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LE Fiction, Andreia Rosanova

Eva’s Garden

By Andreia Rosanova

The voices from the other side of the courtyard, although blurred, reached Kasper’s ears in distinguishable tones. During summer, most of the younger students vacated the residence, Kasper was among the few who remained.

“You know, Anja, now that I’m in my 50’s, I like it even more.”

“Really?” A younger-sounding voice whispered.

“Yeah. I’m much more comfortable in my skin. I know what I like.” After a brief pause, she continued, “My life is also calmer. With no children to care for and the house all to myself, I let my mind wander into naughty thoughts.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I’m kind of revisiting fantasies from my younger years.”

There was the sound of chairs scraping against the floor as the younger woman spoke. “Fantasies? What kind of fantasies?”

“Nothing special, really. Like having sex outdoors, under the moonlight.”

“Outdoors? You mean in a public space?”

“Not exactly. I’d find that uncomfortable. Here in my garden, for example, would be great.”

Laughter filled the air. Kasper slid his chair closer to the wall separating the residence yard from the neighbor’s garden.

“That’s not naughty, Eva.”

Eva chuckled. “It’s because I only dared to share the softer of my fantasies.” A small hiatus followed. “You know what I’ve done recently? Since living on my own, I like to be naked around the house. One very hot evening, I even dared to lie here in the garden.”

“Naked?”

“Yep. Completely. There’s nothing more arousing than feeling the sun’s rays on your intimate parts.”

A mix of murmurs. The next phrase Kasper grabbed came from the younger voice.

“Aren’t you afraid someone might see you? I mean, it’s a student residence over there, isn’t it?”

“It is, but it’s for the art school, they’re mostly women. They all leave at this time of year anyway.” A short pause followed. “But you know what? Imagining one of those cute male students watching me just gives me more pleasure.”

Laughter erupted, then Kasper’s phone rang—damn it. He silenced it quickly.

“Was it your phone ringing, Anja?”

“No. It was yours.”

“Mine isn’t even here.”

A moment of silence.

“I think the noise came from the residence yard.”

“Oh, someone is there. Was I talking too loud?”

The voices lowered to a pitch Kasper could no longer hear.

***

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10/23/2026
New Calls: Sexual Congruency, Dreams and Demons

“Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.”
— Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

Go to our Submissions platform.You’ll find descriptions of our current publication interests on Limit Experience Magazine’s Duosuma page.

Today, we opened

Sexual Congruency and the Wilds Within. Read the topic parameters and get the closing date here.

Dreams and Demons. Get details here.

10/19/2026
Flaneur with Us: Bios

4 minute read

Introduction to the Ageless Sexuality Series and its Origin

This month I urbanize myself in the philosophic sense with the sense of impending change. The season is changing. The government is in limbo and I live underneath my aging skin with a sense of defiance, not toward others necessarily, but toward the looming sense of fear that permeates the public spaces around me. Intimacy is shaped by the subterfuge.

Once I set foot outside the security of my car I flaneur the park, the street that leads to the ocean and then the dock around my local library. I listen to the one inside as Sam Shepard puts it in his novel of that name.

The philosopher Walter Benjamin gave voice to the state that takes over when I roam my city, intimately connecting yet maintaining distance. I check into the computer station at the library and open a piece I wrote while the pandemic was raging in Peru. I think of the last great, bone nourishing embrace with a friend there on the cobblestone street by the mercado.

Urubamba Mountain Range

Surrounded by the Andes from the north and my indigenous Quechua neighbors to the East, I watch as a new phenomenon intermittently occurs in the dark of my bedroom at night. I chafe uneasily under the alpaca blankets warming my skin against the Andean chill. Episodic memories hover after midnight. They wait, transparent to waking life on the walkway outside my cottage door. Their presence informs my dreams, and even my breathing changes when they hover at the Sacsayhuaman ruins near up the hill from my Peruvian home. The horse trainer visits me one night and we sit, me in his lap, on my patio under the Calca sky.

He saddles a Pinto. I put my boot into his laced fingers as he raises me to the level of the ride. The horse and I gallop across the pastures to the edge of the mountain behind our houses. We take a rocky path, dogs from villagers napping at our heels part of the way. We crest to a plateau, lay in the grass overlooking the valley while the horses meander chewing juicy Bermuda cud.

