Reading Room

The Gathering

The wind rolls down the street a rogue wave and breaks in the maples above. Great swells crest in the uppermost branches and it is alone a wonder how the little birds are not shaken loose from their limbs. The wind rolls down the street a rogue wave and breaks in the...

Town

It starts with a river. Green hills, and promising flatland beneath them. All these trees go, and get lugged out of the clearing. The stone near the water is brought to the place where the woods once stood, and also the felled trees that lived there before, and this...

Rag Quilt

I ate my first raw peanut a few months before we left for Sudan. I was taken aback by its beany-ness. It is a bean, not a nut. I had known that, been told, “It’s a part of the legume family.” But in my mouth for that first time, it was transformed. Peanut. Pea-bean....

My Brother’s Body

My brother lost his body bit by bit—a foot, a finger, a shin. The doctors strapped it to a bed, and the mouth screamed on its behalf: Help! Help! With the eyes, my brother spied me, standing in the body of someone who looked like his sister; and the mouth said Health!...

Death and the Canyon

Fifty years married, devoted to Jesus and family, Mom and Dad had remained your protectors in spite of your adult status and incessant lying, your manic highs and pitiful lows. January, 2010 Fifty years married, devoted to Jesus and family, Mom and Dad had remained...

Loving Benjamin

The honourable mention in Room's 2012 creative non-fiction contest, judged by Kathy Page. Part Five: Beginning His eyes are dark and warm, like hot chocolate, and his movements are punctuated and full of life, like a baby Charlie Chaplin. His new lips feel strangely...

Miles to Inches

The honourable mention for Room's 2012 poetry contest. At first it’s terrifying, then it’s scary, and finally, it doesn’t matter. But the space between terrifying and scary, well, it can be an inch or it can be miles, thousands and thousands of miles. And just because...

Lying in Bed in the Morning

The honourable mention in our 2012 poetry contest, judged by Miranda Pearson. There is the crosscutting of twigs, the bulge of red buds carving sky into fragments of grey waiting, molecules of paint melded by winter’s cold on a window frame that won’t open to spring’s...

Honest Work

Your husband has the car for the weekend. You need a car to visit your friend in the hospital tomorrow morning and Sunday morning. The hospital is eight kilometres away. Should you rent a car, call a taxi, take two buses, or walk? Your husband has the car for the...

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ROOM 49.3 NO CANADA

In the new era of CanCon, as feminists and writers it is our task to reject this Canadian exceptionalism, this too-comfortable back-patting. How can we begin to imagine alternative arts economies, Indigenous economies around art, that start with treaty, that align with BDS? What art, what literature, would such a system free us to create?

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Cover image for Room Magazine Issue 49.2, Science. Art by Candace Cosentino of an old-fashioned computer monitor with a bounty of dandelions growing from it.

ROOM 49.2 Science

Welcome to the Science issue of Room Magazine, where we privilege questions: questions about how to construct better worlds; questions about how to destroy hyper-capitalistic, necropolitical systems; questions that beget questions and new questions.

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