Editor: Elizabeth Phillips
Volume 26, Number 4, Spring 1999
featuring: Sara Cassidy, Marlene Cookshaw, Lorna Crozier, John Donlan, Barbara Fletcher, Gillian Harding-Russell, Cellan Jay, Treena Kortje, Hannah J. Main van der Kamp, Mary Maxwell, Miranda Pearson, Trevor Robertson, Glen Sorestad, Virgil Suarez, Derk Wynand, Cyril Dabydeen, Bonnie Dunlop, Douglas Glover, Neil Grimmett, Lee Henderson, Rabindranath Maharaj, Sheila Peters, Robert Strandquist, Leona Theis, Thelma Pepper
Excerpts
by Lee Henderson
Whose baby hands were soft and instinctive, clenching indiscriminately around fingers lain in her palm, whose legs shot into the air like sensitive feelers, probing and tasting the air of her crib; whose stomach was as soft as kneaded dough and bare for a mouth to press against and make loud raspberries; whose baby cry she never lost even when she was six, crying when i forced her out of my room and pinched her toe when slamming the door, crying when i told her she was stupid, crying when i strangled her, and crying when i told her i didnt like her; whose memory was idiot savantish, or photographic at least, remembering things from when she was less than a year old: the colour of the shirt I wore the first time she had a fever and was taken to the doctor, the name of the dead barber that used to cut my hair, before he died-who she had met once when she was two; whose hair, as a baby, began to grow in leafy tufts from behind her easrs and turned long an dflowing and the colour of bittersweet chocolate, whose name for fear was "the Sheep"; whose nightmares accosted us both because she insisted on sleeping in my bedroom; whose first word at five months(!) was "Ben," my own name; whose favourite food was bananas; whose smell was always slightly of bananas; whose constant reminder was that i didn't like her, that i was as close to hating her as a brother could be, that she was not wanted around me; whose own name was Christine, is now long dead.
