Alan Patrick Traynor is an Irish poet from Dublin whose work has been described as “the mystical galvanic paint that sets the fields of Provence on fire.” His poems shock the eyes and the soul at once; they are, in the words of one critic, “deep veridicous spears in a rachis sky of black feathers that will unlatch and unhinge you.” Traynor is the author of ‘Seven Days of Ashes’, a collection written on the spirit of the Holocaust and published by Albino Crow Press. He also has two other poetry collections published ‘Edit Not my Soul’ and ‘Until the Broken Clouds Answer’. His poetry has appeared in literary journals around the world, and he is held in high regard by his peers. Two of his own phrases—“Edit not my Soul” and “Edit not Blood”—capture the fierce integrity of his voice.
The Silence of the Desert is Alan Patrick Traynor’s first novella. It is a work of fiction and truth woven from the living fabric of his poems and life. The narrative follows Liam Bird, a solitary Irishman, and Elise Moreau, an Explorer and Swiss rider of motorcycles who loves mountains, as they travel from the light of Florence through the Atlas and the Sahara, across the Serengeti, into the Alps and the quiet of Vevey, through the rain-wet streets of Wicklow and Paris, the orange groves of Seville, the jazz sanctuaries of San Francisco, and finally into the long northern darkness of Norway under the aurora. At every stage the poems travel with them—read aloud under desert stars, mountain wind, and city lamps—while the music moves from Mozart’s elegant yearning to the searching, unfinished prayer of John Coltrane.
Traynor’s art is not confined to the page. He experiments with German Expressionist painting—its raw colour, its fractured vision, its insistence that emotion is a form of truth—and with jazz guitar, an instrument of listening as much as of sound. These dual fascinations shape the novella’s deepest current: the idea that love, like a poem or a Coltrane solo, is less a destination than a continuous act of attention and listening. The silence that follows every note, every line, every shared night under open sky, is itself a kind of music.
Readers familiar with Traynor’s poetry will recognise the landscapes, the birds, the winter roses, the broken branches that speak an Igniparous language, and the starling that sings in the soul.
Those who come to him for the first time will find a journey that is both outward and inward—a road that begins in solitude and ends in a listening so complete that the boundary between one soul and another grows thin. This is a novella for those who still believe that poems can hold a winter at bay, that motorcycles can carry more than just lonely people, and that the sceptriferous wind moving through the trees above a quiet grave is worth hearing with someone, especially in Vevey.
Through sleepless nights, her prayers rise for me,
She trusts my future more than I can see.
One gentle look from her becomes a prayer,
For mothers are heaven walking everywhere.
Your name upon my lips makes my voice shake,
A thousand thanks are far too few to take.
Your love—an endless ocean, deep and wide,
When storms surround me, you are still my guide.
You were my mother, father, strength, and light,
Allah’s greatest blessing in my sight.
Shokhida Nazirova — Andijan, Uzbekistan.
Ambassador representing Uzbekistan for several international organizations and a regional leader actively involved in ongoing social initiatives. At the age of 21, she joined Worldwide Professional Women, becoming one of Uzbekistan’s young and promising female leaders.
Through her volunteer work, unwavering determination, and selfless commitment to helping others, she continues to inspire and empower many young people across the region. She is fluent in Italian, German, Russian, Turkish and Kyrgyz.
Not misplaced, not wasted. Lost. She would be standing at the sink, or tying a shoe, or waiting for the kettle to click, and then the microwave clock would read 8:58. The missing interval left no dizziness, no memory, no sign that anything had happened. It was simply gone.
For six months she blamed sleep, then stress, then the microwave. She replaced the microwave. The new clock was equally accusatory.
One Tuesday, a cream envelope appeared beneath her apartment door. It contained a numbered ticket and an address three subway stops away. No letter. No logo. The ticket said: DEPARTMENT OF LOST MINUTES, WINDOW 4.