I return to Los Angeles with a sense of curiosity about the state of the post quarantine metropolis. I walked the beaches along the surf on a rare rainy day. In my twenties as an actor this was my city in every sense; I avoided the blase attitude that the sociologist Georg Simmel thought the defining patterns of constancy with which being a city dweller confined you. It was a survival mechanism, he thought, that kept you from being overwhelmed. I didn’t need that in my twenties and now in the last third of my life it doesn’t seem to be available. And then, a stranger at a Tango lesson tales my hand and leads me toward a place my body drinks in the dance. Unspoken, ageless, a form of primal movement requiring trust. What does the flux we’re in mean for us 21st century inhabitants of cities around the globe? Where is our psychic suit of protection? Is it in the small gesture? Does it transcend time?

I find solace in my roots. I learned as a child the fluidity of nature because I was surrounded by pastures and wet weather creeks and cows and forests that yawned fluid and flexible as an umbrella over my budding sense of self. I call forward the dexterity of my rural youth today as I drive along ribbons of traffic, sit amidst the well and the struggling, allowing the one inside to shift the gears, turn the wheel and apply the brakes when necessary. The perceptions of the urban flaneur penetrate the Now with shades of gray, leaving the extremes of black and white as night seeps in gradations across the sky to day.

As I prepare each week’s new work for Limit Experience Magazine’s Ageless Sexuality series, I feel the work turn from dark to light and back again, sometimes with humor and ever punctuated with moments of quiet, stillness, and rage. No judgement, just lived experience opened to the digital page. The work, new and old brings me joy, contemplation and sometimes rubs against me. evening out rough spots it elucidates change, the only guarantee in life.

From My Balcony, Buenos Aires

After all, perspective is everything; when on the way to meet a friend, Uruguay refused my American passport. Shortly after a long ride into dawn, I stood in the border station watching the bus drive away. Several motorcyclists offered me a ride. We stopped and bought I ought a helmet, slung a leg over a tall stranger’s Harley and the took me to the nearest airport. I took a plane to my friend’s mountain town where we spent several days together. We ate nectarines in the shaft of sunlight over the sheets and communicated through out translation devices about our lives as parents, as visual artists and as new friends we bridged vast gaps on time. I never met his daughter but since I had seen her the year before in my vision in the desert of Joshua Tree I felt I knew her. I never told the man about this earlier meeting. The clock didn’t exist in that space but our connection somehow expanded even as I left post breakfast a week later. The liminal world can do this just as literature can. Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote a book about the kidnappings that took place in Argentina and I read it after I left the man. I went South to the end of the continent and in that city felt his presence and then eventually he again appeared. He’d been handed a Paris assignment and his plane stopped in Buenos Aires where I was lodged at their Congreso. I walked endlessly tracing paths I knew he had taken when he lived there when his daughter was a baby. I got messages he was nearby but I had immersed myself in Marquez; I missed his visit and have not seen him since. Perhaps I write submission calls for Limit Experience Magazine about the dynamics of this time curious about others’ rendezvous with timelessness and love.

AGELESS SEXUALITY SERIES

The Strange Hotel, Buenos Aires, Photo Credit: Nicolas Guerrero

A little about the writers you’ll meet; In the next few weeks you’ll have poetry and fiction and nonfiction through which to flaneur with men and women of many different perspectives:

Bio: ANDREIA RODRIGUES

Andreia Rodrigues, author of Sin & Other Stories, is a Brazilian writer based in Europe. Alongside her work in erotica, she has written a memoir, a romance novel, and a collection of autobiographical essays. Her work has appeared in literary collectives such as Bare Back Magazine and Feminine Collective. Through fiction and autobiographical narratives her writing is dedicated to helping women heal and transcend.

Bio: DIANE FUNSTON

Diane Funston lives in Marysville, CA and is originally from Rochester, NY. She began writing in adolescent angst which ultimately led her to a degree in English from CSU San Marcos. Diane has been published in numerous poetry journals. Her first chapbook was published by Foothills Publishing in 2022

BIO: LINDA MALM

Linda Malm was published as a teen and only returned to poetry after she retired as a college dean. She won a competition to write with the Robert Redford/NM Film Board enterprise and now is publishing poetry. In 2023 Kelsay Books published her first chapbook, “Winded from the Chase.”

BIO: JOHN DAVIS

John Davis is the author of Gigs, Guard the Dead and The Reservist. His work has appeared in DMQ Review, Iron Horse Literary Review and Terrain.org. He lives on an island in the Salish Sea and performs in several bands.

BIO: ANDREW PARKINSON

Andrew Parkinson lives and writes fiction in Vancouver, Canada. His recent work has appeared in DarkWinter Literary Magazine, Porch Literary Magazine, and a ‘long short story’ in The Write Launch. Forthcoming writing will appear in Queen’s Quarterly and Gaslamp Pulp.

