– I guess we better get going, I said. We don’t wanna miss our rendezvous. Burt didn’t budge. Finally he said, Ain’t gonna be no rendezvous. He loosened the flaps of his pack and spilled its contents. River rock. I dumped mine — the same. – What’s going on, Burt? – Ain’t no satellite receiver, little brother. Those two buggered off long ago. And look, he said, fingering the napkin map and peering over the edge into the ravine. They were hoping we’d have ourselves a little accident. – But this cable! And the TV store! Burt chuckled. The van was leased, he said. The TV store was rented by the month. I still wasn’t convinced. – I was checking on my stash one night when I overheard the two of them talking. It was all Swanson’s idea. He’s done this before. Bud’s his stooge. – And? – I told the cops everything. Those two are probably in cuffs by now. Burt removed a nylon bag from his pack. – Open it, he said. It was stuffed with paper money, and plenty of it. – Explain, Burt . . . – While Bud was trying to find mine, I was looking for his. A couple of times we almost bumped into each other. With a little help from a friend, I found his first. All the share money, his cut of the TV sales. My brother separated the money into three piles and pointed to the tallest. The bills were stacked like a column of Chinese characters. – I figure we’d turn this in, he said. It belongs to Aunt Peggy and the others. But this one—he stuffed the second pile into the pack— is ours. After all, folks have their TVs. – And the third? – That’s for cousin Mark. A reward. He’s the one found a couple of Bud’s chewed-up toothpicks down by the river and suggested we start digging.
All Cities are the Same at Dawn “All the cities are the same at dawn; they’re all alike” you told me once and I didn’t believe you. When day break arrives to their beds they all sigh the same way. And the night lovers whisper things or embrace each other before they get up and at the first light walk away with heavy footsteps. They wear clothes half undone some inn their underarm when they kiss a soft silent kiss not to awaken the one sleeping next door. And the door closes behind them most carefully, silently. The car is turned on, a sound that seems very loud in the quietness of the night and even the gas petal seems to be half asleep and heavy from being asleep or exhausted from making love all night. And the home they return to is always empty and cold. Only the blackbirds chirp in the garden. Half of the sky is lit and the day commences when you enter the shower to let the water run over it and take away the breaths and sweat of the night. All cities are the same you told me once and I didn’t believe you. Because I saw you leaving and I still wanted you in my bed, to take you in my arms, to breathe your breath one more time and to go back to my dreams. And you kissed me softly and closed the door behind you. How long has since gone? I don’t remember. How many times I closed the door behind me after I kissed someone softly on the cheek and whispered good night? How many empty streets have I driven to reach home? You were so right! All the cities of the world are alike at dawn…they all sigh, they toss and turn in bed, some empty and others full of the all night long lovemaking. Each day break one door closes slowly and one other opens and welcomes the loneliness of the traveller. Only blackbirds chirp in the garden always the same way like the day break. People change. Some leave others come. What difference does it make in which city you are?
Dennis was a top student, the school rep at the Science Fair. Afternoons he skinned cats. – Whatcha watching? – Show about bugs, replied young Ronnie. Fucking stupid. Dennis whispered, Got any smoke? Mrs. Stinson appeared, a towel around her head. Beads of hair colouring sluiced across her forehead. – Burt still not going to Aunt Peggy’s? she asked. The only way the Stinsons could have known about Burt’s recalcitrance was if someone had told them. Someone like Mom. Times like that I’d get these pictures in my head. I could see Al Stinson disguising his voice and mumbling threats into a telephone, the three conspirators having a good laugh afterwards. My brother knew about my visions. He figured I had psychic powers. Aunt Peggy was waiting for us at the bus station. With her was Bud, the latest boyfriend, and Mark, our cousin. Bud walked bull-legged and sucked on a toothpick. Mark was an awkward 12-year-old with eyes the colour of blue marbles. Aunt Peggy said he wore his cub uniform everywhere. – Are you a Sixer yet? asked Burt. Before developing other interests, my brother had been a pack leader himself. – I need one more badge, Mark said. Knots. The five of us squeezed into the cab of Bud’s pickup. Mark and his dripping Popsicle sat on my lap. Bud said, Don’t blink, fellas, you’ll miss the highlights. The town of Coppermine was divided by the Similkameen River, a marauding deluge of glacier-cold aqua roaring through a steep gorge. Mountains loomed on all sides, leaving the few thousand residents in shade for all but a couple of hours a day. The mountains also blocked TV reception. A bridge joined the wealthier west side of town with the poorer east. The narrow wooden span was a popular meeting spot for teens. A resentful congregation dissolved at our crossing. – That road there, said Aunt Peggy, indicating a gap in the trees, leads to the Cherry Creek Indian Reserve. They say all this land belongs to them.