The address belonged to a narrow municipal building wedged between a dental office and a store that sold only lampshades. Inside, fluorescent lights flickered above rows of plastic chairs. A sign read: TAKE A NUMBER. Mara already had one.
Window 4 was staffed by an elderly man in a green cardigan. He examined her ticket, then her face.
“Eleven minutes,” he said.
“Every day.”
“Since February ninth.”
Mara gripped the counter. “You know about this?”
“We know where they go.”
He disappeared into a back room and returned with a gray file box. On the lid, in black marker, was her full name. Inside were hundreds of index cards, one for each missing interval.
He handed her the top card.
FEBRUARY 9. 8:47–8:58. SAT ON KITCHEN FLOOR. DID NOTHING.
The next card read:
FEBRUARY 10. WATCHED LIGHT MOVE ACROSS WALL.
Then:
FEBRUARY 11. REMEMBERED GRANDMOTHER’S LAUGH.
Mara looked up. “I don’t remember any of these.”
“That’s why they were removed.”
“Removed by who?”
The man adjusted his glasses. “You submitted the request.”
He found a form clipped to the bottom of the box. Her signature curved across the page. The date was February eighth. REQUEST FOR TEMPORARY RELIEF FROM NONPRODUCTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS.
Mara remembered February eighth. A performance review. A supervisor telling her she needed to optimize her mornings, protect her focus, eliminate dead time. She had gone home and searched for something—an app, a method, a planner. She did not remember this form.
“I thought it would make me more efficient,” she said.
“It did.”
“Can I have the minutes back?”
The clerk sighed and pointed toward a second sign: RESTORATIONS MAY CAUSE DELAY.
“How much delay?”
“For eleven minutes a day? Considerable.”
“Do it.”
He stamped three forms. Somewhere behind the wall, machinery started with the soft mechanical cough of an old elevator.
“Tomorrow morning,” he said, “stay somewhere safe.”
At 8:47 the next day, Mara sat at her kitchen table.
Nothing happened.
At first she panicked. Then she realized that nothing happening was the thing itself. The refrigerator hummed. A truck reversed outside. Sunlight touched the rim of her glass. She thought about her grandmother and could not remember the exact laugh, only the way everyone else had laughed after hearing it.
At 8:53 she looked at the clock. Six whole minutes remained.
which is apparently how a city tells you now that one of its organs has failed.
No bell.
No man running up Yonge yelling fire.
Just somebody’s phone held sideways and black smoke climbing through the frame behind the gold woman who has been stepping out over the sidewalk for longer than most of the condos around her have been alive.
Zanzibar is burning down.
And the first thing Toronto will do is call it a building.
359 Yonge Street.
Commercial property.
Three alarm.
Road closure.
Structural damage.
Cause unknown.
All those little clean words we invented because things are easier when nothing has a body.
But this place has always had a body.
That’s practically the problem.
They built it in 1895 for undertakers.
Young & Millard.
Caskets upstairs.
Morgue downstairs.
Imagine that.
Before the tits there were corpses.
Before the pole there was the table.
Before somebody slipped a twenty into somebody’s garter somebody else was paying to put their mother in a box.
Same building.
That isn’t symbolism.
That’s Toronto.
We don’t tear the old purpose out.
We drywall over it.
Put another licence on the door.
Eventually there was food.
Then liquor.
Jazz.
R&B.
Rock and roll.
Girls dancing beside the band.
Then girls without the band.
At one point the liquor laws required food so there was apparently a ham sandwich that went around the room from table to table,
uneaten,
performing compliance.
I love that fucking sandwich.
I hope somebody saved it.
Patron saint of Toronto.
One piece of bread passing through everybody’s hands so the government could say desire had been served with lunch.
Then the city got taller.
Cleaner.
More expensive.
Every square foot learned how much it was worth.
Sam the Record Man went dark.
The signs came down.
Honest Ed’s went into memory.
