The birth control pill has been a major game changer in the arena of women’s reproductive rights, opening up new doors in society and the workplace. But, in the wake of the birth control pill’s 50th anniversary on the market in the United States and its 40th in Canada, a major question remains: will there ever be a version for men?

The development of a male pill has been a longstanding joke in the pharmaceutical industry, where someone is always willing to predict that the pill is “five to 10 years away” from becoming a marketplace reality. While this ongoing delay is due in part, to the technical challenges of developing a reliable contraceptive formula for men, backward assumptions that men would refuse to take a male birth control pill have arguably proven to be a much greater obstacle.

Researchers, however, have actually proven the opposite. A 2005 international survey conducted by Berlin’s Center of Epidemiology and Health Research found that a majority of men reported interest in using some form of oral contraception, a finding that is supported by two other studies. “I think modern men would like to take part in this decision,” says Ken Rosendal, the CEO of Spermatech, a Norwegian company currently in the early stages of developing a non-hormonal male birth control pill. “A pill for men would have less side effects than a hormonal pill for women.” Rosendal says, however, that funding is a key barrier in the development of such a pill; while biomedical research companies like Spermatech may have the scientific know-how to make the male pill a reality, finding investors to cover the costs necessary to bring the drug to market (an estimated US$2 billion, according to Rosendal) remains a constant challenge.

This means that, until society decides to catch up to science, the male pill will continue—year after year—to remain five to 10 years away.

A Canadian Auto Workers volunteer helps install a new wellhead in Little Salmon Carmacks in 2007. Photo courtesy CAW.

If you were to turn on a tap in the First Nation of Little Salmon Carmacks, Yukon, your cup might run over with gasoline, fecal matter, and worse (yes, there’s worse). It’s been this way for years, at least going as far back as 1991—the first year of comprehensive water testing.

The problems in Little Salmon Carmacks are emblematic of water problems in many First Nation communities across Canada. Drinking water not fit for human consumption has been, and continues to be, endemic in First Nation communities. For northern First Nations problems are made worse by systemic issues rooted deeply in the structure of our government; caught in a jurisdictional no-man’s-land between Indian and Northern Affairs, the territorial governments, and other government departments charged with funding infrastructure and assisting First Nations, their cases get shuffled from one department to another until they are finally dropped.

The Little Salmon Carmacks First Nation is situated next to the non-First Nation municipality of Carmacks, approximately 180 kilometres north of Whitehorse. The self-governing community, home to 400 people, once had two large wells serving the entire community but, as standards were updated, one was declared too dangerous to use and closed. The remaining well serves 96 people; everyone else has to rely on their own, individual wells, each of which provides water to an average of three people.

The village has been on the same boil water advisory since January 2006, though temporary advisories have been issued to certain areas of the town since 2001, and some individual wells have been reporting E. coli and coliform contamination since 1991.

Even though the federal government has spent nearly $1 million on studies, and improvements to well water testing, treatment infrastructure, and operator training, the problems in Little Salmon Carmacks are not clearing up. Government solutions have not dealt with the central causes of contamination, and have proved to be no more than expensive Band-Aids. Disregarding the results of numerous studies it has funded to investigate the root causes of the community’s water problems, the government seems willing to only fund short-term solutions, such as treating the contaminated water with chlorine.

One government funded study notes that “of particular concern are the positive [bacteriological] results for wells which have had their well boxes upgraded and cleaned and wells shock chlorinated.” In particular, it says that from 1991 until the study was conducted in 2004, “positive bacteriological contamination has been reported for 36% of residential wells over the period of record, with 22% reporting contamination within the last year.” Studies have been clear as to why contamination keeps coming back: poorly constructed individual wells are easy to contaminate and hard to maintain. According to a 2008 report, most of the wells in Little Salmon Carmacks are too shallow, too close to septic tanks, and are drilled in sandy, permeable soil. The well heads are also located underground, in pits that let in surface water, which then stagnates and causes bacterial contamination.

Rodent feces, animal remains, and fuel spills also become trapped in the well pits, and when water levels rise, either from rain or spring run-off, the toxic cocktail overflows first into wells and then out of taps. These same wells were built by Indian and Northern Affairs Canada—some of them as recently as the ’90s—who now refuses to maintain them. Neither the federal nor the territorial government will fund repairs or upgrades to wells serving fewer than five people; both levels of government say that this is the responsibility of homeowners. The case continues to circulate INAC internally in a game of bureaucratic hot potato that has left the community in purgatory. Even more frustrating is the fact that the solution, pointed to even by government funded studies, is completely clear: a single pipe system—one big well, with a pipeline servicing most homes in the village—is described as the best and most cost-effective long-term solution to the village’s water problems. But no government department or funding program has accepted the community’s proposals to construct one.

An INAC spokesperson said that the single pipe system is “not considered cost effective to construct and maintain over the long term.” But this directly contradicts an INAC funded study conducted just one year earlier, which concluded that a single pipe system would produce cleaner, safer water—since the water can be treated and monitored from a single, central location—and would incur lower long-term maintenance costs.

Even the ministry’s own statistics are suspect. INAC keeps a database of water quality in First Nation communities, rating water as being at high, medium, or low risk for contamination. After a 2002 study of communities across Canada, Little Salmon Carmacks’s water was rated “high risk.” In 2006, INAC officials downgraded it to “medium risk,” citing new evaluations from 2003 and 2004, which Chief Skookum says never took place. One former INAC employee, who helped develop the database, stated that officials modified the Little Salmon Carmacks rating “without stepping foot” in the community.

In 2007, INAC proudly announced that “in the past 12 months the number of high risk water systems in First Nations communities has been reduced from 193 to 97.” That number has since been reduced to 49. The problem is not simply that the ministry appears to be moving the goalposts for the sake of public relations; a “high-risk” rating automatically obliges the federal government to evaluate water systems and fund repairs. Downgrade the rating, and that financial commitment vanishes, though the problem does not.

In Little Salmon Carmacks, the government’s lack of serious action proved nearly fatal. In a December 2005 community meeting at which government and First Nation representatives were present, the then Yukon Chief Medical Officer of Health—a territorial government official charged with issuing boil water orders—said, “I am confident that the water is not going to cause immediate health problems … I am convinced that the level of anxiety regarding the wells is too high.” Less than four weeks later, Elder Johnny Sam was airlifted to a Vancouver hospital for treatment of a bacterial infection so severe he had to remain there for four and a half months. His doctors linked his illness to his water consumption, and the First Nation issued its own boil water advisory on January 9, 2006.

