Tank d’Lurd Jaisus ye’v naught but a skelpit lug, noo.”
“Mum.” I rub my head. “People don’t hit their children here.” I duck as the next blows come rounding, but it doesn’t matter. She never misses.
“Och, raileh? Well, mebbe the bairns here are less cunty, leik.”
I look around me in horror. “See what I mean?! Mum, you can’t say that word here, it’s really bad! Just stop, okay?”
“Stop wot noo, Murga? Bidin’?” Mum has gone from mad to sad mad. I hate that. I don’t know the right Canadian words to say. My tongue floats, just like the island it left. I hear the waves of my swallow. I feel the salt in my eyes. I feel the muir under my feet and feel the mist on my skin, and then, just as I start to feel at home again, I know it isn’t real. Nothing ever feels real.
I feel sad-mad, too. The world is disappearing again. There is cotton in my ears, and my surroundings are both too blurry and too crisp. When I answer, it’s with a new voice. Murgatroyd Mk II has risen from the playground sand and become someone that neither Mum nor I recognize. Someone who doesn’t get picked on or hurt, with straight hair and straight A’s; someone who can keep the real me safe. I know a secret Mum doesn’t: if you aren’t real, no one can hurt you. If she could just turn off reality and step out of herself like I can, she wouldn’t have to drink so much. I touch her cheek.
“No, Mum. We can bide here. We can live, like. I mean, we can live.” I don’t believe that, but I want her to think I do.
My newest backstory is one the kids at the new school will respect. I’ve practised it until it feels true. My real parents are in prison. They’re … bikers. This? This is just a foster parent. Yeah, she makes me call her “Mum.” But I’m tough. I’m crazy. Don’t mess with me. My fantasy is my ticket to safety; to friends. It doesn’t feel wrong. What’s the difference between starting again in a new country and starting again with a new name? I exhale hard. Now seems like as good a time as any to tell my mother what I’ve been meaning to. “And I don’t go by that name anymore, Mum. Call me Hannah from now on, okay?”
Mum is silent. The silence is worse than her speaking. She just stares, like she’s watching a hurricane closing in from afar. She lifts my straightened hair and lets it drop like it’s dirty. Her breath is shaky. The hurricane is closer now. She pushes her sunglasses up her nose just as the tears form, and that’s when I know for sure that we’re both pretending.
“Feckin’ reet.” Her voice is quiet now, the eye of the storm. “Yare a reet braaly perskeet, du. Ah’ve a reet ter be here an’ so dae ye. Lay ye doon en yuir ain calf grund prood leik.” She puffs out her chest and smacks me again for good measure. I pretend it hurts, to make her happy. She smiles.

2004

The first time I cannot find my way back, I panic. I try teeth, nails, palms on my eyes. Nothing works. I am floating, floating. I never got lost on my island back home. How could I? Even if I tried to lose myself, the village midwife would find me when she went out on her bicycle, or perhaps the barmaid’s husband would click his teeth at me on his way home from the postmaster’s, or any of the mothers or grandmothers trading vats of soup or bites of gossip who walk around with their skirts hiked over their leather boots would come up to me and grab me by my ear to bring me home. Once, I walked out alone to the phone box on the outskirts of town, and when I returned, my mother scolded me in our unique dialect of Gujerati-Scots for skipping stones at the glass even though I was sure no one had seen me. But here in my head there is nothing, not even wind, not even stones, not even a phone box two miles away.
I begin to cut myself before I know what I am doing. When the air touches the pink globs of fat poking through the opening in my forearm, the sting begins like seawater in the wound and the shoreline comes into sight again. I breathe because I am home. I bandage my arm and wear only long sleeves, even in summer. It takes my mother a year to find the red lines criss-crossing my skin like a highway map to nowhere. It takes her another year to speak to me without hatred because of the shame I bring on our family. I spend less time at home and more with the neighbourhood kids, who fear my scars and follow me as if I can take them to a place where they don’t feel pain until it pushes its way out of their flesh, either. My mother stumbles from drink and shouts that I am not her daughter. There are dozens of Gujerati-Scots words for crazy and I know them all.
We don’t have a word for lost that doesn’t also mean broken.