Yonge Street started wearing glass like it had somewhere better to be.
And Zanzibar—
stupid, gold, horny Zanzibar—
stayed.
Ten-karat glazed tile.
Stars.
Neon.
A giant woman over the entrance with one leg extended like she owned the fucking street.
Which she did.
You could hate it.
You could laugh at it.
You could spend forty years pretending you had never looked up.
But you knew where you were when you saw her.
That matters.
Cities need things that cannot be mistaken for anywhere else.
And Zanzibar was never anywhere else.
It was exactly there.
Yonge Street.
Toronto.
Women going in for work.
Men going in pretending they weren’t lonely.
Tourists taking pictures.
Bay Street boys.
Students.
Regulars.
Bartenders.
Bouncers.
Cleaners.
Dancers counting money under fluorescent light after the fantasy was finished.
That’s the part I don’t want anybody cleaning up now.
Those women worked.
Their bodies were not the building’s mythology.
Their bodies paid bills.
Rent.
Food.
Phone.
Child care.
Debt.
Shoes.
A cab home at four in the morning because sometimes getting home alive costs more than the TTC.
Do not turn them into neon.
Do not turn them into the colourful history of Yonge Street.
They were working.
There were men downstairs once too.
Bodies everywhere.
Bodies looking.
Bodies being looked at.
Bodies converting loneliness into currency.
Bodies surviving another week.
A whole economy with its clothes off.
And underneath them,
the old morgue.
Of course.
The dead beneath the living while the living danced to stay living.
Tell me Toronto has ever written a better sentence.
Someone once danced there as the Queen of the Fire.
She ate flame.
I don’t know what to do with that now.
So I won’t do anything with it.
I’ll leave it where it is.
Queen of the Fire.
Zanzibar.
The roof burning.
Sometimes history doesn’t need a metaphor.
Sometimes the metaphor gets there first and waits eighty years for the fire department.
This morning smoke came through the roof.
The windows opened wrong.
Water went where liquor went.
Ash settled on the gold.
And somewhere behind all of that the old building remembered every version of what we asked it to hold.
The dead.
The drunk.
The band.
The dancer.
The lonely.
The horny.
The broke.
The beautiful.
The ridiculous.
The man with a twenty.
The woman earning it.
The sandwich nobody wanted.
The corpse somebody loved.
The stripper somebody loved.
The stripper somebody was.
Maybe that’s what I’m angry about.
Not that something old is burning.
Old things burn.
Old things fall down.
Toronto is excellent at helping.
I’m angry because we keep acting surprised when memory turns out to have an address.
We think history is Queen’s Park.
Casa Loma.
A plaque screwed into brick.
A black-and-white photograph of important men wearing hats.
No.
Sometimes history has tits.
Sometimes history smells like perfume and beer and bleach at four in the morning.
Sometimes history has a dressing room.
Sometimes history walks out the employee entrance with sore feet and cash folded somewhere safe.
Sometimes history is tacky as hell.
Sometimes history is gold tile on Yonge Street.
Sometimes history is a woman forty feet over your head who has been taking the same impossible step for decades
and never once put her foot down.
Until today.
Zanzibar is burning down.
Not metaphorically.
Not eventually.
Not in the careful language we’ll use after.
It is burning down while Toronto is still standing around it.
And tomorrow somebody will ask what should replace it.
They always do.
As if absence is a development opportunity.
As if every wound is really just available frontage.
As if the city cannot bear one square metre that isn’t becoming something else.
But tonight I don’t want the rendering.
I don’t want the proposal.
I don’t want the heritage strategy.
I don’t want some fucking condominium called
THE ZANZIBAR
with brushed brass lettering and a cocktail lounge in the lobby selling a seventeen-dollar drink named after a woman who used to work there.
Leave it.
For one night,
leave the hole open.
Let Yonge Street look directly into itself.
Let the glass towers see what they replaced.
