Poetry – Page 2

Fargo Tbakhi

in the walgreens parking lot on 44th & Indian school, another massacre

sidles its way onto my screen. a bomb
has struck a Gazan school, a tangle of limbs
untangled. a cookout of cousins, their breaths
taken for granted, then un-granted, taken.
at the walgreens on the corner of 44^th & Indian school
(a street named for the phoenix Indian school,
where indigenous children were forcibly taken, stripped
of their culture, their gutted histories baked
into this asphalt on which my car rests, on which my feet
spring, and my feet carry with them a history
steeped in theft, in forcibly taken, in prisons,
displacement) i taste blood familiar
as sea-stink on the breeze. o
may i note the streets i walk on,
may i sing their massacres, may i bring my own
to meet them. and, now, another of my own
has leapt onto my phone screen
on this street, at this walgreens,
where i have stopped to purchase beard oil.
the redbox outside offers asylum
to a movie where a white man shoots a gun,
a woman pilots a drone, two tongues
tangle together. o
i deem our imaginations complicit. the sun
is warming my skin: were i a patch of grass, i might be
browned beyond repair. were i a troop of fog,
i’d drift and smother the lenses of every cell phone. o
i am too human for all my metaphors, bridges
i am too much body & too much america
to cross. instead, i lean against the friendly wall.
light my cigarette, suck down smoke to fog
my only lungs. i roll the windows up & dribble
beard oil into my palm, crane my neck godwards
to see inside my mirror, & rub.
greet my cheeks with the tips of my fingers,
gentle as a father wiping soot from
a baby’s neck. o my lungs
tiptoe towards collapse, o
i deem my imagination complicit:
may my poems nibble at the mortar in our walls.
i deem my language colonized:
may i find a way to sing death hard & strong.
i massage my chin into submission. o
skin of my father’s mother, o dear colonized
mystery, o hands of prayer, of eating rice
pudding, of holding other hands,
of holding my phone & clutching
tight, fast, insisting on my anti-forgetting,
o thirsty, yearning, thirsty skin, o my people,
my people, my people, my people, my people,
my people, my people, my people, my people,
my people, my people, my people, my people,
my people, my people, my people, my people,
my people, my people, my people, my people,
my people, my people, my people, my people,
my people, my people, my people, my people,
my people, my people, my people, my people, o
may i never find a quiet moment.
may everything echo with each of your names,
may i find you in every hair, in every parking lot,
on every corner of land someone pretends to own,
in the boundless confines of every smoky breath.

Fargo Tbakhi (he/him) is a queer Palestinian-american performance artist from Phoenix, Arizona. He is the winner of the 2018 Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Scholarship, a Pushcart nominee, and a 2020 Desert Nights, Rising Stars fellow. His work is published in the Shallow Ends, Gay Magazine, Foglifter, Mizna, Cosmonauts Avenue, Glass: a Journal of Poetry, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. He tweets @YouKnowFargo and probably wants to hold your hand.

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Derek Berry

black out

Not for the first time, limbs loosen into slingshot. Meaning blurs becomes reckless hum disguised as courage. Too much champagne sparkle, glitterglitzed like jeweled bits of a bottle broken last night while dancing, spilled in the afternoon. Later, I trace the dirt abacus + a boy unstitches the drunk regret buried in my spine. I mimic the pastoral aubade, sob for morning’s sharp sudden light. I am nothing but animal sounds, desperate whetstone scrape + joltblue praisesong. Birdchild crumpled in the grass. Body an archive for the small broken + alive. Soft touch becomes electric when boozebleared, like a dark bedroom bled of lust. A mouse scurries across the floor, finds refuge in the trampling feet of dancing boys, who still each other’s quaking with touch, nostalgic for the next moment alive. In a small house, I cannot feel anything, like my spine’s become a snake’s coil, like my wretched mouth has finally emptied of words.

