Atlantic Books

Atlantic Books

Locate me
FR

Sex

by

They came for us in the night.

We didn’t know at first, but they were there.

The three of us dreaming in bed with the sounds of the traffic and the all-night convenience store right there on the corner, and the dive bars down the way, and the drunks.

They came for us first in our dreams—barely noticeable—a shadow within a shadow in the corner of a dreamed room; the trunk of a car.

Later, we thought we could hear them. First, behind the walls of our apartment; just outside the window, hanging from the eve trough or in the branches of the trees out front—then finally, we thought we could see them: news footage, music videos, porn sites—they were right there, flitting around the edges, in disguise.

At last, we could feel them in our bones and in the beating of our blood.

 

And I still don’t know where it all started.

But it had something to do with the Painting Game.

The Painting Game, Shane’s dad, the Radio Room, and the war.

They’re tied together somehow—and then everything came to an end.

And that had to do with me.

***

I came a long way to find what my life meant, you know?

From the bars and the back alleys of The Metropolis to the tenements of T Dot to the cliffs and the hills of the 7-0-9—sometimes I thought I’d never make it.

But I found what I was supposed to do.

It was like the seed of a flower inside me.

And the seed of that flower was a flame stretching up into the heavens that would never die.

That’s what I am.

And this is how it happened.

***

One day the satellite plunged into Lake Sludge.

Shane, Nina, and Brit watching the shaky video footage on the news.

A black cylinder, glinting darkly in the light, dropping out of blue sky.

An enormous splash. Debris flying up. Shock waves in the water.

It replayed over and over again, the angle of the satellite in mid-fall suggesting some terrible consequence.

 

They’re in the car now, but will never be safe.

The three of them knowing they just have to keep moving.

And Carter, poor little Carter, with his PTSD.

 

The man at the toll beside the ferry terminal watching as they pass.

It actually made them feel good to see a person behind the glass.

The black smoke from the ferry’s chimney hangs in the air above them.

 

They blow by a hitcher on the gravel shoulder of the highway.

Just another refugee.

Her cardboard sign saying HOME.

 

***

Nina’s like, it’s 1991. But it’s not your 1991, it’s ours.

And it’s not even 1991, it’s 2024.

It’s like, sci-fi or whatever.

We’re ahead of you fucking dumb shits, but also, we ain’t.

We’re like, an alternate universe or whatever.

We’re like, hardcore over here—we ain’t your world.

But we are your world.

I don’t even know what it is we is, but we are, so like, deal, I guess.

This here is your world.

Don’t care what you say:

This is your world.

***

They call him Shaky, Milk, Dead Fox, Skeet Love.

He’ll rap only in front of the mirror at home, a straight-up genius, thinks Nina, legit.

Skeet Love, Shane says, that’s like, Rock, yo. Like where my dad is. That’s a fucking Rock term and that’s me, so fuck you.

Know what that shit means?

Naw, man, of course you don’t, you’re dumb as shit. But I’m not.

I’m not, and here’s why:

It means I’m like dirt, yo.

Like, shit.

Like, shit on my whole life, man.

And there ain’t nothing that makes you smarter than being shit.

 

Skeet.

Like, what’s Nina say about it?

Like, a derogatory term for urban, white, working-class.

Someone who’s up to no good.

A total outsider, like every damn day of my life.

That’s me.

(Except, not.)

 

So whatever, and anyway, like I said, Fuck you.

***

Nina and Brit checking his flow.

His hands, the cut of his shoulders.

At first, Brit was only around occasionally, now she’s here all hours.

When she met them, Brit was on top of the moon.

Like, over the world.

Seriously giddy.

That’s sometimes the way she talks when she’s excited—she mixes shit up.

Shit is always getting mixed up—totally—like your world and this world.

It’s messy, man—like where does one start and the other one end?

Or do they even?

 

Nina and Brit and hours and hours on karmaloop, lookbook.

Ecko, Obey, HUF, Billionaire Boys Club.

White Doves, Yellow Airplanes.

Nina’s got the best clothes, Shane the best drugs.