Pip: If you've ever wondered what it looks like when one publisher holds together Greek modernism, Irish wakes, cruise ship romances, and Kabbalistic horror in the same week — well, here we are.
Mara: This episode covers work curated by vequinox across three territories: poems of desire and grief, prose wrestling with spiritual and moral conflict, and fiction that moves through travel, loss, and homecoming.
Pip: Let's start with the poetry.
Desire, grief, and the alchemy of souls
Mara: The poems gathered here keep returning to the same question: what do we carry inside us, and what does it cost to carry it?
Pip: "Entropy" sets the stakes plainly. The poem reads: "motionless, we, the descendants of ignorance, move the voices, the names, the history of waves aren't coming from the outside they are the love of a heart that faces the miracle the alchemy of souls that turns the earth around as the anchor of hopelessness floats between the inexistence and infinity."
Mara: So the upshot is that movement and stillness coexist — we are paralyzed and yet carried forward by something internal, not external. The poem locates history and love inside the body, not in the world.
Pip: "Orange" distills that into two lines that hit harder for their brevity — wilted carnations, two empty bowls, two empty glasses, and then: "life full of desires. Thirst, so much thirst and not a single fountain." "HEAR ME OUT" answers with hunger of a different register, erotic and urgent, mapping a lover's body like uncharted territory.
Mara: "Wheat Ears" pushes back against the pessimism — pundits declare nothing can be done, and the poem's answer is to stand in the plaza holding hands. "Red in Black" frames love as structural, roots and wings at once. "Titos Patrikios" goes darker: a soul that gets used to being whipped and begins to ask for it.
Pip: The Cavafy piece — "Constantine Cavafy" — is the quietest and maybe the most devastating: a mirror that rejoices at having held a beautiful face for five minutes.
Mara: "Kariotakis-Polydouri" gives grief a voice that has gone voiceless: "No voice reaches here anymore from all the powerful things I had." The Ritsos volumes carry that forward — "The Victor" shows a man raised on shoulders in the sunshine while silently crying, and "After the Fire" asks whether surviving a battle is the same as winning it.
Pip: And "Introspection" closes the arc with a Nietzschean prophet who sees the new race of humanity before his eyes, even with his eyes closed — which is either visionary or a very convenient excuse for not looking.
Mara: From the interior life of the poem, we move to something more embattled — faith, institution, and the places where they fail each other.
When belief meets power and the wild
Pip: The posts here put spiritual authority under pressure — from mystical horror to the quiet collapse of a priest who cannot speak the love he is supposed to embody.
Mara: "The Qliphoth" opens in full disorientation. Lucas is strapped to something between a chair and a launch pad, voices layering over each other: "His inner ear is roaring with an echoplex of distant detuned voices, drowning in mutual overlap — Westway music room / dub reverb / his father roaring at the nurses / mother bawling out dumb classrooms in her sleep."
Pip: What that passage is doing is collapsing private trauma and collective noise into one body — the skull becomes, as the text puts it, a flickering moviedrome. Transcendence and violation arrive in the same image.
Mara: "Blood, Feathers and Holy Men" works the same tension from the opposite direction — not visionary excess but institutional silence. A Brother tells a priest directly: "I do not want your judgments and I do not need your approval. I want your trust and your love." The priest cannot answer. He walks into the forest for three days.
Pip: Three days in the wilderness to avoid a conversation about feelings. The Church has always had a gift for dramatic avoidance.
Mara: "Ugga" compresses the institutional question to its most extreme form — a figure called the Great Homo Digitalis consolidates all scientific discovery and convinces every religion to submit to one universal church, positioning himself as the Antichrist. It's a single dense paragraph, but it reframes everything around it.
Pip: And then "Ken Kirkby" steps entirely outside institution — into the Arctic tundra, where Inuksuit are described as a language of stone, and an eight-inch tree takes hundreds of years to grow.
Mara: The sacred there is horizontal and practical: a stone on a stone means the fishing is good here. No hierarchy, no doctrine — just accumulated knowledge readable by anyone who knows how to look.
Pip: From stones in the tundra to people in motion — arrivals, departures, and the ground between.
Journeys, thresholds, and the weight of return
Pip: The fiction here is preoccupied with thresholds — the moment before entering a room, the moment after a death, the crossing that changes what home means.
Mara: "The Unquiet Land" opens at a graveside. Clifford Hamilton steps forward to eulogize Finn MacLir: "I have the duty and the honour of saying a few words about the man lying in death before us." The grave already holds Finn's wife, Roisin, dead since 1892. Finn's name will be added later. The scene is precise about that gap.
