after Emergence, an exhibit
by Haegue Yang, installed at the Art Gallery of Ontario
from October 1, 2020 to April 5, 2021
On a productive day I get out my fountain pen
and paper and stand outside, in the rain, letting wet smear You can’t
read this. You ca t rea thi. You can’t I melt pods of red wax in a
spoon held over a candle and seal
open wounds. I see animals in everything and crochet little sweaters
for the table legs, the chairs, the stove
burners. I watch as an end of yarn
catches "re beneath the steaming
kettle. I advertise contracts on
all the hydro poles: signing away my storage
locker code, my phone password. I strip apartments of their
shutters, and use them to build
houses, cots, and international treaties. Cyborg horses alert the neighbours. I hide in Circle K and make a picture frame around the
yellow stain le# beneath molding
potatoes.
First published in untethered
magazine vol. 15
Working
on now: Currently I am working mostly on short fiction. In the vein of André
Alexis, I am writing weird stories about all the unique places and histories of
Ottawa.
Mahaila
Smith (they/them) [photo credit: Curtis Perry] is the author of the novelette
in verse, Seed Beetle (Stelliform Press, 2025). They are a researcher, poet and
editor based on the traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinabeg in
Ottawa, Canada. You can find more of their work on their website:
mahailasmith.ca.
a
series of video recordings of contemporary poets reading from their work, originally
prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellations, shut-downs and
isolations; a reading series you can enjoy in the safety of your own protected
space,
Kate
Cayley :
“Mary Shelley at the End of her Life, Recalling the Monster”
Kate
Cayley
has published two short story collections, three collections of poetry, and a
young adult novel, and her plays have been performed in Canada, the US and the
UK. She has won the Trillium Book Award, the Mitchell Prize for Faith and
Poetry, the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction, and an O. Henry
Prize, and been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, among
other awards. She is a frequent writing collaborator with immersive company
Zuppa Theatre, most recently on The Archive of Missing Things and This
Is Nowhere, and her writing has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, Best
Canadian Stories, Brick, Electric Literature, Joyland,
The New Quarterly and The North American Review. She lives in
Toronto with her wife and their three children.
Melanie
Marttila :“Imagined”
Melanie Marttila
has been writing since the age of seven, when she made her first submission to
CBC’s Pencil Box. She is a graduate of the University of Windsor’s masters
program in English Literature and Creative Writing and her poetry has appeared
in Polar Borealis, Polar Starlight, and Sulphur. Her short
fiction has appeared in Pulp Literature, On Spec, Pirating
Pups, and Home for the Howlidays. She lives and writes in Sudbury,
Ontario, in the house where three generations of her family have lived, on the
street that bears her surname, with her spouse and their dog, Torvi.
Mahaila
Smith :“My Lethal Fear of Being Consumed” & “Overhang”
Mahaila
Smith
(any pronouns) is a young femme writer, living and working on the traditional
territory of the Algonquin Anishinabeg in Ottawa, Ontario. They are one of the
co-editors for The Sprawl Mag. They like learning theory and writing
speculative poetry. Their recent chapbooks include Water-Kin (Metatron
Press 2024) and Enter the Hyperreal (above/ground press 2024). Their
novelette in verse, Seed Beetle, is newly published with Stelliform Press.
You can find more of their poems on their website: mahailasmith.ca.
Susan Gevirtz : reading 3 excerpts from the book AERODROME ORION &
Starry Messenger : “so they drove…” ; “Prologue / [to be read in Aviation
English]” ; “Brief History of the Sky: A Manual for Air Traffic Controllers”
Susan
Gevirtz’s
recent books of poetry include Burns (Pamenar), Hotel abc
(Nightboat) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street).
Her critical books are Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of
Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang) and Coming Events (Collected Writings)
(Nightboat). She is based in San Francisco.
Noah
Berlatsky :
“One Day Gravity Stopped,” “On Finding the Creature,” “Time Will Fuck You
Blues” and “True Love”
Noah
Berlatsky
(he/him) is a freelance writer in Chicago. His full-length collections are Not
Akhmatova (Ben Yehuda Press, 2024), Gnarly Thumbs (Anxiety Press,
2025), Meaning Is Embarrassing (Ranger, 2025) and Brevity (Nun
Prophet, 2025).
Recently, when I was scrolling on Facebook, I saw a
good example of what Jean Baudrillard would call a simulacrum. It was a
screenshot of a tweet that included an image of a person holding a white mug.
On the mug there was an image of another mug, this one in the shape of Gromit’s
head, with two handles, a reference to the character from the claymation series
Wallace and Gromit. Gromit is a beagle. Between beagles and this image of a
tweet, there were so many layers of separation that the symbol had lost all
relation to the original reference. Simulacra like this are fundamental to
Baudrillard's theory of hyperreality, which describes the state of our world
where we drown in media but lack true information, and live in a place where
the concept of "real" no longer exists.
Baudrillard's theories of simulacra and the hyperreal
have inspired me to write. As I was reading his work, I did something that
Baudrillard would likely disapprove of, and wrote surreal, dissociative poems
based on my lived reality. Enter the Hyperreal is an accumulation of those
poems, written over the past four years.
I have found that writing ekphrastic poetry inspired
by visual art allows me to easily enter the flow state I covet when writing
these poems. One piecefrom this collection was inspired by the work of Diana
Lynn VanderMeulen. I have a number of her fantastical neon landscapes hung up
around my writing desk. Other influences on the collection include the poets
Barbara Guest and Mark Strand, Stardew Valley, Dr. Strangelove, Robert Burton's
Anatomy of Melancholy, and intellectuals like Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu
and Judith Butler.
A number of these poems were written while I was
enrolled in Stuart Ross' inspiring course, Poetry: Introduction, in the summer
of 2022. Reading Stuart's own poetry in the years prior was the beginning of my
realization that writing weird poems could be a thing. It fueled me to write
weird poems of my own.
Mahaila Smith (any pronouns) is a young femme writer,
living and working on the traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinabeg in
Ottawa, Ontario. They are one of the co-editors for The Sprawl Mag. They like
learning theory and writing speculative poetry. Their debut chapbook, Claw
Machine, was published by Anstruther Press in 2020. Their second chapbook,
Water-Kin was published by Metatron Press in 2024. Their novelette in verse,
Seed Beetle, is forthcoming with Stelliform Press. You can find more of their
work on their website: mahailasmith.ca.