“Someone just about died,” said Chief Skookum, who issued the 2006 advisory. “The government has got to show more effort in showing that they can step in and help with the cause and communicate— there’s not much of that at all.”

Chief Skookum isn’t the only one thinking that. A 2005 report by the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development (CESD) cited lack of government responsibility as a systemic problem directly related to the quality and safety of drinking water for First Nation communities. The CESD recommended that a new regulatory body be created to address the crisis. The government has acknowledged the problem but the steps it is taking have not won the support of Indigenous groups.

On May 26, 2010 the government introduced Bill S-11 in the federal Senate. The proposed legislation would set up a regulatory framework with jurisdictional clarity responsible for setting appropriate standards for the treatment and disposal of water. In its current incarnation, however, it applies only to reservations and not to self-governing nations (like Little Salmon Carmacks), although communities could opt in.

Critics argue that without a corresponding financial commitment, many First Nation communities will lack the resources to meet these guidelines, and fear they could be penalized for it. Irving Leblanc, the acting director of housing and infrastructure for the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), says that “by pushing this legislation forward, the government is setting up First Nations for failure.” He adds, “There’s been no consultation done on this bill.” Though the government has made some effort to discuss the bill with First Nations, many feel that their views and opinions were not heard, much less incorporated into the legislation.

In the meantime, private volunteers have proved to be more effective than the ministry that’s actually responsible for ensuring water quality in First Nation communities. In 2007 Little Salmon Carmacks got in touch with the AFN which, in turn, proposed a well revitalization project to the Canadian Autoworkers union. In May of 2008 CAW members arrived for their first of two summers helping the community upgrade and repair its water infrastructure.

The volunteers—skilled tradespeople, most from Ontario—extended the wells a metre above ground and put caps on them so only well water could enter. This altered the structure of the wells more drastically than previous repairs, elevating and sealing off the once festering, below ground well heads and well boxes. The volunteers also installed heater cables to prevent pipes from freezing in the winter and controllers to maximize energy efficiency. The project was initially supposed to take only one summer. However, at the end of their six weeks of work, only half of the intended 57 wells had been repaired. The union decided to extend the project and volunteers returned to the Yukon the following summer to finish what they started.

Mark McGregor, a millwright who works in Brampton, Ontario, and one of the volunteers during the second summer, says seeing the community and their infrastructure made him realize that “people up North are forgotten about.” He compared Little Salmon Carmacks’s situation to that of Walkerton, Ontario’s in 2000, saying the water was so dirty, “we wouldn’t even shower in it,” and that “sometimes it was brown coming out of the taps.”

The volunteers may have been able to improve the state of the village’s water infrastructure, but the deeper systemic problems remain.

Most critically, there is a shortage of qualified people to operate and repair the wells. A government report notes that there is “a severe shortage … of certified water-treatment systems operators in First Nations communities.” Yukon College offers courses that provide water operators with the knowledge they need to pass the Environmental Operators Certification Program, and the federal government does have funding available to cover the course fees of potential operators from Indigenous communities, but the mathematical requirements seem to be a barrier for many individuals.

“You have to be able to drive a truck and do the math,” Jordan Mullett, Little Salmon Carmacks’ only certified water technician, says. “Most people who are truck drivers are older guys, and they don’t really have their math or their algebra.”

Accordingly, Yukon College has set up a crash-course math course. “You can do it by video conference,” Mullett explains, “five half days in a row.” But despite these efforts, INAC representatives estimate that, for First Nation operators in the Yukon, “the pass rate over the past two years … is approximately 50 percent.”

“We’ve sent lots of people,” Mullett says, “but they always fail. We’ve sent everyone that we possibly can, and some people twice, three times, and they still don’t pass. And even though it’s no cost to us, there’s no point in sending someone for their third or fourth time.”

That leaves Mullett as the only certified operator in the village, one man monitoring dozens of wells—a dangerous ratio. And the story is repeated in communities across the North.

Despite mountains of evidence, much of it accumulated by its own branches, departments, and agents, the federal government has not acted strongly enough to improve water treatment in First Nation communities. No matter how many times the relationship between water quality and other quality of life issues (education, depression, general health, etc.) is spelled out, often by their own employees, politicians and senior bureaucrats have not taken the necessary steps to improve the quality of water in First Nation communities.

To aboriginal leaders, however, the link between water and overall quality of life is clear. The United Nations backed them up in July when the General Assembly passed a resolution affirming water and sanitation as human rights.

“This resolution establishes new international standards,” said Assembly of First Nations National Chief Shawn Atleo shortly after the vote (from which Canada abstained). It “compels Canada to work with First Nations to ensure our people enjoy the same quality of water and sanitation as the rest of Canada.” So far Atleo’s call has little attention from the federal government, leaving Little Salmon Carmacks, and many communities like it, to rely not on the ministry, but on the kindness of strangers.

Seasonal philanthropy is as much a part of the winter landscape as bearded men in red and white suits. And one charity you’re sure to hear from at this time of year is the food bank. Holiday campaigns are a key part of any food bank’s donation strategy, and with good reason. Canadian food bank usage is up and the need for donations is urgent.

This had us wondering about other food bank facts. Using data from Food Banks Canada we decided to sort through food-bank-fact and -fiction.

Food banks are an inevitable part of modern life.

The first Canadian food bank was established in 1981 as a temporary relief measure for people facing economic hardship. Almost 30 years later, more and more people are turning to these “temporary” services. But Food Banks Canada believes that we can see the end of food banks if governments get tough on poverty by providing equitable access to social assistance and unemployment insurance programs, and by addressing other problems with the welfare system.

The need for food banks is decreasing.

According to HungerCount 2009, Food Banks Canada’s annual report on food bank use, March 2009 saw an 18 percent increase in use compared to March 2008, the largest year-over-year increase on record.

Most food bank users are homeless.

Actually, only five percent are. According to 2009 numbers, 87 percent of food bank users live in rental housing, with 60 percent paying market rent and 27 percent living in social housing. Six percent reported owning their own homes.

It’s mostly adults who use food banks.

But a large number of children need them, too. Food Banks Canada’s March 2009 count found that 293,677 Canadian children were eating food that came from a food bank. Families with children comprise 49 percent of all users, with 25 percent being single-parent families. Of users without children, 39 percent are single and 12 percent are couples.

Food banks are able to provide enough groceries to last a week.

Two-thirds of food banks provide five days’ worth of food or less per visit. Fifty-five percent provide help once a month or less.

