“I’ve heard,” says Kristen, shifting gears as she pulls out of the ER parking lot, “I’ve heard that quadriplegics, they can get off to someone stimulating their ear. Is that what this was?” “I’m not quadriplegic,” I say, wishing I’d had the foresight to puncture my left eardrum instead of my right. “I mean was it, like, gratifying somehow.” “Not like that.” “Like that?” “Not like anything. It hurt.” She taps her index fingers on the steering wheel restlessly. “I’m just saying, ever since we were kids—” “What, you mean the fingernails? Everyone does that.” “And your scalp, too, and the acne ..read more

From India’s dirt forests, into the elephant chest of the West we brought a child. Years erupt on skin. You are larger than Canada!—you are not a child. We all see things we do not want to see. In a white world, my father left my mother—she knew she would be a prisoner as soon as she got a child. Distance between school and war crushed to powder. Against the gunshot: a child. In the mugshot: a child. I am a good person, I live for others. If those others too live for others, are we not all alone, thought a child. I wished to kill god when he stabbed needles in my womb. Yet I have known women w ..read more

Plenitude Magazine’s Genre Bender category is a new call for submissions of hybrid writing. Our aim is to publish work that bends boundaries, to offer a space for literature that doesn’t fit standard conventions of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction. Does your work blur the lines between genres? Examples could include literary blends of two or all three standard literary categories; cut-and-paste flash fiction; found poems from documents or journals; erasure; conversations; collage text, you name it! Surprise us. We look forward to reading your cutting-edge submission. At this time, submi ..read more

Reviewed by Shannon Page Christina Cooke, Broughtupsy (House of Anansi Press, 2024), 240 pp., $22.99. Born in Jamaica, Christina Cooke is now a Canadian citizen living in New York City. Broughtupsy, her debut novel, is both a gritty, queer coming-of-age tale and a nuanced dissection of grief, identity, and language. Set in Vancouver and Jamaica in 1996, it is narrated in the first person by Akúa, a twenty-year old Jamaican Canadian lesbian. After her little brother, Bryson, dies of a form of inherited sickle-cell disease, like the one that killed her mother ten years earlier, Akúa breaks up wi ..read more

Plenitude Magazine is once again increasing payment to its writers! Paying LGBTQ2S+ writers an industry-standard honorarium for their poetry and prose continues to be very important to us. Thanks to a generous grant boost from the Canada Council for the Arts, Plenitude will increase payment to writers as per the following: Poetry: from $50 to $60 CAD per poem Prose: from $100 to $125 CAD per fiction / creative nonfiction piece This increase will take effect May 1, 2024. Looking to submit to Plenitude Magazine? Head over to our Submittable page to send us your best poems, short stories, and m ..read more

Reviewed by Andrew Woodrow-Butcher Greg Kearney, An Evening with Birdy O’Day (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2024), 336 pp., $24.95. At 69 years old, Roland is long past the peak of his hairdressing career. And after 25 years together, he and his handsome, chronically ill boyfriend Tony have settled into a comforting rhythm. Between setting perms, correcting highlights, and occasionally venturing to the bar for a few too many drinks, Roland still keeps a scrapbook about his childhood friend, faded pop star Birdy O’Day. And when Birdy announces, decades after the peak of his stardom, a concert in their na ..read more

You are ninety-eight and blind and nearly deaf and can hardly walk and live mostly in another world now, a world in which dolls can talk and each person appears twice, and in this other world, I like girls, or so you tell my mum matter-of-factly one afternoon as she sits with you in the care home, “I think your daughter likes girls,” which of course is true in this world too, so perhaps our worlds are not so far apart, and when you speak this secret, something unspools inside me, I feel you reaching out across generations and geography, I remember the names you’ve called people like me and won ..read more

Deirdre opens the door, a vision of opulence with onyx hair and topaz eyes. One look at her and Cassie forgets about Ben and the kids. She finds herself in the narrow entryway of Deirdre’s apartment. Cooking smells of oil and garlic permeate the air, settling in her throat. “It’s been too long!” Deirdre exclaims, pulling her in for a hug. She wears ripped jeans and a white tank top with no bra. The pebble of her nipple presses into Cassie’s clavicle. The last time they saw each other was Deirdre’s wedding day. Today her ring finger is bare. Cassie walks behind Deirdre, noting that even in her ..read more

Liquid dark slides down our throats, sloshing against curved glass. I place my goblet back on the dash. The evening air shifts, a mineral of many disguises. Body twines within itself. Groaning from the cold, the liver and the heart sit — at the centre of our existence. † A deep and pulsating gloomp gloomp, gloomp gloomp, trails along in our wake. Are we disjointed? Disc-jointed, rattle and bone, calcium, stone; we dance up an alchemy of black water and damp soil. Drag our shoulder blades up and wonder, what does it mean to fall? † The male nightingale, I am told, has one of the most complex an ..read more

And while I may look like a prophecy-monger, we shall confine our attention to the clump of houses in a seaport subdivision, home to Lancelotti the Italian abbot, a respectable and veracious man save for his tentacle suckers, big as saucer lids. Absolutely I am governed by sunbeams. When death comes to dock, the living fall under the spell of its sail. If a shadow spills over a milk crate, your secrets will unravel in a long silken skein at your feet. All night I dream of Jane kissing my hands. Each kiss is barely equal to a single speck of sleep. A pilot and the ghost of her father discover t ..read more