Can one dream while lying awake? This proximity of cloud. Consensus, the end of parenthetical. Draws curtains, threat. This pragmatism: my mother gave birth to it. Melancholy, melancholy. Ask anything you want. What measure, propositions. Withdraw. Jolting, epiphanic effect. This sentence, shadows; these missives on death. Slammed door, silver lining. Declarative: I would have liked to move the earth. Imagine, the desire for mute prose. Liquid. This body or death. This end of text.
rob mclennan’s latest titles are On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025) and the forthcoming the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025). He is currently Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival. https://robmclennan.substack.com/
A month ago my boyfriend gave me a carnation I didn’t want it but now I’m stuck with it
At first I thought maybe I wanted it most women love carnations but the more I thought about it the less I wanted it I’m too young and carnations have always scared me
I tell my parents I don’t want it they say that I have to keep it
I tell my sister that I’m scared she says that I’m lucky because she’s always wanted one
I ask my friend if she knows how to dispose of it she says that I should ask a professional
I ask a professional if he can help me he says that it’s against the law
I tell my boyfriend that if men were given carnations they would be able to dispose of them whenever they wanted
I don’t know what to do most carnations are pink but mine is yellow
Originally from Embro, Ontario, Hannah Kirwin moved to Ottawa in 2018. She loves reading, writing and gardening. Currently, she is a first-year Master of International Affairs student studying at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University. Upon completing her undergraduate degree in English with a concentration in Creative Writing, she decided to submit some of her written works to Sumac Literary Magazine with the hope of getting published.
I met you on a Tuesday Lost in the woods And your dandelion-seed touch Set my worried mind free While my body turned to dead weight In a broken lawn chair Ever since that night I’ve been reaching for you Every time I’ve had enough Of twisting and bending
And wrenching myself into knots When the tension starts to feel Like snapping bones I reach for you And when we kiss My muscles unclench So I keep coming back To your foggy embrace Even though I’ve been told You’ll ruin me in the long run I don’t care about the long run When I can’t even walk
Here and now I’m falling Deeper and deeper But you drag me out of the fire And I know this crutch Is crippling me But I keep reaching For a taste of the ecstasy You gave me A moment of leaden-limbed bliss That I’ve been gasping for Ever since
Laura Gillis is a third-year journalism student at Carleton University. Her poem “Seasonal Obsession” won Sumac’s summer postcard contest. She is a writer and storyteller born and raised on Treaty 4 territory.
She was tucked in between a box of junk and a ratty old sweater, only the top of her dull head sticking out amongst the mess.
Head.
Hands.
Chest.
That was all she was. I thought she was the most beautiful thing I ever saw. I took her home and washed her. My crude hands gently scrubbed away the dirt with a warm cloth.
(I could feel her warmth beneath my palms.)
I think my cat is jealous of her.
We spend hours talking.
(She is a great listener).
I show her my favourite books.
(She likes Frankenstein the most).
I dress her up in tank tops and sweaters and dresses.
(Her body never fits them quite right).
She is just like me, in some ways,
Too quiet, with a face that doesn’t move when it’s supposed to.
She stares too much.
I know what it is like to be made of parts that
don’t fit together just right.
Her joints are old and clunky and move slower than they should.
Her face is a blank slate where emotions should be, but I don’t mind.
When I run my fingers along the smooth, bumpy curve of her breast,
I can feel her heart underneath, pounding in rhythm with mine.
Dull and steady.
That is enough.
Today, my mannequin kissed me on the lips.
It happened when I was comparing the size of our hands.
(Mine are far larger than hers, I think she likes that).
She leaned forward and whispered in my ear. I wish I could have heard her. (I’m sorry, I’m sorry).
I cling to her desperately. Lips touch plastic.
Cold.
Dead.
Warm.
Alive.
My teardrops blot on her hardened surface. They roll down her smooth cheeks. Boys don’t cry.
My fingers yearn for her heart, pulsating in my palm. I want to consume her. Let her consume me.
I claw and scrape at my chest, peeling back layers of slippery pink flesh. I destroy myself and build my body up again. She is made of marble, and I am a lump of clay. I am a monstrosity. (Kiss me anyways).
