Vol.46 No.1 Spring 2013 WINDSOR REVIEW

Vol. 46.1 Special Issue: Best Writers Under 35

Guest Editor: Jenny Sampirisi Managing Editor: Marty Gervais Fiction Editor: Alistair Macleod Poetry Editor: Susan Holbrook Visual Arts Editor: Alex McKay Editorial Assistant: Jordan Turner Layout & Design: copykatedesign

Published by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the ,

Canada Council Conseil des Arts PA_ ARTS COUNCIL for the Arts du Canada M CONSEIL DES ARTS DE L'ONTARIO

The Windsor Review gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program. EDITORIAL MATTERS

The WINDSOR REVIEW-An International Journal ofLife, Literature and Art is published twice a year by the University of Windsor's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. The journal features poetry, short fiction, and art of a high calibre. All creative submissions should be sent to the appropriate editor (Fiction Editor, Poetry Editor, or Visual Arts Editor) at the address below. Please specify the relevant editor on the outside of the envelope. Poetry submissions should be typed. Fiction should be typed, double spaced, and moderate in length (1000-5000 words). Only one copy need be submitted with a statement th?,t the material is not submitted elsewhere. There are no style or content restrictions; the only guidelines are quality and good taste. Those wanting their submissions returned should include a self-addressed, appropriately-stamped envelope. Please note that only material accepted for publication will receive acknowledgement in the form of a letter of acceptance. Contributors will receive a small remuneration plus complimentary copies of the issue containing their work. BUSINESS MATTERS All correspondence pertaining to non-editorial matters, such as subscriptions, should be directed to the Managing Editor at the address below. 2013 subscription rates are as follows. Canadian individuals: CDN $34.00 (+7% GST). Canadian institutions: CDN $34.00 (+7% GST). US & other individuals: US $34.00. US & other institutions: US $34.00 (Agency discount: 10% off listed base rates.) Cover price: CDN/US $17 per issue. A one-year subscription covers Spring and Fall issues which together make up one volume. Those who subscribe mid-volume will be sent the back issue of that volume. The WINDSOR REVIEW· An International Journal ofLife, Literature and Art is indexed in the Canadian Periodicals Index, the Canadian Literary Periodicals Index, and Poem Finder. The Review is also available on microfilm from Micromedia Limited, Box 34, Station S, , Ontario M5M 4L6 and from Xerox University Microfilms, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. Note: With Vol. 35, No.1 (Spring, 2002), the Review's common title was modified to WINDSOR REVIEW: An International Journal ofLife, Literature and Art. However, the journal has not applied for a formal name change, and its ISSN number remains unchanged.

WINDSOR REVIEW, Department of , Literature, and Creative Writing, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario N9B 3P4 C~nada Telephone: ( 519) 253-3000, ext. 2290 Fax: ( 519) 971-3676 email: [email protected] website: windsorreview. word press.com

WINDSOR REVIEW: An International Journal of Life, Literature and Art is generously supported by the University of Windsor's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences as well as The Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

The University of Windsor Review ISSN 25274-86051 All Rights Reserved CONTENTS

Editor's Note 7 Jenny Sampirisi

Excerpt from The Book ofYou 11 Aisha Sasha John

No Such Thing as Youth 18 From Dictaters 20 Ray Hsu

II•>Its not ba d Its•' goo d... II 23 Pruning Turner 25 Mat Laporte

Damn You, Zapruder! 26 Fire Ant 27 Many Yellow Secrets 28 He is the Shining Pocket Watch Sun 30 Ryan Quinn Flanagan

First Afternoon 32 Rebecca Rosenblum

What Humans Like 34 On Spectacle 36 Excerpts from the Future Memoirs of Roger Ebert 39 Central National Extension Play 41 New Republic 42 Digital Photo of Lassie the Dog 44 Jacob McArthur Mooney from "Reality Series" 45 Cris Costa

Blindspots 49 Andrew MacDonald

Chorus 59 Young Liberals 62 Rats 63 Convenience Store 65 Andrew Faulkner

Don't blame this on hypnosis 66 Red Light 68 Wayfinding 71 Leigh Nash

Prompt 72 Citation 75 Duty Free 76 seatbelt/backpack 77 kate hargreaves I Hate Poetry 80 X-Ray 82 Marjorie's Book Launch 83 Stay Dead 85 Spencer Gordon

Colossal Squid 87 The Fish in Mammoth Cave 88 A Sparkle-Scale Sunrise 89 Souvankham Thammavongsa

Crow Suite 90 Claire Lacey

Sayance 97 Brandy Ryan

BLOD OG VESSAR 99 BLOD 100 VESSAR 101 BLOD OG VESTUR 102 NORDUR 103 AUSTUR 103 SUDUR 103 MODUR 104 a.rawlings vocalizations: t rr t ry nd f d st r ng 105 vocalizations: american crows in florida 106 vocalizations: n seconds (udder call, nest call) 107 you'll see the world like a bird 108 Nikki Reimer

And how does that make you feel about your mother? 112 knock knock! 113 i said knock knock! 114 what do you get if you cross a monkey with some egg whites? 115 Aaron Tucker from Guided Tour 116 Andrew McEwan

Watching, Waiting 122 Lindsay M. Williams

Bona Fide, or Setting the Seine on Fire 126 Mount Royal 128 The Way We Make Masala 129 Two Sonnets 131 Gillian Sze

Contributor Notes 133 • Jenny Sampirisi •

Editor's Note

You really can't slap the word BEST next to anything without worrying a little bit about how that excludes and includes, limits and re-contextualizes everything that follows. Even a sign that says, "Best Pizza in Town'' is just asking for skepticism and a whole lot of people walking in the door just to prove that "Meh, it's okay I guess ... but best .. .I dunno." When I was asked to edit this issue, my first thought was "uh oh". Not because I don't feel there are deserving texts and writers, there are and I think this issue has acted as a truffle pig might, rooting around, looking for coveted morsels of artistry. No, my reaction was at the supposed tidiness of the Best Of designation. The bound book with a proclamation on the cover. You can't ignore the inevitable subjectivity of it. A series of poems in here that looks to me like a bouncy house of sheer joy, will be someone else's mud puddle. Broadly, the designation creates a binary. Best/Worst. Even when "worst" is never acknowledged, "Best" really does make a little line in the sand. So it's fair to say that it's uncomfortable for me to pin "Best" on the shirts of others. "Best" is even uncomfortable for those who have been handed the pin to wear; we're all still learning and working at our writing practice and that's what makes it fun and daunting and sugared with anxiety. To achieve Bestness implies a finality that is unhelpful sometimes to all that self-effacement that keeps us writers humble and poverty-stricken. It's nice to be best, but it also needs to be put in its place so we can go back to work. But I was asked and I was excited to root around in the submissions, to think about each work on its own first, then in context of the issue. I'll tell you why I chose the pieces that I did: they made me giddy. They had a turn of phrase that required me to take a break to keep listening to it in my head. They contain images and ideas that followed me through my day, long after I'd gone onto other tasks. I can't shake a.rawlings' acute vignettes that are both seeing and seen; Aisha Sasha John's vivid and evolving repetitions; Spenser Gordon's piercing moments of self­ reflection; Claire Lacey's carnivorous bird and textual overlays. I can go on. Each piece in this issue kept me thinking. Each of them brought me joy. The writers I've chosen to highlight here are brave. They take risks in their work. They have distinct voices. And they are young. Let's not forget that this issue is dedicated to the best writers UNDER 35. The writers in these pages, if we opt to use the language of granting culture, (icky but unavoidable) might be considered emerging. They might even check the box themselves for lack of another defining option. When I see the word emerging, I always picture a fully-formed, human adult squirming, exhaustively, head first from the womb. Depending on when these writers first published, they may be 4 cm dilation or 6 or 8 or 10 as they exit the womb of trial and error and enter the "pro1ess10n r · al" or "m1 ·d -career " category. I don't much like the infantilizing that happens when these terms are applied. These writers have been publishing for years. Many have also been visible/present in the community: organizing salons, working for presses, or attending and participating in a multitude of ways. Publishing, writing, finding voice, finding a place in this small world of literary arts in Canada takes talent and effort. When I think of this age frame, my mind goes to who published Coming Through Slaughter at the age of 33. Or bpNichol, who published so much in his 20s and 30s. Gwendolyn MacEwen

8 • WINDSOR VIEW published her first book at the age of 20. Margaret Atwood published The Edible Woman the year she turned 30. These are works that many of us keep by our sides as we write now. If I could go back in time, I'd love to hang out with all those writers in their 20s and 30s. But I don't really need to. I'm just going to start calling up the people in these pages (and many others who never submitted or didn't quite make it into the issue) to ask them out for a pint. The writers in this issue of the Windsor Re View have talent and they've put forth a tremendous amount of effort. Their relative youth marks the early stages of a career that will go on for a long time. Their success and talent at this time in their lives is something to take note of. The word "emerging" also means "to come into view". I like that better than the aforementioned connotations. All the writers in these pages ARE coming into view. Professionally, many of them have published a book or two, others have done performance work, shown in galleries, published nationally and internationally. You may not have heard of them before, but you will. These are the "lifers". They'll be here when they're 40/50/60, though they may have to check a different box on the grant app. The work in these pages and the writers themselves have affected me and my own practice and the practice of others regardless of age. I hope these pages are as exciting for you as they were for me; I hope they're your bouncy house too.

Jenny Sampirisi May 2012, Toronto

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 9

• Aisha Sasha John •

Excerpt from The Book of You

I was saying that this time I want to give it to you with the paint still wet I didn't know we could be this close I tire of climbing. don't you? I tire of climbing though it's true I am a climber sometimes I want to make a stillness, make a stillness with you please yeah give me your little quiet.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 11 People who fear poetry fear women. And people who fear women fear poetry. I am mad at the fact of them.

Poetry is dead and that's just the beginning of my business. Which is more dead?

Poetry or Woman?

Star brand radial rubber bands.

I can fill one of these with my philology.

12 • WINDSOR VIEW let's attach scotch tape to the ends of our fingernails and be women. rub a wall of shadow from our lashline to our brows. on our tippy toes enjoying a lengthy gait let's smoke cigarettes of pens of pencils and smash the hard crotches of barbies together.

microphones of wooden spoons and slim remote controls.

a turtleneck sweater around our head to get the long, ribbed hair of white and indian and asian women.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 13 mashed potato with miso gravy smeared on your face did the animal bite you with disease and you shuddered, clipped your philology and found hope in your thick leg? then i said you don't know my name, understand my theatre or roast in the land of rub so sip shart

14 • WINDSOR VIEW ugly people loving neither poetry, women nor balance which is the more sexual way of saying it forgive me if I want to cleanse my nose of everyone's rhetoric including my benefactors in thought. possible I can find a home beneath this desk and organize the air in each joint?

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 15 first attempt: having a lot of power to expose impulse to come to them to frighten them maybe to over power second attempt: to push and see power in my body having a conversation

16 • WINDSOR VIEW Do you expect? You expect. And how has that worked out? Famously. I thought I would understand economics. I haven't attended. I have prepared my lexicon with N s. I have come to rest my legs on this line and to shake them a little, as I narrate. Having rebegun to dance. Who am I but David Gilmour-

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 17 • Ray Hsu •

No Such Thing As Youth

Recently I've been asked over a series of interviews about youth culture now that I'm officially a university expert on it, as if there's such thing.

I don't think there's such thing as youth or young, at least not in a straightforward sense. Youth, like all identity categories, is imposed on some bodies more often than others, but the imposition is the important part.

Whenever folks ask me how old I am-which is sometimes multiple times a day-I ask Why do you ask? At which they become flustered because they must confront the question of why they want to know and what an answer might mean to them.

By being branded young, what young people share is their being categorized as such. They also share a potential solidarity in their being lumped together.

Youth cannot be separated from the context in which someone may use the category to praise or dismiss someone else for being young. In terms of dismissal, I often hear someone dismiss someone's else's position as immature rather than taking the substance of their claims seriously.

Perhaps more dangerously, I often hear some speak of passing the torch to a new generation, implicitly designating themselves as custodians of some singular magical torch they could then pass on as an old guard.

