Long Exposure Magazine Issue 4, October 2016 | Page 12

The expectation

of gratitude had

long given

way to uncertainty’s

dull resignation before I

finally squeezed tubes

onto palette, tested

colours against each other,

coerced the daughter to sit

still for two

goddam minutes.

But here on our side

of the canvas

the unprimed you sinks

teeth into my breast

like a suckling cub.

The fading

light of you siphons

this lifeblood

from my brush into your raw

fibrous veins just when

your sister-flesh breaks pose

to light a “coffin nail”

from my pack of Marlboros

lying on the nearby

glass table.

Steven Mayoff was born in Montreal and now lives on Prince Edward Island, a province on Canada’s east coast. His fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals across Canada and the U.S. as well as in Ireland, Algeria and France. His story collection “Fatted Calf Blues” was published in 2009 by Turnstone Press and won a PEI Book Award in 2010. His novel “Our Lady Of Steerage” was published in 2015 by Bunim & Bannigan Inc. and his first collection of poems, “Swinging Between Water And Stone”, will be released by Guernica Editions in 2019.

Leonard Fligel was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. As a teen he studied art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art with Arthur Lismer, who was a member of the famous Canadian art collective, The Group Of Seven. As a young man he worked in Alaska so he could earn money to travel and live in Mexico, studied in Florence, Italy and settled down in Glasgow, Scotland. Leonard now lives in a nursing home in Glasgow where he is struggling with the late stages of dementia, although on his lucid days he still picks up pen and paper when the mood. strikes him. and draws.

10