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  • The Literary Review of the Quebec Writers' Federation

fiction

Storm Chasers

William Robinson

Cal and I got stuck on Route 9 surrounded by fields of corn, stalks barely three feet tall, New Jersey’s pluckable yellowed-ears still months away. Cal’s Plymouth, his radiator, steamed up, so he cell-phoned for help, but after forty minutes it was obvious nobody was coming to get us. [Read more...]

poetry

Seven Wards

Buxton Wells

Man is made of ordinary things, and habit is his nurse.
–Johann von Schiller

I. BEDSIDE

Bedrest follows at long last, and a nurse,
like a bridge over me, holds bedrail
to bedrail. To think I’m awake for all this:
how streams are changed in their beds,
how a day is engineered, the blood being drawn,
the bloodwork done.

How she spans me, fixes me,
the keystone set in her eye.
[Read more...]

nonfiction

Stars

Tilya Gallay Helfield

After the wartime regulations were published in the newspapers during World War II, my mother told my father in no uncertain terms that she had quite enough to do sewing blackout curtains for the rest of the windows in the house, so he could just paint our cellar windows black. I remember scraping holes in the paint so I could peek inside. At night, the wartime blackout was so pervasive I imagined that God had painted the sky black like our cellar windows, and then chipped away a bit of the paint here and there so He could spy on me through the twinkling hole-stars. [Read more...]

fiction

Bats or Swallows

Teri Vlassopoulos

“My teeth,” Frances said. “They fall out of my mouth when I speak. They’re falling and I keep spitting them out like they’re cherry pits, but no one says anything about it. You were there once, and you ignored it, but I think you kicked a tooth away when it landed too close to your foot. You were barefoot. [Read more...]