10/17/2025
Limit Experience NEWS

FALL 2025

We’re putting the next series together from our most recent Ageless Sexuality: Libidinal Innocence and Wisdom call for submissions.

Next Friday, October 3, we’ll announce the new LE Authors lineup. Take a peak here on LEM in a week.

And, on Wednesday, October 1, a new call for submissions about the chaos of sexuality both personally and collectively begins:

READ the CALL: Figuring Feral: The Great Ephemeral Skin

“That is, to be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.” – Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing.” – Charles Bukowski

“Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces: not only the skin with each of its folds, wrinkles, scars, with its great velvety planes.” – Jean-Francois Lyotard

Go to our Duotrope Submissions page to see the calendar: Duosuma’s Limit Experience Magazine Call for Submissions.

Share this opportunity to become a part of the Limit Experience Magazine Contributor’s Mission with your writer groups and friends.

09/26/2025
BECOME A MEMBER
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Writing with pen and paper out of necessity once I reached South America, I found myself diving into a deeper relationship with the text…surprising revelations began to surface on the page. My work took on new dimensions.

So I lit a match, built this campfire, and invited others to gather around it. You are welcome here. Your words matter here. Our community is ready to celebrate your gifts, and push the boundaries of what literature can do.

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06/30/2025
LE Poetry, Manifestation for the Dead and Blue

Shan LYU

I.

I stepped into a street buried behind a hidden corner.

The sound of coffee grinding weaves through the streets and alleys,

French toast is sliced, a knife scraping against a porcelain plate, across the street under the gaze of a pale gray Gothic statue.

Blue pinpricks cover the stretched-out skin.

A woman in pain, a body indistinguishable and bodies tangled.

The air carries an inescapable scent of death.

A wave of dizziness washed over me.

II.

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BIO:

Shan Lyu is an artist and writer based in London. Having completed an MA from the University of the Arts London fine art program, she is taking on a creative writing and artistic practice based in UAL. She works across the mediums of prose, composition and sound art.

05/23/2025
Literary Events

Upcoming

DREAMS AND DEMONS

May 02 – Alaina Hammond – Theatre

May 10 – Editor’s Letter

May 16 – Christie Chandler Stahl – Poetry

May 23 – Shan Lyu – Poetry

May 30 – Kelly Piner – Fiction

June 06 – Craig Matsu-Pissot

June 13 – Robert Pope – Fiction

June 20 – Gerrard Sarnat – Poetry

June 27 – Thomas Penn Johnson – Nonfiction

July 04 – Hugh Findlay – Poetry

LEM NEWS

July 04 – Limit Experience Magazine’s SEVEN YEAR CELEBRATION!

05/20/2025
Under Love’s Influence

Alaina HAMMOND

MARA ROSE, 30s

JOSHUA, her husband, 30s

CHORUS 1 and CHORUS 2: Any age or gender.

Setting: An empty stage, populated only by the actors.

The dialogue takes place in MARA ROSE’s mind. When writing to JOSHUA, she speaks directly to the audience. The shifts in time can be depicted by changes in light, or just the actors’ body language. The CHORUS can speak from a distance or more closely interact with MARA ROSE and JOSHUA, to the director’s discretion. The pace should be quick, the dialogue at times overlapping with only a few significant pauses.

MARA ROSE: To my nearby darling: Today is the first Valentine’s Day since we met…wherein we’ll not be in each other’s arms.

JOSHUA: When you’re away, please write to me. Letters from my Valentine will speed my heart, and warm me.

MARA ROSE: Words drawn on paper are too remote, not real the way your touch is. I need your body beside mine!

JOSHUA: Wrong. You need nothing, outside yourself.

MARA ROSE: Perhaps, maybe not. I’ll miss you till I ache.

JOSHUA: I feel the same, my love. Aches heal. You’ll heal.

CHORUS 1: Heal.

CHORUS 2: Ache.

MARA ROSE: This place—

CHORUS 1 and CHORUS 2: St. Vincent’s Rehabilitation Facility.

MARA ROSE: This place is so pretty. On the outside, at least. But still I grind my teeth with my fellow inmates.

CHORUS 1: What a miserable vacation this is!

CHORUS 2: I need a drink!

CHORUS 1: Miserable!

CHORUS 2: Drink!

JOSHUA: It’s not so bad, my Darling Mara Rose. You’ll see. The days will fly by.

CHORUS 1 and CHORUS 2: Ha!

CHORUS 1: Does he not know how long a dry day lasts?

CHORUS 2: Tick. Eternity. Tock.

JOSHUA: There must be at least three heated pools here.

MARA ROSE: Good. Maybe if I drink enough chlorinated water, I’ll black out till my time is done.