2006

Clouds are closing in overhead. Bring in the boat, I think, but it is an old thought. There are no boats here for us to make our living. Here, I survive with my fists. I roll up my sleeves. The girl my friends are dragging across the parking lot to me is crying, but I don’t care. These bitches all cry. Not me—I haven’t cried in years. “What’d this one do?” I say, looking into the tear-streaked face. Some of them steal boyfriends, tattle, or run their mouths. This one looks pretty clean.
“New girl. She don’t speak no English, even. We brought her to you for initiation. Curb her bitch ass.” Fight, fight, fight. The familiar chanting begins, and I realize I am floating away.
It is like looking into an enchanted mirror. My ears and eyes keep losing the present and I see blood on my hands. C’mon, hit her, what are you waiting for? But I taste playground sand in my empty mouth and hear the sound of the swing, the swing, the swing. I can’t hurt myself here, and the creaking is so loud it envelops me. You stoned or what? Fuckin’ knock her out. I finally smell the garbage. It took years, but it all comes back now. “You hit me first,” I whisper to the girl, faking a shrug, trying to keep my cool. “It’ll be better for you.” The girl just cries hysterically and keeps shaking her head. Please, please.
There is so much fear between us I could cut it with a knife. But I have no knife, not to cut the fear in the air or the fear out of my own skin, and the girls who know Hannah surround me, hungry for blood. I know only one way to find my way home from here: I leave reality, go to a place where I have no feelings or sensations at all, and I punch the girl in her face as hard as I can.
The kids cheer. Everyone disperses.
She is vomiting. Or maybe it’s me. I might be vomiting. I don’t know. I can’t feel anything. Feet are running, and they’re mine. I am an island surrounded by wind, water. The water undoes the job of the straightener; reveals my curls. Nothing touches me. Everything is touching me. The feet take me to my apartment door. I am wet and screaming. “Open the door, Mum. It’s me, Murgatroyd. It’s Murgatroyd. It’s me.” The door is open now, but I am still sobbing and banging the doorframe. “It’s me, Mum, it’s me, it’s me, let me in.”
My mother squeezes me softly and strokes my half-curly hair. She is mostly sober, and for the first time I notice the hand marks on her neck and shoulder, the thick makeup over her left cheekbone. “Ah know who ye are, ye stchupid bloody fecking chakotra. Ah know.”

MURGATROYD MONAGHAN

is an Autistic mother, author, poet, and spoken word artist of mixed descent. Her work has won national and international awards, including the Canadian Nonfiction Prize (CNFC). Her essay, “Island Girl,” was originally longlisted for the CBC Nonfiction Prize. Murg’s most recent collection, white spaces where we learn to breathe (Off Topic 2025), was named one of 2025’s best collections by CBC. When she isn’t writing, performing, or teaching, Murg can be found snuggled up with her kids watching Star Trek. 
            