Anne Carson's 'Nox: An Epitaph for My Brother' (New Directions Press)

In the last year, U.S. publisher New Directions released two irresistible books: Nox: An Epitaph for my Brother, by Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson, and Microscripts, by Swiss modernist writer Robert Walser. They’re irresistible by virtue of their content, of course, but also their presentation: Nox is a striking accordion of a book, made up of photographs, drawings, and anecdotes printed on a giant strip of paper folded into just under 200 pages, and housed in a beautiful box. And Microscripts, one of a handful of Walser’s works recently made available in agile translations by Susan Bernofsky, collects 25 microscripts—short pieces Walser wrote in his unique, shrunken-down shorthand—reproduced on narrow strips of paper in full colour, along with more legible translations. These books are beautiful, sophisticated, and most of all, fun. Fun to touch, fun to read, fun to share and give away.

They’re also a merciful reprieve from the current gloomy atmosphere of the book business, which lately has been stuck on repeat, obsessed with the spread of e-books. Book-industry and mainstream media alike have perpetuated a conversation in which the discussion of books has been replaced by a lament for them.

To be clear: e-books are great, and getting better. As standards rise and technical knowledge spreads, e-books will only become more relevant—more experiential, interactive, engaging, and innovative. But as we’ve seen in the music industry, the shift to mass-market digital has also spurred a return to small print-run, high-quality physical editions—vinyl LPs, special editions, original artwork. The growing ubiquity and quality of e-books doesn’t need to come at the expense of the quality of print. We can have better-produced books all around.

Recently, a coalition of small Canadian publishers launched the Handmade Campaign, which aims to promote books with exceptional production values. Featured titles include Migration Songs by Anna Quon (Invisible Publishing), The Sleep of Four Cities by Jen Currin (Anvil Press), and Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip by Lisa Robertson (Coach House Books). These publishers continue to release high-quality print editions of their books, using textured cover stock and paper and superior typesetting, while also making them available in digital form. In doing so, they’re meeting two very distinct needs: permanence, tactility, and quality on one hand, and ease of access on the other. These two market demands are coexisting, not mutually exclusive. The growing prevalence of e-books should pave the way for an increase in demand for, and availability of, handcrafted, limited-edition book objects. As readers have greater digital access to a greater number of titles, including longburied back-catalogue and public-domain titles, they will become choosier about what they want to give shelf room in their homes.

These days, I find myself acquiring new books in one of three ways: from friends, from the library, or from digital retailers like Kobo, the e-reader backed mainly by Indigo Books & Music. When I’m smitten with a book—whether because of the story or the design—I’ll go out and buy the print edition for my shelf. I’m not buying fewer books; in fact, in some cases, I’m buying the same book twice. I’m building a collection, and I’d prefer that it be comprised of beautiful artifacts, not $10 mass-market paperbacks.

The new world of e-books presents an opportunity for publishers, not a limitation. As Kassia Krozser wrote in a July 2010 post on publishing blog Booksquare, “Print becomes more valuable when it becomes less disposable.” E-books can be used as a way to facilitate different release schedules by allowing publishers to introduce titles as limited-edition advance releases, or responding to the popularity of certain e-books by issuing post-publication collectors’ editions.

Compared to most other forms of entertainment, books are terribly cheap. Let’s use some of the conversation about e-books to reopen the door to a more mainstream appreciation of and dialogue about beautiful print editions—to redevelop a wider appreciation of books instead of bemoaning a change that’s inevitable. The fight between the two isn’t really a fight: given the choice between print and digital books, I choose both.

In 1999, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission took a hard look at the then-burgeoning internet. They then did what many Canadians would consider a very un-CRTC-like thing: they decided not to regulate it.

That may come as something of a surprise, as we tend to think that if the CRTC has a thing, it’s regulating stuff. They are, after all, the people known primarily for “CanCon” rules, the quotas that dictate that a certain percentage of programming on Canadian radio and television is made in Canada.

Yet at the time, the Commission’s logic for not touching the web was twofold. First, it felt that the bulk of material online consisted “predominantly of alphanumeric text,” and thus simply wasn’t theirs to regulate; second, it seemed Canadians were both consuming and making lots of Canadian content just fine on their own.

Eleven years later, the internet is a different place. The big change is that, whether on YouTube or the sites of Canadian TV networks, we are watching millions of videos a day. What’s more, we also have unfettered access to TV and film through online services like iTunes, and, since September, streaming video through the U.S.based Netflix. With this sudden online expansion of our entertainment and cultural choices, it may be time for Canada to not only change its approach to regulation, but the entire CanCon concept itself.

Though always contentious, the need for CanCon in our culture’s most dominant medium, TV, has compelling evidence behind it. Except for Hockey Night in Canada, the top 20 most-watched shows in Canada are all made in America. Though there are many reasons why, money is the big one. The pilot episode for ABC’s Lost was widely rumoured to have a budget of around $12 million. That’s as much as or more than many Canadian dramas get for an entire season. The disparity in financial backing—and, consequently, in cultural influence—is often stark. Legitimate debate rages over whether regulation is the best way to solve this gap, but the dominance of American media is likely to increase following the arrival this September of streaming-video service Netflix, allowing users to watch movies and TV shows on their PCs or, with the right equipment, TVs. The growing service already has 15 million subscribers in the U.S., and the company has become so well-known that even Ottawa-based Zip.ca has for years advertised itself as Canada’s Netflix.

But because Netflix delivers content over the web, it’s not subject to any CanCon regulation by the CRTC, and is under no obligation to deliver Canadian content. Similar services from Apple, Microsoft, and Sony are also free to sell and rent whatever they please. Because it’s relatively easy to license Canadian content, and because Canadians will watch it, most services do launch with some Canadian shows and music. But as more and more of these services spring up, Canadians will have increasing access to online broadcast channels untouched by CanCon requirements.

The answer, it would seem, would be to regulate them. When the CRTC initially chose to leave the web alone, it did so because it felt the market was doing an adequate job of protecting Canadian interests. But a decade later, market economics have done what they always do: they created a link between capital and cultural clout, and wealthy American giants like Netflix and Apple will soon have even more influence over what we watch.

What’s more, if media is the fodder for the conversations we have on Facebook and Twitter about the contemporary moment, it’s hard not to talk about those ubiquitous American shows. If you want to chat about body issues, it’s Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks you talk about. The web is a global conversation, and in a world in which U.S. cultural production is everywhere, American culture often becomes our shared reference point.

But even amidst this changing landscape, regulating the web is not the answer. In fact, the cyclical relationship between web hype and pop culture means that regulation is far less effective than relevance. CanCon was effective in a world with a few limited TV channels to choose from; the nearly limitless bandwidth of the web has changed the game.

To become more present in Canadian culture, Canadian media must provide its own fodder for online chatter, links, and debate. What this means is that rather than regulating the delivery system, we need to fund homegrown arts and culture to ensure the internet pipe into every home is filled with high-quality Canadian content.