JOSHUA: Don’t joke about that!

MARA ROSE: At least my humor’s dry.

CHORUS 1: Black humor.

CHORUS 2: Bitter ale.

JOSHUA: Yes, Honey. That’s the “spirit.”

MARA ROSE: Sorry, I don’t mean to “wine.”

JOSHUA: I could trade sober barbs with you all day.

MARA ROSE: I could try, I mean I could give it a “shot.”

JOSHUA: Which brings us here.

MARA ROSE: Which brings ME here. You’re free to go, no addiction binds you to this place. Or anywhere. You’re truly free.

JOSHUA: But I’m here with you, even as I leave.

CHORUS 1: Leave.

CHORUS 2: Here.

MARA ROSE: Oh god. Will you become possessive of my illness? Will you smell my breath with eyebrow raised, disguise it as a kiss? Will you measure how much juice I drink, worried it’s whetting my appetite, a chaser to something stiff? Will it become “our” alcoholism?

JOSHUA: Don’t be absurd. Although of course what’s yours is also mine. Sickness. Health.

MARA ROSE: I would have spared you…this. All this.

JOSHUA: You’re getting the help that you need. As such, you’re helping me.

CHORUS 1: Help.

CHORUS 2: Me.

MARA ROSE: I promise to no longer mistreat your wife.

JOSHUA: My lovely wife. My perpetual Valentine.

CHORUS 2: To pour much liquor down her throat, and numb her till she feels nothing, rapidly approaching nothing herself.

CHORUS 1: (Moving hands together until a dramatic clap) Closer closer closer closer CLOSER CLOSER (CLAP)!

CHORUS 2: In time we go from live to dead, no abstract between the two. You know this, you can’t blur it, and so you close your eyes.

MARA ROSE: Eyes closed, I move—gratefully—toward that which I fear. And to the abyss beyond it.

CHORUS 1: Death hardly frightens you then.

CHORUS 2: Not quite. It just seems less real.

MARA ROSE: With every drink, I’m closer to forgetting irrefutable, depressing facts. For a moment, I feel less mortal, less made of meat that’s doomed to decay, when my mind is enhanced by chemical madness. Immortal truths of light and air unravel in my consciousness…at cost to my liver. The false disconnect between brain and body kills me slowly.

JOSHUA: Last week, it damn near killed you fast. Live awhile yet, my love. The future’s bland without you in it.

MARA ROSE: Well…For you, I suppose I could be swayed. To stay—in this constructive castle.

CHORUS 1: Bland. No booze.

CHORUS 2: My teeth grind.

JOSHUA: (Hugging her) They’ll let me visit you soon. We’ll walk the hospital grounds together, grounds that soon may feel hospitable. If your teeth still grind, I’ll kiss you anyway.

CHORUS 2: Did you imagine this would come to pass—

CHORUS 1: —when you placed gold upon her hand?

CHORUS 2: Remember what you said that day.

CHORUS 1: Recall your wedding vow!

JOSHUA: (Reciting his wedding vows) The future cannot be seen, nor determined, by any fixed point of the present. I am humble regarding that which I cannot know. And yet, I know myself, and you, well enough to face no doubt: I’ll always love you, Mara Rose. Whoever you become.

MARA ROSE: What did I say, then? I forget, though for once I hadn’t dulled my sense with drink.

CHORUS 2: Drink. Drink. Drink!

CHORUS 1: The external toxin that’s practically part of you.

MARA ROSE: I was drunk off a different chemical, though. That which comes from nature, unmade my man.

CHORUS 1 and CHORUS 2: (confused) …Weed?

MARA ROSE: Adrenaline!

JOSHUA: And you know you’ll get more of that natural high, starting now. Alcohol does not exist outside regular physics: Whatever we suppress comes back in kind. All displacement eventually compensates itself. Your mind, my love, will do for you what you have done for it: Intoxicate to ecstasy. Soon you’ll have moments of euphoria…and be able to relive each one.

MARA ROSE: Relive moments. Yes. My wedding. I must have vowed before man and god: All of me is in love with you. On a subatomic level, that which can’t be broken down—I AM my love for you. My Joshua.

JOSHUA: Yup. That’s what you said, to effect. I’m still not sure about that metaphor, but I like the sentiment.

MARA ROSE: (Back to her letter) It’s that emotion, that intellectual knowledge of emotion, I’ll use to stay well. My bones are dry, and they love you.

JOSHUA: I can imagine you without a glass in your hand.

(flashback to the time they met. MARA ROSE is drinking. JOSHUA is not.)