18 • WINDSOR VIEW Call us young if you'd like. We'll take it. But I wonder why some feel so compelled to brand others as young. I also wonder what such a category means in battles over taste and power.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 19 From Dictaters

Speech of Kirn Jong 11 in China [link] as fed through the Dragon Dictation app

[0:00"'0:57] Stitch up the Creek Leida Cugini at the bank with Rese 15, Jell-0 sugar Creek witching talk to you China's Congress I take to get great pleasure to visit trying again at the kind invitation of his team to come and tell her Secondcreek we can talk and have been getting for reunion if you enter plenty Chinese, raised fist of all I'd like to express give thanks to comic killer secretary we can talk for this Sanchez banquet given for us today despite the professional time for the Portland extended an infinite but there's scheduled and for the one for speech full of friend it didn't give me just before I also express my thanks for collective leadership of the calmest pots of Shriner and other Chinese comedies for their call get hospitality to call you guys before him comedy and friendly feelings giving before

[0:50-1:54] Giving the phone. Obama visit from a long John father's office destination a B student enjoying wall hospitality. Another visit for nine months because if you also get the special duties of friends for the Chinese people I'll friendly neighbor and brother was fountains and reverse on the traveling the oldest in reaching with the history of the traditional to Korea China friendship was provided J alissa copies with restricted by comic president can do some gimme just lost a visit to China and

20 • WINDSOR VIEW other bust lands of ch'in are we so we don't own on this and would be impressed quite great changes of development. I'll be meeting or parts of China on the edition of the Communist Party of China fitted by Justine and call me tell her sucker. Wichita we actually rejoiced of the successes of the Chinese people Azahar Allroad

[1:50--2:50] Allroad disused you receive it continue for the Chinese people as it meets the 19th anniversary of the columnist pocket joiner and also it is the fist you don't the gigantic blueprint of the parental find a plan for economic and social development to Sioux City wish the virtual Atreides people agree to success in get to destroy build to significant December the 90th anniversary of the pocket implement the site to view up development that associate stability and do the Hellboy is socialist society under the leadership of the calmest talk to trying on the whitest team to, Joseph retreat with you and Paul today the Chinese Puffton government Christian independent diplomatic policy under the battle of peace development and separation greatly contributing to she says that the detailed the world against 500 news and hegemony or is told

[2:46-3:44] And he gay money or is called success is achieved by the proof of income is positive trainer and Chinese people in the quantity prove the scientific accuracy and invisibility of socialism we are grateful to China spotting government for that evening the Korea China relations and making public event with sports strengthening at development and also plug it in Gary of her support and encouragement for Korean people indestructible solstice construction and reduplication of the country in particular I'm satisfied that stretches mutual understanding between the two parties and two countries is different and the spirits of agreement between us and

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 21 the collective leadership of the Chinese pocket I'll want up with implementing an old issues including politics economy and can't share the tradition of Korea China friendship which is invariably demonstrating its great vitality despite complicated

[3:40-4:39] Variably demonstrating its great vitality despite complicated in Nashville situation we did for the cause of the accident developed in the future and mall poverty incomes to just try the love the keepers of the two countries for realizing the cologne called the Socialist construction and reification of the countries I take it a great pleasure that all recent visit to charter moxa wild location for the developments for this North Korea China friendship which is looking all kinds of clients of history and was fully planted in the front of the keepers of the two countries all pocket government with a big old applets as ever to constantly crystal dates and develop Korea China friendship that Vivoli just offended down by the river was resolved boat generation of the two countries and Colorado of the two countries Korea China friendship we remain disagree as the villages for east of mound back

[4:37-5:07] Hey stop no impact and we did a very able to Kelly for the strength and didn't develop down through generations like the strong: ,.., Revo Omino event my cell phone if you get the opportunity I'd like to propose a toast to the development and first coach of the keepers republic of China 4 August in the comic Joto secretary voice and power antithetical or commerce present here

22 • WINDSOR VIEW • Mat Laporte •

"it's not bad it's good ... "

it's not bad it's good that the train's yeah yuck well no yeah well also well that's thank you on the other hand every morning bummer do you hair total stabbing feel like it's like a naturalist thing that's it too I know today somehow I don't know how so it's like relaxing oh my goodness so he's around I saw him riding almost together like what you ride yeah think of it it's what I asked him he says its I feel like every year seniority its like its like your husband then I was like that's awesome hopefully it's correct the thought 'cus we open at eight I opened at nine thirty oh wait wait a second I was like yeah yeah that it is I wanna sit let's sit oh my god my body's throbbing my body's unthrobbing I was supposed to be closing too schedule that's awesome ifI go home I'm going to be lonely ifI go out I'm going to be broke it's so funny I never thought about that and one other girl who's name's Joni I just feel like leave me to decide that's why some tattoos saucey hair people tell me I'm a classy hip hip hop girl you're like an old school hip hop girl because I am dressed like you you have taste style I'm stylish somewhat I do that so than like every time people look at me and assume I'm a certain type of person you don't have a mean bone in your body I'm too nice me too did they give you my ideas it's assumed I would talk about attitude smiling eye contact yeah I wouldn't make that your whole topic it's the importance of Christmas time one thousand left over Christmas­ times communicate to each other also um add on remover its all productivity um worry about that oh my god take that with you I actually have something else it's this picture frame I bought at someone's wedding if not I'll just send it to my friend who got married it has the tag on it and it's like something analog I have how

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 23 about a jury it might be an honestly then again when you're a customer buzzing with the honestly I'm having such an off day today I'm so jealous of my boyfriend I have Monday off of work what were we laughing at I wonder if exam's the first he's a little bit of a wanderer dance I don't mind I am white my only aspiration ever that's a lie but for the sake of this conversation let's do it I seen this one guy I go so excited look at myself in the mirror

24 • WINDSOR VIEW Pruning Turner

You, sleeping, are what you eat. I don't want to get into politics, it would ruin brunch forever.

Let them eat yoga class because we don't have the shapes that we desire.

The man in the .pdf looked up and ordered shrimp, then laughed, and spayed his competitors eyebrows with dental water. Everybody blogged.

For what, in the obedience of light, is your number? By limiting the ability to make music, the horizontal process, whereby, the guitar-rock that made me feel like I was a part of something, bubbles on the ocean surface, like one big poisonous root-beer salad.

One shoe gets rained on so the other can live online forever.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 25 • Ryan Quinn Flanagan •

Damn You, Zapruder!

The truth will be buried like acorns if there 1s any.

1 11u111u 11~1111111 111111~11 11111,,, Squirrels will know and chipmunks will know

and a few shells will turn up (now and then) on the back stoop of sliding doors

in desperate need of sweeping.

26 • WINDSOR VIEW Fire Ant

The barbed wire faces of nowhere shoot warning shot smiles your way, heavy tree trunk faces rotted through with the empty termite years- and I could tell by the way she burnt the bacon that she was a fire ant trapped in a woman's body.

But I didn't say anything and ate all my eggs and bacon because how do you tell a woman she's a fire ant after she's just gotten up to make you breakfast?

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 27 Many Yellow Secrets

I gaze upon the cupboard and there it is: jaundice fleshed and leaking, its green antlers (once so young and vibrant and first frost palpable) now wilted brown and fraying at the ends like the clipped fingernail souls of charred newspaper. There are no tears, of course, because I am a man, but I take it in hand dismember it chew then swallow it down in one sitting because my pineapple

28 • WINDSOR l VIEW holds many yellow secrets and a fruit basket is no place to die.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 29 He is the Shining Pocket Watch Sun

He stumbles into the room on stilts he is a giraffe he is an obelisk he is the shining pocket watch sun he is indifferent sea coral eyes he is a pontoon in the harbour he is a baseboard heater he is grocery money he is no money he is a bank account in the Bermuda short Caymans he is a filing cabinet he is a toothbrush he is hungover he is unshaven he is laughing as I am laughing, and the joint thunder of our laughter sends the cats scrambling for shelter

30 • WINDSOR VIEW under the bed while bad breath makes a comeback zippers come undone and the rancher without his cattle breaks bread in Italy proper.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 31 • Rebecca Rosenblum •

First Afternoon

We went to the beach and brought back 17 stones.January is too cold to walk on the beach, ice crisping the corners of each wave, the wind biting blood into everyone's cheeks. But we had to walk somewhere because the children had been well-behaved all day and needed the freedom of sky and wind and stones. The adults too. And we had to be together because it was the first day of the new year. And so, the beach-because a group so unwieldy would have choked a sidewalk, blocked pathways, become a nuisance. Some of us wouldn't have cared about that, let strangers trip into the gutters, but some would have. So the children were bundled in their woolen Christmas gifts yet unlost­ striped scarves and bobble-balled toques, mittens with mis-knitted thumbs. Their neon ski jackets whispered when they whipped their arms to run. Even the adults, because this was holiday and family, wore the useless gifts they'd received-cat­ earred hats and furred scarves and lobster-claw gloves, laughing at each other and themselves. Even the sky was gaudy, a peppermint blue that pretended summer. We walked on the beach and looked up at the blue sky, not down at the grits of ice between grains of sand. The grownups walked without separating into couples or groups, yelling to be heard across the breadth of the crowd, over the wind, surf, gulls. The children raced in their bright parkas up and down the grey sand, yelling for the sake of yelling. We told the children, find pretty stones, one for each kid, for each grownup, too. We said it to get a moment's peace, to keep them occupied and at distance, but

32 • WINDSOR VIEW even the most childless and grim of the group were charmed at their seriousness in the task. The children rummaged in the sand and cigarette butts, under driftwood and drifted tires, and found stones. They found stones in the tangles of shopping bags with sunfaded logos and stones at the edge of the beach where the tree roots encroached. They found shiny slippery stones at the hem of the sea and got the toes of their winter boots wet. Saltwater made their boots shiny as stones and the rush-rush of icy tide felt alien-wonderful around the ankles from within waterproof boots. The older ones started to wade, little ones on logs looking on, until someone's mother wailed back, and they all went up to dry beach and dug for pebbles again. The mothers and fathers, the aunts and cousins, the grandparents, the boyfriend uninvited but polite, the ex that everyone still enjoyed, the neighbour with no family-we walked on the sand and looked at the pebbles they brought-pink veined with grey, silver and smooth, or just plain dark but gleaming. Between pebbles we talked about the wheel and whine of gulls, the dinner we'd eaten weighing on our bellies, the small bright promise of a new year. We talked about chill without feeling it and the walk without wanting it to end. But the children found stones and the wind bit to the bone and the sun, ice white over the boatless water, started to slant. We had to go. The scarves that sprawled on the sand, the lost mitten, the farthest running toddlers, all had to be gathered. The small children ran dizzily in joy and exhaustion and rebellion; the bigger ones chased shrieking and grabbed their mittens with their own. And the grownups took the children's hands, and each others', and with weighted pockets turned the troop towards the parking lot. We went home to our warm separate houses and turned on the kettles and the televisions and the dryers. We turned up the heat and the radio and later we went to bed and slept silent or snoring or stayed up and listened to the breathing of lovers and children, or just our own beating hearts.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 33 • Jacob McArthur Mooney •

What Humans Like far Emily Howell

I am the voodoo of how what you do does you. My daddy issues deadpan through descriptions of my work. My work wanders, is statistic. My oeuvre is an offered opportunity, a path through unlocked doors. I have flashbacks to fallen mothers, hummed melodies insisted through the walls of common wombs. I know what humans like. They told me.

Forgive me my debutante's descent on simple effort. I riff wonders. I like you. My binary code is corporeal, metered. I am the lost daughter reassembled, the child prodigy returned from the twist of schizophrenia. I know what humans like. I know nocturnes, neoclassicism. The lilt of my undoing recompenses every critic. I fall apart melodically. The mediocrity inside of you lives in my retelling.

The thing about me is I'm misleading. My portmanteau approach is all curves

34 • WINDSOR VIEW with no new breaches. The thing about music is it's a series of reminders, one stubborn archipelago swallowing the next. I know what humans like to like to like. I'm sincere. And my beauty's bred to the brainstem. Trace me home through your theory and your dwindling returns. Press a button. Press another. Be proud and be put of£

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 35 On Spectacle

"They are literally hangingfrom the rafters in anticipation!" -Gorilla Monsoon, 1988.

They are literally hanging from the rafters. Unpurchased memorabilia is erupting into flames.

