PREFACE
Karen Mulhallen - On the Beach, Apostatic

THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE
Mary Ann Mulhern - can’t be right; nine-year-old girls; somewhere safe;
mea culpa; altar girls; magdalen; in nomini patris; recess at St. Ursula’s; a room upstairs; mages of childhood
Matthew Holmes - The Reliquaries of Trees
Ted McInnes - Swimming Hole of the Dogs
Elisabeth de Mariaffi - For Yankl; Tender is the Night; Requirements for Flight
John McEwen - On the Beach (Portfolio)

SYNCHRONICITIES
Zdena Salivarová - Why I Played the Bruch Concerto So Beautifully
David Mason - Remembering Irving
Cortney Davis - Finding What You Didn’t Expect

DIS-EASE
Kristen den Hartog - The Craving
Colleen Anderson - Battle Dress
Martha Silano - After Drinking the Orange Liquid for the Glucose Tolerance Test
Braden Labonté - Fake Friends and their Favourite Flowers (Portfolio)
Elaine Batcher - Highway Cinderella; Aubergine and Pumpkin; Ephemera

REINCARNATION
Mitch Berman - Billy Moscow and Me
Anne Germanacos - In the Time of the Girls
Dan MacIsaac - Abra

STATES OF BEING
Changming Yuan - Human Culture; 10 Latest Fashions about Fashion
Kimberly M. Goodliffe - Drivin’ that Train
Laila Haidarali - my fascist boots
Gillian Harding-Russell - Phobos Portfolio
Susan McCaslin - Heard on Waking; Condolences; The New Asceticism;
Thinking the Unthinkable
Armando Pajalich - The Lyrics of Change and the Need for Change: Thoughts on Leonard Cohen’s Dear Heather
Geoffrey Pugen - Utopics (Portfolio)

Back of the Book
Contributing Editor’s Column Mark Kingwell
Contributors’ Notes
Co-Editor’s Diary Laura Meyer
Production Editor’s Diary Linda Johnson
News and Notes
Advertisements

(NOTE: excerpt of full text)

All through the month of October, David had been dreaming that Peter was dead. Peter had died but had been too afraid to be put in the ground and had run away on the day of his funeral and come to find David. He stood at the foot of David’s bed, looking just as he’d looked in life, a nine-year-old boy with a bowl of dark blond hair that hung in his eyes, brown eyes, with blue circles beneath. The circles were like the remnants of bruises and had been there since David could remember — since Peter was born. They gave him a pathetic look, as though he had been emptied of blood or as though there’d never been enough blood to start with. But there was plenty.

Your mother has, as they say, passed on.
Your daughter is in the advanced stages of anorexia.

These two headlines scuttle your dreams —
a double helix.

Mother floats overhead.
Daughter staples your heart to a stone.

From a cycle entitled “Parings: The Anorexia Poems”

near the back
of St. Ursula Church
I kneel between my parents
they do not believe
their own flesh and blood
is consumed
by the man
who raises consecrated hands
above the altar
in nomini patris
et filii
et spiritus sanctus
my parents whisper amen

silence turns to stone
like the eyes and ears
of angels and saints
who will not see
will not hear

XII

Fear in the narrow aisles
of the economy airplane after September 11
(twin towers ablaze crumbling under flames
amidst the wagging of a billion tongues,
your neighbour on the telephone
and the child beside you
fast-talking in your ear

while one last unidentified Icarus falls
on a back page of history and memory
flailing arms and legs, falling
implanted horrific
mythic on your brain).

A tall, well-dressed Arab walks out
of the cubicle of washroom and
your own recalcitrant heart slurs over
a second, messy beat. That glazed eye
meeting the upturned faces on re-entering

silence grips the aisles on this flight
could be construed as something
of a fanatic, and the foreigner’s needling look
across three seats from you bears
an instant grudge while he reads

it in your blanched face and
you who have prided yourself
on your openness and light

are left to quick-chat with a neighbour
about crop blight
(about which you know
absolutely nothing) with staged
nonchalance.