I Have Never Sneezed

Suzanne Sutherland

I have never sneezed. Not once in 22 years. I’ve never sneezed. It’s the kind of thing some of my closest friends have never realized but I still I feel marked by my inability, my inexperience.

Lately I’ve found I’m jealous of actors who do it in movies. I know they’re faking it, but they make it look so real. Like in a romantic comedy where the main character is allergic to her future mother-in-law’s cat. Her sneezing causes a rift between the two women, which is exacerbated by their opposing personality types. Somehow it all works out though and the two bond over the experience. Mother-In-Law gives Main Character a handkerchief, a family heirloom and now a private joke. Husband-To-Be smiles, relieved.

I’m never going to have that.

Olkhon

Eric Foley

Boys watch puppies on a windswept island.

Girls wash dishes in the deepest lake,

gardening, growing into beautiful teenage

women with acne scars and yellow-green

seaweed wrapped tight round their dreadlocks.

Seagulls sit on wooden roofs performing

Chekhov, a drunk hunchback picks weeds

against a crooked fence, a blind boy

wields his shovel like an axe. Cattle pace

dusty streets, stand staring at a sky turned pink,

while thin clouds watch tired boys feed tired puppies,

one single tired sky of the billions that have

turned to silence as the wind dies down. Then

the music of human speech, and laughter, carries

across the little valley, echoing for the ones

that still know how to throw themselves

into the arms of night, singing Siberian prison songs

‘til dawn, seeking love in the form of another.

The Puppeteer

Jessica Tsang

She tries on voices in the night

the way one models new dresses before the mirror

when nobody is watching.

Sometimes, when she thinks I am asleep,

I hear her take out her inventory of accents and manners,

hear her try each one on in turn

and assign personas to them all:

the Australian is her favourite—

one she slips into as fluidly as

one eases into a well-tailored gown,

and then there is the Mexicano,

which she grates out in harsh tones

from behind the portrait of the mariachi.

She plays out conversations between the two—

long winding arguments over whether

avocados count as fruits or vegetables

and whether the plural of octopus

is octopi or octopodes

(“Never mind what the populace says,

the Greek base makes it octopodes.”)

Sometimes, when I awake from bizarre dreams

of cephalopods declining Greek nouns,

I can still hear the Sheila and the Señor

bickering into the night.