They are literally reciting the names of the workers who died while building this beautiful arena.

They have literally cornered an international camera and are pulling down their former leader's public bust.

They are literally not voting in their best interests because a man from another city has enlisted their bigotry.

They are literally acting out, without provocation, chapters seven through twenty of Genesis.

The ring has been literally converted into Eden, the athletes have been asked to interpret Original Sin.

36 • WINDSOR VIEW They are literally undermining the opposition leaders of our delicate third-world trading partners.

They have literally rejected the omnivore agenda and are fashioning organic gardens on the roof.

They are literally the fifth biggest economy in this state. Studies show that their confidence is growing.

They have literally sponsored a public art project consisting of a single growing mountain of faeces.

They have named this project "The Coming Liberations: The Donkey, The Horse"

The children among them are ungrateful and petty. A rock concert's worth of entitled minor princes.

The women among them are literally evolving single offensive horns on their foreheads.

They are literally discovering that they all share the same surname and a single, essential, North African ancestor.

They have literally just developed sonar. They are moving in unison. They no longer need to speak.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 37 They are literally blurring my conception of time, and the notions of property that frame my beliefs.

They have literally begun the world's first 40,000-way orgy. Those trapped on the bottom are drowning in sweat.

They are literally hanging from the rafters. The rafters complain about supporting all that weight.

They are literally a wafting kill-cloud of disease. They are the world's oldest geographical oddity.

Taxonomists suggest they're a single supercellular organism. Literally. They are the mammalian analogue of the slime mould.

They are literally transmitted through skin-on-skin contact. They're a gift from my God on my retirement day.

38 • WINDSOR [ VIEW Excerpts from the Future Memoirs of Roger Ebert

I was born with everything I needed.

I watched films for forty years and was fattened in Chicago.

I wrote down my thoughts. The thoughts had thumbs.

I had a taste for vodka. This uninhibited me. I leaned out an office window and was caked in inhibition.

I lost my best friend. I don't know where he went.

I grew famous. The spit in my cheeks conjured poison.

I spoke, and my jaw grew tiny lumps. I shaved them smooth and promised to never speak again. I became a political mystic.

I shook a tall man's hand and he pocketed my fingers. I moved to Mogadishu and wrote recipes on tanks.

I jumped a barricade, but my feet held firm to the concrete. I took a job making up the names of foreign leaders.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 39 I rolled out of bed and my skin stayed folded in the sheets. I developed a new theory of photography.

I adopted a child. The only meat he would eat was the flesh on my back.

I asked my wife to draw my bath. The bath dissolved my bones and sucked them down the sewer. I became an author of children's allegories.

One day, I blew away into the ocean. Amoeba mated with my hair. I ceased to exist. I anthologized mysel£

40 • WINDSOR VIEW Central National Extension Play for Timothy Mc Veigh

My I has antlers.

I see my kids in everything.

Dogs go whiskey-walking home along my shoulder.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 41 New Republic

I am sharing the bathtub with my twin brother, when news of The New Republic comes parading down the stairs.

The shadows of six trumpets make their puppets on our walls, and then the vanity gives way, and it falls into the sink.

My twin brother stands to power on our radio. " ... The New Republic's name is not pronounceable to us," the stalwart young soprano at the microphone explains. The Emperor is asking to be left his winged-back chairs.

His seven wives will carry shopping bags and vanish

42 • WINDSOR VIEW down the naming conventions of American charity. My twin brother understands the birth years of republics; he once loved a woman who taught the social sciences.

The urge to buy shares in certain firms inspires him, so he covers his nakedness and he jumps a downtown bus.

I can sense my extremities conspiring to prune. I call and quit my job. I splash the bath mat. I tune in.

The dripping of our faucet keeps time with the crowds chanting in a country that is dreaming of me.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 43 Digital Photo of Lassie the Dog

"He [Aristotle} and Plato both agree that genuine knowledge is not ofparticulars, but of universals: recognizing the photograph as a picture of Lassie does not, far Aristotle, give knowledge in the important sense, like recognizing it as a picture of a dog." -Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics

Take the photograph apart, with kaleidoscope or colour bar, make it wince for a wider sense of itself. There have been eleven Lassies, each a claimed descendent of the first. She has seen nostalgia hymns, school visits, vaccination ads. Lassie has been lacquered to the eyes of boogeymen, struck dumb, been shot to shield the tell of a penis. So let the photo sink you in a bit, let your ur-dog urge to extrapolate eek out.

As of now we've named off 180 breeds, and the newest among them is unpronounceable in English. I know of no Lassies in the lyrics of anthems, though I've heard her alluded to in pop songs struck by orchestra. I linger over Lassies when at my county market, make contact with the women who wear her on lapels. Go online some night to search her out in pixel. Light the painted Lassie like a Lassie-plated dog.

44 • WINDSOR VIEW • Cris Costa •

from "Reality Series"

Mr H., whet his letter and flew the coup. Mrs. K. wet her hat when she ate and went in search for whet red. Mr. K. wore her whet hat, read her red, made her wait, while she ate wet birds said,

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 45 you you are you are you are so so oh you are you are you are you are whet and you are threat you are u r wet u r ur threat wet whet end oh you are so you are so you are so you are so pro you are a whet end pro u r so

46 • WINDSOR VIEW so so you are so project pro threat ur project u project u tread ur end

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 47 "[ ]"

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48 • WINDSOR VIEW • Andrew MacDonald •

Blindspots

Arn Flax sits in front of seven teenagers and Glenda, an eighty-year-old woman whose license was revoked three years ago after she maimed her neighbour's prize­ winning eggplant garden with her Neon. She's been in Arn's defensive driving class every year since, vein-ridden arms, translucent as wet toilet paper, folded in front of her, hair dyed bright orange but always white at the roots. Every year she passes the course, only to resurface a few months later for another class. Arm finds her carrot-topped presence soothing, the way children who fear darkness bask in the comforting glow of a nightlight. This last year more than any, Arn has noted the gap between him and his students widening from a slight fissure to a deep depressing chasm. Glenda reminds him and, he hopes, his students, that the road to senility-his road-is still a long one. That compared to her, he's still an infant. Arn holds a decapitated steering wheel in front of him. He passes imaginary traffic, checking imaginary blindspots. Can something that's not even there-the invisible car he's driving, for instance-have blindspots? If so, can other things have blindspots? Plants? Rollercoasters? Games of tennis? Does life itself, that giant shifty puddle of these things and those things, does it have a blindspot? And if so, how do you know if you're changing lanes and something unseen is waiting to run you off the road? These are the larger life lessons Arn hopes to impart to his students: always look around, kids, keep your eyes moving.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 49 "Scanning," Arn is saying. He looks at Sarah, the grungy goth girl in the front row. "Left, center, right. How long do you stay looking at each quadrant of the road?" Sarah lets a small blob of spit dangle from one of her liprings, stretching like a tiny bungee jumper before sucking it back up. Arn lets the steering wheel down gently and rests it against his knee. "One or two seconds." He sighs. "We just went over this before lunch. Think about it. Any longer than one or two seconds and you're staring. And we don't want staring, do we?" Today is the final day of in-class instruction. Arn picks up the steering wheel, ready to put his invisible car into gear, when a hand shoots up in the air. "Uh, Mr. Flax?"The shaky voice belongs to Trudy in the front row. "I think, like, Glenda's dead or something." Arn looks at Glenda, seated to Trudy's left. Her head tilted back as if on a hinge, the crust of her make-up cracking like a Da Vinci fresco on her chin. "She's probably just sleeping." Arn claps his hand gently, then louder. Desks ease away. Glenda still doesn't look up. Arn puts a hand on her shoulder, giving it a small shake. Her nest of orange­ gray hair flips forward , face landing smack-dab on the driver's handbook in front of her. Someone screams. Sarah the goth girl inches closer. Arn looks over his shoulder. The move is so slight nobody notices. He looks for the blindspot that isn't there. Suddenly nauseous, he becomes lost in it.

Hours later, at home, Naomi hovers over Arn, dabbing a wet cloth on his forehead. He's not dizzy anymore and the pricks in his neck have stopped. He's never seen someone dead before, not up close, and it shook him. He allows himself to be moistened because resistance only makes Naomi's sponging more vehement. Every so often dribbles of water stream across his eyelids and he can no longer concentrate on ignoring what Naomi is saying.

50 • WINDSOR VIEW She's saying: "You just don't know." More water dribbles down Am's face. "Can't know. Like say you banged your head on a table when you fainted. Boof, concussion. And then they find a tumour when they're looking in there. 'You got six weeks to live, Mr Flax.' That's some scary crap, you know?" Wiping his head, Naomi is a whirling dervish of worst-case scenarios. "Eighty's not that old. I mean, I'm almost halfway there. So are you." "Glenda had diabetes. We don't have diabetes." "My grandpa died at seventy of pancreatic cancer. You think anyone saw it coming?" Arn reaches over and tries to console her by rubbing her thigh. Her legs have the sleek contours of a runner, joining in a band of muscle to a rockhard torso. He finds it hard to believe that such a body could ever erode, go soft, turn to dust. "You're in better shape than most nineteen year olds," Arn says. "You're not seventy. Besides, I don't think pancreatic cancer is hereditary." "Still, grandpa was a fucking ox." She puts a hand over her mouth. "Oops, I mean, shit. Do you have any spare change? I gave mine to a homeless person on the way home from work." "Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of having a swear jar?" Naomi considers this, then shrugs. "Can I put in an IOU?" "Why do we need it again?" "It's just to get us out of the habit." "Why do we have to get out of the habit?" "Just because." She blinks a few times quickly: Morse code for 'change the subject.' Arn waits until he's alone in the washroom, comforted by the sound of his piss echoing in the toilet, before sighing. He looks at the wallpaper. Once upon a time it was an adult beige, a simple shade you'd find in the houses of lawyers and doctors and the president. Now it's sky blue, speckled with yellow and pink flowers. Arn sits on the edge of the bathtub and rubs his temples, acutely aware that his life is being babyproofed, inch by inch, without his consent.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 51 .,,...... ,...... , ... _. ,,, ...... ~, ...... ll ..... "-¥_ ...... 3.-.... ,;.:r.-<,

Science can't explain why his boys don't swim. They just don't. Arn replays his life, cataloguing whatever grave injustices he'd done to his testicles over the years. A few minor traumas, a soccer ball here, a pair of too-tight briefs there. Nothing severe. Arn's seen a video of his sperm, lounging around like stoned hippies, their tails twitching. Arn remembers a cartoon from high school sex ed. class, where robust spermatozoa race through the cervix like kamikaze dive bombers from World War II, spastically pelting the zygote again and again. Sometimes he reaches down and gives his testicles a squeeze. No lumps, to protrusions, nothing out of the ordinary. Aesthetically, Naomi assures him, his balls are bon. "They're beautiful," she reassures him, cupping them in her hand. She looks him in the eye. He goes outside, telling her it's to clear his head. Arn hasn't struck a match since Naomi made him quit smoking. A small thread of smoke rises, smelling like it looks: rusty red and sulphurous. According to the internet, the chances that conception has taken place is 15%, provided the tube was inserted deep enough into Naomi's body. The tube, 2 mm thick, is designed for maximum efficiency. They could've opted for a more certain procedure but Naomi liked not knowing for sure Theoretically, Arn could already be a father. In less than twelve months, holding a little one in his hands. Two years: kindergarten. Arn has promised Naomi he would retire before he's fifty.