Forget the free-marketeers’ response that “Canadian media should stand on its own two feet.” We need to acknowledge that the web has expanded our cultural choices well beyond Canadian borders. For Canadians to have and keep our own points of reference that speak to our own issues, we must fund them so that, placed side by side with American or British counterparts, there is no reason to click away.

Fortunately, this path has a precedent. Recent examples from television like Corner Gas and Being Erica prove that when Canadians are given high-quality programming from their own backyards, they will flock to it. In the face of the web and massively expanded competition from across the world, Canada must continue to invest in its own cultural industries if it too wishes to be part of that global conversation.

Set on the icy Labrador coast, Kathleen Winter’s Annabel follows Wayne from birth to young adulthood as he struggles with his desire to dance and fascination with synchronized swimming. Wayne’s problem is not his anatomy, but the social labels that work to isolate the various components of his identity. Even Annabel, his secret female self, christened by a family friend, is a construct of gender divisions. The novel’s characters are sensitively drawn, their inner lives rich and nuanced. While Treadway’s stoicism and Wayne’s passivity may be frustrating, they are achingly real. Winter’s prose is simple, but true to its setting: its lilting cadence recalls an East Coast ballad.

Winter’s haunted Labrador hinterland is the novel’s most vividly rendered creation. “Some know, from birth, that their homeland has a respiratory system, that it pulls energy from rock and mountain and water and gravitational activity beyond earth, and that it breathes energy in return,” Winter writes. In Annabel, she has written a novel that pulses with its own rapturous energy.

This is not an operating room. It’s a solarium. The glass windows connect to a metal frame that connects to the concrete floor, the floor of this enclosed balcony three storeys up. The concrete is coated with sealant to keep it non-porous. The less porous a surface, the less chance bacteria will take root and grow and contaminate the area. When you’re dealing with skin and blood, you try to avoid contaminants. They cause irritations and infection and other disturbances that can lead to hospital visits. You don’t want someone to leave here and go to the hospital. The fewer people who know someone was here, the better.

Andy Niland knows this. It’s his apartment, his space, though he shares it with his girlfriend, Adrianne, who’s been living here for a few months. He put in the work to make sure it was as close to sterile as possible. But “almost sterile” doesn’t mean anything. Sterile is absolute. A crack, a cleft, a weak stitch—any imperfection, anything overlooked can lead to trauma.

A blue massage table sits inside the solarium’s sliding glass doors. One corner holds an autoclave. There are plastic drawers housing Andy’s tools: scalpel blades; surgical sutures and suture needles; silver nitrate in the form of lunar caustic; bottles of the local anaesthetic lidocaine and syringes with which to inject it. There are also piercing needles and body jewellery—by trade, he’s a body piercer, and sometimes he’ll do piercings here, too—but he has no use for them tonight. He bought all of these items legally; being in possession of them is not against the law. What he plans to do with them, however, will make him a criminal. He knows this.

It’s Sunday, January 18, 2009, and just after 5 p.m., the party arrives. Twenty-four-year-old Danielle leads the way. She’s pretty, with dark dyed hair, crimson streaks in the front, some piercings, and some tattoos—most of the former done by Andy—and she’s accompanied by a couple of girlfriends and her cousin. Maybe they’re here for support, maybe to gawk, or maybe there’s just not much to do in North Bay, Ontario, on a frozen Sunday night in the middle of winter. By 9:30, Danielle is lying on the massage table, naked from the waist down except for a pair of leg warmers that Adrianne, playing the role of nurse, gave her to wear. Andy, wearing a surgical mask and white nitrile gloves, injects three half-full syringes of lidocaine into separate points in Danielle’s inner labia, numbing the area. Then he marks with a surgical pen where exactly on her labia he’s going to cut. He’ll draw a pair of lines, let Danielle take a look with a handheld mirror, then wipe them off and try again. “You’re not going to have one bigger than the other,” Andy tells her. It’s an easy, friendly atmosphere. Danielle, Andy, and Adrianne know each other well, and all three are cracking jokes to keep it loose. “Oh, look,” Danielle says, “I’ve had both of you separately between my legs, and now I’ve got both of you together between my legs.”

This is not an operating room, and that’s part of the reason she wants to be here. In this solarium, subzero North Bay blissfully unaware just beyond the glass, she knows Andy will take care of her.

It’s not hard to find a cosmetic surgeon who will perform a labia reduction. Pick one at random in a major city and there’s a good chance he or she will offer some variation of the procedure. In Toronto, clinics take different approaches to selling it. Some go for the technical “labiaplasty,” while others soften the operation by calling it something like “vaginal beautification.” But for between $3,000 and $8,000, a licensed surgeon will use a laser to safely and quickly trim or reshape distended, uneven, discoloured, or painful labia.

These are the only circumstances under which a woman in Canada can consent to a labia reduction. The Ontario Human Rights Commission folds labia excision into its policy on female genital mutilation, if performed alongside removal of the clitoris and suturing shut the vaginal opening, called infibulation. The OHRC takes a stand on the issue to protect women from certain cultural backgrounds in Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Asia and South America from being coerced or otherwise forced into “consenting” to such operations. It’s a difficult phenomenon to track reliably, however. “There is some evidence that FGM is practised in Ontario and across Canada,” notes the OHRC policy on the matter, adding that in some cases girls are likely sent out of the country for the procedure. These surgeries are unsafe and painful, in some cases performed with instruments as crude as shards of glass or cactus spines.

But while female genital mutilation might be widely recognized as a serious violation of human rights, legal labiaplasties happen every day—within limits. In Ontario, legislation has specified it as a “controlled act”—that is, one that only members of certain medical professions may perform. The 13 (soon to be 14) specified acts range from performing any operation below the dermis layer of tissue to even inserting an instrument (or finger) beyond certain thresholds (including the outer labia). Dentists, surgeons, nurses, and even acupuncturists are authorized to perform some of the acts, depending on the nature of their work. To operate without an authorization is, in the law’s eyes, illegal and potentially criminal. The Criminal Code of Canada, after all, explicitly mentions excising, infibulating, or mutilating the labia minora as acts deserving of an aggravated assault charge—unless, of course, they were performed by surgeons as parts of legitimate medical procedures. The Code also offers an allowance provided the patient is at least 18 and the procedure doesn’t result in permanent damage.

These are sensible, obvious precautions. They guarantee that the people performing these procedures have a certain level of skill. And yet, some see a trade-off: as legislation piles up in the interest of safety and security, people’s autonomy over their own bodies decreases.

