The

Firework
Journal

A monthly publication for creative and critical writing from students at the
University of Calgary

Vol. 1 – No. 6
OCTOBER 2023
 EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

EDITORS Mackenzie Ashcroft

John Rawlek

CONTRIBUTORS Marvellous Chukwukelu

Conner Levi
Victor Jacobina
Dalal Khalil
Mason McDougall
Emcher Sison
Elsa Stokes

Copyright © Contributors 2023

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

EDITOR’S NOTE ..………………………………………….…………………..…... 4

POETRY
“Money Makes a Boy” by Conner Levi …………………………………………….…... 5

“--” by Elsa Stokes …………………………………………………………………….…6

“Chase” by Emcher Sison …………………………………………………………….….8

“Summer’s Last Breath” by Dalal Khalil …………………………………………….…12

“My Autumn Girl” by Mason McDougall ……………………………………………...13

PROSE
“The House Opposite Mine is a Catholic House” by Victor Jacobina ………………....14

“When Brass and Iron Glow for Home” by Marvellous Chukwukelu …………………17

CONTRIBUTORS ………………………………………………………….………20
 EDITOR’S NOTE

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;”
These opening lines of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” paint a portrait of a
speaker, poised at the branch, divided over a decision they have already made. The product of
faith as much as will, the speaker chooses the path that, by resisting the familiar, activates an
otherwise restricted personal growth. In truth, both paths are the same. It is the traveler, rather,
that distinguishes them. Perhaps this metaphor for coming-into-selfhood has become cliche. And
yet our eyes travel, past the weeds poking through the gravel that hums beneath our feet, down
around the path’s bend. The bowed trees shake free their leaves; “let each path,” they murmur,
“be untrodden.”
With their abandon they gift us certainty— though we often do not know it. As Frost
ironically reminds us that taking the road less travelled by “has made all the difference,” he
allows us the privilege of defining that road.
For this issue’s writers, the road is a dream-like labyrinth, a basement, and a sidewalk
outside the neighbour’s house. It is the sound of heeled boots on city streets, runaway thoughts,
bolts of lightening, and a pebbled riverbed. Characterized by their fluid style, this collection does
not merely capture the changing season but the transition of the self; the questions, reflections,
and desires that drive, not only their characters to ponder, but their creators to reflect.

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

—Mackenzie Ashcroft, Editor and Co-Founder

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Money Makes a Boy
Conner Levi

warm nectar,

suck me dry,
a dying flower.
use me

so you can be.

i’ve heard

women like you more than me.

i!m living in my parent’s basement.

i made this in my parent’s basement.

i’m a failure.

it still feels weird to call myself a man

rather than a boy.

5
--
Elsa Stokes

When I’m on a roller coaster

at the top
right at the part when
it starts to go fast
but before it starts to go
really fast.
After the drop but before the loop.

On the swings.

When I’m running at the green indoor track and I push myself
just a little bit harder than I should have
and it hurts
but I don’t stop.

Right after
I make a left hand turn
when I probably should’ve waited
But I didn’t and
I made it because
Fate decided to be kind to me that day.

That day at the hotsprings when

my brother and I
had a breath-holding contest
and I won.
My eyes pressed shut and my hand pinching my nose.

And
in the most nonchalant possible way,

I think but I don’t say out loud,

when you kiss me.

Really
I don’t say any of that.

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I’m staring at the
purple
floral-printed quilt my grandmother made me;
running my finger along the small grooves of the duvet
I’m silent
As you wait for me to answer the question you’ve just asked me.

“Do you ever stop thinking?”

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Chase
Emcher Sison

she visits the labyrinth where all

thoughts are entangled in rusty wire

every starless night.

my bruised legs try to chase her down

as she runs into every passage

enclosed by the crumbling walls

we built together.

she pushes a metal gate and stumbles

upon the entrance of an airport where

her feet stop in front of my mother,

hands clasping hers as she keeps

a young promise of being a good daughter.

her palm waves a goodbye that lasts seven years

then runs away.

i see her wander into a rusty old playground

beside the Methodist, kicking pebbles alone,

watching the other kids talk in hushed whispers. i

watch her walk up to them with an open heart and

watch her walk away in tight-lipped tears.