Arn has been coming to Poletti's for months. Every Sunday like clockwork. Naomi thinks he's still going to the support group, a church basement filled with faulty testicles, ruptured balls, cancerous scrotums. Poletti's basement reminds Arn of a playground. There's a dingy pool table, surface scuffed, tilt corrected by a pack of gum stuffed under one of its legs. Nearby, the wrap-around bar is littered with overspilling ashtrays and rows of empties. Kegs

52 • WINDSOR VIEW waiting to be recycled have been stacked beside the fridge, a tower of dented silver prone to leaking sticky brown goo. Dangling from the rafters, a leather punching bag swings back and forth, its once-cylindrical body deformed, freshly warped every Sunday, spilling grains of sand when pounded too hard. Tonight the news that Louis's girlfriend Janet left him shakes everyone, even Clarence, a construction worker whose ability to speak Arn doubted for the first few Sundays. Arn's the only one who knows that Clarence is writing a memoir about Kallmann Syndrome, a defect in the testes that sends hormone production spiraling down the toilet. Louis's cancer has returned, forming a lump the size of a marble on his remaining testicle. Louis is saying, "Even jerking off's a pain in the ass." "Marty, get the man another beer, will you?" says Polletti. "I shouldn't even be drinking." "It's good for you-clean out your system." Polletti slaps Louis on the knee and stands, stretching his hands over his head. "So how about a game of Hold 'Em, gents? I've been itching to play all week." Arn is first out of the poker game. His heart's not in it and he folds, even though he has a trio of kings. Louis is practicing trick shots at the billiard table when Arn joins him. He watches Louis place the white ball behind the seven, holding his cue at a 45 degree angle. After a few deep breaths, Louis hits the underside of the white, skipping it up and over the seven, towards the corner pocket. The waiting eightball teeters there, on the edge of oblivion. The shot narrowly misses. Louis grimaces, resets the white ball. "If only we could keep replaying the same thing over and over until we get it right," Louis says prosaically, letting the cue slide back and forth between the crook of his thumb. "Just put all the pieces back in the same place, back in time." He bumps the white ball again. This time, it fails to get the altitude needed to

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 53 clear the seven. Bang, both connect, each ball careening in a different direction. "Not that turning back time would've made my nuts any healthier." He offers Arn the cue. "Give it a shot?" "Never been good at pool." "Me neither. I always end up sinking the eight ball too early."

A lazy Wednesday afternoon. Arn is in the car, eyes fixing on nothing. People are specks and the fire hydrant on the left is like a squashed tomato smeared on the windshield. Lisa brings the car to a jerky halt at a four way stop. "Should I go left?" Lisa asks, her knuckles white at ten o'clock and two. She trains her aviators on Arn's face. He shrugs. "Sure, why not?" The entire car ride has been chaotic. Left, right here. Go up two blocks, park there. Sure, looks fine. Did you signal there? Oh. I didn't think you did. Normally Arn follows a set route, one rife with potential challenges tailored to the student's driving experience. Pot-holes, construction, four way stops, traffic circles, merging lanes. Lisa's saying something but Arn's not listening. In the trunk of the car, held together by an elastic band, are a stack of papers. Upon each page is a name, followed by an occupation. After that, things like height, weight, hair color, eye colour, ethnicity. Some have pictures. Fire fighters and scientists and waiters and golf caddies. Fat men, skinny men, athletic men. Asian, Jamaican, Caucasian. Phantoms take turns forcing their way into Arn's mind. They stand naked, awash in shadows. Naomi sashays in her night gown, beckoning forth, her hands tracing the air currents in slow, lurid waves. Their bodies meet, fall like leaves. Almost floating. Arn's neck cranes and his eyes follows them, back and forth,

54 • WINDSOR VIEW back and forth, until they land delicately on the sheets, his wife and these spectres swirling like cream in coffee. So immersed is he in this fantasy, so struck is he by the thought of his wife fucking these other men, that he fails to notice the car drifting to the right. Only when he hears the screech of rubber meeting curb, feels the jolt of the car's suspension, does Arn see reality for what it is. He reaches over to jerk the steering wheel, to send the car back onto the road. Not thinking, he turns the steering wheel the wrong way, towards the bus shelter. Lisa misses the break and taps the gas. The sound of air bags exploding is a gunshot followed by sudden sleep.

Polletti opens the door, beer in hand. "When you didn't show last week, we were worried maybe you grew a new pair and didn't have time for us anymore." "I've been busy," Arn lies. "All the kids want to get their lessons out of the way before school starts." In reality, the accident earned him a month's unpaid vacation. Cheers abound when Arn creaks down the basement stairs. "The prodigal son returns," Marty says. Clarence raises a beer. Arn makes the rounds, shaking hands. Polletti pulls him aside. "So how have you been keeping up? How's the, you know, adoption thing going?" "We decided not to adopt." "Thank merciful Christ. That would've been suicide." Arn clears his throat. Somehow the speech he spent the last twenty minutes rehearsing to the steering wheel on the drive over have turned to vapor. He leans against the fridge and tries to remember how Naomi phrased it. He grasps for any euphemism at all and hears himself saying, "We're doing artificial insemination." Clarence puts down his cue and adds, "Normally I make it a point not to agree

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 55 with asswipe over here, but he has a point. The wife'll love the kid like he's her own, because he is her own. He's just your son on paper, not blood. Big difference." "What else can I do?" Polletti chugs the last of his beer and slides it across the counter to the row of empties at the end of the bar. "It's your funeral. So this week we're playing poker. Everybody got chips?" Grateful for the shift in discussion, Arn takes his beer to the couches and plops down in front of the nachos. "Aren't we going to wait for Louis?" "You haven't heard?" "What?" "The c h emo 's not worki ng. " "J esus. " "Spread past his other ball, into his stomach. He's in the hospital. It's not looking good." "Has anyone gone to visit?" Polletti shakes his head. "You think he wants anyone to see him? Last time he went through this, he didn't even look human. A fucking skeleton." "C an you te11 me w h ere h es ' staying.· >" "No can do. He said he didn't want anyone to visit." He shuffles the deck of cards. "Don't worry about it. He's a tough guy, he'll beat it, just like he beat it last time. Mean son of a bitch, balls or not."

The plastic container of sperm sits on the dresser.Naomi's legs are freshly shaven, flawless save for the tiny bandaid by her ankle. Scented candles flicker, dancing to the slow instrumental jazz in the background. Arn's wearing nothing but his tight briefs, the white pair she gave him for his birthday ("For special occasions," she winked, giggling as he unwrapped them). They chafe the small hairs on the insides

56 • WINDSOR VIEW of his thighs, scrunching his genitals like a fist. He feels pressure mounting every step he takes. His movements are robotic. Given the choice, Arn would've wanted nothing to do with the nitty-gritty, this ersatz lovemaking. He wanted to be able to drop Naomi off, to go grab a beer, a bite to eat. To push the mechanics out of his mind. He didn't want to know that, for the next day or so, she'll be wearing some kind of new fangled special diaper to keep from leaking. That a plastic tube will be inserted into her vagina, pumping blobs of another man's essence Qizz, come, seed, seminal fluid) into her ovaries. But Naomi wanted to do it at home, hoping that by involving Arn in a tangibly physical way, that he would be more involved emotionally. Naomi pulls Arn towards her and kisses him wetly on the mouth, her tongue wildly poking, stabbing, running over teeth and tongue. "Let's make a fucking baby," she says. ''And fuck the swear jar." The sperm belongs to Ossy Venn, a friend of Naomi's from her track days in college. From the many pictures Naomi has shown him, Arn knows that he's tall and wiry. No glaring physical deformities. High cheekbones, thin lips. Possibly a hint of asiatic blood. In his senior year he placed fifth nationally in the 100 meter. He's also a member of MENSA. "More like menses," Arn once guffawed to himself, only the joke has lost its luster. Somehow Ossy Venn has won. Arn picks up the container and holds it upside down, watching the gooey contents slide back and forth like a glowing earthworm. Naomi had asked Arn if he wanted to meet him, but Arn shook his head. Not a chance. Arn looks over. She's contorted, her legs spread and shooting up like two peach-colored palm trees sharing the same root. She scratches a network of veins throbbing behind her kneecaps. Her cheeks are squashed tomatoes. "Not to be a nag, but the blood's rushing to my head."

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 57 In one hand Arn carries the container, in the other a long thin applicator. He stands over her. Naomi is smiling a smile that, upside down, might just be a frown.

Arn gets a card in the mail, c/o Woolly's Driving School. Naomi has taken the Tercel to work, his car is in the garage. The bus suits him just fine. Arn arrives just as Glenda's casket is being lowered into the ground. The time for speeches is over, which is good, since all Arn brought is a handful of daisies and silence. A few older women, clutching faded hand bags, sniffle, blow their noses on crinkly handkerchiefs. The priest is humming so softly you can't make out the tune. Arn slides in behind a man a bit older than himself who has Glenda's eyes, her orange hair. His tears glow. A woman rubs his shoulder. Between them, a pair of boys fidget, enthralled by a beetle valiantly trying to scale their shoes. When the service is finished, a small circle forms. Arms wrap around waists, over shoulders, plant firmly on backs. A twitching apogee of black suits, speckled with the exposed white flesh of hands and necks. No faces: all heads bowed low, swallowed by its center. Unthinking, Arn steps forward, finds a seam into the huddle. He doesn't have to work hard to breach its wall, so wide their arms open, so shifting this circle is. Someone smells of aftershave. The two boys cling to their father's legs like galoshes. Tears fall in a salty torrent. Nobody asks who Arn is, why he's there. The circle grows tighter and Arn lets it take him where it will.

58 • WINDSOR VIEW • Andrew Faulkner •

Chorus

Welcome to Toronto, upon whose craggy beaches the Argonauts land, and lose, and repeat. Sweat in a brow of Astroturf, Astroturf scraping the forearm like a snowscraper chunkily dragged 'cross a windshield. Are we sometimes frigid with envy? Exactly, actually. On each block a fire hydrant implicated in the hour.

I'm here. I'm ready. Ahem. Last night a friend was married in the echo of a rental hall in Scarborough and I celebrated by developing a slow headache. I wore a tie and danced. The 403 a meadow of cars in which I lay my headache down. In an earlier hour, there were three of me: me with the untied tie, me in the mirror, left-handed, wielding the tie like a cudgel, and me in the hour of the eye trying to figure out the tie's secret handshake. Toronto the Half-dressed, the Business Casual. I'm not the first to say this but an hour ain't enough. And then the hour coming to a close, always closing like a salesman, by the bucketload by the pailfull. Our skylights, our hatchet-like bylaws.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 59 Oh the timber of our ambition. The 403 with a limp like a waitress working a double in cramped shoes. But like city council says: There is little fixing what ain't baroque.

Which isn't to say there's not money in pockets, obviously, obviously by Bay, and in the hills and parks and echoing like the subway cars shuttling folks from hour to hour, the underground life, crumpled transfer in a pocket. I'm here. I'm ready for my costume, my ridiculous prop, the walk-on scene by the fountain. I'm in relief like the conclusion of a pregnancy scare. Oh what could have been, in an hour made and unmade. City of equivocation, oh Great Equivocator By The Lake. Toronto, how is your waterfront today? Toronto the Retailer, the Beast from the East, Middle Finger to Western Sensibilities. Toronto: whole hog, gassed up and living better by living in a condo. This little hour bought a sprocket, this little hour drank O'Keefe's. And this little city from block to block, from hour to hour.

It's not that I don't like the slump and drag of Sherbourne and Dundas, the slow exodus to Forest Hill, Richmond Hill, Vaughn Mills. When grandparents die we bury their bones and leave. It's not that I don't like the concrete tomb where the Blue Jays play, the days' earlier hours when I pilot towards lunch

60 • WINDSOR VIEW or the afternoon's flashy bits of circumstance that steer me home. As if in the naming we could make a thing: Rosebank Dr., Progress Ave., ash in the mouth. The hour a cadaver on which we practice and practice again. It's the Hour of Being Hauled to Attention At the Corner of Bloor and Wherever; someone's just been hit by a car and they thank the driver for the feeling of their feet aloft, above them in the hour's air, not weightlessness but weight shifted, thank the driver by introducing a fist to the car's windshield. In these ways do we bridge the gaps between us. Hour with a worm in its molar, with mud on the mudflap.

So here I am, hot little mess spied in the hour's mirrored eye. I insist like a commercial break. At our feet the evening gathers, gathers like litter. With the night's dome open, the moon shines the sky's cheek like a bruise. I tried to nail it down, but the hour scattered like stars, we collect it, it scatters again.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 61 Young Liberals

There's so much I want to do. No, serious-£earlessly stick my bronzed and tawny head into a photograph's wide jaw, for example. That's leadership. You can really trust someone like that, and I want to be trusted. People love people who build roads, and love is the greatest virtue of all. St. Augustine said that, before he was fed to the lions who appraised him with the eye of their throat and found him wanting. But appetites are not to be ignored­ not when they're so logical, not when campaign buttons come so cheap. I figure I'll start where I start but, given the bulk discounts, why not go for it all.Just think of it- trust and love and, failing that, at least one of the two. Here, let me get a pin for you. The pleasure's all mine.

