Summer 2025, Volume 46, No. 2

$14.95

Cover Image by Tétro Design

MRB Fiction Contest
Winner: Rose Cullis
Honourable Mention: Jaksyn Peacock

MRB Poetry Contest
Winner: Cassandra Eliodor
Honourable Mention: Kevin Irie

MRB Creative Non-Fiction Contest
Winner : Siavash Saadlou
Honourable Mention : LJ Weisberg

Fiction
Kevin Calder
Julia Lin
Michael Matejcek
Alex Turner with Lucian Childs

Poetry
Noah Cain
Michael Goodfellow
Warren Heiti
Jordan Mounteer
Anna Navarro
Molly Peacock
Vivek Sharma
John Wall Barger

Creative Non-Fiction
Kate Anderson-Bernier
Susan Glickman
Erika Thorkelson

Non-Fiction Preview
Smoker
By Erika Thorkelson

I found the pack of smokes on top of our neighbour’s fridge. Looking back, I’m sure the pack was stashed there to be out of reach of her three boys, but I had grown just tall enough to be able to reach it and to construct a whole framework around it that in retrospect makes no sense: I had never seen the mother of the boys smoking. Therefore, she didn’t smoke. Therefore, the cigarettes weren’t hers and wouldn’t be missed. The rest arises from that single faulty premise.

It was the summer of 1990. I was ten years old and had been tasked with the responsibility of making the world a better place. Our parents had been hippies, and we were told all the time that they had changed the world for us, but there was still work to do. We sang “Baby Beluga” with Raffi and promised to save the whales. There was a hole in the ozone layer, and we had to rid the world of the scourge of hairspray bottles that used chlorofluorocarbons. There was something about acid rain.

I remember growing up with two distinct stories about cigarettes. On one hand, there were the beautiful women in magazine ads, their long fingers wearing Virginia Slims like jewellery. There was Madonna challenging the camera with a smoke hanging between two plump lips and Karen Allen’s tough-as-nails Marion Ravenwood blowing smoke in the face of a Nazi scientist in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. On the other hand, teachers showed us pictures of blackened lungs and hearts. They told us of people who breathed through holes in their necks and had parts of their faces removed because of cancer. They armed us with all this horror and sent us home to do battle with our parents for their very lives. “You can get them to quit,” they told us “Just be persistent.”

Poetry Preview
after john prine dies
By Noah Cain

swallows through my window
through the swirling april snow

antenna tv signal
flickers faint as hope

babies breathe in dreams
from wounds shadows flow

email my dead dad
call his empty phone

pray with the dial
of a broken radio

Fiction Preview
Sea Change
By Alex Turner with Lucian Childs

Anxious to get out of the drizzle and cold, I park my beat-up VW Beetle on Hastings and—shoulders hunched, jacket collar turned up—hustle over the rain-slicked sidewalk. In the entryway of an abandoned building, a sleeper lies entombed in a cardboard sarcophagus. Hookers sheltering under a tattered awning regard me hungrily. Moments later, a sunkeneyed fellow blunders by, his gaze transfixed by the neon in the barred window of a pawn shop.

January, 1964. Downtown Eastside, Vancouver.

Not exactly my idea of where I’d like to spend a Saturday night. But this is where I find the Montreal Club, the only place in town where I can have a good time, dance—and with any luck, meet someone. For nearly five years, that possibility has lured me through these depressing surroundings to this gay dive. Since I split my small BC hometown, ditched the whole ingénue schtick and its dreary high school certainties, I have been making discoveries and mistakes, making up for lost time. One-night stands, romantic bust-ups, next morning hangovers—I suffer them willingly.

Before ducking off Hastings, I catch a glimpse of the Smilin’ Buddha, a nightclub catering to rockers and wannabe hipsters slumming it Eastside. Its cheerful illuminated sign and prominent position on the strip, the boisterous crowd of punks lounging out front, contrast sharply with the nameless entranceway, the deserted, dingy and poorly lit stairwell that I now begin to ascend. I cast repeated glances over my shoulder until I reach the tenuous safety of the top landing. I press a buzzer and wait.