Pip: A quiet, solemn wake for a man renowned for his parties — the gap between the life lived and the life being mourned is doing a lot of work in a single sentence.
Mara: "Small Change" moves to a younger threshold. Rico returns home to an empty house, finds a note, and sits alone in the dark rather than crossing the street to the party. When his aunt Marianna finds him, he holds up papers — something he's worked on — and "suddenly he feels very small, and scared and shy." The stakes are intimate but the weight is real.
Pip: "In the Quiet After Slaughter" puts a piano player named Buddy on a cruise ship, where falling for a passenger is called Man Overboard — so named, the text notes, because a despondent waiter once jumped after being rebuffed. Buddy writes on a coaster: "Her eyes look inside my head and see everything," and underlines the last word.
Mara: "Jazz with Ella" ends a journey rather than beginning one — Jennifer returns from a trip through Russia and Montreal, and when she finally passes through the arrivals gate she almost doesn't recognize her estranged husband waiting with flowers. "Despite herself, a full, warm feeling dispelled the black cloud, if only for a moment."
Pip: "Fury of the Wind" places Sarah at a rural fair in Nimkush, where no one speaks to her except a man named Pong struggling with a table, and a stranger at the bleachers. She is new to the district and it shows.
Mara: "Redemption" finds its threshold over a dinner table — Hermes, his father, and a quiet negotiation about guns and permits that turns into a pleasant evening. "Straits and Turns" gives us Mike, a Greek immigrant in Canada, writing in Hellenic on paper torn from a hand-wipe roll, on an old manual typewriter a friend gave him for free.
Pip: He writes: "Both of us were born close to different seas, mine was the blue Mediterranean and yours the grey Pacific Ocean, yet we bleed the same red blood." A novel about arriving, written on whatever's at hand.
Mara: "Wellspring of Love" closes the set at speed — Tyne is pulled over doing fifteen over the limit, rushing to a hospitalized aunt, and the officer lets her go with a look of compassion she almost misses.
Pip: Small mercies at the edge of crisis. That's most of what travel turns out to be.
Mara: What holds all of this together is the question of what we carry across thresholds — grief, desire, faith, language, the memory of a face in a mirror.
Pip: And whether the anchor of hopelessness floats or sinks. More of that, next time.
sixteen-year-old breasts, long legs, the outline of her female parts where the wet cloth of the suit pulled tight, and I felt a surprising warmth flow down from my racing heart to fill the netted sling in my swim trunks with muscular intensity. I could barely breathe. My head seemed to float above my shoulders, and as I stared like a hypnotized animal, she caught my look and smiled. I never saw her again until that fall. It was almost supper time; the street was deserted and it had begun to get cold. She came right up to me and I felt my chest tighten till I was breathless and a little giddy. I couldn’t read the look on her face. It was amused, but not quite sure of what she was going to do, as if she were crossing a line, or testing something, and there was a challenge too, and I remembered that smile from the summer and I saw it now as something else, something that made me feel a flicker of anxiety along with the excitement and the wonder of this unexpected proximity. She didn’t say hello, or what’s your name, or I know you, she just blurted it out, “Wanna wrestle?” and she was a little breathless too. It was something my friends and I did all the time, but I’d never even imagined wrestling with a girl, much less an older girl who was already a woman, and I didn’t know what to think about that, and before I could think anything, she stepped up and put her right arm around my neck, trying to pull me into a headlock. I slipped out, spun around, grabbed her forearm and wrist and attempted to force her arm behind her back, but she was taller and heavier than I was and she used her weight to push me off balance. She grabbed me from behind, but I squirmed around until we were face to face inside her bear hug, and I could feel her warmth, smell the light fragrance of her deodorant and a deeper, muskier scent that astonished and aroused me so quickly that I could feel my stiffness fit between her legs, and her face looked shocked and she tried to twist away and we fell, and my ankle caught on the curb and she landed on top of me, both of us breathing hard, and I heard a dull crack, and a stab of pain like an electric current that shot up my left leg, and I went pale and started to faint, and she looked scared, rolled off of me, took off at a full run down the street. I lay there catching my breath and wondering what to do next. When I tried to get back on my feet, the pain shot up from my ankle again and I felt a moment of panic. How long would I have to lie here before I could walk? Should I yell for someone to help me?