MARA ROSE: Hi!

JOSHUA: Oh, hey!

MARA ROSE: You’re not drinking.

JOSHUA: I don’t drink. It’s not my thing.

MARA ROSE: Then how do you make a fool of yourself?

JOSHUA: With surprising ease.

MARA ROSE: How will I convince you to dance if you’re not drinking?

JOSHUA: …You want to dance with me?

MARA ROSE: Sure. Or I could just have you dance for my amusement, judging all smug from the sides. “Faster puppet! More rhythmic!”

CHORUS 1: Hey Mara Rose! You look stupid!

CHORUS 2: You should drink more!

CHORUS 1: That’ll make her look even stupider.

CHORUS 2: Yes, but she won’t care as much. Faster, puppet!

CHORUS 1: More rhythmic!

MARA ROSE: I’d never do that to you. I’m not a bossy, nasty drunk.

JOSHUA: Well you definitely don’t seem nasty. Or drunk.

MARA ROSE: Give me an hour.

JOSHUA: An hour?

CHORUS 1 and CHORUS 2: Yeah right!

MARA ROSE: I hold my liquor well.

CHORUS 2: For now.

JOSHUA: Lucky liquor. I’m Joshua.

MARA ROSE: Mara Rose. And don’t worry, I’m really not going to insist that you dance.

JOSHUA: (Disappointed) Oh.

MARA ROSE: I’d rather just sit with you and engage in conversation.

JOSHUA: (excited) Sounds great!

(Time shift, to the present)

MARA ROSE: How strange. I didn’t get wasted that night.

CHORUS 1: Wasted.

CHORUS 2: Night.

JOSHUA: I must have been sufficiently charming on my own merits.

MARA ROSE: You were. You are. My body didn’t get bored of your touch—It got thirstier of its own accord, for reasons that are beyond me. Why do I drink? Am I trying to remember how small I am, how much a part of all living things, and so destroy my too-alert self conscious thought? To be a babe in utero, or a fish that does not think, nor judge itself? Just swims. A fetus in the womb moves in a sphere. Makes circles, as close to perfect as a living thing can get. Fish and birds form themselves in rigid alliance, and no one sticks out. I’d like that grace.

CHORUS 1: Did you just pontificate on how you wish you were less cerebral?

CHORUS 2: Kill metaphysics with itself?

MARA ROSE: (quickly, dismissively) Whatever, I guess. (beat) But it’s not only that.

I drink because I am…an alcoholic. The tautology is brutal, elegant in its simplicity. Red wine is called that because it looks red. Drunks are called drunks because they’re drunk. There’s no mystery, no underlying cause to the phenomenon. That is: I’m an alcoholic. No why, only what.

JOSHUA: I almost lost you. I didn’t.

MARA ROSE: Am I a good gambler, because I won?

JOSHUA: There’s no such thing as a good gambler.

CHORUS 1: Chance eventually makes you its bitch.

CHORUS 2: What a tasty gun is booze, loaded in your hand, brought to your tongue. Dragging you to heaven.

CHORUS 1: Be careful not to mix metaphors. Metaphors aren’t drinks!

CHORUS 2: At least I’m not slurring my words.

MARA ROSE: (Interrupting CHORUS 1) I would feel dazzling. The eyes of my friends reflected my buzz as we shared wine and laughter. I was so funny, everything danced…and in the morning we remembered little. Sunlight can’t recall the magic dark. Before the blackout is the darkening.

JOSHUA: None of that matters; you require no veneer. I only see one of you, and you’re no less beautiful for that. You’re still whole.

MARA ROSE: Your love’s my favorite elixir. Great high, no headache!

JOSHUA: I do what I can.

MARA ROSE: Well, so does everyone, you just do it better. I worry, though. We’re beautifully in love. According to the classics, shouldn’t one of us die soon? And seeing as I’m the one with the disease….

JOSHUA: Shut up. Get that out of your head. Don’t even think of hurting me that way. That’s not romance, that’s melodrama. Suck it up and stay awhile.

MARA ROSE: Until the world spins one time too many, and we’re no longer on it.

JOSHUA: But how many spins, how many rotations, have we until that dread time comes? How many nights of your sleeping head by mine? How much bread will we break for each other? Our flesh will be solid until it is naught. For all purposes, we have eternity to touch.

MARA ROSE: Oh god, it should be enough! And yet…I’m afraid. Of a future with no more liquid hope—A bottle held fast in the same space I breathe.

CHORUS 2: Breathe.

CHORUS 1: Heal.

CHORUS 2: Drink.

