By Bart Verhoeven A wheel squeaks, the kind that sticks, then gives, then sticks again. Metal rails rattle, bright against the floor’s dull shine. A faint trail of disinfectant follows, sharp enough to blind the tongue. The sheet lifts at one corner as the bed turns; a loose gesture, barely a gesture at all. It brushes the ground with a soft, dragging sound like someone shuffling in a dream. The ceiling lights slide across the frame, one after another, each reflection trembli

By Wing Yau The ghost of my deceased workplace still haunts my new uniform as an unspeakable sweat stain. It haunts my work shoes that squeak like my tightened windpipe as I walk into the pale daylight. I mean, through daylight into a relentless odour bounded by empty spaces in my life indenture. At night the ghost always returns to the clock and strikes the most feminine pose to beguile time. She

By Alice Hatcher We weep at memories of misted fiddleheads, the milkweed seats of chrysalid kingdoms, sacred scrolls of silver birch roseate at dawn, glacial till of pungent loam and marbled stone, gardens seeding themselves in endless resurrection, all the nectar of mottled fruit we found wanting. We walk accursed in wilderness, across barren plains, through scabrous lands and bedeviling dust. Gloaming is too soft a word for sudden nightfall, the world’s hard turn into unc