i saw manchester when i closed my eyes: velvet sofas, drowning bluffs, a sunset clouded by emotions.
i’m no stranger to stumbling down unfamiliar streets and daydreaming at midnight. it’s become a haven.
at 16, i was all knowing, no worship.
i studied god at the bottom of my glass and said my prayers between each panting breath. maybe i look back too often, i’m not sure.
Read MoreFlipping through my old Blackberry photos from 2011, the one from high school, I found photos of at-home dye jobs that left the blondes—myself included—brassy, the brunettes closer to red. I smiled at how young we looked, frolicking in the freedom from ourselves that we found in plastic bottles of Smirnoff vodka. With alcohol we acted older than we were, escaping our teenage selves and emerging fearless. Later, we hid behind it: I didn’t mean it, I was just drunk. Our eyeshadow unblended, our foundation a tone off our skin colour, our crop tops and skirts hardly covering our bodies. We were gloriously unburdened.
Read MoreTwo poems by Charlotte Nip, "Funerals are for the living" and "I drink wine sometimes," accompanied by illustration by Allison Eng.
Read MoreTaylor Neal’s interpretation of their experiences rising for early morning shifts as they work as a support worker in the DTES. They would rise each morning to find the moon protecting them, and they would have these tender, quiet mornings alone before anyone else was awake, which allowed them to move into their day in a peaceful, protected state of calm.
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Illustration by Allison Eng.
David Ly is the author of Mythical Man, which was shortlisted for the 2021 ReLit Poetry Award. His sophomore poetry collection, Dream of Me as Water, is forthcoming in 2022. David is the Poetry Editor at This Magazine, part of the Anstruther Press Editorial Collective, and a Poetry Manuscript Consultant with The Writers’ Studio at SFU. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram.
“…I put five drops of lavender and bergamot orange, summery essential oils, into the black teardrop-shaped diffuser…”
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Photography by Michèle Bygodt.
To showcase the musical menageries that accompany all kinds of folks partaking in all kinds of strokes, we present So SAD So Sexy: a reader-sourced, SAD Mag playlist for doin’ the deed. Check it out on SAD Mag’s Spotify, and get it on!
Leah Nelson and Sarah Leavitt shows us the labour of love, loss, and life in striking film Tangles at the Vancouver International Film Festival 2026.
In Experiments in a Failed Repair, an art exhibition that deconstructs and decolonises the monumentalisation of violence, Ghinwa Yassine challenges viewers to confront human violence through the rubble and remains of homes destroyed by war—and to imagine the lives that once existed within them.
Writer Brett Nelson reviews 'The Effect,' the latest production from The Cultch that explores the chemical nature of love and grapples with depression.
In this review of Frequencies: A Novel, Sophie Ganic’s debut, we explore a chilling blend of dystopian science fiction and feminist horror. Set in the aftermath of a deadly global outbreak, the novel examines isolation, psychological unraveling and past trauma.
Jill Goranson and Kelsi James presents Burn Blue, a multidisciplinary performance, at the 2026 Vancouver Fringe Festival, exploring water, memory, migration and colonisation, and the meaning of home through dance, music, poetry, and puppetry.