You cling to her. This girl you could be, this woman that she is.
She drew herself out of the rubble and made a spectacle of herself.
She rips out your rib with loving delicatesse, a plastic bone that glows in the dark. (You feel humbled. As if such a beautiful creature could ever be fashioned from the likes of you).
The Garden of Eden is no longer yours.
(Was it ever?)
(can you own what was never made for you?)
I want to live like my mannequin.
Words unsaid lodge in my throat.
Étouffer.
A transitive verb.
In transition.
I trace a finger down her spine. Her sunflower dress is crumpled around her waist. The rays of sun streaming through the curtains turn her into a dappled fawn, newly born and clumsy. She is femininity and beauty enveloped in a blank plastic slate.
She is the epitome of womanhood.
(Can I be a real girl, too?)
My mannequin lays beside me as I sleep. I hold her close to my chest. We erupt into licks of white flames, sparking and consuming, shedding the weight of darkness with our light. For the first time, I can breathe.
For the first time, I hear my mannequin whisper.
(You’re breathtaking.)
(There are not enough words to describe what we are.)
(I wish you would let yourself be like me.)
(I know you.)
(I see you.)
(I love you.)
Parker Thomas Paquette is a second-year student at Carleton University, currently enrolled in the Creative Writing Concentration of the English department. When he is not typing away at his desk, Parker spends his time reading, drawing, browsing the shelves of the library, purchasing far too many journals, and creating meaning out of everything. He cites his inspirations as Lisa Hanawalt, Kimya Dawson, T.J. Klune, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the “camp” of vintage horror media. Parker acknowledges that Carleton University resides on the traditional, unceded territories of the Algonquin and Anishinaabe nations, and he thanks the caretakers for their continual dedication and kindness to the land.
A Microsoft 365 subscription costs 179 dollarydoos, equating 15 pints per annum. Therefore, you should stay on mine, even though I’m more than antipodean. At this point it’s not even interdependence, you insist, but utilitarianism, yielding warmth and fuzziness. AMP blurbs warn a single 100-word email from GPT-4 wastes 519mL of water in cooling processes. I ask directly. The claim that generating a 100-word email requires 519mL of water is likely an oversimplified calculation based on the environmental cost of training and running LLMs. Assigning a precise water cost to something as small as a 100-word response is highly context-dependent. Water cost varies significantly based on the time of year. “Try again” is a valid prompt. Analysis found that ChatGPT consumes just over one 500mL bottle of water per 100-word request. How to boil an egg. What is the meaning of life? Traditional search engines are gentler. Training GPT-3 is estimated to have used 1 300MWh of electricity, the equivalent of 1.625 million hours of watching Netflix. Almost half of respondents used ChatGPT casually. One application. LLMs are most effectively used for producing text, so use them to assist with writing documents. One heaping teaspoon. Provide as much detail as possible in one prompt to get the most out of it. Please. The result will only be as good as the information initially provided. What I wouldn’t give for one pint, rounded up, spent on a summer night with you.
Feat. ChatGPT-o1 preview and found text from this article.
Ealhwine is the pseudonym of a Carleton alumnus turned AI trainer.
One must imagine, the Kayal that flows to the sea, to be pristine, to be untouched. Allowed to be. but we wade, you wade, not you, you will hear. The sounds of feet, sinking, caressing, mud and glass mud and glass, the lurches of a crowded train, the tardy metal behemoth groaning under its legacy’s weight. But under the bridge that holds the train, lies the water, ebbing with tears, flooding with fears, rising with groans, falling with sores she has grown, never grown, left alone to froth, to foam, to seethe and to churn. She carved into the land with her current, and now she gnaws at the rest since she knows she’s worth more. She has held your dreams, she has held your beliefs, she has held onto your lies and she will no longer be the cradle for the life you keep, the lives you reap, the secrets you tell, the hurt you sow, She will course through the land with dreams of her own, with stories she has written with love that is hers and hers alone. And she will be the Kayal she wants to be
Omar Shaji is a second-year undergraduate English major with a concentration in Creative Writing. He hails from India and is an international student who spent his childhood swimming, running and lighting things on fire. He is entranced by the writing of Ruskin Bond and is currently trying to grapple with the fact that his dislike for otters is not shared by many. Omar Shaji acknowledges that Carleton University rests on the unceded territory of the Anishinaabe – Algonquin Nation. He has published a poem in Sumac before and is grateful for being given the opportunity to submit a piece this year.