MARA ROSE: It tastes so sweet and hearty, as if joy could be distilled, bottled, and corked. Emotion fermented by fruit. Born fully formed in the throat.

CHORUS 2: Poison is easily brewed to taste sweet.

CHORUS 1: Do not conflate pleasure with happiness.

MARA ROSE: I love my body, but sensual pleasure is not enough. That’s a dead end, as sure as the same body someday must die.

CHORUS 2: And yet?

MARA ROSE: I want to leave myself—swim away from the gravity that brings me down, pulls at my breasts, my face, ever closer to the dirt. Free myself from Earth, my breasts, my ego.

JOSHUA: I love your breasts.

CHORUS 1: You crawled from the water, you walked upright—Why would you return there? Fish aren’t happy. They’re just simple.

CHORUS 2: Simple. Stupid.

CHORUS 1: Don’t envy them, Stupid!

JOSHUA: I need you here.

MARA ROSE: Could I be partway here? Drunken revelry’s the compromise between too much consciousness and death. You still can hold me, feel my bourbon breath even as I float above it.

CHORUS 2: Don’t kid yourself: The serpent’s fruit only offers false wisdom.

CHORUS 1: Nothing appears more beautiful, less sinister, than what harms you!

CHORUS 2: Shatter your idol. Break the glass.

MARA ROSE: What’s broken in me must break, dissolve. The antimatter of my illness, my antibody, if you will.

CHORUS 2: You were damn near destroyed by the chemical explosion erupting in your veins.

CHORUS 1: Do you remember what number your blood was, as they hauled you away in a stretcher?

CHORUS 2: You didn’t ask. You didn’t need to know.

MARA ROSE: I got the point.

CHORUS 1: She’s very perceptive.

CHORUS 2: Why waste that? Is the world so dull that you must dull it further?

CHORUS 1: Through a wine glass, dark and cloudy.

CHORUS 2: Break the glass.

CHORUS 1: Red wine is called that because it looks red.

CHORUS 2: Blood. Red. Break. Glass.

JOSHUA: Look at me. Focus on the human that loves you. The rest is ephemeral, of no matter.

MARA ROSE: I love drinking, while thinking of you. I stumble home smiling. Toasted. Warm.

JOSHUA: On nights you came home drunk, you’d slam the door open and jump in my lap. You’d swallowed fire, that my touch alone would fuel and quench.

CHORUS 2: Fuel.

CHORUS 1: Quench.

MARA ROSE: Life seemed to get easier with every drink. (beat) But it never gets easier.

CHORUS 2: Just more lush. And therefore, better.

CHORUS 1: Lies, lies, lies!

CHORUS 2: We’re lying to you. You know that, right?

MARA ROSE: I know; I don’t care. I want a drink. I WANT A DAMN DRINK! (beat) Or five.

CHORUS 1: Or ten.

CHORUS 2: No you don’t. We want you to drink.

CHORUS 1: But you’re the one calling the “shots.”

CHORUS 2: Will you drink? Will you?

CHORUS 1: Will you?

CHORUS 1 and CHORUS 2: Will you? Will you?—

MARA ROSE: (interrupting, with violence) NO!

(CHORUS 1 and CHORUS 2 recoil. Pause.)

MARA ROSE: (with weary resignation) Dammit. No. At least…not today. I physically can’t. I wish I were stronger…this is where I am.

JOSHUA: Mara Rose? You’re the perfect amount of human. You need to wake up, and come home. I’ll make love to you. You can drink your own endorphins.

MARA ROSE: (Going back to the letter) Joshua, my husband, my Valentine. March comes closer. Soon I can leave the prison that I—with help from others—walked inside. Healed. (beat) Or nearly healed.

CHORUS 2: Well, sober at least.

MARA ROSE: No small feat, that. And in the meantime…

JOSHUA: In the meantime….

MARA ROSE: Dream of my body, beside yours, and whole.

MARA ROSE, CHORUS 1 and CHORUS 2: Dream of me.

JOSHUA: Always.

END

Bio:

Alaina Hammond is a poet, playwright, fiction writer, and visual artist.

Coming Soon:

LE’s Interview with Ms. Hammond about her work and influences

05/02/2025
LE Literary Journalism

The Common Thread: Alice Munro’s Family Secret

by Deborah Blenkhorn

My childhood best friend’s social media post about the recent death of her mother, a renowned artist, triggered a memory for me as the tributes and condolences poured in for the family who mourned the loss of a powerful matriarch, the rock of their particular clan. This woman’s middle daughter (my friend’s older sister), as well as, I believe, a young cousin, had been assaulted by an uncle and had sought abortions in the late 1970s. These facts were common knowledge in our small Ontario community, but the general feeling seemed to be that “Uncle T” had issues because he and his wife had never been able to have children of their own, and they subsequently adopted… a preteen girl.