Perhaps ironically, though, the medical community is more invested in patient autonomy now than ever before, except the focus is now on the patient’s refusal of treatment. “There’s a famous phrase in medicine,” says Dr. Philip Hébert, chair of the Research Ethics Board at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. “The doctor proposes and the patient disposes.” It’s simplistic, he admits, but the point is to avoid wading into territory where clinicians end up assaulting clients by performing unwanted or improperly explained procedures. Over the past 50 years, he says, bioethicists have occupied themselves with the robustness of the consent process to ensure patient autonomy is unimpeachable.

Patients’ wishes, however, only go so far. “Just because you have a right to your body,” Hébert says, “doesn’t mean there’s an obligation on the part of the health professional to help you do those things,” at least when it comes to experimental and dangerous procedures. There are limits to consent. For example, he says, people cannot consent to their own murders. “That will remain murder—it doesn’t exculpate the person from the responsibility of carrying out the act you ‘consented’ to.” Grievous bodily harm, no matter the circumstances, cannot be a consensual act.

This has been tested. In 1991, the Supreme Court of Canada decided, in the case of R. v. Jobidon, that a man who killed another man in a consensual fist fight in a bar parking lot was guilty of manslaughter. The verdict hinged on the belief that even though it was a fair and mutually desired fight, a person cannot consent to assault, and even if it was consensual, it’s hard to argue that two men brawling outside a pub are doing anything but assaulting each other.

Except, what if the assault doesn’t end with a death in a parking lot? What if the victim is a vocal and willing participant, one who makes it out alive, one who laughs at the idea that her rights have been violated in any way and is her alleged assaulter’s most vociferous defender? What then?

Danielle’s a bleeder, but at least the anesthetic is doing its job. It’s like being at the dentist, she says—someone’s obviously poking around, but she doesn’t feel much. While Andy nicks away with his scalpel blade, one of the friends snaps photos of Danielle’s bloodstained buttocks, complete with freshly formed clots, and Adrianne jokes about frying and eating the pieces of labia that Andy has removed.

It’s a fix for a problem Danielle has felt she had since she was 16. “I thought it was saggy and gross,” she says of her labia, “and I figured it was only going to get worse as I got older.” She called cosmetic surgery clinics, but either couldn’t afford the thousands of dollars it would cost or wasn’t able to convince a surgeon in either Toronto or Sudbury to take her without going through a psychological evaluation. One night at Andy’s apartment, she told him she’d been seeking out a surgeon, and he chided her gently for it—he’d done the procedure before, he said, and would do it for her at a fraction of the price.

“Really?” she asked. “You’d do that?”

He said it wasn’t complicated—just cutting off some extra skin. This was appealing: they knew each other well, the money would be easier to come by, and he’d use a scalpel instead of a laser. Based on photos she’d seen, the laser method removed the tissue in an unnatural looking straight line, whereas with a scalpel, it looked more organic. He quoted her a price of $250—far from the thousands of dollars she’d pay at a clinic, and based less on profit than on covering costs for the supplies he’d need.

The cuts themselves take an hour and a half, after which he stitches her wounds and applies the lunar caustic to cauterize the area and stop the bleeding. He gives her 10 sticks of her own and shows her how to use them: dip the head of the matchstick in distilled water to activate the silver nitrate, then apply it wherever she might be bleeding. It’ll burn, but it’ll work. He packs the area with gauze and puts a menstrual pad over top. She and her friends head out, around midnight.

When she wakes up at 3 a.m., the anaesthetic is long gone. Her body is screaming, racked with pain, and if a doctor were there, he’d probably tell her she was going into shock. She shakes violently but manages to toss herself into the bathroom to inspect the damage, where she finds the pad has stuck to the seeping blood from her stitches. Either out of fear or instinct, she pulls the pad down, which inadvertently tears off the scabs, causing a surge of bleeding. For the second time in a few hours she’s covered in blood, her blood, but now she’s alone in the middle of the night and she doesn’t know what to do. She tries to stop the bleeding but can’t. She’s panicking. So she calls Andy.

He’s a calming presence. He’s been in Canada almost 10 years after meeting and marrying a Canadian girl. The marriage didn’t last and Andy fell into one in a series of depressive periods, but he stuck it out in Canada, made a decent living as a body piercer and, finally, on July 25, 2008, officially became a Canadian citizen. His Irish brogue became so fine you could easily miss it—Adrianne says it would come out when he was grocery shopping and couldn’t find vegan-friendly foods—but now, with an agitated friend and client on the line, he summons whatever softness he can to put her at ease.

She tells him there’s so much blood she barely even knows where to look to apply the silver nitrate, so he instructs her to rinse the area, gently but fully, and try to catch where the bleeding starts. He offers to pay for a cab over to his place so he can do it for her, but, no, she’s able to figure it out. Yes, she’s comfortable. No, she doesn’t need to see him. He tells her if it gets worse to go to the hospital. They hang up, Danielle calms herself down and manages to stop the bleeding.

Neither one of them knows this will be the last time they’ll ever speak to each other.

Not long before Danielle came over for the procedure, Andy called Simon for advice. Simon has been operating at the heavier end of the body-modification spectrum before some of the younger practitioners had gotten their first piercings, and has knowledge to share if he thinks you’ll use it safely. “The longer I’m in this industry,” he’ll later say of this unsanctioned pseudo-surgical offshoot of body piercing, “I see there’s a point where things can be done safely, and there are certain things where we don’t have the right equipment.” For Simon, labiaplasty falls into the latter category.

But he thought highly of Andy and his work and was happy to give him some tips. For one, he told him to use taper-point needles to stitch in sutures rather than reverse-cutting needles—the former look like regular sewing needles and help prevent tearing after the fact. Simon won’t do labia removals anymore, though. If it’s available legally, he’s more inclined to leave it alone.

“Body-modification artist” is a handy, albeit recent, catch-all title for Simon and practitioners like him. But 30 or 40 years ago, when people started performing these procedures— largely in the gay S&M community—they were called cutters. You’d seek out a cutter for an extreme procedure like a subincision (a bisection of the underside of the penis from the urethra towards the scrotum) or a castration. Cutters typically didn’t advertise their services, which were, at best, legally dubious, but if you wanted to find a cutter, you’d find a cutter. It might have taken some time hanging out at piercing studios or leather shops, but the channels existed.