Your mossy curls, longer now, hang from tired branches and sway in stagnant wind, distorted. Your decrepit dance in stale air still beckons for dormant woods
The wooded ribcage trembles as you take your greedy breath.
Insatiable roots wrap around my chest drinking my dread, rhythmic thumping beneath the soil. I stumble through the fog down the trail Amygdala, forgotten, spare from familiar footprints left by smaller soles
You found me for the hundredth time.
Hannah Paterson is a third-year English major with a concentration in Creative Writing at Carleton. Throughout her time at school, she has had the pleasure of engaging in several creative writing classes focusing on a wide variety of genres. Over the past year, she has become increasingly interested in writing poetry and was involved in writing, editing, and designing a poetry anthology dedicated to Seamus Heaney with her Celtic Literatures class in 2024.
I am walking to the bus stop when I come across a dinner party I was not invited to.
A meeting of like minds, yellowed legs, and ringed bills. They watch me like hunters tracking prey.
Feathers twitch in anticipation of fallen offerings: leftover crumbs of food court fries they will descend upon like blood flies.
A brave one, their leader, perhaps, strolls over to me.
The admiral of an avian army, she puffs her chest to show off many medals.
“Watch me swallow this one,” she says, and the parking lot falls silent.
“Watch me gulp him down whole and hollering, worming his way down my throat.
He is big but my stomach is bigger and God knows I am starving,
for I was made to eat men and beasts and garbage bags
so watch me swallow him down.”
Her underlings laugh their cackling cries, beaks to the sky as though laughing at God Himself.
And then, as quickly as they gathered, they are gone.
Someone tosses an apple core into the bin with a rattling bang and the army takes to the sky, wings fluttering, playing with the wind.
An entire squadron lost in a moment.
I do not see them retreat.
I board the bus.
Percy Hentschel is a first-year Biology and Humanities student at Carleton. He has no previous publication experience, besides a self-published chapbook.
Apathy is the enemy of Idealism, though Idealism has yet to notice. This lucid hatred may be the only thing Apathy cares about. The two women stand together at a window overlooking the city, where Idealism laughs and ponders the view and gently pokes fun at the people as they scurry to work; Apathy sees only the streaks on the glass and the reflection of her own miserable face and so she refuses to partake in the fun. Idealism finds this behaviour charming and, in her opinion, is indicative of their close friendship, where the silence is golden if you allow it to rest.
Pragmatism only knew the textbook meaning of joy until he met Idealism. Sometimes he doesn’t understand what he’s done to make her laugh so uproariously, but it makes him want to take her in his arms. Pragmatism and Idealism are husband and wife, where the wife wears an eternal megaphone strapped to her chest and her husband rubs her feet at night. Apathy spends evenings like these with bare legs, waiting outside nightclubs and blowing blueberry vape clouds into the faces of strangers. Apathy only sleeps with someone once she knows how she’ll leave them.
Sometimes Pragmatism’s act of physical affection makes Idealism cry and cry. Pragmatism thinks this is because he’s hitting the right pressure points, but Idealism can cry with such ferocity that it frightens him. She tells him the world is so beautiful and so ugly, but the ugliness is something she never sees and can only feel in the bones of her feet. She tells him it walks with her, and she says it can only be her fault if it spreads. Pragmatism knows deeply how wrong she is, but he just stays, silently, and that seems to be enough for Idealism in these long nights. When she emerges from the bedroom in the late morning light, with sleep still in her eyes, she finds him making pancakes. He watches her eat as last night’s admission becomes a breeze; something never meant to stay.
Idealism likes to try new things with her whole heart. She picks up paintbrushes and pens and protest signs. Boxing gloves and running shoes. Dostoyevsky and calculus textbooks; scholarship applications. When Idealism shoots for the moon or somehow manages to murder a cactus, Pragmatism can find her supine on the floor for a month (or three months, or ten).