Those were the days! I wonder what happened to the girl who was adopted into that family clan. She was my age, but never fit in with nor was accepted by our friend group, though my best friend would have been her adoptive cousin; we teased her as being a “Lezzie” and were unspeakably cruel in the way that only preteens can be. Of course all of that is water under the bridge of time. It’s not time to remember that; it’s time to celebrate the life of the family matriarch, the artist: all her achievements and the lives she touched. Who knows what she struggled with in the Uncle T years? Was he her brother? Brother-in-law? I don’t even know.

Does every family have a dark secret that may or may not eventually come to light? It’s a bold claim that we all have an Alice Munro skeleton in the family closet, because Munro’s condoning of her husband’s abuse of her daughter seems unthinkably horrific, incomprehensible. Not every family holds that particular secret–though no doubt a fair number of them actually do–but the differences between that situation and those of other families may be simply ones of degree. And of course we’re not simply talking about a secret within a family; rather, it is a question of a suppressed truth. So much sacrificed for the sake of decorum, in that case the preservation of a grande dame of the Canadian literary scene. In other cases, perhaps less extreme (or perhaps not), other sacrifices were made as transgressions were (the cliche is so apt I can’t help but use it) swept under the rug.

Are we about to enter the Me Too Two era? I almost hope so, though (again I can’t resist the cliche) the shit will totally hit the fan. Without even stopping to think, I can list a litany of parallels. My late mother condoned sexualized behaviour initiated by her partner (and others) towards me, on the commune where we both lived in the 1970s. She died without my forgiveness. Without revealing details that would compromise anyone, I can allude to the crimes I’m aware of in my friends’ lives, perpetrated by parents, siblings, roomers, priests, teachers, family friends. I sometimes think that anyone who does not have such a story… simply hasn’t told it yet. Is there a common thread? Yes. Power. The corruption of it, the colonialism of it, the condoning of it.

And what can we do? Fight it, yes. But first, let’s at least acknowledge what has happened. Let’s own it, and let’s try not to be complicit in the great cover-up. One more cliche: Let the chips fall where they may.

BIO:

Bio:

Deborah Blenkhorn is a writer and teacher living on Bowen Island in British Columbia. Her work fuses memoir and fiction, and has appeared in such venues as Blank Spaces, Dreamers Creative Writing, and DarkWinter Literary Magazine.

10/20/2024
LE Author CONVERSATIONS

GINA MORIARTY

“The trip shifts into periods of introspection, and when that vast awareness is suddenly switched inward, some may not have the mental or emotional capabilities to deal with their shadows.” – GM

In your essay,100 Words / 12 Hits / Gravity, you write from a transgressive space punctuated by the speed of an actual and metaphorical ride through the libidinal realm of union. It feels like the cerebrally exploited appendage of sex acts as a metaphysical portal to the ephemeral side of intimacy. The couple seems by the end of the ride to open to a paradoxical lack of connection. How did you identify and develop the mapping of the narrator’s drug induced confrontation with the masculine/feminine axis of desire amidst an edge of what leads unexpectedly to subtextual longing?

GM While this essay reads as though it was written in a transient state, time was my true companion. Enrolled in a Travel Writing class during the pandemic provided an interesting obstacle – writing about travel without traveling. I chose to write of a trip I’d taken the previous summer with my boyfriend, and in doing so, gave myself the chance to play around in this Creative Nonfiction Travel Writing genre. Each week my professor, Marc Neison, assigned one word to use in the telling of a 100-word short story. Marc didn’t expect us to weave a narrative, but I appreciated the challenge.

By the end of the semester, I had 16 100-word segments prompted with words such as home, water, sunscreen, currency. These words became the landmarks to map “Gravity.” This piece wasn’t written in order, instead driven by these words set along emotional markers on the timeline of the trip. In my initial composition, the idea of balancing connection with disconnection was involuntary, but with each passing week, I noticed the theme and wrote with this harmonization of movement in mind.

Writing about drugs – psychedelics specifically – creates portals for nonfiction writing which allow space for fantastical elements, but more-so, make room for garishness, for those carnal moments to transpire. This drug-induced state erases any filter, and that can only transfer to the writing, allowing the narrator a sort of jester-like persona. With LSD the true nature of the partaker is unabashedly revealed. The connection between all who indulge together is forged by the efforts of the drug, by the shifts of frequency, and in such a way a different friendship forms as the user’s consciousness expands to a greater understanding of the persona they’re tripping alongside. The interconnectedness on such a deep level prompts new levels of intimacy, a compulsory truthfulness occurs, and the user can’t help but show their true nature.