The two girls changing outfits while Shane paces and smokes, flexing his trophied lats in the bedside wall mirror—this world, and that man, like legit.

Shane’s like, Know how many crunches I can do, motherfucker? Well neither do I cause I lose count after a thousand. Chin ups? Whatever. This body is tight, yo, like tight as shit, like a virgin—for real.

He’s old school, thinks Brit, sells pills for five bucks a pop when everyone else is into powder.

They go to a club, the dance floor crazy, Brit and Nina making out for the crowd while Shane leans at the bar sipping a cooler.

He hates beer, has a gluten intolerance.

Nina once said, Shit, you’re so skinny, baby, it’s hot. I wish I was sick. I wish I had cancer.

She pictures herself, like him, with her ribs showing through. She could kill anything with ribs like that. She could destroy the universe if she were that thin, her knee bones knocking together painfully in bed.

She sees herself emaciated, grinning.

She winks and the skyline is flattened.

Waves her hand and all the buildings utterly devastated.

Blackened bodies, ash on the wind.

Drop another twenty pounds and you’re the shit, she thinks, she smiles.

In the club, she screams over the music:

Ever wanna just, like, destroy the fucking world?

Brit smiles back at her. The vamp fangs she bought online glow in the black-light.

When Shane first saw them, he was like, Keep that mouth away from my dick.

But not really. Really, he was totally down.

 

Brit’s fangs—they’re good for a week and then fall off—two white little talons, like bullets.

 

Brit’s a poet—the fucking legislator of the wound is what she told Shane and Nina when they first met.

 

Nina and Brit coming off the dance floor covered in sweat.

Shane thinking how everyone in the club, every eye in every head, is watching them.

They rent bikes from a Thai kid outside and peel through the streets, neon blinding them.

Left, right, left, left and right.

If there’s anyone following them, they ain’t anymore.

Not yet, Nina thinks, wanting to vomit. They come to a park and throw the bikes to the ground.

Sprawled on the grass. Trying to see stars through the smog above their heads.

You guys are my family, Brit says, her eyes huge in the dark. I feel like I’m home.

Nina punches her shoulder, retches and pukes.

Sour Puss and grenadine, a puddle of blood.

Brit says, Take the in out, and you’ve got a grenade.

Nobody laughs.

Nina’s spinning.

On the train home, Nina with her head on Shane’s lap, KO’d.

Shane watching the other passengers.

Dude in a suit with his eyes all over Nina’s body.

Another looks at them over the top of his newspaper.

The soundtrack in Shane’s head screams bad cop drama.

They get off two stops early, Shane carrying Nina, and Brit trailing behind.

Later, Brit watches the two others sleep on the mattress. She meant what she said. The sun is up, Monday morning traffic on the street. A fan by the bed blows strands of Nina’s hair into the air.

She pops another of Shane’s pills. Red Butterfly. When they wake up that afternoon, they find her on the fire escape cross-legged. Her eyes as shiny as a polished gun barrel.

***

Soon, Leo will get out of prison, and when he does, he’ll come looking for Nina.

She belonged to him, but now she belongs to Shane.

She puts her nose behind Shane’s ear and says, You own me, baby, you own me.

She snuggles closer to him in bed.

He rolls over to face her, his fingers in her hair, and she’s thinking how lovely it is to have his fingers in her hair.

The thing he does when his fingers are in her hair is that first he smooths it all down—almost like he’s petting a dog or a cat, and then his hand comes down over the curve of the back of her head, and with her hair in his hand, he sort of clenches his hand very gently and tenderly into a fist, and then releases her hair and smooths the back of her neck.

Then he’ll tuck some loose strand of hair behind her ear, and he’ll kinda cup the spot where her jaw and neck connect—kinda right where her earlobe is.

Then he’ll caress her earlobe between his thumb and forefinger, and run his hand down her neck until his warm palm meets her collarbone—and then he’ll do the same thing again, and again.

You wouldn’t think someone like him could be that way—so sweet—but he is.

And when he’s like this with her, she worries he isn’t brutal enough for the world or something, but maybe he is brutal enough—and anyway, maybe it’s not something she needs to worry about.