For better or worse, that process has been simplified over the years, due in large part to the internet. Russ Foxx doesn’t hide the procedures he offers; nor has he been to medical school. Working out of The FALL body piercing and tattoo studio in Vancouver, he has split people’s tongues, pointed their ears, and implanted silicone designs under their skin. Some fellow artists—and there are thousands performing these and other procedures around the world—worry that he shows off his work too readily and maintains too high-profile an online presence. He argues, though, that he’s offering services surgeons won’t. “I believe people should have the right to do these things,” he says, “and I have the right to do them safely for another consenting adult.”

Dr. Hébert’s views are in line with Foxx’s, at least as far as an attitude towards openness. Legitimizing and regulating these procedures would open them up to the public in a way that would, in the end, make them safer, he says. “The evidence that something’s wrong,” says the bioethicist, “is if people aren’t willing to talk about it, bring it into the public eye. It suggests they themselves think something’s wrong with it.” In his experience, when such ideas and practices are concealed, whether in a professional setting or otherwise, the general public only finds out about them when there’s an egregious, tragic misstep.

Simon’s had his share of close calls. The first labia removal he ever did, he clamped down on and crushed the labial tissue with forceps under the misguided impression it would make the cuts easier. Once the cuts were made, though, a rim of damaged tissue remained, not nearly strong enough to hold even well-stitched sutures. Blood pooled until it welled up and burst, a projectile stream of red geysering three feet out of the tissue. He quieted the squirting with pressure, but with so much blood, a hospital visit could have been in order. “Some practitioners,” he says, “are not willing to make that call. There’s a point where you’re not there anymore, and it’s all about the client.”

Police arrested Andy and Adrianne on charges of aggravated assault on Wednesday, January 21—a few days after he removed parts of Danielle’s labia—and gave Andy unrelated weapons charges for a collector’s gun found in his apartment as well. The mother of one of Danielle’s friends who’d been present for the procedure found out what had happened and wasted no time getting in touch with the North Bay Parry Sound District Health Unit. Dr. Jim Chirico, the medical officer of health with the health unit, says his team had reason to believe there had been “significant complications” from the procedure and turned the matter over to the police. Detective Constable Jim Kilroy took the lead on the case, first visiting Danielle with another officer earlier that day.

They seemed amazed that she was mobile, but she made it clear she felt fine. Kilroy, a tall man who had to duck down slightly to fit under Danielle’s six-foot-high ceilings, told her that they’d still prefer she go to the hospital for an examination. But this visit, which implied something wrong had been done to her, felt like more of a violation than anything Andy had done. Andy had given her the remnants of her excised labia in a jar of alcohol, which Kilroy told her he’d have to confiscate as evidence. (Kilroy declined to comment on this story, citing privacy laws.) She argued, but he told her that once it left her body, it was no longer her property.

A doctor who saw her at North Bay General Hospital told her that Andy’s work wasn’t all that bad—maybe not enough stitches, but generally well done. Of course, Andy wouldn’t have been able to prescribe antibiotics or anti-inflammatories, but from a technical standpoint, he seemed to know what he was doing. An infection was developing, though, and Danielle was given a portable IV to carry with her to fight it off.

She and some friends went to the courthouse on Friday for Andy and Adrianne’s arraignment. The justice of the peace singled her out in the crowd, telling her that the conditions of the bail meant she was to have no contact whatsoever with the two defendants. Adrianne was released on her own recognizance, but Andy’s bail was eventually set, after an appeal, at $2,500 and one surety, and by February 27, he was out of jail and back to work, albeit restricted to body piercing. The trial would follow later in the year. “I’m confident that I can win this,” he wrote in an online journal, “though it will take no small measure of effort.”

Danielle was livid. She visited Kilroy at the station to vent, only to be told to calm down, to look up the law—she was not allowed to consent to what had happened, he told her. Legally, this was true. She may have agreed to the procedure, but that assent was not the same as true consent, which goes far beyond a signature on a waiver. Andy wasn’t trained to assess her capacity to make an informed decision; nor was he qualified to disclose the necessary information to allow her to make that informed decision. And disclosure doesn’t just mean giving a patient a pamphlet to read; the clinician must ensure all alternative medical measures have been discussed, including the option of doing nothing, and the likely outcomes from those paths. Andy may have been a good friend and handier with a scalpel than the average citizen, but he was not a physician, nor, in the law’s eyes, was he in any position to receive consent for the procedure.

This likely didn’t faze Andy. At some point, he developed an ego about his work. When Craig Coupal met him, not long after Andy came to Canada and was piercing at a shop in Sudbury, Ontario, he said the Irish expat stood in stark contrast to the body-modification “rock stars” who took unnecessary risks just for the sake of an interesting and unique portfolio. Beyond that, Coupal says, he was opposed to the do-it-yourself types who would experiment on themselves and friends outside of a professional setting. Gradually, though, a competitive streak started building in Andy. He wanted to outdo—or, at least, keep pace with—the industry’s cutting-edge practitioners. “His work was never bad,” says Coupal, a piercer at Live Once Tattoo, where Andy was once employed, “he was just getting cockier, advertising on Facebook, doing stuff in the shop.” It was bad form to do heavier modifications at the studio, which was inspected by the health board, so he started doing them at home, stepping outside the strict client base of friends and staff he’d previously stuck to. If people want a cutter, they’ll find a cutter. Andy made himself easier to find.

In May, Danielle moved to the Ottawa area with her boyfriend. By then, Andy and Adrianne had broken up and she had left North Bay for Sudbury. They were still not allowed to speak to Danielle, but Andy’s online journal entries indicated that the case was moving in a positive direction. On July 23, he wrote that he was going to take a plea deal. He’d pay a fine of up to $5,000, be on probation for a year and likely be prohibited from doing any genital modifications beyond piercing. “Ultimately,” he wrote, “I’ll just be happy to give a deep breath and be able to say, ‘it’s over.’”

On Saturday, August 8, Coupal stopped by the shop to say hi. He didn’t work Saturdays, but the piercer on duty was happy to see him—they were swamped with customers and he asked Coupal if he could stick around and help out. “I don’t know what it is,” his co-worker said, “but apparently we’re the only piercers in town today.”

“Where’s Andy?” Coupal asked. Andy had been working at Sacred Art Skin Grafix, a shop a few kilometres south.

“I don’t know,” he told Coupal. “He’s missing.”

He’d actually been missing since August 4. Up and gone, left behind his identification and his cats, not a mention to anyone of where he was going. His friends were flummoxed— this wasn’t like him. Theories sprung up: he was camping to clear his head; new charges were coming down and he was on the run; someone had disapproved so strongly of what he’d done that they’d murdered him—one rumour was that his body was found with nine bullets in it. Without any inside knowledge, Coupal scoffed at this. “This is North Bay,” he says, “someone gets nine bullets in them—someone gets one bullet in them, accidentally, cleaning their gun—it makes the news.” But weeks went by with no new leads. Members of his family from Ireland came to North Bay to meet with police.

