The sea wept with Rhys, each wave breaking like a breath he couldn’t catch. Clouds aglow in pink and orange stretched above the western coast of Lanilia. Dawn over the Wilnayan Sea always echoed the blush of succulent fruit to him. Memories bloomed on his tongue, of the sharp, citrusy bursts of sunpearls and the lingering, spiced warmth of mourningberries. Rhys stood, motionless, clutching the flower bud in his hand, rubbing its soft petals. He wondered if he would soon forget the taste of his favourite fruits as well.

Fresh loroco, importing banned. Oblong 

little smugglers, edible blossoms, green-

sheathed, pale inside. Insipid. Pandemic 

first date in rain. Sipping cheap white wine from 

a pink plastic cup, SLUT scrawled across the 

bus shelter. I text a friend a selfie. 

Based on Tea Gerbeza’s experience with scoliosis, How I Bend Into More (Palimpsest Press, 2024) re-articulates selfhood in the face of ableism and trauma. Meditating on pain, consent, and disability, this long poem builds a body both visually and linguistically, creating a multimodal space that forges Gerbeza’s grammar of embodiment as an act of reclamation.

This story begins in 2022, Padua, midwinter. Across the city a debate is raging. It concerns a woman whose name I only recently learned: Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, the first woman in the world to earn a Ph.D. City councillors Margherita Colonnello and Simone Pillitteri have proposed to place a statue of Piscopia in the town square — a notable historical woman to join the effigies of notable historical men. This suggestion has sparked outrage across the country.

River travelled softly along the boundary line between sleep and waking. Somewhere off to the side, he was aware of Mom and his sisters talking, the motion of the car. But he was also wandering through a deep dark wood, looking for Fern. Someone or something had taken her. He couldn’t see the sky through the tree canopy and didn’t know if it was day or night. He just knew he had to find her. Looking up from the long, shadowy path ahead of him, he watched a giant cedar slowly tip and fall across his way, its roots tearing out of the ground in horrifying silence. He woke with a start. The car was turning off the highway.

On one warm summer day, the heat was stifling in University Station. As always, I waited, poised, coiled like a spring. When the tones chimed, I would be ready to strike. 

     I was relieved when we got paged out for a call. 

     I hit the bay door switch, Fletch started the truck and I jumped in. He hit the lights and siren and we took off. The siren’s wails echoed off the apartment blocks and office towers. Our rig’s lights reflected in the windows of the shops at street level. 

With an unnaturally faint heart, I clasp
rooted qualms that match my own:
fears hidden in worn rock,
fears that rest in vertebral gaps.

The Ark loomed before her now, a green monolith in a sea of white, like a land mass all its own that by its sheer size was able to alter the course of the storm.  Martha watched the snow sweep up onto the wide plane of its sprawling roof, slide in wide swaths along the incline until it crested over the peak in swirls and eddies, sifted down the far side to cascade gently over the edge, settle along the wall in a long line white.

It is a cool spring morning, and a boy and a girl are running, breathless and laughing, in ragged circles around their backyard. The girl gallops clumsily, just out of reach of the bigger boy’s grasp. The two-storey house behind them is faded white clapboard, the paint chipped and peeling at the edges. An old shed crouches at its flank, its low roof sagging beneath the weight of tree droppings and decades-long neglect. The sun shines through smudged clouds onto the damp grass. They are both barefoot, and their heels and toes are numb. The tips of fungi tendrils, intertwined in the grass roots and searching upward from dark earth, touch their soles.

The four subversives dug into their backpacks with nervous, twitching fingers. They unzipped the vinyl and openedthe lunchboxes fully to allow themselves full range ofmovement. A pair of nitrile gloves was balled up at the bottom of each of their floppy packs. With as little motion as they could manage, they pulled them over their fingers and up to their wrists.

Poetry that explores our “post-truth” society, NMLCT holds up a mirror not only to nature, but also to its unnatural distortions and facsimiles. Imagine The Matrix retold by the reanimated cyborg bodies of the Brothers Grimm.

Lily released the arm of Mr. Johnstone and turned to look at Coffin. “I think you have me confused with someone else. I’m Theodora Bow, here with the travelling show. Colleen Bawn? Perhaps you’ve seen it?”

Coffin, grinning now, said, “You can certainly act. But you can’t lie about those violet eyes of yours, can you?”

Lily rested her hand on Johnstone’s arm to bring him along with her as she took a few steps towards Coffin. She sighed and said, “Sir, you really are confused,” and then smiling patiently turned to Mr. Johnstone and said, “Mr. Johnstone, what colour are my eyes?”

After Hurricane Katrina, the photographer Robert Polidori flew to New Orleans to document the devastation. In the wreckage he witnessed, and in her questions about what she saw in what he saw, Stephanie Bolster found the beginnings of a long poem. Those questions led to unexpected places; meanwhile, life kept pouring in. The ensuing book, Long Exposure, is Bolster’s fifth, a roaming, associative exploration of disasters and their ongoing aftermaths, sufferings large and small, and the vulnerability and value of our own lives. Incremental, unsettling, Long Exposure rushes to and through us.

Do you like my braids? Pinterest taught me.
Curls come tumbling.
I have a room just for this. Night terrors and vanity.
Pigeons, rroux rroux.
Rroux, rroux. It sounds like American poets.
Sounds like opaque familiarity.

Larkin was fifty-one now, almost the same age as his father was when he’d died a quarter century before. And in the last while Larkin had been thinking about his own mortality. About how the past could feel more present the further away you got from it.

Larkin turned and stood motionless, looking at the dark that hid the open fields and beyond them the dense bush surrounding the farm. He was remembering. 

My sister says How could you
bring a child into this world.
I get it—not like galvanised iron
is the ideal nest lining. 

Someone said today
That I belong to the 
“Cree Race”

Well, madam,
Allow me to educate
As well as disseminate 
That which I wish to illuminate
What one they tried to eradicate
Permit me to 
Elucidate….

I insisted on having time off this Christmas, which I’ve covered at the café for three years running, to spend the holidays with my mother in Copper Cliff. I’ve had my old room back during visits home ever since my grandmother died five years ago. My mother had moved Sigrid into the apartment for the last two years of her life. She never told me why she made that decision, even when I questioned whether it was the right thing to do, to keep Besta out of a hospital, especially when I knew they had never gotten along.

We call it Frink, and Frink it has been since he was able to demand “drink.” Frink it remains, though Frink is specific in a way only his family can know: a carbonated drink from McDonalds as dispensed by an accessible self-serve fountain (a pox on behind-the-counter tyrannical control!). Though cup sizes have escalated over the years, Frink’s always come as an earned reward. Frink as the meaning of life; Frink as the purest joy; Frink as the promise at the end of a long day pining for Frink; Frink if, and only if, one is Good. Frink because he is Good. Consider Frink to be your sex, your drug, your rash internet purchase, but also your wholesome chaste handhold with a first date at a carnival, your sleep stuffy, your comfortable around-the-house lived-in sweater. Frink for a blissful, refill-laden hour. Then the return to normal frinkless life.  

River Street’s Founder Hollay Ghadery is an award-winning author as well as a mother of four humans and a multitude of furred and feathered bairn. As a special Mother’s Day gift to all, she’s agreed to share one of the most beloved stories from her short fiction collection, Widow Fantasies, which was released in 2024 with Gordon Hill Press.

As many critics have noted, in Hollay’s stories, there is a chorus of voices that sing to the multiple ways people can be women and mothers…or not. This inclusive and rangy mosiac has made Widow Fantasies a must-read for short fiction lovers, and we are proud to say, has introduced many members of our community to the wonderful world of flash fiction.