Montreal Serai

03/28/2025

“You told me he had turned into a star
His spirit had flown to meet his Maker
Happy in a world where the sun never sets.”

Rediscover Nilambri Ghai's poem, Greetings, Grief, and Kabir, in our latest issue!

📷 © Renu Parkhi (uploaded from Flickr and used under Creative Commons)

Kabir cries now for the world has lost its mind

03/26/2025

Sri theyvi evokes the elements of air, earth, fire and water to portray the “Creation Story Series” through innovative art and the retelling of The Ramayana.

📷 ©Sri theyvi

Trans people are divine beings. Do not forget that.

03/24/2025

“When I’m grown, I still want all good people to fall asleep in the comfort of a mature sun, but instead people love god in double scoops while their hearts bloat with hatred for their neighbours.”
Discover Lucia De Luca's poem, More Than God, in our latest issue.

📷 ©Family photo of the poet with her parents, June 13, 1999

God sits next to her in the playroom as I distribute plastic pizza slices detached at their Velcro hips.

03/21/2025

El Arbi Mrabet’s short story, “Ali’s Herbal Bouquet,” takes us to the mountains around Marrakech with 12- to 14-year-old Ali Ben Mohand, the ageless Ayyur, and the curious craft of medicinal herbs.

📷 ©El Arbi Mrabet

Aren’t crows sentient, intelligent, social and repenting? Why wouldn’t the first one be able to create the stars and the moon to illuminate the night, the darkness of the mind, its tenebrous ignorance?

03/19/2025

In “fragmented,” shailee offers us her “poetic meditation on loss, survival and the elusive hope for peace in the face of war.”

Discover more on her werbsite: shaileerajak.com

📷 © Ali Hamad, APA images, Oct. 7, 2023 via Wiki Palestine

a path of olive trees filled with booming laughter now whispers beneath a barrage of bombs.

03/17/2025

Noor Musawi argues that “true peace can only begin to blossom through tough conversations.”

Find more on her website https://noormsi.substack.com.

📷 © Bahram Azimi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

My fragile sense of peace was collapsing.

03/14/2025

"... For many, the removal of colonial structures from our lives is a prerequisite to the search for internal peace."
Muhammad Manji tackles the privilege of peaceful resistance.

📷 © Gandhi, Salt March, April 5, 1930

That the burden of peace should lie with the occupied rather than the occupier is one of the great and absurd myths of the colonial age.

03/12/2025

Cora Dean’s poem, Proxima Centauri b, pleads for humanity to not give up on Earth — to protect our home.

📷 ©Eagle Nebula M16 - Gianni.lacroce, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia

When we're all in bunkers on Proxima Centauri b, who’s to say we won't destroy those oceans...?

03/10/2025

Ceta Gabriel unveils three excerpts from her unpublished manuscript, “One Crow’s Sorrow, Two Crows’ Joy,” an auto-fictional story based on different eras of her life, speaking for a generation of youth who did not have a voice.

📷 © Ceta Gabriel

This is an auto-fictional story. It is not romantic. No palatable packaging. Just a complex series of nuanced, semi-fictional, real and raw events.

03/07/2025

Catherine Hermann's poem, The Priests Have Been Arrested, portrays the miracle of devotion that surpasses understanding, at a time where China was just starting to open to the rest of the world.

📷Qingshuiyan Temple, 2021 © Zheng Mingqing, courtesy of the photographer

We can’t understand each other’s words—I am a stranger she wants to welcome into her wavering world...

03/05/2025

In “Slouching Towards Peace,” Beverly Monk shares her creations, art born from objects found garbage-picking on the streets of Montréal, as she witnesses the onslaught against Gazans.

📷 © Beverly Monk

Artist’s Statement These works are a holding place for my emotional turmoil as I witness the ongoing U.S./Israeli genocide in Gaza. The work allows me to give form to that which could not be processed or expressed in any other way. We all have a front-row seat to this genocide against the indi

03/04/2025

Guest co-editor Dominic Gabriel teams up with Nilambri Ghai to navigate this issue on peace.
Discover their editorial through the link in our bio!

📷© Ajit Ghai

Only when we all flourish can we hope for collective peace.

03/01/2025

Discover the behind-the-scenes peace process in Kevin Callahan's essay recalling the long and violent conflict in Northern Ireland (1968-1998).

📷© Reddit r/ireland, photo Juda Ngwenya/Reuters, Johannesburg, June 19, 1995

02/24/2025

Saturday, March 1 from 4 to 6 at 1250 RUE GUY FB 630.17, 6th Floor (CORRECTED ADDRESS)

02/19/2025

Join us on Saturday, March 1 at 1 :30 at 251 Av. des Pins ouest for a community celebration and art installation on What Keeps Us Going.
Contact [email protected] for more information.