And why shouldn’t she be happy? She had just committed to marrying a wonderful man, who obviously adored her. They were of the same faith … no problems there. And Morley had found a woman who shared his faith … no problems there, either. So why should she not be literally dancing with joy? I’m tired, that’s all. Tomorrow, I’ll be fine. Just let me go to bed now, and I’ll be fresh as a daisy to take Cam to church tomorrow … my church … his church. Thank God, no more conflict with Mom and Dad. Aunt Millie … what will Aunt Millie say? She’ll be happy, of course, even if she has always favoured Morley. No more worries, Tyne. She was jolted from her thoughts by the others making a move to leave the table, and she heard Cam say to her dad. “I’d like a word with you, sir, if you have a minute.” Oh no, Cam, not tonight, let’s wait a day or so. She knew he planned to ask her dad for her hand in marriage. Why did he always have to be so formal, his manners so impeccable? Now she would be obligated to stay up and join them all in the living room after Cam had his talk with her dad. There would be hilarity, maybe even toasts. Jeff Milligan would declare he must break out his best bottle of wine. He always professed to have one on hand for joyous occasions, although Tyne had yet to see him open one. She got up quickly to help her dad out of his chair but he was already on his feet, grasping the corner of the dining table with one hand and his cane with the other. He waved her away when she offered to help him into the living room, but she noticed that he took Cam’s arm and let the younger man guide him through the doorway. No indeed, no more worries. She had done the right thing by accepting Cam’s marriage proposal.
I had a good bite of my sandwich, turned the food in my mouth and chewed slowly while I stared at the beautiful Goddess who was observing me and after I slowly chewed and swallowed my food while she was chewing hers and while my wife was sipping her red wine, I sent towards the Minoan beauty a kiss with an imperceptible movement of my lips to which the Minoan Goddess reciprocated with an even sweeter kiss sent my way and the pact of the day was sealed, the beauty the up to now dull day had changed into, brought back my thoughts about the travellers in the Atocha train station in the bowels of which thousands of people go through, like that blonde traveller I met yesterday, who played footsies with me and who would probably was with her lover, yes at this moment in time, in this big city of Madrid, she was surely enjoying the body of her husband, or lover, or Lesbian partner, while the Minoan beauty, who had just finished paying her waitress, got up and walking towards us and quite unexpectedly she faced my wife and asked, “visitors?” to which my wife said “yes”, “Having a good time in Madrid?” “Yes,” my wife said, “how long have you been here?”, “a week, but we go home tomorrow” my wife added, “have a great time and safe travels back home…by the way where is home?”, the Minoan beauty asked, “Vancouver, in Canada,” my wife said, “well enjoy your stay in Spain” the young woman added, to which my wife and I said in unison, “thank you” and the Minoan beauty turned and walked away showing us the calligraphy of her buttocks, knowing well that I’d make sure I’d pay attention to them as I paid attention to the unimaginable images she graced me with, images that surely I’ll keep in my mind for the rest of my life.
Ari found a special friendship in Grey Wolf, once Grey Wolf learned from Ari that he had been avenged for the loss of his ear. Grey Wolf and Leaping Water expected their first child before the end of the next summer. Throughout the winter, Rordan and Ula created a deep special connection with Running Deer and the other camp children, teaching them simple songs in the Celtic of his own childhood. They called Ula, Aira, meaning Of The Wind, because she could run like the wind and beat almost anybody in a race. She was expert at throwing a knife and could hit a target at twenty paces. Ula didn’t mind the new name because both names sounded so similar and she loved the acknowledgment of her prowess and strength. The Natives gave Brother Rordan the name Mountain Thrush for his pleasing voice and happy laugh, though many of the elders referred to him as Ominotago, Beautiful Voice. The children were also fascinated with his blonde hair, almost the colour of the cotton traders brought from the Lands of Winter Sun. For the first time in many years, Brother Rordan had found his niche as a singer and teacher of song among the Natives. Finten regarded the transformation from surly boy to happy Brother as a miracle and didn’t object that Rordan and Ula seemed to spend all their time together. Perhaps this was God’s country after all. He often thought that if singing were praying twice, the singing of the children would surely bring conversions. Music contains a power stronger than many medicines and Brother Rordan’s chanting was healing Ula’s sadness but she still remained wary, especially toward Father Finten and Bjorn, both so much older than she or the Brothers. It took a period of fever, when Ula had to be nursed by Chochmingwu Corn Mother, Brown Bear’s wife, for Rordan to reach a new closeness with Ula. It was then that he saw her vulnerability, as she revealed her childhood suffering through fevered ravings and as he witnessed her tears. Since her daughter’s murder by Illska, Corn Mother had dedicated herself to healing the village children and young people. It was a testament to her loving heart that she nursed one of the white strangers. She also appreciated Rordan’s commitment to the children and so she reached out to his constant companion. Corn Mother’s herbs worked their magic. Ula began to speak to Rordan of her past as she recovered from the fever that had racked her for two weeks, and as she saw the relief and warmth in Rordan’s eyes. “How did I come to be a slave? No, I wasn’t taken by Vikings. My parents weren’t killed in an awful raid. I didn’t crawl out of the flames. My pigshit mother thought I’d make a good nun and sold me to a convent. A good nun, ha! Could you see me in a convent? “My father? I had three fathers. All of them were my father. None of those assholes was. I was traded to the convent for six chickens and a pig. A pig! My mother got the better of the deal: She got the pig; they got me. “I was there a whole bloody year. Thought they’d rescued me from a life of shame following my mother’s trade. I was their prisoner, more like it. Stale straw and kitchen slops and prayers, prayers, prayers, morning, noon and night. So I ran off dressed as a boy. Then they were going to hang me up for a loaf of stale bloody bread. The sheriff sold me to a Norseman instead.