sophie anne edwards

And Then It Only Fluttered

I entered the world with one eye open, she said. Wary of the world. Not sure whether I really wanted to enter it.
I watched her eyes weeping with infection. I watched her eyes close.
By Monday, she was only awake for part of the day. She smiled every time she saw me, or when the nurse leaned toward her face, and when Emilie arrived for a visit. From time to time, very slowly, shakily, she raised her pointer finger to the corner of her eye in an attempt to wipe away the sticky gunk encrusting her eyelids. I’d painted her fingernails blue a few days before. They matched her blue-veined soft hands.
On Tuesday, her eyes only opened for a few minutes at a time. Her hands lay at her sides. Her jaw hung open, revealing the ravaged mouth, the pulpy tongue, the skin peeling away from the inside of her lips, the teeth mossy with yeast. She had first refused food and then drink, everything stinging.
On Wednesday, both eyes fluttered for a few moments when a remembered voice spoke to her.
I didn’t think of the garden then, nor of the seedlings germinating in the greenhouse under Yan’s care. I wasn’t sure what she’d planted of the seeds I’d left with her. There was no world but this one. A bed, a La-Z-y Boy chair, a small fridge, and my mother’s starving body. I have tried to tend toward life—planting, caring, helping my mother, tending to her for so many years. I hadn’t intended death, not in this close way.
Walking through the woods in the snow following Karen’s discarded clothing, finding her body curled in the cold was different. There was the life, and then suddenly there was the death. There was no preparation except the feeling that one should have been prepared. Should have seen, known, intervened.
The nurse called to say there was a hole in my mother’s back. I can see metal. Does your mother have metal in her back? The hardware bolted along her spine after the first accident crushed her back twenty years ago was eroding, the now naked bolt pressured between skin and the wheelchair, skin and bed. The hole felt like a dream entering the daytime hours, a fault line. That Mom hadn’t mentioned the pain or that her pain hadn’t been heard was a silence that couldn’t be spoken.
I thought I had been preparing. The ground had been worked.
Tomatoes can develop blossom end rot, squashes and eggplants, too. Round sunken spots darken the bottom. The fruit rots. The culprit is a lack of calcium, usually from soil deficiency, or from over- or underwatering, which makes it hard for the plant to uptake calcium from the soil. My mother’s spine, spongy from osteoporosis, was crushed when her car went off the road, down the embankment and raced over a frozen mound of road construction waste, from where she flew forty feet to land next to a swamp, the tires of the car splayed. The doors were crushed, too, like her back. A lack of calcium and the loss of estrogen results in bone not being replaced as quickly as it should. For two decades she had taken medication for Barrett’s Esophagus to reduce reflux, the medications further reducing the body’s ability to re-create bone, affecting her stomach’s ability to absorb calcium. The second car accident crushed her hip. A third accident broke her arm. I found a round piece of metal in her ashes when I divided them for me, my daughter Emilie, and my brother.
Seedlings that are too damp can develop what is called damping off—a fungus that develops around their stems and causes them to rot and die.
The rosemary plant, a Christmas gift from my friend Anong, did fine through the winter, then began drying. Small tufts of white fungus gathered at the nodes between the needles and the stem.
The yeast that colonized my mother’s body is naturally present in all our bodies. But the conditions became overly favourable, and so the yeast duplicated and travelled. They didn’t notice her mouth until it became raw and she was unable to eat. They hadn’t noticed her weakly trying to lift her hospital gown to scratch below her belly and the thin hairs of her pubic bone. Please can we have some Canesten, I asked. Can we reduce at least one irritation? They didn’t notice the pain in her belly. She had a urinary tract infection, vaginal yeast. Her eyes began to get sticky. The antibiotic drip intended to reduce the risk of infection post-surgery made her body prone to yeast. They replaced the antibiotic with a medication for yeast but after a week it still wasn’t working—too late, too much yeast, her body too weak, the yeast multiplied.
Plants infested with spider mite get sticky. The leaves roll into themselves. We could treat the UTI and the vaginal infection. She was hydrated through the IV but we couldn’t clean her mouth. It was too painful. The surgical incision along her spine was eight inches wide and four inches down, a red cross that began to become redder, inflamed, puss building behind the stitches.
A few years ago, I transplanted a climbing rose to a south-facing wall, a gorgeous peach colour with a classic heady rose scent. I made a mistake, though. I planted it in a raised box I built and lined with blue insulation. The freeze and thaw of that mild winter killed the roots of the climber, and the other two small rose bushes I’d planted alongside. Those two small roses were simple grocery-store roses, the miniatures in pinks and yellows, dark red that show up around Mother’s Day in four-inch pots with coloured plastic sleeves. Those two miniatures had blossomed into full-size roses with heavy blooms. Come spring, when I pruned them back, it was dead wood all the way down.
There’s a stillness in the body that is like a hole in the back; a dream undreaming itself, a silence that isn’t silence because it’s not just a lack of sound. It’s beyond silence, beyond stillness. Beyond.
I miss that rose. The generosity of her blooms, the grandness of them, the enlivening of the grey siding, the companionship of the blossoms sitting beside my bed. I wasn’t holding my mother’s hand when she died. I had slipped into my own deep sleep, finally, after many nights of wakefulness. And wait-fullness. I lay beside her, the palliative playlist running. I’d stayed awake through the night, counting the seconds be tween breaths, the silences increasing by increments of four until she’d reach twenty-three seconds of held breath, then she began the cycle again. Breathing for a few seconds, holding for a few seconds, then holding for seven seconds…. And again.