Let the morgue and the stage and the dressing room and the bar and the gold woman occupy the same ruined air.
Let the city smell like itself.
Let everybody who ever looked up admit they looked.
Let everybody who ever worked there remain larger than the story we are about to tell about them.
And if she comes down—
the gold woman—
do not say she finally fell.
She didn’t.
Toronto burned the place beneath her.
There is a difference.
Joshua W.J. Brown is a Toronto-based writer and filmmaker. His recent work has appeared in Canadian Dimension, and his poetry has been accepted for publication by The Wise Owl.
new law: real news: cannibal country . . . storage limits I’d be more on board buyer’s market which music video damn autocorrect to qualify all police, reaally hoping changing delete all the memes if thou wouldst be legacy box a patriot and catholic judges, politicians search for ‘baseless’, that screenshots to be expected two offers came first — remember when I liked let’s digitize of the sort spend a year these correlations and pdf’s you were seizing the means some new intel who’d happily see his popes in convict leasing ‘disproven’ are illusory storing here or one presidents comically reinstated asking questions
2
Oh, and by all indications they’re still at large
Can we all take a moment to pause and recognize that our presidents, royals, prime ministers, popes, bankers, spiritual leaders, celebrities, press, directors, producers, writers, poets, actors, artists, models, musicians, captains of science, technology, academia and industry — and lets not forget to mention the armed forces! — were snuggled up in bed with, some literally sandwiched between a cabal who were trafficking children, making torture pornography, descended from those who funded and instigated the holocaust, apparently did 9/11 and Covid, weaponized Alzheimer’s and Parkinsons, were exploring ‘getting rid of all of the poor’, whilst subsisting on a strict diet composed entirely of human flesh?
so the supper club
have a monopoly
on violence
3
provisional
“Apple’s best new sci-fi show just made a shockingly convincing case for cannibalism.” “Wonder Years star ‘embarrassed’ by how much she loved the taste of her placenta.” An anthropomorphized captain crunch reveals a fridge full of his own kind, discernible by frozen googly eyes staring into camera pleadingly. A shiksa has a whirlwind romance with a man constructed of Pringles until the ravenous masses suddenly leap upon and consume him, of which she cannot resist the temptation to partake herself. A young man in a strange occult ceremony is immersed in oil and withdrawn as an enormous hunk of battered chicken deeply fried.
hot tips
will receive a more escalated
non-acceptance
I can only once again report am not loving these growing observable trends. Especially considering how much money, how many resources, the quantity of discussion among so many forces, research and analysis goes into expensive ad campaigns that are highly visible to the public in prime places by huge brands, on prominent platforms… Will just say this is not boding well, that such is considered prudent, lucrative, justifiable by organized capital and big business.
lovebombing
had I juicy details you’d have
a dead man’s switch
4
the high bar
baby mama
. . . Joseph
is a mensch
shell full
of shells whenever
they mention family
keelhauling
I know people in
the background
something taken
something left
holiday snow
wild thyme
the roach’s
molting
* “The Cherry Tree Carol” exemplifies Joseph’s journey from doubt to faith through a miraculous event where the unborn Jesus commands a tree to bend, providing fruit for Mary. It showcases trust in divine will by reversing the Edenic fall, while anticipating Christ’s power over nature, divinity, and his future sacrificial death.”
5
madness acting
inconspicuous
on a summer’s day
hunchback moon
slow snow
driving through
a parking lot
charms . . .
selling something useless, counting
on only half returning it
mulberry bush
tortoiseshell sunning
across the way
sand trap
his back leg
kicks up grass
skulking hare
signs appear for
the next sweeping
lightning round:
the pounding knocks
down another frame
wiping garnet
off base of the glass
napkin darkens
season’s greetings
under the snow
a deer carcass
ouiji
not giving the
unwanted truths
* The name is a blend of French (oui) and German (ja) for “yes”.