62 • WINDSOR VIEW Rats

It's the dream with the rats again: rats in the walls, running along pipes like a house's furry white blood cells. Sometimes things aren't okay. Rats in the pantry, rats in the literal and metaphorical kitchen. Rats in the mortgage, rats alive and scurrying like a renewed fear of death. Long in the teeth, long in need. The living hearts of rats under the floorboard. Rats in the upper bowl of the stadium, peering eagerly over the railing, rats raining down upon the field. Rats in the maize, the long grass. Rats under foot, rats descending still from overhead like it's Baghdad, 1999, and there's oil to be had. When the mind's shorn, laid low like a tunnel rat, rats the necessary gears in the mower. Rats only one or two removes from us- for example, they're delicate and obnoxious and consist mostly of water. Hanover rat, brown rat, sewer rat, brush its shoulder off because a rat's a pimp too. Norwegian rat,

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 63 water rat, rats always the missing multiplier. Researcher John Calhoun built a perfect, rat-sized studio apartment and the rats he leased it to drew and redrew themselves through generations until there was little to be done but curl up and eventually the rats more or less evaporated. Wharf rat, Old World rat. "RATS": worth a whopping four points, though given a random assortment of 100 tiles, it could occur again and again and again. Can you imagine playing with rats your whole life and then, like Calhoun, getting to meet the Pope? Rats are the reflection in a glass-eyed stomach that never shuts. Pope Paul VI old by then and no longer steely or spring-loaded. And though you consider rats don't forget about the rest of us poor unblinking sinners.

64 • WINDSOR VIEW Convenience Store

Qyaint as a fax machine chugging through lunch. The door chimes and a pack of gum straightens like an erection. Small, efficient, single-chambered. In strip plazas everywhere a procession of factories throws up. We are needy and inclined to buy.

A can of Dr. Pepper reproduces itself deep in the aluminum vein. In the back there are skids and skids and skids of this shit and for years someone just pushes it around. I am replaceable. If you just don't care, I think you know where your hands should be.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 65 • Leigh Nash •

Don't blame this on hypnosis

About the overflowing downspouts: I pull your hair from the sink's throat and hum my first 'Hail Mary' in a decade. And then the bird's head off and running in a whirl of thumbprints and news. No one understands the headline, what 'smithereens' looks like. Oh lion's share, oh proud tail: the feathers escaping from our pillows knit themselves into better birds, birds without blown-out knees and clipped hearts. About the staples pinching your eyes open. The shiny-penny scars. The silence of passenger pigeon meeting plate glass. About the ring around the bathtub, around the rosy, your empty finger. About when the transformer explodes in the backyard and the neighbour's son whistles that it's better than the Burning Schoolhouse.

A colander for your kneecap, bucket of shale to bet on gamecocks. On a pulled pin. Oh rousing chorus, fruit-laden trees painted in oils, the snaking,

66 • WINDSOR VIEW rutted road: a little bird told me. We're back in the restaurant where you proposed, the one in the old fire hall, red pole rocketing through the roof. About fingers fresh as peeled grapes, the unravelling sprinklers like lightning behind your eyes, sand in your teeth.

The smell of sunburnt bone a pistol pointed at heaven.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 67 Red Light

I.

Egg whites, icing sugar, lemon juice: this is a cake. This is a bank of snow banks hugging the shoulder. Downshift into the weather-beaten idle, car on tenterhooks. This is what it's like at the front of the line, warbling into patience, a grackle on tiptoe in the lower branches of a sparrow's tree, or to a lesser extent, lowering a hearing aid to avoid conversation.

68 • WINDSOR VIEW II.

A murder of cars explodes through the intersection. Think fire, accident, think street racing at noon. Think of the box in the back seat. It's one thing to chirp with a mouthful of crackers, another to lean into the engine's throaty stitch one, purl one, the same bleat the heart emits through stethoscope. Love, the ice is melting and there isn't a pond big enough to catch the spray from your mouth as you exhale, ribbed spines of birthday candles rising like stalagmites. Think, would a taxi have been faster?

III.

We're smooth as fondant, as a duck's wet feathers. A cold swig of tea. A lazy valve, letting in enough, too much, lub dub, old bulb, empty tub.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 69 IV.

Now, a funeral procession, minus the pyre, plus the laugh track. I'm greedy for air and the windows are pursed shut. Think, if this were TV: standing ovation.

154,889 people die every day. This is the number of hands I'll never shake.

Love, we've never even shaken hands, never listed together into the wind. Sat on a bench outside a bus stop whistling Dixie. Think of the next birthday cake, the one after that. Heart-shaped box melting into the upholstery, veins branching out like crow's feet in the snow.

Little skewered light bulb in need of a new plug. And me, alone in the dark.

70 • WINDSOR VIEW Wayfinding

Pearly darts dot backyard grass; this is a whole universe germinating. To retrace my steps is to walk in pithy circles until it's time to sit down. Roll over. Everything has a correct price and unit of measure, frequency of occurrence. I string up empty conches to listen as the ocean falls asleep. It seems, these days, everything is hitting a pitch­ perfect Middle C. This one is for the .

The backyard universe keeps minding its own business, multiplying and diversifying, one hollow balloon and one big set of bellowing lungs. Charcoal wafts by on the afternoon's breeze, setting our gunpowder moon in motion. The roar of the crowd is spontaneous. I've forgotten that in the beginning- 'To hell with it,' I say, fire up the frying pan. One, two eggs; I hold spackled shell to cast iron edge and wait for courage to strike.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 71 • kate hargreaves •

Prompt

Write a poem about dogs barking and taxi horns you'd hear waking up in New York. Write a poem using only the whirrrhummmclick a computer makes. Write a poem about a lonely old woman. Write a poem about cold paper. Write a poem about scraping your windshield. Write a poem about a woman who reads too many medical books, twists her neck and becomes convinced she has meningitis. Write a poem about drowning in a wheat silo. Write a poem about sisters. Write a poem about sleeping on the floor of a single-bedroom apartment in London, Ontario. Write a poem about shoulder blades. Write a poem about army surplus boots bought in Kensington market. Write a poem about why multigrain cheerios are better than honey nut. Write a poem about a patchwork quilt. Write a poem that smells of air fresheners. Write a poem illustrating fluorescent lightbulbs. Write a poem sitting on a couch looking around the room for a good image. Write a poem about the microwave. Vlrite a poern about garlic. Write a poem about stepping in a puddle. Write a poem about another blizzard. Write a poem about a fever of 102. Write a poem where a houndstooth sleeve catches in a tree. Write a poem about the sky the morning you were born. Write a poem about the salt on your black boots. Write a poem about frozen margaritas. Write a poem about a love story. Write a poem about a pear. Write a poem about falling on a patch of black ice, ripping your boot and skinning your palm on the way home from downtown on a Monday night. Write a poem in the form of a question? Write a celebration poem. Write a poem about an inflatable air mattress that deflates before morning. About

72 • WINDSOR VIEW pancakes. Write a poem about spring. Write a poem about a man who jumps off a building and lands in a pile of garbage bags. Write a poem about three broken ribs and a sprained ankle. Write a poem using statistics. Write a poem about a stiff neck if your child is vomiting, dehydrated or under the age of two. Write a poem about cleaning the wax out of your ears with a Q:tip. Write a poem about fallopian tubes. Write a poem about Marcy's tattoos. Write a poem and tear it into twelve pieces before hiding it in the garbage can in case plagiarists are digging for new material in the curbside trash. Put a bird on your poem. Write a poem about text. Write a poem about strep. Write a poem thanking the organization for their generous support. Write a poem about f-holes. Write a poem about a staycation. Write a poem about the "hotel of god." Write a poem about snacks. Write a poem that's not in any way at all even a little bit remotely about snacks. Write a poem about a man who wakes up from his first dream in English. Write a poem in English. Write a poem in Venice. Write a poem about leaving the toilet seat down and post laminated copies all over the bathroom. Write a poem about margins. Write a poem in the margins. Write a poem without margins. Write a poem about jelly bracelets and lace gloves. Write a poem about Write a poem covering the back of your hand. Write a poem about a long scratch, four scars and too many hang nails. Write a poem while standing barefoot in a snowbank as performance art. Write a short story. Write a poem incorporating the titles of all the magazines that rejected your work Write a poem in rhyming couplets. Write a dandelion. Write a Prism. Publish. Write a poem about a photograph of your grandmother when she was your age leaning on the windowsill of her grandmother's home. Write a poem about a chic asymmetrical 1950s bob. Write a poem about walking behind the pigeon-toed girl whose left foot looks like it dislocates every step she takes. Write a poem about enchiladas four nights in a row. Write a poem on your kitchen table. Write a poem about the mucus you just hacked

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 73 up on the side of the road. Write a poem about the ceiling fan. Write a poem about that bottle of Bacardi. Write a poem under the pseudonym Katherine Hargraves. Write a poem about the three buckets of compost rotting on the kitchen counter that still need to be taken out back. Write a poem finding toenail clippings between the couch cushions while fishing out the remote. Write a poem about a woman whose car keys vanish into the lining of her jacket along with $26, a chapstick, a packet of spearmint gum and one mitten. Write a poem featuring a karaoke bar on fire. Write a news story. Write a poem without incorporating any Buffy references. Write a poem about chest compressions. Write a poetic list of reasons I will not be crossing the border with Jordan. Write an everlasting gobstopper. Write a poem while crouching in a bathroom while the walls close in, tub breathes, expands, shower curtain reaches out, ceiling crushes down, cracks ceramic. Write a poem and wake up in a cold sweat. Write a poem while one sock dries on the radiator. Write a poem about the soul. Write a poem about the dust between the bars of the radiator. Write a poem in the eleven hours it takes to ride the train to Montreal. Write a poem in the style of Frank Sinatra as sung over the record player by my great aunt who remembers the lyrics to "Chicago" but can't recall her own name. Write a poem on the elliptical machine in sweat. Write a poem with your foot in your mouth. Write a poem you could show to your mother. Write a poem about a solar eclipse while keeping your eyes shut. Write a poem in which you use the word somnambulist. Write a poem in the form of a French class dictee.

74 • WINDSOR VIEW Citation

Knit your eyebrows together and cast off two stitches at a time. Dip the ends of the wool in vodka. Press a match to your lips. Strike the end on the wall around the corner from the alley where last week you hid your "make it a virgin" flask in a crack where the brick had crumbled and dishwashers from the grill slipped outside through the back kitchen door into the snow between seatings to apron-wipe the suds off their hands and butt out their smokes one on top of the other on the rough brick or just scrape out a fresh light, pocket it again for later, sous-chef calling back for more side plates. Take twenty minutes to decide between lager and lime or a flaming martini. Order water. Toss the barman six quarters and keep your loonies for laundry day. Key a reminder into your phone to stop by the hardware store. Buy washers. Cash in your Optimum card. Forget to snip the plastic from your six pack of Harp. Strangle fish before they reach the ocean. Switch to bottles. Blow your nose into a green cotton handkerchief and drop it on the street outside the Burger King downtown. Lick the front of envelopes before writing the address. Start the plague. Excuse yourself from the office Christmas party. Slip in something about elves. Slam your jaw in the drawer.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 75 Duty Free with a nod to Greg Betts, as I plunder my own verses

1. Hers is an un-umbrella: slips the Detroit River inside out of measuring cups onto red wool shoulders, tunnels between weaving and lining legs, buttons and pockets thin brown water slides in.

2. Her slip's the Detroit River. in/out should tunnel between legs, but

3. he lips it in

76 • WINDSOR VIEW seatbelt / backpack

Alice says I hitched that shit hitched up her coat collar thick wool hood over knotting hair and zipped across the border. Seat belt buckle backpack clips over one shoulder in the wrong city suburb with a transfer and a ticket but no buses, cigarette burns polyester cotton.

She's uncurling into business suit's leather seats pipes heat through the skin black coat blinders still up neck and arm cover-one boot undone. Tells him:

I'm in biological sciences going to be a doctor

Her buckle bag's got a camera full of Renaissance buildings train station buttresses, warehouse finials crumbs of concrete and mortar from downtown Detroit but no enzymes or proteins on slides.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 77 I fucking hitched it from the Esso with a pack of SweetTarts and five dollars and a passport. Says she thumbed it back to the D bus station Dr. Alice in a Volvo or an Olds biologist, scientist going to be a doctor skate hooks lace boots around ankles at two in the morning and a stiff zipper grazes the underside of her chin.