I read to her, a flower blooming on her face when she saw me. I lay in the narrow bed alongside her and we looked at photographs from her childhood home: Carcassonne, les calanques, the streets of Marseille, lavender fields.
Plant characteristics change depending on the type of fungus they grow with. This is such a close relationship perhaps we should call them they rather than two separate entities. Much in the same way that our own bodies are so microbial, these microbes so integral to our systems, so influential in our bodies. The medicinal qualities of plants, their antioxidant levels, aroma and flavour, and their adaptations are all affected by the type of fungus with which they cohabitate. Plants began as algae and evolved into what we call plants, and yet they are only plants by some visual cue that we seem to think is definingly independent, like our own bodies.
Lichen aren’t a thing, really, or a thing. Lichen are the symbiotic conjoining of fungi, algae, cyanobacteria. Less a conjoining than a world in process, an encounter, a long conversation in much the same way that during pregnancy there is no separation—mother is mother and baby. The baby is the mother’s blood circulating, the shared history of cells. Even later it becomes difficult to parse what of ourselves is unique from our families, to parse what of ourselves is separate from the microbes, the water, the collection of collaborations that we are.
The biologist Merlin Sheldrake writes that each lichen is birthed in relationship. The relationship between plants and fungus is so very close, that he argues in book Entangled Life, “What we call ‘plants’ are in fact fungi that have evolved to farm algae, and algae that have evolved to farm fungi.” Fungus is entwined with roots, too, and where plant and fungus connect, plant signals pass between them.
I am somehow the garden, and it me—neither fully functioning without the other, at least becoming our current expression through our relations. The garden is also a third entity between the “wild” and the human, between past and future. The garden is not a thing of itself, but rather all the relations between soil and seed, weather and microbes, insects and intentions. And I am my mother, too, and her mother, and her mother’s mother, and my daughter is me.
All day Thursday she began breathing slowly but regularly again, seven or eight seconds apart. It was the twenty-seventh of March. They told me it could be weeks more. I didn’t know it was our last day. I lay beside her as I had been every day and every night, lifting the blankets when she sweated, recovering her when the skin was cold, her ability to regulate temperature diminishing. Alert to the most minute movement signalling pain, I whispered to her, stroked her arm, read passages aloud from La Gloire de mon père.
Plants are aware of one another and the insects and other critters that eat and otherwise interact with them. I cannot see this recognition between plants and their worlds, yet I was aware of my mother’s every minute movement and my mother was aware of me.
The birds notice me. The crows know when I am adding more food to the compost. At night I hear raccoons fiddling with the lid of the bin, which I’ve covered with a board and topped with a couple pieces of firewood to keep the dogs out. I sense the plants know me. I too have a scent that must give the plants and critters information about me. I move between the plants, rub against them all, I prune suckers, accidentally bend a stem too far, step on vines that cross the pash. Their chemicals do not work against the size of me. I’m not a small insect feeding on leaves, but a large predator. But the blistering that developed on my arms this summer from the parsnip has changed my behaviour with them. I do not have a way to measure how the leaves might taste differently day to day, week to week. I wonder if the plants look forward to my touch. My gentle touch. The way I tuck a leaf away from the electrified fence. Tuck compost around the base of the flowering squashes.
I called my brother. Told him she needed to hear his voice, for him to say he would be fine. We would all be fine and that she could go. I sent my daughter to the liquor store to buy a bottle of champagne. We drank small sips from small glasses and each time a friend or beloved visited or called to say goodbye, I wiped a drop across her lips.
The scent of tomatoes is strong on my hands when I prune and gather. This scent must have a function. I sometimes wish I had followed my interest in plant biology, the only science class in high school that turned me on. I loved learning about the plants and creating plant identification drawings. I am not a scientist but I have my imagination. Science is fascinating and important—it proves what we guess at. It gives the rationale for love, for protection. It leads to understanding the functions, the mechanisms that can help us help the plants, to understanding their medicines and gifts. Long observation does this, too. The layperson’s long observation, the long observation of Indigenous tribes carried forward, reaches the same place as science, but often well before.
I was fine-tuned to the scent of her. I could smell the yeast, the drying breath, the dried sweat and warmth of her skin. I should have trusted my instinct and stayed awake with her, to witness her final breath the way her mother witnessed her first one, to hold her hand as I’d been doing all week.
Some flowers grow so quickly. You think you can sit and watch them grow. Suddenly the basil needs pinching back. The true leaves have formed above the cabbage’s cotyledon. Beans race toward the sky within days. Sprouts pop up from seeds, giant sunflowers tilt their faces toward the sun just like mine, Mom would say.
I rotated my sore hips on the extended La-Z-y Boy that I had drawn up close beside her bed and fell asleep again.
The garden is always scented, but it is absorbed differently into the open sky. In the greenhouse it is distilled. In the greenhouse it feels as though I inherit green. It’s always eight degrees warmer than the temperature outside. Scent is a relationship with water molecules; the gift that is the respiration of leaves. When plants began to breathe in carbon dioxide, humans began to breathe it out. We are connected directly by breath if nothing else. I’d like to say we are a gift to the plants but the exchange is reciprocity only up to the point when we make them work over hard by pumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere. This closed greenhouse, the earth.