Pragmatism leans down, strokes her hair, whispers to her: “Take a break and come back stronger.”
When at last she rises, Pragmatism says: “There is a next step here. We will find it together.”
Idealism might resemble Apathy when she can’t pick herself up from the floor, but regardless of appearance, Apathy is not present for Idealism’s hibernation. Apathy is out meditating wherever the world is burning.
Idealism has never been able to shake the feeling that one day she will set out from her front door and start to walk the earth. She will grow taller and taller as she wanders down its hills, skips along its rivers, waves to its mountains, and drinks from its oceans—until one day, she is taller than the tallest trees, unsure whether she is rooting into the earth or reaching for the sky, or both. Idealism knows in her heart that time is a Mobius strip where you only find yourself walking forward. The realization that a shattered glass can never leap back into her hand intact is a puzzle to her: worth a slight furrowed brow but nothing more.
Pragmatism watches Idealism as she plants her feet into her yoga mat and does her asanas. Her dedication to touching the sky—if only in her mind—inspires him to stretch further for his goals, as his goals—once, in plausible reach—are now further away. He allows them to expand slightly, like a balloon his delicate nature will never allow him to pop. Idealism inspires Pragmatism to consider that his dreams will become airborne.
Idealism says to Pragmatism: “I’d never change you.”
Pragmatism says: “You have, and you will again, because you’ve never stopped.”
Pragmatism and Idealism need to kiss on the mouth and roll on the floor together while giving the middle finger to Apathy, who is ignorant of the love people can make to one another; the love an idea can have for another; the idea of love as a balancing act that makes both parties grow taller.
Love is a garden, and if you’re lucky, then sometimes you find potatoes in it. Idealism might marvel in the morning light at the flowering plants and clap her hands; Pragmatism might return in the early afternoon to prune the flowers, so the potatoes will continue to grow steadily beneath the soil. In this perfect world, he presses the purple flowers gently in a book, to preserve them for Idealism to coo and marvel at once more. He presses them into the shape of his heart, and holds steadfast, so he is prepared to give her the gift of summertime when reality becomes dreary or cold or wet—and of course: she may be on the floor again. He would do anything to hear her voice ring out when the silence around them is damp and beckoning.
Right now, Pragmatism and Idealism are eating au gratin in the summertime, holding hands and looking at the trees and clouds from her small, tender balcony.
Nobody cares where Apathy is at all.
Rebecca Dougan has a background in mathematics and engineering, from which she balked at continuing. She now finds herself at Carleton University studying English with a concentration in Creative Writing, where small crumbs of her love for mathematics still turn up in her writing. She has never been happier.
new perspective, renewal can’t imagine mere semantics cool confesses salt of the earth pulling the trigger to heaven
everything changed
really, really persistent you spent weeks looking for that confidence
Lauren Bacall’s a breath of fresh air weightless knot (there’s only one Bacall) the smile coveted
archive after-hours jukebox memories classic portraits fairground at home one last audition
create awakening impossible to imagine winter is coming
half ruminating I had saved his life, now he belongs to the angels Shakespeare is God
rummage through the costume bin mask and unidentified attraction absorbing boys with toys
smart people keep climbing live for no other medium never let it fade down on one knee You always wanted more I do not have a gentle heart
Frances Boyle (she/her) is an Ottawa author of both poetry and fiction. Her latest poetry books are Openwork and Limestone (Frontenac House 2022) and Light-carved Passages (Doubleback Books 2024), a reissue of her debut collection as a free open-access e-book. Her first novel, Skin Hunger, is forthcoming in 2026. Frances was a long-time board member at Arc Poetry Magazine, and currently helps run VERSeFest, Ottawa’s international poetry festival, and the League of Canadian Poets. Apart from admiring the view from Dunton Tower at poetry readings, her main connection to Carleton is a magical poetry class taught by Michelle Desbarats several years ago. Visit www.francesboyle.com and follow @francesboyle19 on Instagram, Blue Sky and elsewhere.