Danielle came back, too. She’d felt responsible for the trouble he’d been through all year, and this was almost too much to take. Still, it wasn’t a secret Andy had his issues. Years of depression, hard drinking—he once took two bottles of wine as payment for a more advanced body-modification procedure. Going missing, though, especially after seeming resigned to his fate, didn’t sit right with those who knew him.

On August 28, his body was found in the woods off Highway 63 in northeast North Bay. He’d hanged himself weeks earlier, leaving behind a mess of secrets. Danielle says that if she’d known it was going to come to this, she never would have had the procedure done—at least, not by him. She could have saved her money and found a licensed professional who would help her. She could have gone to Tijuana and had it done cheaper there. She could have lived with a part of her body that she found unattractive, too. For a brief window, though, she thought she had another option. “I trusted him,” she says. “I trusted him with my life. And I don’t see why he shouldn’t have been allowed to do what I wanted him to do.”

Sure, blame can be spread around. If the procedure hadn’t been reported, he never would have been arrested. If he hadn’t been arrested, he wouldn’t have had to deal with the stresses the year brought. If he hadn’t just recently become a Canadian citizen, he might have simply been deported. Hell, if he’d just been allowed to provide the service Danielle had given him permission to do in the first place—if the laws didn’t apply to him, as he appeared to believe they shouldn’t—maybe he’d still be alive. He made his choice, though, his final choice, just as he’d made the choices that led him to that point. He didn’t deserve to die, but it’s just not that simple, is it?

Who knew that a hobby so bizarre even had a name for itself? But Mandy spelled it all out for her baffled mother early on, back when she was oh, eight or so. Waxidermy is what she called her riff on Madame Tussaud. For starters, Mandy appropriated the cold white stubs from the shabbos candles and yahrzeit candles her mother had illegally blown out before they were fully burned down so that the flames wouldn’t singe the dining room sheers while they slept. Her mother was a modern woman, happy to observe the traditions to the extent that they didn’t impinge on safety or decor, though her laissez-faire approach to religious observance abraded her daughter’s parochial school sensibilities. Little Miss Holier-than-thou stashed the filched candle butts in a shoe box until she accumulated what she deemed a decent hoard, at which point she melted them down to malleability in the crock pot. Once her pinkie advised her that it was cool enough to work with, she turned the waxy mass out onto her mother’s marble pastry board and moulded it into a marzipanish figurine of one of the relatives.

Mandy, in family lore, had no talent for art. It was her brother Bram who had locked up the Chagall genes. But it was starting to look like they’d given her short shrift. Her sculptures were eerily lifelike; masterful representations of the various members of the mishpocheh Tabachnik. On the face of it, they were a dubious bunch to inspire flights of creativity, but muses must come in all flavours, apparently. Mandy seemed to put her miniatures to no particular fetishy use. She didn’t stick thumbtacks in their hearts or lop off an arm here or a foot there. Once they cooled and hardened, she just positioned her downsized kinfolk very precisely on top of her bureau and there they sat.

Mandy’s mother cleaned house every Thursday. Bella couldn’t help but study her daughter’s munchkin output while she flicked the feather duster over the assemblage. Not that the array changed all that often. It took months and months worth of candle stumps to yield a single new specimen. Bella peered through her bifocals at the statuettes. They were placed in a rough semi-circle. At first, she took the configuration as the lead-up to an eventual ring-around-the-rosie arrangement, an innocent and joyful family tableau, or an incipient hora circle, maybe. But over time she was forced to question her initial assessment. Surely she was hallucinating, but didn’t the layout on Mandy’s bureau look more like Stonehenge?

That impression, ludicrous though she knew it to be, refused to shake loose. Soon Bella was obsessing over the relative positions of the wax replicas that populated the top of the chest of drawers where her daughter stored her Cinderella undies and pyjamas, trying to sniff out their subliminal message. Whatever it was, she figured, no way could it be good.

As Mandy added more bite-size family characters over the years, placing them here and there among the old-timers according to her own internal logic, Bella was able to enjoy a brief period of relief. It was all beginning to look less to her like Stonehenge and more like the diamond at Fenway, but no, that wasn’t quite it either. The particular disposition of the effigies in Mandy’s room rang a faint bell somewhere at the back of Bella’s mind, but she just couldn’t manage to dredge up the matching image from the archives. She was forever ruminating over the deployment of the figurines like a scientist puzzling over crop circles until the penny finally dropped.

A nativity scene. That’s what it was. Bella wanted to be wrong, but the evidence, undisputable, was right there before her. What did her Mandele know from a crèche, but the most recently added figure was the baby Jesus all right, and he was wearing Uncle Seymour’s pocked puss. What the hell kind of statement was Mandy trying to make? The girl had been a mystery to her mother since day one; seldom disobedient, seldom ornery, but always opaque. And if this wacko diorama was indeed some sort of message to Bella, why was Mandy taking an eternity to cough it up? Her daughter had shown herself, growing up, to be a patient sort, but this much restraint was downright pathological.

Not one word did Bella say to her daughter about her revelation; no action did she take. That is, of course, until the day Mandy parachuted the donkey into her mise en scène. That fateful Thursday, Bella lugged the vacuum cleaner into her daughter’s room as usual and dumped it in the corner. She always started her cleaning forays into Mandy’s territory with an inspection of the forms on the bureau; only then could she settle down to business. Bella noticed the new inhabitant at once. The arrangement of bonsai Tabachniks was graven on her brain, and any change to the blueprint leapt immediately to her attention. It was an animal this time, Mandy’s first detour into the realm of wildlife. She dipped her head down closer to examine it nose to nose. Once her focus locked in on the most recent arrival, she had to lean against the wall to steady herself. The donkey bore her own face. The heart-shaped mole on Bella’s right cheek combined with the cat’s-eye glasses were unmistakeable. She was staring at her dopplegänger on four hooves. That was it, the last straw.

Bella barreled out to the kitchen to rescue the crème brulée burner from the bottom of the regifting drawer, and brought the hitherto useless gadget back to Mandy’s room. She aimed the business end towards the peewee clan, pulled the trigger and torched the lot, melting years of her daughter’s exacting labour down to a murky puddle. As soon as the deed was done, Bella suffered an episode of some sort. Looking back, she hesitated to call it a stroke — she never actually lost consciousness — but her joints seized up and her brain hung out the “back in five minutes” sign. When she came to, she cracked open her mouth and started to recite Humpty Dumpty to the four walls. The voice that echoed back sounded normal to her own ears. In her crazed state, she halfway expected that she’d bray. She reached behind her back to give her coccyx an exploratory pat-down. Bella palpated carefully in the same circular motion her ob-gyn had taught her, but she detected no tail bud lurking under the skin. The tension got the best of her. She abandoned the roux of congealing wax on the bureau, hoovered the carpet slap-dash, and then set herself up on the couch with a medicinal Chivas.