The reason some swear against acid is because the come down requires self-work. The trip shifts into periods of introspection, and when that vast awareness is suddenly switched inward, some may not have the mental or emotional capabilities to deal with their shadows. The thing about LSD is it’s a truth serum some just aren’t ready to taste. Those, like me, who have used the drug with the objective of mine expansion instead of simply getting super trippy, tap into the superpowers we all possess – the superpower of intuition. Expressing how these characters opened themselves to the vulnerability of each other, I was able to set their motorcycle along this paradoxical axis of drug addiction that parallels their relationship, displaying how cocaine shuts out the universe while psychedelics open one’s mind to it.

It’s a perilous balancing act – not the motorcycle – but drug use in a union, because the moment one person tunes themselves to a different level – a different frequency – the whole relationship disassembles, and while both remain on an unbalanced precipice of addiction, the universe’s pressure will increase on the couple until their only chance is to split or to conform fully around each other and their chosen substances.

10/14/2024
LE Author CONVERSATIONS

SUZANNE LEA

“In the most literal way, Like Oxygen, was born at the end of a love affair.” SL

(photo credit: Suzanne Lea)

LEMagazine asked author Suzanne Lea to explore her creative process as a poet. She’s been previously published in the earlier iteration on this platform, the literary journal, LEJ. You can read her essay, The Specificity of Desire here.

Surprisingly her second submission, a couple years later as we were transitioning from the literary platform of the journal to the more expansive nature of the magazine format, was poetry and not essay. We wanted to ask her about the differences she experiences as an essay writer and as a poet.

LE Your poetry collection, Like Oxygen, reaches outside the theoretical container of Limit-Experience and pulls to it the libidinal space in a very visceral way? How did you arrive at this space and how did the process differ from your encounter with your essay, Specificity?

SL When you think about it, writing is a strange thing. We pluck words from our lexicon and place them in such a way that the reader understands both the meaning and the intention. Creative writing is even more interesting – creating a path using words in the wild, words strung together for the first time, creating something altogether new. I write because I have a love affair with language. I write because I love finding new ways to tell universal stories.

I love the taste of new words meeting for the first time. Words just introduced, taking their first steps off the tongue and in the world. I love big, fat, juicy words. Little, tine, bony words. Dirty word. Holy words Dark threatening, stormy words. I love long, complicated, ego-stroking words and fanciful words that exist only to serve the needs of children and lovers. My favorite, though, is the discovery of a word whose materiality is so organic that a gentle nudge can send it floating like a dandelion on the current of a conversation. These words, when placed together properly, are so sweet as to be missed the instant they are spoken.

In the most literal way, Like Oxygen, was born at the end of a love affair. I find that to be true of much of my writing. Most of my poetry is written after-the-fact. Although every ending is not tragic, often grief allows for a very specific kind of hindsight. A perspective not found in the midst of an experience. While we are pushing and pulling, touching and pressing, we only feel our own skin. We only know whether we’ve been kissed or kicked. Afterwards, we often find a sort of aerial view. We become the topographers of our own country.

Writing poetry is the place where I have the most fun with words who were once strangers. Tucked away inside my poem, Like Oxygen, there is something more. Inside what appears to be a song about the libidinal desires, I have secreted away a prayer. Please kiss me properly. Kiss me like oxygen. Kiss me as if you were certain. Kiss me as though you have abandoned yourself to the experience. I ask for these things because I know the tepid tongue of endings – when the lights come up and everyone leaves.

In my experience, non-fiction storytelling is different. There is a linear quality to creative non-fiction. There is usually a beginning, a middle, and an end. Non-fiction storytelling is experienced as fact. (Or as factual as we are able as fallible humans.) The Specificity of Desire is my attempt at telling the story of my Limit Experience. There is no pleading for more. There is no longing for less. My Limit Experience is measured by a before and after. My experience created a moment when I jumped from who I thought I was and what I was capable of, to the very edge of propriety and then a step further.

My Limit Experience was life altering. I am not the same person that I was before the events of Specificity. I barely remember the girl who lived in this body without that experience. That can also be said for Like Oxygen. Although the details are drastically different, the same ‘before and after’ exist. Similarly, the act of storytelling closely resembles this dynamic. I pull from my love of language to tell a story. I try to set the stage for what comes after. Both experiences create a longing for something more. Both experiences beg me to step outside the safety of storytelling and run my fingers along the rough edges and smooth surfaces of life.

10/14/2024