In the room where my mother was dying, we were in a world apart, a space between the world outside and the room we inhabited, between the world toward which she was moving and the one where I would live without her.
I’ve always heard that talking to our plants is good for them, and music, too. My mother always said so. Perhaps it’s an old wives tale, but the voice is vibration, an invisible language like the volatile chemicals of plants. Certain people can make my hands clammy, my underarms sweat. It is said we can smell another’s fear. I could sense my ex-husband’s mood at the turn of a hair. I had become finely tuned to the slightest shift in tone, to the scent of him. I wanted to hear my mother’s voice again, to feel her sound my name.
On Thursday only the left eye opened. She was finishing her days as I started mine. One eye closed. But she was sure of me. A slight squeeze of my finger, the moving eye. A small sound. She was perhaps less sure of where she was going than from where she had come.
And then it only fluttered. I watched carefully to see the eye under the lid, a fish swimming below the surface.
Around midnight I put a chant on repeat, reminded of the Ravi Shankar records she and Dad played when I was a child.
I slept. Perhaps I dreamed.
The roses on the window and the opening orchid absorbed her last breath and returned it to me.

sophie anne edwards

(she/her/settler) lives, writes, and gardens on Mnidoo Mnising (Manitoulin Island). A Mouth of Vowels, an experimental novel, is out now with 1366/Guernica Editions. Her debut collection of visual and text-based poetry, Conversations with the Kagawong River (Talonbooks, 2024), was a CBC “must read.” She’s just started a new letterpress company called Field Folios, working with a 1954 Heidelberg “windmill” press.