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 she goes up to a haunted house and

plays hide and seek with her shadow.

as her eyes look outside the window,

the world is painted in colour blue.

candles flicker by the glass,

aroma of fresh corpses of those

who are dead to her lingers in the air.

she puts on a dress weaved in cobwebs

and hums a lullaby to help her fall asleep.

she wakes up next to a teenage boy

whose arms become her shield

from the eyes that feel like weapons.

their harmonious laughter makes

flowers fully bloom in winter.

they dance under the midnight rain,

kissing under perfect storms before

whispering their secret goodbyes.

i watch her fidgeting with his sleeve,

dragging him to the pits of her darkness,

unveiling the demons that look like her

in her past dreams.

but when she looks at him,

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 all she sees is a mirror reflecting the

monsters she lived with for years.

her heart stops,

then continues to beat for him.

if only she sees what i’m seeing.

he is terrified of his own monsters.

he can no longer be her dreamy knight

when all they ever are are each other’s nightmares.

i see her desperately chasing after the love

from people who do not know how to love her.

i see her

abandoned.

alone.

hurt.

bruises slither around her legs

trying to escape by climbing over the walls

of this barbed wire maze that hold her

hostage to these haunted memories.

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i catch her at the dead end of

this sickening labyrinth,

grab her by the wrist and embrace

her for who she is.

i tell her that everything will be okay.

after all, she is me.

11
Summer’s Last Breath
Dalal Khalil

a sigh of relief dances around the dim streets;

tree branches relax, slumping as though
the Summer act has come to an end, freeing the
stiff trunks from a stubborn posture.

green crawls back into the cracks of Earth, welcoming

the golden hues that begin to paint the grey paths.
Bursts of orange and red take over, tinting the pink
Summer sunset into a gentle candlelight flicker.

sunlight grazes over the skin in an attempt to savour the

last crumbs of warmth, wanting to leave a lasting
memory before the world is met with a break. Sandals
turn to black-heeled boots that break the coloured leaves in their wake.

spiced apple fills the streets with recipes to comfort the uglier
parts of the year’s heat: mending the cracks left by sullen goodbyes,
wrapping our heart’s into a bundle of fuzz, kissing the thoughts left
far behind on those late summer nights.

the gentle stroke of a nearby guitar twirls alongside the dancing

breeze, strumming a tune of warmth to cut through the crisp
cooling wind. Flowers begin to slump forward as they retire
from their facade, relaxing to Earth’s new song.

Summer takes her last breath and closes her soft eyes as she
watches the world adjusting to a new pace, smiling softly
to present her harsh rays of heat one last time. Her rays hit
the now fading green, lulling life into a new rest.

12
My Autumn Girl
Mason McDougall

If you could only see

the way your brown hair
shines gold in the summer sun.
The way the waves on your
forehead flicker like flames
when you look up into my eyes.

You look good in brown.

Everything about you is brown
and autumn and orange
and gold.

I have visions of your naked body.

The grass is yellow,
the trees are bare,
their orange leaves on the ground.
You roll down the hill like a child,
leaves and dead twigs
sticking to your body,
thorns dug into your skin.

I’m at the bottom of the hill.

The rush of the cold water running
softly behind me.

You stand up,

covered in dirt and moss,
a vision of Mother Earth.
You take my hand
and lead me into the river,
the water rising above your hips.

I think you are the sun,

but you look up and the sun
is replaced by a harvest moon,
a full and bright blood orange
moon.

I lay down on the pebbles,

and drown in your body.

13
The House Opposite Mine is a Catholic House
Victor Jacobina

On Sundays I like to observe them as they file out of the squat basement they inhabit,

more like fleas living timidly and abashedly on the back of an acquiescing dog, as if they were

ashamed of their nature which was their sole duty to carry out, than humans who inhabit a space

in time and call it home. But home it is, and I know it well, though I have never been one of their

own, neither a catholic or a member of their large family, neither willing to accept them or to be

accepted by their welcoming embrace, which is so vast and so vague that it seems to wrap the

whole world in the forgiveness that a mother might bestow upon a sullen or naughty child. Some

are incapable of accepting this kind of benevolence - in me my own nature prevents it. On

Mondays I usually walk the ten metres or so that lie between our respective domains to ask them

how their mass was. Theirs is a missionary religion and they keep no secrets; I believe I know

the mass as well as any devoted catholic might and even the Latin mass, though it is an alien

language to me, seems like it exists on a plane separated just by a thin sheet of glass from me. If

I pressed my ear against it the words would pass through it into my ear like divine music - the

sound of music requires no translation.