 

A phone call will come and it’ll go like this:

Skeet Love?

Yo.

This is Dr Dre. You a fuckin’ genius.

No shit? Dope.

Here’s a million dollars.

Sweet.

ODB came back from the dead for this shit. I played him yo demo.

 

But first Shane will make a demo.

But before that, Shane will win a million rap battles.

And there’s Nina stage left, watching him embarrass the fuck out of each and every comer.

Like step in the ring, motherfucker.

Like Mohammed Ali.

Shane will make it, and Nina will wear a white faux-fur bolero jacket, a black mini with thigh-high black boots, and her eyes will burn from the camera flashes.

But really, Nina knows, a phone call will come like this:

Shane?

Yo.

This is Leo. Imma fuckin’ shoot you dead.

Skeet Love
Craig Francis Power
Breakwater Books

by

Perhaps a poem begins with longing, with the possibility of loss, with the elaboration of a separation hollowed out by the passage of time. Love poems surely partake of such a structure, built as they are from an address to a beloved who is almost always somewhere else.

We might say then that absence lies at the foundation of this particular form of poiesis or production, the love poem. Missing calls conjures or convokes the lover—as well as the reader, who is summoned as another beloved, albeit a voyeur, one who reads over the shoulder of the initial addressee. Thus from one time to another and one place to another, love poetry repeatedly populates its world and builds its readership from what is sometimes a daily effort to confront and live with longing.

So too does epic poetry. If we take as our example the Illiad and the Odyssey, we may see that they track a journey away from home, hearth and heart to an experience of war, and then chronicle, by way of multiple setbacks and episodes, the struggle to return again. Poetry, in such a frame, is hard work; one approaches the extinction of separation and the prospect of love and the beloved by way of elaborate productions of delay. More acutely, we see that in order for a poem to come to be at all, the hope of arrival must be matched by insistent deferral. Such labour is perhaps an exercise or art of the erotic, but is it or could it be pornographic?

I would not have thought to ask such a question—poetry and pornography don’t typically occupy the overlapping slots in my head or history or bed—but Darryl Whetter’s latest poetry collection, Search Box Bed, argues that “there is no history of poetry without love poetry, and there is no history of media without pornography.” How, Whetter asks, as he labours over his search box, sexting, noting, licking, does the changing media landscape alter the pathways of our discussions of desire? Exciting new sexualities are clearly emerging in and from this new media landscape; what then might our new poetries become?

While it is perhaps too soon to tell—Whetter’s poems, for example, come to me in a book and look very much like other poems that I’ve read over the last 20 or 30 years—Search Box Bed contains some signs that poetry and pornography may lie together, albeit uncomfortably. This is not because poetry isn’t an apt medium for seduction, sexuality or erotic experimentation and expression. On the contrary! Poetry’s labour-intensive, handmade aesthetics and attention to detail, its tilt towards immediacy and community and its tendency to linguistic and phenomenological thickness are at odds, philosophically and materially, with a world in which desire is increasingly reconfigured as forever repeatable acts of consumption, as if sex can simply be ordered up and had, one more infinitely obsolescing commodity, no contact and no messy consequences of labour required.

But, as in all other forms of rapidly expanding global commodity production and circulation, somewhere in the elaboration of erotic content for the “search box bed” of the internet, labour happens. Whose labour, where and how, are key questions. Whetter notes that according to Extreme Tech, porn accounts for “30% of the total data transferred across the internet”—that’s a lot of largely hidden and often illegal, appalling, dangerous, underpaid, racialized, feminized and infantilized labour. In one poem, Whetter imagines the off-camera life of a “cam girl;” she turns off her computer, settles into warm loose pants and comforting layers of clothing. Other poems are about intimate erotic communities and exchanges. Hovering, as cover illustration and in the background, is the fantasy of the big-box porn store of the internet, the motherboard or mother-lode, to which endless clicking mice stream.

