Issue 1.1 | Entanglements

Life is made up of infinite entanglements—situations, places, relationships that trap us and embroil us—leaving us perplexed and tangled up in the intricacies of our worlds. Yet, these experiences shape us at every stage of life. Like a weed growing between cracks in the sidewalk, our entanglements force us into new paths of growth and resilience. flo. online Issue 1.1 focuses on the complexity of entanglements in our lives and our relationships to the entangling moments we have lived through. After all, what are we without our intricate complications, our little perplexities, our never-ending misadventures: our entanglements?

What is Real Life? (video)

Madeleine Merritt

Madeleine Merritt is an Ottawa-based artist with a research-based approach to visual art and storytelling interacting with the creative process. Their work often engages with satire and the absurd, and bridges ideas of crafty and dignified art. Often, their work comments on technology and pop culture in the form of "personal" narrative. Through exposures in varying formats (photographic, mechanically-printed, hand-printed) and integrations of hand-drawn imagery, they unfold the traditional "comic book" and present narratives as extensions of story panels.

Train 46

June Lin

The Geminids, mid-winter meteors.

Unspoken wishes streaking across the sky.

If I wanted fire I could’ve lit it,

Flame like breathing on a drunk man’s skin.

I didn’t.

You used to be more tragic than a stained

Glass window, rainwater like tears

Down your tortured face.

Now I’m starting to forget what it looks like.

It’s raining meteors tonight.

I’m shaking on the train home

As I pass through your city.

I was too young to hold everything you gave me,

But then again, so were you.

June Lin is a writer from Canada. She loves practical fruits, like clementines and bananas. More of her work can be found in issues of perhappened, Gone Lawn, and Vagabond City. Her debut chapbook, "how to construct a breakup poem," is out now from fifth wheel press. She tweets sometimes at @junelinwrites.

Possession

David Bergin

Without cause, but with good affect

I bore the brunt, bent tempered steel

flexibility into strength.

The wound is deep. I can bear.

The sheet folds. It does not tear.

What comes of me, I cannot say.

High voltage currency flows

through my economic veins.

To possess is to be possessed;

with understanding comes control.

The spirit now belongs to me;

of the Label’s prison, I am free

What comes of this, I cannot say.

The wound is deep. I can bear

the obsession, is one

I now possess. The ownership

has set me free.

David Bergin is a retired social science high school teacher who was born and raised in Ottawa where he pursued his 31 year teaching career. He currently lives in Carlingwood where he writes as a way of expressing a number of his historical and philosophical beliefs. While taking a creative writing course in poetry, he received an honourable mention in Carleton’s school wide writing contest.

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Renad Amash

I walk into the clinic and the doctor comes, a very kind old Arab man who reminded me of my deceased grandfather.

He asks me “How can I help you?” I want to say that I don’t think anyone will ever be able to help me, that I am way too deep into a hole no one will ever be able to pull me from.

Instead I say “I am here to get some very urgent referrals.”

He asks me about my symptoms, his face shows a lot of concern. “You are a very young lady, how did you get to this point?”

I respond saying “Just stuff back home” with tears rolling down my face. He advises me to go the hospital, he writes me a letter that I can provide to the hospital so I can be taken seriously: “Please assess 20 yrs old female, refugee status, severe depression and anxiety, auditory and visual hallucinations, I think she needs to be admitted.”

He makes me promise to not end my life, that there’s so much to look for. But the only thought I had then was “Like what?”

I go to the hospital, I enter the urgent care, they ask me for my health card, I explain to them that I don’t have one and offer them my refugee claimant document. I couldn’t read the reaction on the face of the guy at the reception, he tells me to go sit and wait. I go to sit and pull a comic to read, I indulge into the story of a girl who also didn’t like it abroad but couldn’t survive back home either.

I only stop when a young White woman starts hysterically crying in the waiting room. Her boyfriend brought her to the hospital. What an absurd concept having a boyfriend is, and to come with him to the hospital? Very implausible. Sometimes I forget that you can actually ask people to be there for you when you need them. I have never tried that.

I talk to three different nurses, and eventually they call my name, “Renad Abdlaziz room number 4 please,” the doctor comes, it’s a young White woman this time.

She asks what brought me to the hospital, I tell her about the referrals, she seems very confused and starts asking me to describe my mental health. I hate explaining things so I try to pull out the letter the other doctor gave me, but I couldn’t find it, one of the nurses took it. I think about telling her that I have lost my way. That I am not exactly sure I have ever discovered it in the first place. That I am very sad here, yet I don’t think I’d be happy back home. That home is a very strange concept to me. That I seem to hate it everywhere I go, that I have ran out of places, that I don’t know what to do. That I wake up, and think, how many more days will I have to live through this. That I’m constantly avoiding the calls from my mom because I don’t want

her to know that I am not doing okay. That I’m exhausted by naming the reasons of why do I seem to be uninterested in everything. That I am so tired of having to tell myself it’s fine every time I dip into my savings. That I can’t stop thinking about ending all the close relationships I

have. That I don’t see a future for myself, that I feel like I have wasted my entire life, that I am not okay and never been. But I decide to just tell her that my mental health has been declining, and my therapist thinks I need to see a psychiatrist.

She asks some follow up questions, leaves the room, and comes back with a couple documents. She explains that she has contacted a psychiatrist, and he made a few suggestions, and one of them that I should be put on a very low dose of an antipsychotic called quetiapine. She affirms me that it’s just to help me sleep at night and make me feel calm during the day.

When my roommates saw my hospital bracelet, they seemed surprised and said “You don’t look like someone who was a patient.” I didn’t get it, what does a person receiving medical treatment look like? They started interrogating me, “What is the cause?”, “When did this start?”, “Why have you never mentioned that you’re struggling?”

I wanted to tell them that it’s not easy to just casually bring up the story of your mental illness, that it’s very painful to pick at these wounds, that it’s very difficult to admit there’s so many wrong things when I don’t seem like anything is wrong with me at all, but I said nothing.

Renad Ammash is a queer refugee who has been living in Ottawa for three years. Renad is very interested in literature, particularly nonfiction, but is also a lover of all forms of art.