They are eight in all, father and mother, and six little ones, usually dressed in the garish,

made-in-Bengal colours of the Walmart kids aisle, come out obediently in their best raiments.

They kick each other’s heels as they climb out over the cracked steps, like goslings scrambling

behind their mother, without thought or doubt as to where they’re being led. They are roughly

the same age, having been produced in a period of what must’ve been remarkable fecundity. The

mother is a heavy-set woman, perfectly maternal, the incarnation of mother love. The father is

not heavy-set, but waxes outward from his torso a voluminous crescent, smooth as silk beneath

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the white fabric of his shirt. He owns only one suit: a brown, ill-fitting monstrosity, which I must

see every Sunday in the same, exact, repeating ritual. I used to think the family was a caricature,

so stereotypical as to be false, taking on the character of a pantomime, but now I see it for

something else. There’s something more real in the theatrical than anything else which is woven

into and dispersed among the nuances of the lives we present to the world. What I see in that

family is a resplendent rainbow cloth, sporting all the forbidden colours, unpolluted and virginal,

floating in the manner of a magic carpet above the world, unable to touch it for fear of soiling its

many colours.

All eight of them wave to me as they get in their minivan (they seat four in the back), and

the first seven remind me of the cardinal virtues. I know well which represents each member, and

it was always the lamentable fallacy of that family to have six children, to leave one of

themselves without the safe realm of their faith, the one without virtue. Within each family is a

finite amount of faith, one of them will fall away from it, will starve for it, before conceding that

it will never nourish him. No family retains a perfect record. Then again, God never made Eden

without imposing in it a threat and a temptation for Adam and Eve; we were always meant to

struggle for our faith, it was inevitable that we would fail Christ, inevitable that some of us

cannot meet his gaze. For some, they look at him but see nothing at all. For others, He is all they

see. It can be a blessing and a curse.

I wave back, but it is its own struggle. I have without variation felt a deep pang of

loneliness after that minivan has departed, black smoke exhaled exactly like a cigar, that van

being the only member of the family gripped by vice, as dependent on this Sunday ritual as the

living beings that required it. My dark room, perfectly suited for a bachelor, seems consumed by

that exhaust, mired in similar vices, the ones I have breathed into the room by my own misdeeds.

15
On the middle wall, where the light shines strongest through the haze, hangs the cross I inherited,

as rudimentary and austere as is possible to make it. It’s a damned sight different from theirs,

where Jesus suffers eternally, but whose glassy eyes show no compassion, only the lifelessness

of market fish. If you put those eyes to a wheatfield in Saskatchewan they would stare to the end

of the earth and eventually wrap around the whole of it, coming back to where it started, seeing

nothing, and somehow judging.

I can’t stand the sight of it. It tests the remains of my faith just to look at it. Jesus is so

impossible, a paradox of pure love, that I can’t open my heart to receive what he gives freely,

lest one drop should cause it to burst. The plain cross is all I can bear.

But somehow, though I can’t bear it, my dark, empty room is lacking in a corporeal

element. I exist, but nothing else. I have no visitors, no one comes. Christ exists, but he is not

here. Nothing is alive. It was perhaps my Kierkegaardian struggle, my protestant cross, to believe

in a God who exists only between myself and Him. That was my choice. But the singularity of

that empty cross on my wall takes up the whole room, and it crushes me with its silence. All I

can hear are the words God won’t speak.

Until that family comes home.

16
When Brass and Iron Glow for Home
Marvellous Chukwukelu

At 1:04am this morning, a bolt of lightning tore through brick, metal, and glass to

strike Lot Af1939,34.1 at the British Museum in London. The lot, a brass rendering of the

head of the Ooni of Ife, was thankfully not destroyed but continued to glow a burning red

until dawn.

By the next morning, news of the incident – and the discussion it brought with it–

was being carried on every major news network. BBC brought on a professor of African

Studies from Oxford: a wispy man who went on to extol the importance of such a prominent

piece of artwork remaining in an institution just as prominent. CNN– although they had

taken a similar approach by bringing on a researcher from the African Cultural Institute in

Houston– broadcasted an almost polar view, with much of the time being spent calling for

the repatriation of that lot, and others like it, back to its home country of Nigeria.