How are such visions and modalities changing our lives? Whetter’s last poem, “A Home of One’s Own,” an unorthodox riff on Virginia Woolf’s famous phrase describing the terms of a modernist woman’s self-determination and capacity to write, suggests that the wired pursuit of each privileged individual’s least desire, all of that online searching and clicking, emerges from and leads to endless loneliness. To want may be generative, but to think one can always get creates not poetry so much as a republic of isolates, endlessly clicking and stroking, but never approaching or dwelling with each other.

by

TRIGGER WARNING: This article contains references to sexual assault and violence that may be triggering to survivors.

The world of human trafficking feels like a parallel universe to many people—despite the fact that there were 206 violations in 2014 alone, according to Statistics Canada, and those are just the ones that are reported—so we can safely assume that the actual numbers are significantly higher.

Human trafficking is defined by Public Safety Canada as involving “the recruitment, transportation, harbouring and/or exercising control, direction or influence over the movements of a person in order to exploit that person, typically through sexual exploitation or forced labour. It is often described as a modern form of slavery.”

As adults, we also tend to assume teens are blissfully unaware of all this, but the stats show that they aren’t nearly as sheltered as we think they are. In fact, the same Statistics Canada report shows that 25 percent of human trafficking victims reported between 2009 and 2014 were under the age of 18. Another 47 percent were between the ages of 18 and 25 percent of these victims are women.

In short, human trafficking is a very real issue in Canada—and the predominant issue in author Wanda Lauren Taylor’s first young adult novel, Ride or Die. The book is part of Lorimer’s SideStreets series, which Lorimer describes as “edgy, fast-paced novels that combine real-world themes and believable characters to make for short, heart-stopping books—sure to engage the most reluctant reader.”

In Ride or Die, protagonist Kanika, a 15-year-old girl growing up in Guysborough County, Nova Scotia, is lured into sex work shortly after she and her friend Panama discover their “hideout” has been taken over by a group of older teens. Kanika gets a bad feeling and runs away, but since Panama’s “boyfriend” Gabe is there, she stays—and goes missing. Kanika’s concerned, but a distrust of police and a reluctance to “squeal” on her friend leads her to try to find Panama herself. But when she tries to get information from Danny, one of Gabe’s friends, she falls for Danny instead.

A textbook “Romeo pimp,” Danny carefully manipulates Kanika into believing that he loves her and that she’s his girlfriend. He starts by showering Kanika with attention, then buying her gifts and finally, just a couple of days after having sex with her (when she’s heavily invested), “testing her love” by asking her if she would let rats crawl on her if he asked (spoiler: she would). But despite the emotionally charged confusion she feels after the rat incident, she’s completely caught off guard when Danny tells her he’s going to take her to a party in Halifax—and then sells her to human traffickers who drug her, gang rape her and then transport her to a house in Scarborough. There, a high-ranking pimp named Dragon forces her into sex work.

It couldn’t have been easy to write a book about human trafficking that really examines all the subtleties, including voluntary sex work and the related issues of bodily autonomy and inherent risk that goes along with it. But it’s evident—in her acknowledgements and the book itself—Taylor has done her research. Not only does Kanika’s experience accurately mirror the actual reported experiences of many teenaged human trafficking victims, Taylor also uses subplots involving Kanika’s deceased parents and a voluntary sex worker named Ru to provide balance in her examination of sex work.

Ride or Die’s pacing and design is perfect for reluctant readers—the larger font, short, basic sentences and fast-moving plot will help keep teens turning the pages until they reach the satisfying ending.

There might be a bump or two along the way though, due to a couple of minor writing quirks throughout the book. There are a couple of moments when Kanika’s age feels inconsistent; while we realize later in the book that Kanika is 15 when the story begins, this fact is undermined by an early comment, where Kanika describes Gabe as “the boy who had been teaching Panama about older kid stuff, like kissing.”

The frequent use of specific verbs like “squealed excitedly,” which appears twice in two consecutive pages, and a heavy use of dialogue tags like “sang,” and “worried” and “laughed” instead of a simple “said” also felt jarring at times.

But overall, the writing flows well and Taylor’s fine story development and research skills outweigh these small writing issues. Ride or Die is an important cautionary tale for young-adult readers and a solid option for reluctant readers looking for a realistic page-turner.

Ride or Die
Wanda Lauren Taylor
Lorimer Publishing