“Bobby won’t give you a minute’s anxiety,” Emily said, “and neither will Katie. I don’t think I can be so confident about that little monkey, Susie.” “Strangely enough, Mom, it’s not Susie I’d be worried about, it’s Katie. She’s sweet and gentle but I also think she may be easily led. We just pray she’s led in the right ways.” Millie put her needles and unfinished sock on the coffee table in front of her. “As far as you and Morley are concerned, she will be.” She started to rise but sat back quickly with a hand grasping her abdomen. Tyne sat upright, ready to go to her aunt’s aid. “Are you all right, Auntie?” Millie’s face had paled, but she relaxed and forced a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Yes, I think so. Just a stitch in my side. I’m fine.” She reached for the coffee table, but Tyne gently touched her hand. “Sit for a minute until you feel better. I’ll wash up the tea things.” She collected their cups and plates and carried them to the kitchen. As she ran water into the enamel sink, Tyne said a silent prayer for her aunt. And suddenly she realized there had been something different about Aunt Millie recently. She didn’t have her usual spark, and it was obvious she had been losing weight. Tyne dried the dishes and hung the tea towel over the bar on the oven door, all the while berating herself for being unaware of changes in her aunt. Had her nursing skills deteriorated so much that she didn’t notice something so basic about one of her own family? Where had her attention been? Was she so absorbed in the children’s needs that she hadn’t looked beyond them to the senior people in her life? Maybe it was time she returned to work to brush up on the things that used to be second nature to her. One thing she knew – from now on she would spend more time with Aunt Millie than she had in recent months. And Rachael would have to step up and help with the twins. And maybe, just maybe, that would also solve the problem of the amount of time she spent with Lyssa.
“Do you like it there?” “No. It’s not where my heart wants to be but it is where I have to be.” “I was in Toronto once. I married Hilu’s father and he was from Ottawa, so I’ve been to Ottawa too.” “What happened?” “I don’t know how you people can live in a place like that. It’s soulless. It’s like people living in caves up in the air. It’s just not human. How is it that someone who isn’t born here, who doesn’t live here, and only spent a few years here, can love this place and these people so much?” “I don’t know,” Ken said. “I don’t know how that happened. We can have a lot of ideas and we can say a lot of things, but the reality is that we don’t know these things. We don’t know the first thing about love – we haven’t a clue. We have all sorts of feelings and all sorts of passions. We call it love and hate, but that’s just a lazy way of expressing something we know nothing about. I think love is something that is lived. It doesn’t have very much to do with the other person although we focus the idea on one person. I think it’s a life lived in a particular way. It encompasses all the things that are in that life and it depends on how that life is lived, whether the invitation to love will be heard and accepted. I don’t think there is any language, including Inuktitut, that truly expresses what that’s all about. The only conclusion I can come to is the one I’ve given you.” Joan let a long silence hang between them. Ken finally asked her again, how she knew this was the place where he had witnessed so much death. “It’s not just you knowing,” he said. “There’s something more concrete to it. This is a specific place where a specific thing happened.” “I know this is the place because my mother knew these people and knows their story and she knows about you,” Joan said. “This was the time of my grandmother, and my grandmother knew you. My grandmother found you very interesting. They called you the quiet Kabluna – the mysterious white man who had the capacity of silence. That’s how I know about you.” “Would it be possible to visit them in Baker Lake?” Ken asked. “Yes.” “Could we visit now?” “They’re away.” “Away?” “Visiting.” “Family and friends?” “Yes – very far away.” “So we can’t go and see them?” “No.”
Manolis Aligizakis 