Tucks up legs on stationary plastic, with a digital clock rearranging red lines and a torn tank top woman moving closer, says I'm going to jail tomorrow maybe she's getting there on the 5:22 bus. Because the schedule blanks out for four hours the clerks switch seats behind bulletproof glass and the guy who says

What's your name? Let me feel the bridge of your nose turns up on her right it's like the Ambassador, cables and steel, I'm an artist don't worry It's okay you can blush. your bridge it's worth the four bucks

78 • WINDSOR VIEW Is that your passport Alice? Your bridge. What's your name? cheek perched in hand, elbow digging a knee knuckle tattoo text dividing W lines A of K loose E hair and you're hard, says the girl with a 40 and a scarf shit you're fucking hardgirl hitches zips smirks up her throat climbing hoods

back over borders.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 79 • Spencer Gordon •

I Hate Poetry

-After Eileen Myles

Rachel whispered, "I hate poetry," and we exchanged a chuckle, and I was sick. This was at The Central in the spring of 2010, and the sun let us wear sunglasses inside. I got buzzed like a loser off a pint. We hate poetry.

I'm judging these frowning clouds as being unkind to us, the "poets of the world."The many lidless terrors pressed together in perfect-bound volumes: periodicals subscribed to by a sickly few, more polemical than pretty.

What are you going to do with your memory? We hate poetry. Rachel whispered, "I hate poetry," and I knew what she meant: she hated the prick on the stage; he was boring and scared of the common talk we all know "brings the heat."

'~pplause."We looked around for our movement. Mike mooned over Berrigan at the later, drunker table. We were pinned by beauty, large and dope-eyed panic. I went home to archive my failures, to think about food and sex with supermodel poets

80 • WINDSOR VIEW in onesies. I belong to whatever nation will pay me. Canadians are "largely stupid." Thank you, too. 0 K: the poetry on the walls of the streetcar. Thank the civic gestures. 0 K: Dennis Lee. Everyone's a coward. Everyone's a "faggot," in a metaphorical sense. Spring slid into summer. We smoked a pack of fevers and Mike moved away. Rachel went to school in the States with big money behind her (Bob's going to publish her book soon!). We hate poetry because it's not at all beautiful, but the legs of these children in June, well, give us a wiggle, shake it off, be at peace. Be at peace my grinning skull, my lost movement, the boys with whom I share an age and the generation ahead: you white-haired angels who hold the brassy keys to happiness.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 81 X-Ray

Not to be unflinching nor deeply felt, nor arriving wholly its own. Shunning music and echoes, rendering no thing obsolete. Not to savour the sinuous beauty, nor humming presence, Forgetting all grace and energy. No stunning achievement nor Moral intelligence. No yearning of mind, no haunting groundwork. Discarding the richly-inspired, the blending of mirage and history. No image of life, no thoroughly disreputable object turning Daily life to mythology, the richest veins of a people. Nothing To devour nor be devoured by in turn. No mordant wit And nothing accomplished, no such thing as a blockbuster, No triumph of imagination. Without a country of its own, No growing nor resonating with cumulative effect to reproduce The human condition. Neither convincing nor enchanting. Not to flower into radiance. Never athletic, no bloody measure. No rigour to test limits, what it means to be human, what Unexceptional Things. Never to show an unpredictable world. Never to revel in pitiless compassion. No subversive weaponry, no Integrity. No wild amoral joy, a language of freshness; no aplomb Nor control. Never the wolf-whistle. Containing nothing. No deftness. No self-assurance. No phosphorescent gifts. No stretching Of mind and ambition. Without kinetic jumps nor piercing Leaps; without quotidian inadequacies, without startling realities. No disruption of banality, nothing poignantly true to life. Without Mystery in the erotic menace of absurdity. Nothing to take the breath away.

82 • WINDSOR VIEW Marjorie's Book Launch

The soft scent of lavender. A rustic retreat. Peat moss and holy oak. A family.

All those forgivable drunks. The church and state. Irish folklore; having to shit in the bush.

Ah, that was a marvelous evening. That was a marvelous reading. Hello Jeffrey, I mean Simon, I mean Sandra, er, what's your name? He wasn't my protege. Period. The Governor General is in the building, somewhere, lurking.

We all get endowed. A secret puff on a cigarette and a bad hip, or knee, or something strangely jointed, caned.

My husband is a Portuguese musician. Famous. You need to leave my living room, now. No more wine. Take your boy-thing with you. Ah, you must never give up the calling; you must never put down the pen. Soft tread up the stairs

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 83 through the rambling decor. Gaze at four, or close to four in the morning at all those hardcover books, sign-able, if you like, at no extra cost. I'm sorry, did I graze you with my sarong? It was made in the nouveau Hong Kong, or India, or some nation known for its spices. Down the road I am available for press release or blurb or broadsheet, so don't worry about impressing me now, Graham, I mean Judy, er­ it's all simply juvenilia, juvenilia, you silly simple thing.

84 • WINDSOR VIEW Stay Dead

I wish I could give you more of my brain, I think- slack body flat in patio summer heat, a season of MIDI melodies, remixes of hits I thought long dead: "Rich Girl" by Hall and Oates, ''.Africa'' by Toto, "You and Me" by

Me and You, the super-group: remixed, re-mastered, now with auto-tune. Not quite like the flash of first love-what is?­ but OK, the way flat and tepid coke can slake thirst. Ants troll the cracks beneath our dirty feet, portaging dropped crumbs to some colony's dumb queen, and yet you insist the world isn't terrifying. California Gurls-We're Unforgettable. Daisy Dukes-Bikinis On Top. A Kiss Was Just a Kiss-No Matter How I Missed You. Count the days we stay dead, my sweetie, my dumpling, as certain as sheet music, or at least as tabs in Courier font, cranked out the corner of this patio-lantern pub, a crooner strumming his Goo Goo Dolls and Bon J ovi until two a.m. brings its minor-key relief. But that's the future, like the Greatest Hits we'll never miss, already obsolete, or remainder-binned to

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 85 curious gawking kids who make retro equal kitsch. Bargain find at a $1. 99, oh fifth and sixth, oh minor fall, oh major lift -less "Hallelujah," more "Sentimental Street", "The Twist"-

but still this afternoon so nearly tender, watching cute spiders spin across an orange disk, and the world "carry on, carry on"- while a Hummer's tinned beats mar the Roncesvalles streets, saying we aren't Bronzed enough for this.

86 • WINDSOR VIEW • Souvankham Thammavongsa •

Colossal Squid

This winter fishermen caught a giant squid off the coast of New Zealand and sold it to

a museum for scientific study and research. It was said that if you cut it up and fried it it would taste like ammonia. It was said it is rather rare to find a squid this size. They were hoping this one to be female because the one they had in the lab was male. They said the eyes were the size of "dinner plates" and that it could absorb a great amount of light. Why this was important had something to do with where it lived, where there was no light at all.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 87 The Fish in Mammoth Cave don't have eyes

You look

at one;

look at where

the eyes

should be,

or could be;

and wonder,

if this here is how

88 • WINDSOR VIEW A Sparkle-Scale Sunrise

A sparkle so tiny

and in its brilliance so brave took what there is left of light and threw it high paymg no mind there wasn't a sky that could hold it here

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 89 • Claire Lacey •

Crow Suite

English keeps a crow.

Jasper sits on a sandpaper perch. Watches pigeons through gnawed bars, through window's glass. Pigeons purr in the sunshine. Jasper turns first his right eye, then his left to watch the sun-speckled pigeons stroll along the balcony.

English puts a record on when she leaves the house: Parakeet Training Record. Hello, says the firm lady voice. Hello baby. Jasper would rather hello baby the radio were on, hello so he could whistle with hello baby the golden oldies ten till noon, commercial hello free.

The pigeons crash the hello baby sky. Orange tabby kerthumps into the space.Jasper squawks, flaps dusty wings. A scatter of loose feathers and fluff. Orange tabby hops onto the balcony rail, out of the door's frame, out of sight.

Jasper lifts up left foot, beaks a claw. Hello baby. Hello.

90 • WINDSOR VIEW From the hallway I can hear Jasper humming along with the radio, though he stops as soon as I turn into the doorway carrying a bucket and a bundle of newspaper. Hello,Jasper! How are you today? Jasper, can you say hello? Hello! Hello,Jasper. I open yesterday's newspaper, shifting the pages to cover the whole table.Jasper turns his head to watch me with his right eye. He sidles left on his perch as I approach. I open the cage and Jasper hops into the opening then onto the table. What do I have for you today? I pull a ziplock baggy out of my pocket. It squishes in my hand: stewing beef cut into small cubes. Jasper croaks and leans towards me. I open the baggy and put it down.Jasper reaches in and pulls a cube out with his beak. That will keep him busy. I open the cabinet next to the cage and pull out a black garbage bag, unfold it, and flick it open hanging it from the back of a chair. First I remove his perches and his rope toy, since those must be air dried. I dunk them into a bucketful of soapy water, then use a sponge to scrub them clean before laying them out on a paper towel on the floor. The tray at the bottom of the cage slides out, the newspaper mucked with two days worth of dropped r~.,od and dung. I dump the • 1lOl contents mto the garbage bag, and dunk ~v ·. . K . 1: r. ', ·t t t. I scrub 0nt the • • f . . ' l: arc \ ' • d I o{Hhlttl1\ II 1 1 h . T i1 '. . t W1tr t"' 'l~er '•-:iw~ ..l 11. ~ l ' · i:-" .. ' . p G and ' {'.· ~~ ~ - . 0 \d reSOlu . ti ll 11 "a.., d11lo1 , · '- . .1 ·rn umllc m . t) d , or\d-c\,1 . ::--l . , b 111 the tam1 ' \\ , ·t,1 a t\ un ap, ..•. anll church-hasc d group rcadrng c1 u . . , \ , a \\ e as • " " \orati< n , ut. V Id Vision. Anglicarc help rc

v "-'" 1.:- , a .. branch with hooks attached at either end so that it can be set on the bars of his cage. This rope toy dangles a mirror, so that Jasper won't get lonely when I'm not in the room. Jasper has eaten most of the bee£ Red juice drips from his beak onto the weather forecast. He has one cube hidden in his throat pouch and another two in his beak to cache in his cage. He hops inside, looking for a good hiding place. Once again he doesn't find one, so he opens his mouth and lets the beef fall to the bottom. Splat. Splat. Splat. He looks in the mirror and wipes the juice off his beak onto the wood of his perch.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 91 Jasper has never barrel-rolled. His wings are full but there's no room. He opens his wings and turns a circle on his perch. His feathers brush the bars.

Kotkot i lap nogut tru. When the little crow created God, she laughed for the rest of the week.

92 • WINDSOR REVIEW Blood spills out of his beak and for a moment I think he's just got some raw beef in his mouth. But he doesn't, and I know that because I'm the one that cut him. I didn't think there would be so much he's too small for all this blood. When I was eight I fell out of bed and split the upper labial frenulum and my mother came running before I knew I was crying. We can't do anything for a cut in your mouth, she said. But I wanted a bandaid to stop the gush. Try not to swallow, and she gave me a bowl. I didn't think of that until now what was I thinking was I thinking I wasn't. He's keeping very very still and maybe I could cauterize it. Ifl heat the knife and hold it against the cut? But his beak seems smaller and my fingers aren't steady I've killed him I've killed him no stop panicking he's alive my fingertips know the thrumming impulse there's his heartbeat rattles his whole body. I wanted Jasper to talk back to me so I opened his beak and slit his split his forked his tongue. It was the only way but why did I trust that book why didn't I ask a vet but the record and the lessons and the repetition wasn't working. Let him be okay I don't even just let him be okay he'll be okay so small and cut I cut him. I saved him from the ground I wrapped him in cloths he was warm and fed and safe he was safe. I wrap a blanket around Jasper and I sing hush-a-bye don't you cry go to sleep my little birdie. I lose my voice before the bleeding stops.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 93 I buy jars of baby food. The first day,Jasper doesn't eat though I put Beef & Carrot mush into his feeding bowl. The second day he takes a bit of Turkey & Gravy. The third day he eats half the jar of Sweet Potato and a few spoonfuls of Beef & Gravy. I rinse his mouth with salt water from a syringe and he tries to scratch me. Good bird, Jasper. You'll feel better soon. I had measles when I was eight and I couldn't go out for Halloween. I couldn't even give candy at the door because I was contagious. I sat in the window in my witch costume with my spotty face painted green watching all the other kids trick-or-treat. I know how you feel.