A few hours later, Mandy came back from school and retired to her room to do her homework as usual. Bella girded herself for the moment when her daughter discovered the ravaged remains of her life’s work, her entire waxy family incinerated in a holocaust unleashed at the hands of her own loving mother. But there was no outcry, nary a peep. Was this what Bella had been trying to provoke all along in destroying the shot glass statues, the colossal blowout that would break down the wall between them? If so, it was a dud. The bedroom was silent. Bella recalled her relationship with her own mother, a shrieking battleground. She didn’t communicate with her in smoke signals or charades or papier mâché. They duked it out at the highest decibel level in the time-honoured tradition of mothers and daughters. How had an incrementalist like Mandy ever sprung from Bella’s slash and burn loins?

The counter-reaction, though not verbal, didn’t tarry. Mandy hauled the crock pot out of the cupboard that same night and set to work melting the slab of wax. This time, though, she fashioned one solitary figure, a grand statement, bolder than all the rest. No more pissing about with pygmies. The result seemed somehow bigger than the sum of its parts. Maybe Mandy had thrown her backlog of virgin candle stubs into the mix, or could be she’d cleaned out her ears to add to the critical mass. In any event, this wax creation loomed over her bureau. It was, of all things, an African fertility goddess. So perfect was it in every detail that it might have been nicked from a case at the Smithsonian. The idol’s hair was intricately braided and draped, its charged breasts diddled its kneecaps, and its navel pooched out at a perky angle from a distended belly. Only her mother’s myopic face etched onto the sculpture killed the illusion. Bella nuked it on the spot, but there was no stopping Mandy now. She slapped her mother’s kisser onto every last one of her subsequent waxworks. One day Bella was rejigged as a giant Buddha, and the next a garden troll. Mandy scrimshawed her mug onto Che Guevara and Donald Duck and then shoehorned her into Mount Rushmore between Roosevelt and Lincoln. She whipped out her masterworks at dizzying speed, the Edward Scissorhands of wax, but each new opus her mother melted flat. Twice already Bella had had to replace her butane cartridge. She was considering a rare midweek sortie to Costco to buy some in bulk.

Themes began to emerge in Mandy’s oeuvre. Well into her New York period, she moulded her mother into King Kong, one arm slung buddy-buddy over the Empire State Building, and next into an owlish Statue of Liberty. Against all her instincts, Bella fell for this last waxy iteration. When she pointed her trusty burner at her clone to zap it like all the others, her index finger went on strike. Bella holstered her weapon and approached the carving, scrutinizing it from all angles. Then she closed her eyes and massaged her forehead as if performing some interior triangulation. The tumblers of her mind meshed with a satisfying click of resolution. Bella grabbed hold of the statue by the throat. She rocked it back and forth until it popped its moorings, and toted it into the dining room. There she centred it on the buffet in front of the bay window, elbowing aside the Chanukah menorah that was already kitted out with its two start-up candles for the first night of the holiday. She yanked the candles out and jammed the yellow one into Lady Liberty’s torch and the pink one into her head, just behind the crown. Bella stood back and eyeballed her ad hoc menorah. It wasn’t half bad.

For each of the following nights of Chanukah, Bella drilled yet another spiral candle into the statue’s cranium. As was her custom, she snuffed them out prophylactically at half-mast. Even so, enough heat was generated by the amputee candles that it couldn’t help but affect the integrity of the menorah proper. Its features began to morph. Ms. Liberty’s mouth and nose melded into each other harelipwise, her chin lost its resolve, and her toga pleats needed a good pressing. As the Chanukah candles dripped down the contours of the menorah, they clotted along the way, padding the Statue of Liberty’s hips in multicoloured waxen strands until she looked like a Chianti bottle centerpiece in a boho pizzeria. On the eighth and last night, Bella decided, God alone knows why, to let the candles burn all the way down, unchecked. She parked herself at the dining room table after the family retired to keep a firefighter’s eye on the blaze, ready to whip out the extinguisher and let her rip if need be, but she drifted off while the flames were still shimmying full force above the statue’s chignon.

The morning found Bella with her head cradled in her arms. She’d slept the sleep of the dead, a rare reflux-free snoozerama, chloroformed by the latke fumes holed up in the fibres of the blue and white holiday tablecloth. The wooden dreidels lodged upended under her bosom were just starting to prick her awake when she made out the approach of slippered footsteps. Bella opened her crusted eyes a slit to spy on Mandy from behind. Her daughter was contemplating the moonscape of residual wax that coated the surface of the buffet like a patch of psoriasis, all that remained of her glorious handiwork. Mandy nodded her head. She scraped up the wax, carried it over to the kitchen garbage pail, tossed it in among the coffee grounds and the orange peels, and let the lid fall on lesson number one.

Behold my face at a quarter turn: dragonly,
dog-eared, a carnal mask mirroring
half-lit spits of wood. This morning
Nevada furrows, my shoulders
too warm for leather; yet I’ve no better
armour against the wind, the stagey
palms that threaten to bend and replace
my stationary ramps, Caesar’s fountain.
Downrange, I prepare to be bandaged,
hear myself speak fluently in my own language:

“Bridge the strips around my bicep.
It’s where I… fuck, not like that. Grip
the razor down-hilt… there. Push…
shit… it won’t…”. I turn my gaze
towards the melee that surrounds
my bike, making’s landfill a network
of forgotten jumps, a backwards glance
before a maelstrom of sand. Derelict,
I’ve seen how closely my muse lurks,
have heard myself described as hard work:

having the face of an eagle, lion and ox.
Tricked out in off-white chaps, cape,
the valley of the shadow of death,
I gauge the line from rubber to ramp:
uncamp its frame on doubled wings.
Fountain-side, Romans balance,
flock to witness my ramshackle horse couple
with sky: behold my stance,
my corrugated flanks that rake the air, its absence
(as hard to get through as Scotch broth), though once

I groped around and found myself
unmoored at latitude. What mechanics
hold me, having already landed,
what patience, body tossed ass-first
over the gas-tank’s hive? The desert
revives as if in dream: my head a brick,
a helmeted weathervane unraveling
in every plane at once. Lo, it’s clear
that this is paradise, and if given a mic
someone rather bladdered will tell me I’m magnetic.

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