Overall, the event– although strange– simply made for an unorthodox news cycle. A

few digital townhalls were held, some scholars met for drinks, one or two African studies

classes around the world became particularly animated, and the British museum called in a

contractor to fix the damage in the wall.

That night, at exactly 1:04am in different time zones, two bolts of lightning tore

through the walls of museums. The first struck Lot Af1910,0513.1 at, once again, the British

Museum. The second– which arrived five hours later and three thousand miles away– struck

Lot 1978.412.323 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The two lots, very

similar masks from 16th century Benin, are completely fine. Unfortunately, the same cannot

be said for the poor NYU student-intern who decided to stay late at the Met and had a near

miss with literal lightning. Sources say she has turned in her resignation letter and decided to

17
spend the rest of her summer vacation in her parents’ home in the Hamptons.

The discourse this time around was cynical; Nigerian Twitter was ablaze with gods of

thunder references, New Yorkers set up a memorial for the intern in front of NYU’s

archeology building, someone went to the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren

Belgium with a poster– in lightning-inspired calligraphy– that translated to “YOU ARE

NEXT”, and the Nigerian Government– finally making its debut in the digital era–

published the denial letter the British Museum had sent back in 1977 when they asked for the

now struck lot to be loaned for the FESTAC ’77 celebration.

In retrospect, the RMCA– or AfricaMuseum as they now prefer to be called– should

have considered listening to that nameless sign holder because, mere hours later, the gods of

lightning and thunder did indeed come to visit them when it struck Lot EO.1971.69.1, an

Ogoni mask from Nigeria.

Perhaps the funniest part of the whole ordeal was on the fourth day of the ‘strikes’–

as they had now been named. That day, the malignant bolts decided to grant some reprieve to

the museums of the world and went after a non-descript Igbo-Ukwu bowl housed in a quaint

villa in Bordeaux. The vessel, as you should now expect, remained unharmed. However, the

path the bolt had taken to it was every art collector’s horror story: ashes of pre-revolution

French molding, a scorched Imperial Ming Dynasty vase, and a hole through a previously

unseen Lichtenstein. The owner– a billionaire vacationing in Monaco– hightailed back to

France and unceremoniously dumped the ‘cursed vessel’ into the arms of the laughing

staffers at the Nigerian Embassy in Paris.

By the end of the week– even though only Nigerian artwork had been hit–

governments across Africa had received hundreds, if not thousands, of repatriated artwork

18
from museums and private collectors around the world with the noticeable exception of the

British Museum. No. The curator for that particularly stubborn institution is said to have set

camp in the center of the museum, rubber soled boots on his feet and a large lightning jar in

his hands, as if daring whatever god is up there to try and come for ‘his’ art again.

Meanwhile, in the underbellies of Greece, a bunch of mad scientist university students

are rumored to be planning how to get a bolt of lightning to narrowly miss the sole Caryatid

of Acropolis still in England, so that maybe, and just maybe, the British Museum will be

motivated to reunite her with her sisters back home in Athens.

19
 CONTRIBUTORS

Marvellous Chukwukelu is a second year Computer Science major, with a minor

in Statistics.
Conner Levi is an English Literature Alumni from the University of Calgary. He
was born and raised in Calgary, skiing in the mountains and eventually joining the
Canadian National Ski Jumping Team. Later, he got an Acting diploma at Capilano
University before publishing his first collection of poetry called "Look! A Life of
Poetry", under the name Yukon de Leeuw. He is now finishing his second
collection of poetry, which this poem is from.
Victor Jacobina is a first-year English major.
Dalal Khalil is a concurrent student in the Werklund School of Education
beginning her fifth and final year of study. Her piece looks at the way that Summer
in the city turns into Autumn; she aims to capture the visible sigh of relief that the
world lets out at the end of the warmer months.
Mason McDougall is a third-year English major.
Emcher Sison is a first-year student in the BEd Secondary Education in English
Language Arts. Sison’s submission was originally written for an intro to Creative
Writing course portfolio.
Elsa Stokes is a current third-year student in the concurrent BA French and BEd
Program.

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 Colophon
This journal was set in Times New Roman & Georgia

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