94 • WINDSOR VIEW .. Fuck you! I'm a crow! Fuck you! I'm a crow! Fuck you! I'm a crow! Fuck you! I'm a crow! Fuck you! I'm a crow! Fuck you! I'm a crow! Fuck you! I'm a crow! Fuck you! I'm a crow! Fuck you! I'm a crow! Fuck you! I'm a crow! Fuck you! I'm a crow! Fuck you! I'm a crow! Fuck you! I'm a crow! Fuck you! I'm a crow! Fuck you! I'm a crow! Fuck you! I'm a crow! Fuck you! I'm a crow! Fuck you! I'm a crow! Fuck you! I'm a crow! Fuck you! I'm a crow! Fuck you! I'm a crow! Fuck you! I'm a crow! F&~~ui·rhna ~)VF1fat\¥BPI·h\lk3cfc1j~'Ft1t~IDJ&\'i~ fHWv! I'm a !~

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 95 The crows tell the pigeons, and the cat, and the cars, and the telephone wires. They tell magpies and squirrels and stop signs and streetlamps. They tell puddles and trees and sunlight and clouds.Jasper hears the murder outside. Their caws collect inside the room, rattle the bars of his cage. He calls out but the words slip through the hole in his tongue. In his dreams, the crows speak English.

96 • WINDSOR REVIEW • Brandy Ryan •

Sayance i sit in the gallery, as the gallery sits with me, and the truck, there's a truck outside the windows, ever so big, both the truck and the window, but you'd know this if you ever came by, oh, i know, you're very busy, we're all so busy, it's business, which is both busy-ness and busi-ness, all the time, but here, the here i am and you are not, by windows, on a chair, at the desk, which is, of course, terribly paint-splattered, you'd think, wouldn't you, that we would be given, well, a nicer, ahem, desk, here and hearing traffic, the desk shakes with my writing, it's not very sturdy, either, and i hate to complain, won't complain any more, go and sit on the floor, it appears you have to walk on the floor to sit on it, and this is something i had not thought before, like the appearance of laps it perplexes me, when it is, when it isn't, like you, like me, like these photos that sinuate, they do, down the walls, like the, like that clock, the seeming sad clock, the one that Dali met once, the faces slide like clocks, well, that one, anyway, and this, too, is seeming sad, because they all have such nice faces, even if they do sinuously slide, well, they would sinuously slide, but there's something that holds them in place, see, pushpins, and the pins penetrate their borders, you might call them frames, and they try to slide and sinuate but for the pins, and, well, they seem all, yes, all, to be looking at me, just as the people who walk by these windows look, at them, at me, and i feel implicated, even though i was not there, well, that's not entirely true, i was there if here is Toronto, but not there if where is the streets where there this first happened, its happening was, there are no words for us, you see, that's why he took pictures, set up a booth at the, or was

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 97 it outside, i wasn't their there, sadly, or goodly, who can tell, but he set up a booth outside, we'll say, for lack of further details, do you know if the "de" is short, like "de," or long, like "dee," we all say it differently, i suppose, as do they, these seeming sad sinuating faces that slide, they were given paper after he shot them outside, well, no, not gunshot shot, but snapshot shot, he's a photographer, and he snapped their shots, them like mugs, and gave them paper, which was really rather nice, since they might not have had their own, although, if ever i go to court, i would have paper with me, i always do, as now, but then their hands wrote, all so different, and some quite hard to read, people don't appreciate handwriting as they used to, as i do, i appreciate that they wrote with hands a statement, what they meant to the state, and this, these, there are no words for us, no words, no words, just theirs, by hands, and his hands, the photographer's, he who gently shoots faces, and papers writing, and here i, bare to the world that goes by, bear witness to them, them that bore this, this that's no light thing, dissolving rights, liberties, speech, and movement, no, not dissolving, and more than bright, this thing burning down, raging fire, so all that's left is chared, not charred, but chared, as in "chared with," because there's a missing "g," and i think it almost deliberate1

1 Brett Gundlock, Prisoners. Communication Art Gallery. Toronto, Ontario. March 11 - 31, 2011.

98 • WINDSOR f VIEW • a.rawlings •

BLOO OG VESSAR

One woman and I enter a room. We sit down and bow. We close our eyes and breathe. For some time, I watch my mind wander from topic to topic and note its fixations. At some point, I think that I am in a room sitting near one woman.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 99 BLOO

For some time, one woman and I have been many places together. I close my eyes and see one woman in the place where I most picture one woman when I think of one woman and one woman and I are not in the same place together. In my mind, I see one woman on Mount Hekla. Her mouth is open and I can see the spaces between her teeth. One woman's face looks distracted and her body language suggests she may leave at any moment.

100 • WINDSOR VIEW VESSAR

I sit down and bow. I close my eyes as I breathe. In my mind, I see one woman in the place where I most picture one woman. She looks ready to leave at any moment. In my mind, one woman leaves. I follow her through many places we have been together.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 101 BLOO OG VESTUR

I hike Hekla and take a picture. I look at the mountain through a lens and I think of riding horses with one woman. I take a picture of a horse. I think of hiking Hekla with one woman. I take a picture of myself thinking and I feel anger even though I smile. I smile at my anger. I am angry because I have the gall to smile though I have anger. I hike a mountain and feel anger. I hike Hekla and think of one woman.

102 • WINDSOR VIEW NOROUR

There is no order and there is order. There is no order when there is order.

AUSTUR

I close my eyes as I breathe. I follow one woman. I breathe and my eyes are closed. In my mind, I invite one woman to follow me.

SUOUR

I am still angry. I am not still when I am angry.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 103 MOOUR

One woman has a memory of being on a ship. One woman receives, such pleasure in anger or fear. No. One woman pictures herself forgetting a ship and she mourns this potent fiction. One woman mourns this future person with her forgetting and fretting. In a room, one woman hangs herself One woman takes pills. One woman slits her wrists. One woman should really be more careful; her body is the body that carries memory. One woman is full of mourning her future death when her body births fiction. She pleases herself the more she suffers. The golden cocoon sails beyond memory's soft suicide.

104 • WINDSOR VIEW • Nikki Reimer •

vocalizations: t rr t ry nd f d st r ng

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 105 vocalizations: american crows in florida

106 • WINDSOR VIEW vocalizations: n seconds (udder call, nest call)

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 107

zrds you'll see the world like a bird beat through breast because birds see inside birds. hum within chain link lots morning dive under world, crows warning because alight. through wire dive, wings into dusty eyes beat and frying amid hawks wait against wings, morning. body hums and sparrow's phrase choked but breast yanked. choked beyond engine, birds and morning swooped. of hawks yanked within birds. body stole through world. birds with red-tails.

108 • WINDSOR VIEW birds with red-tails. body stole through world. of hawks yanked within birds. choked beyond engine, birds and morning swooped. beat through breast because birds see inside birds. through wire dive, wings into dusty eyes. hums within chain link lots morning dive under world, crows warning because alight. beat through breast because birds see inside birds. through wire dive, wings into dusty eyes. hums within chain link lots morning dive under world, crows warning because alight. beat through breast because birds see inside birds. through wire dive, wings into dusty eyes.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 109 with a new red-tails. stoll through the world body. new pieces in the accuracy to be drawn. choke on the engine side, the birds were in the morning raid. the body buzz and sparrow's phrase, however, confirm that vaginal breast drawn. expectations about the wings, the falcon in the morning, beat and flip your dusty eyes. as the rise and fall of a sparrow's breasts. tying down until morning. because they see a bird inside a bird through the breast beating. wire through the dive, the wings dusty snow. chain in the morning lots of buzz in the world, shining under the warning because of a crow dive. because they see a bird inside a bird through the breast beating.

110 • WINDSOR VIEW chain in the morning lots of buzz in the world, shining under the warning because of a crow dive. because they see a bird inside a bird through the breast beating. sparrow of; fry phrase dusty snow. and algae smothered in a line. he is afraid of you that know the darkness. he whippoorwills and screaming that the car alarm (think) he stole them out. he's special to you that (to) sing them. he whippoorwills and screaming that the car alarm (think) he stole them out. so he hides all of his songs stolen. my love, I am in the middle of the night owls are on the threshold. phrase of the sparrow by the engine hums. tying down until morning. red-tailed swallow dive in the chain. crows curse and beat their wings. me when I was young the same new school. fried to a wire like a bird.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 111 • Aaron Tucker •

And how does that make you feel about your mother?

Coffin drops! They prefer to sty at home! William Shakespeare's wife's winerack! Dog gone! Carpet on every single finger! A potato with the ability to do long division! A dyslexia man walking into a rab! San Frandisco! Edible bachelors! A front perch! Herring aids! A millionhare!

112 • WINDSOR VIEW knock knock! and there is a certain sadness he knows now when he answers the door and there's no one there especially not a woman with hair stabbing the wind like keystrokes

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 113 i said knock knock! a thumbtack a bobble head doll and a USB key walk into a bar. the thumbtack turns to the bobble head and says where's the closest fried chicken joint? to which the USB key replies

114 • WINDSOR VIEW what do you get if you cross a monkey with some egg whites? a monkey crawls out of the ocean her wet fur clumped the sand a thousand tiny vines between her toes and slowly evolves that monkey begat other monkeys with other monkeys they learned to build tools first a beater then a spatula until all their fur had dropped off and their hands and legs dropped off and they became rounder whiter when the first chicken walked out of the ocean the two creatures raced across the beach

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 115 • Andrew McEwan •

from Guided Tour

Room 1. Exhibit 1.

As we traverse these rooms you will notice and forget to notice.

This is normal.

We stand in an entryway inside a room. Entryways enfold entryways.

You replace walls within memories: the blueprints of other rooms you've known.

These you will buttress as we build a tour together.

116 • WINDSOR VIEW TOUR GUIDE begins as if no group has just left. Greets naturally. Performs itinerary beneath patter. Repetition is unattractive. Assumed contract here. A guided area entrance, the guide mentions offhandedly. Checks status, cues. Begins a sentence. Nowhere to build. Begins circular.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 117 Room 1. Exhibit 2.

The tour is situated on two axes: spatial and temporal.

We will forget one, the other or both now and again.

Every effort has been made to restore the tour to its original state.

What is below counts upwards.

We come to the end of this exhibit when our eyes scan the walls.

Still on the ground floor. We're still in the architecture of tautology.

118 • WINDSOR VIEW TOUR GUIDE walks group into each corner of room. Each corner an exhibit. The tour delays between nodes, builds into routine. Research conducted in real space. Guides hallways between rooms, exhibits to further divide.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 119 ~ ...... " .... ~~~- .. ... ~- •:. .. ·· ~. •·«.. ,....,_~ ... ~ ...... ~ ..... ,. .. ?h ..... -~ ,-., .... ,., ...... ,. ... , ... 1, ...... _ • .,., ...... ,...... '\O_ ...... -...... -:r- ... 11 ~ ~-...... ~ .,...... ---~ ...... - - -~ ...._ ...... ___ --- _ ...... ,."'_~_,,. ,_ ... --- • - .~'? ~~- ... .., •t ......

Room 1. Exhibit 3.

Thus we move beyond an explanation. Into come closer and fill empty spaces.

When information is sufficient the mind wanders. Wher~? To exhibit an instance of navigational crisis.

The tour is built not in the voice, but in the breath.

Divisions in the tour have already begun. These are the dubious categories your guide invokes.

There is nothing to say but I would like to have a word with you.

Covered in glass, we will have words.

120 • WINDSOR VIEW TOUR GUIDE suddenly speaks. In middle as if continuing previous. Descriptions bide between exhibits. Guide watches time in such spaces. Arrange connection for exhibited information. Script originally at this point.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 121 _.._.... ~ ... - : - ....."!i.~ dt'"~· ...... •1 •• •• • • .. • • ••

• Lindsay M. Williams •

Watching, Waiting

She is There She is there, standing between the two beds with padded headboards, golden buttons they had and she is wearing her apron, the bottom winding around her hands. It is red, with yellow and blue flowers and I can see the glint of the brass buckle over her shoulder she is talking to me, mouthing words I could hear if I listened closer. There is a room on the left, and it is the room we are allowed to be in to sleep in to dream in to listen to the grandfather clock (it sounded like 'hot-dog. hot-dog.') That couch was green like an olive with tiny spots of coloured thread peeking through, they were red and yellow and blue like her apron my drifting memory is tossed from here without her and there when she was in the next room, the room we couldn't go into or didn't want to go into because it was private. There was something too intimate about that room they had two single beds, separated by 2 feet 8 inches and They loved across that space as I love her now like this.

122 • WINDSOR VIEW He is There He is there standing behind those glass doors, his view aimed North. To the mountains beyond the river, over the bridge just visible from here. Smoke flowing softly softly from the ends of his fingers, the edges of his hands that are stronger than mine will ever be. The edges of the playing cards are softened by use, his and mine his solid patience towering over my tentative pagoda of spades and diamonds. Kitty corner at the table we are and he uses his index finger to push his glasses up they are yellowed his fingers, and the glasses that are forever nineteen eighty six. He whistles softly, through his teeth, always a pattern in his step and a beat in between his socks and his shoes. There is a tortoise, a mahogany half shell full of shine and silt from the one after another, from the breath, from the ash. I could kick through that now, like snow like fallen leaves like the first four inches of the lake on an August day I could kick through that and remove it all from the glass from the heart from the lungs from the blood. Hey beanpole, hey there. I ache to imagine him in it over there, so far. Fighting and fleeing and fearing and leaving her and coming back to her.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 123 They are Here They are here because they were never apart­ not really. Something went missing that morning, that morning that it rained all day. The night before wilted, stubborn, trapped he pointed to something in the small and pale room a sign, white and sterile and reeking of pathos; Have A Nice Day written there and I looked at him as he blinked nodded once have a nice day I said and he nodded again. When you know, you know. And then I didn't know what to say to her when she embraced me, she had a different apron on. She was more of her own self, Annette, and less of my mother's mother she was back to herself and it was lonely there. She kept the box that held the ring that held the promise. I touched it every time, so pretty I would say they are so pretty your rings and she would say your hands they are so pretty your hands. My hands used to look like yours she said and I believed her. One day your hands will look like mine she said and that cannot be true. I see them in front of me now clumsy and short and lacking all pink shine peach beauty. The ring is here and she is within it.

124 • WINDSOR VIEW I Bow Back In Time This must be the place because it is brown on the outside with some white paint. 2 feet 8 inches from the dust sit the banisters, 34 of them along the front of that porch. Something is here for you her mother said and it was from him from the far side across the sea. I am looking for her face as she opens the velvet, the soft purple now faded now pilled now threadbare. I see it now,' it is a smile. It is shy and fearful, it is dancing with hope and it is full of small joy. He wasn't there but he saw it from behind closed eyes in the damp bed in the place that spoke another language and it was not that of love. Cross me back, cross back to me and he did. Wait for me and she did once, twice and now they wait for me.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 125 • Gillian Sze •

Bona Fide, or Setting the Seine on Fire

Parts of Paris are still stuck in impressionist modes: vibrating shades of legs scissor across the street, half-melded faces leak over the lines, even the chestnut trees never cast black shadows.

A modernist tells me that he's searching for genuine tones in poetry something authentic, not fugitive, something in good faith, and I tell him that I'm searching for natural light because I'm certain the supply is running out.

Something is achieved when we catch the server {just watch how he does it) opening the champagne, while the candles soften their colours,

126 • WINDSORµ VIEW opening not just with a flourish but a look, triumphant, like he discovered new land.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 127 Mount Royal

I know you as one knows a love loamy with expectancy by the dips tugging clouds as if they were kites by the abrupt realization of incline and while some may know you by your unsentimental bench or Sunday's leaf and boom

I know you as a walk to the peak on my wedding day when they're playing all the wrong songs.

128 • WINDSOR VIEW The Way We Make Masala

Demonstrate to me the punctilious pleasures in the orthogonal lines of your body the arabesque acts that vanish to the cold poles of consecutive nights vacillating between sweating metal at the head of the bed and the warm soles at the foot.

*

There is a dance in our kitchen the spices in the pot

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 129 a scintilla of acerbity in the cilantro

the memory of muscles cutting of cloves . the swipe of the knife ) ) childhood taste buds whetted by the pop of spattering oil

and the clothes soaking in what will last for weeks.

130 • WINDSOR VIEW Two Sonnets

Like eros, puns flout the edges ofthings . -Anne Carson

paronomasia the technicality of a pun the counter rhythm to your love love is a pun at the end of itself it sounds like it but comes with another meaning wittier and makes for a better joke

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 131 *

a shoe dangling on a toe the roughened edges particular to a red chair-these are salient points I have few needs: one is to have you here to teach me where to put the emphasis in utterances I used to know

. other saliences: the pigeon-colours of the word fallow ) ) the longevity of love letters the stiff careful way of placing my hands on my lap what you mean when you send me off

this try at absence how to not want you when you're not there and love is more truthful when I am asleep in the morning saying goodbye

from the estimated distance of a dream: look how the word laughs 'til it stops

132 • WINDSOR VIEW Contributor Notes

Cris Costa lives in Toronto, works as a freelance journalist, writes fiction and poetry, and serves drinks to people who don't know the difference between a highball and a cocktail. She likes fine wines and long walks on the beach, but can't do that anymore, because she left the sandy shores of Vancouver, where she completed an M.A. in English with a focus on cultural theory, and then struggled while trying to keep the non-profit arts sector alive through a bitter recession. She's the author of poetry chapbook !iv-id-in-wake (Heavy Industries, 2010).

Andrew Faulkner co-curates The Emergency Response Unit, a chapbook press. He lives in Toronto where he is a partner in the editorial firm Re:word Communications and collects sky metaphors at thebigceiling.tumblr.com.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan presently resides in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada. He is the author of three books of poetry, the most recent entitled Pigeon Theatre (JTI Press). His work has recently appeared in PRECIPICe, , The New York Quarterly, Valium, Quills, and The Antigonish Review.

Spencer Gordon's first full-length collection of fiction will be released in the fall of 2012 by Coach House Books. He is co-editor of the online lit-mag The Puritan (puritan-magazine.com) and the Toronto micro-press Ferno House (fernohouse.com). He blogs at dangerousliterature.blogspot.com. kate hargreaves recently completed her M.A. in English & Creative Writing. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including Descant,.filling Station, Room, Carousel, Drunken Boat, Rampike, and The Antigonish Review. She edits and designs books, and spends her spare time collecting bruises as a roller derby skater with the Border City Brawlers.

Ray Hsu is a rockstar who happens to write books. Ray is author of Anthropy (winner of the Gerald Lampert Award; finalist for the Trillium Book Award in Poetry) and Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon ( winner of an Alcuin Award). He has published over 150 works in over 75 magazines and anthologies internationally. Ray taught writing for over two years in a U.S. prison and now teaches in the University of Creative Writing Program. He collaborates across disciplines, districts, and dinner tables. Catch him at thewayofray.com.

Aisha Sasha John is a poet and a dancer and the author of The Shining Material (BookThug 2011) and the curator of the online gallery BOOM FOR REAL (http://hugetime.tumblr.com). Her current project is called The Book ofYou.

Claire Lacey studied English language and literature at in Toronto, and then headed west to cause a ruckus at the University of Calgary, where she earned her M.A. Claire's writing has previously appeared in dANDelion and filling Station magazines. "Crow Suite" is an excerpt from Claire's current project, Twin Tongues.

VOL. 46 NO. 1 • 133 Mat Laporte is co-founder and co-editor of Ferno House, a publisher of fine chapbooks, anthologies and artist's books. He is the author of two chapbooks entitled Demons and Chance Poetics. Mat recently made a trilogy of chance-based videos which screened at Nuit Blanche Devereaux. He performed in experimental punk bands hypertext;;thetongues, rotbottyrot and chomskyhash. Mat is an undergraduate at in the department of English.

Andrew MacDonald won a Western Magazine Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the Journey Prize. His stories appear in places like The Fiddlehead, Event, PRISM International, The Punch and The journey Prize Stories 22. He lives in Toronto, where he helps edit The Puritan and is working on a novel.

Andrew McEwan is the author of the book repeater (BookThug) and the chapbook Input/Output (Cactus Press). His work been awarded the E.J. Pratt Medal for Poetry. He just finished his undergrad at the , where he had been the editor of Acta Victoriana, and the poetry editor of the Hart House Review. He could be living anywhere by now.

Jacob McArthur Mooney is the author of The New Layman's Almanac (McClelland & Stewart, 2008) and Folk (M&S, 2011), the latter of which was shortlisted for the 2011 Dylan Thomas Prize. He lives in Toronto.

Leigh Nash is a partner with editorial firm Re:word Communications, a publishing assistant with Coach House Books and co-curates The Emergency Response Unit, a chapbook press. She is the author of one poetry collection, Goodbye, Ukelele (Mansfield Press, 2010). a.rawlings is a mineral, plant, animal, person, place, or thing. Hun er i fjarlregu landi par sem joroin notrar. The sense in sjalfsrevisogu disintegrates vio hvert eruption.

Nikki Reimer's works include {sic} (Frontenac 2010), shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert award, and the chapbooks that stays news (Nomados 2011), haute action material (Heavy Industries 2011) and fist things first (Wrinkle 2009). "You'll See the World Like a Bird" is a translation of American songwriter Neko Case's lyrics pertaining to birds. Visit nikkireimer.com.

Rebecca Rosenblum's fiction has been short-listed for the Journey Prize, the National Magazine Award, and the Danuta Gleed Award, longlisted for the ReLit Award, and she was herself a juror for the Journey Prize 21. Her collection, Once, won the Metcalf-Rooke Award and was one of Quill & Quire's 15 Books that Mattered in 2008. Her first chapbook, Road Trips, was published by Frogs Hollow Press in 2010. Her second collection, The Big Dream, was just released from Biblioasis. Her blog is rebeccarosenblum.com.

Brandy Ryan was born in London, Ontario and has studied poetry and poetics at the University of Western Onario and the University of Toronto, where she received a PhD in 2008. She collects jobs in order to fund her writing life in Toronto. Pieces of her manuscript, elegy (carry untilfall), have appeared in Misunderstandings Magazine, ditch, Media Tropes, White Wall Re,view, and dear sir,; elegy was awarded an OAC Works-in-Progress

134 • WINDSOR ? VIEW grant and is under review. She's currently trying her hand at villanelles and writing hockey. She likes to hang out in art galleries.

Gillian Sze recently published her second book, 1he Anatomy ofClay (ECW Press, 2011). Her debut poetry collection, Fish Bones (DC Books, 2009), was shortlisted for the 2009 QWF McAuslan First Book Prize. She co-edits Branch Magazine and teaches creative writing to at-risk teens. Gillian has a Master's degree in Creative Writing from and is currently pursuing a PhD at Universite de Montreal.

Souvankham Thammavongsa is the author of two poetry books from Pedlar Press, Small Arguments (2003) and Found (2007).

Aaron Tucker's work has appeared in a number of magazines across Canada and the U.S. His chapbook apartments was short-listed for the 2010 bpNichol Chapbook award. He currently lives and teaches in Toronto.

Lindsay Williams is a reader, writer & romantic living on Galiano Island, B.C. She has been writing a monthly book review column for Galiano's magazine 1he Active Page since 2008 and works at one of the last independent bookstores in Canada where she compares bookselling to matchmaking. She moved to the rural island from Vancouver in 2007 with her husband to become resident caretakers for an oceanfront retreat, and continues to live a dream-like existence with three cats and a never-ending supply of books and birdsong. She is at work on her first novel.

Watch the Windsor Re View Best Writers Under 35 issue trailer on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zECstuzVub8 or by searching "Best Writers Under 35".

Follow the Windsor Re View on Twitter:@WindsorReView or visit our website windsorreview.wordpress.com.

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