Not for the first time, limbs loosen into slingshot. Meaning blurs becomes reckless hum disguised as courage. Too much champagne sparkle, glitter-glitzed like jeweled bits of a bottle broken last night while dancing, spilled in the afternoon. Later, I trace the dirt abacus + a boy unstitches the drunk regret buried in my spine. I mimic the pastoral aubade, sob for morning’s sharp sudden light. I am nothing but animal sounds, desperate whetstone scrape + joltblue praisesong. Bird-child crumpled in the grass. Body an archive for the small broken + alive. Soft touch becomes electric when booze-bleared, like a dark bedroom bled of lust. A mouse scurries across the floor, finds refuge in the trampling feet of dancing boys, who still each other’s quaking with touch, nostalgic for the next moment alive. In a small house, I cannot feel anything, like my spine’s become a snake’s coil, like my wretched mouth has finally emptied of words.

aubade in omelas

a bee lands on the windowsill,
lazy stumbles into the bedroom where we sleep.
i allow the bee to land on my nose
as if i have never heard of stingers.

i flip over, grasp the cell phone resting
on the desk with someone else’s
severed hand. my mouth slobbers honey & you
wake with a throat swarming
with wasps.

it is possible, yes, the minerals in the cell phone
were harvested from a starved earth
by hands scarred by conflict.
& yet when i wake to tweet
a photo of a dog dressed as a lobster,
i do not think about this.
every day you mourn
tame as a forgotten anarchy
the sin gargled tequila-pungent.

it is possible, yes,
every joy is honey & blood.

i pick up the phone, thumbs-up
a meme. laugh react without laughing.
& a mother collapses at the border of town, her child
plucked from her hands.
the child, in a basement,
loses his first tooth.

the dirt will crack & swallow us
but only through small violences,
like slapping a mosquito mid-bloodsnack
leaving behind the messy remnant smear on your bare thigh.
what an inconvenience to consider its minor life,
to scrape its guts from skin, to return
to mundanity & forget.

i trace the warmth of you,
happy to live here, here
where honey is abundant.
this is a hard grace,
how we forget so easily the origin of salt in the human body,
how the sun rises quick & brings with it a red, red sky,
the horizon splitting open gorgeous like a knifed neck.

grief habit

there’s a brief barter with each bottle,
a simple equation tilting toward vice.
choose joy, the unwarm neck
begging for a mouth. choose
tonight, tomorrow a slot machine promising
only uncertainty. it is good to feel good,
indulge in a moment’s mercurial luminescence.

even the cancer ward does not ruin
your taste for cigarettes.
even your father’s surgery does not discourage
your sugar feast.
as your body pulses in revolt, you push
another pill past cobblestone teeth.

at your aunt’s funeral, her mother
buries the body in the backyard.
her brother-in-law has crafted
the casket himself.
red faces hover, a grief mob
carrying torches wicked with whiskey.

the drink killed her, they whisper,
this woman who bloomed alive
when blood-monstered,
wedding dance dust storm,
loud-laughed patron saint of pleasure.

graveside, you teeter
tipsy.
flask holstered to hip.
wear a habit. pray
to what cannot save you.
learn first booze-loosed lucidity.
here, see clearly how joy
frays, how an overflowing cup can drown.

behind the barn, choose yourself again.
let the gutwarm lick your brainstem.
call this self care, how you barter
for another moment underwater, then
join the mourners.
take turns tossing handfuls of dirt.

Derek Berry is the author of the novel “Heathens & Liars of Lickskillet County” & the forthcoming poetry chapbook “Glitter Husk.” They are the recipient of the Emrys Poetry Prize & Broad River Prize for Prose, among other honors. Their recent work has appeared in Yemassee, Beloit Poetry Journal, Raleigh Review, Gigantic Sequins, Taco Bell Quarterly, & elsewhere. They live in Aiken, South Carolina, where they teach creative writing to children & work in Cold War historic archives. Their work can be found at derekberrywriter.com

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Hussain Ahmed

Satellite Phone Call to Girls that were Once Sand Miners

Without having to lose their tongues to gravity
in a pond of brown water, I see them wash mounds of earth

until they found Coltan. In the beginning was a pond,
shallow—but it would be enough for baptism.

their legs ankle-deep in mud,
this is how they build a dam to keep their homes from burning,

but end up breeding mosquitoes in the water.
our homes are rings of minerals,

we become what we walk upon. so everything ends where it begins,
mama had been sick for months,

but she complains the flowers in her body are dying without the sun.
anytime she sleeps with the lights on, she wakes up with smiles on her lips.

I am my mother with no flower to remediate the pains of losing her lovers to the war.
mama begged that I don’t dig deeper than my knee,

she tells me stories about her childhood,
when the only time she dug the ground was to bury kernelled seeds of sunflowers.

Satellite Phone Call to the Tourists in the Train Station

there are a thousand ways to make fire, because the sea is receding
back into its skeleton—each day, it becomes farther from us.

how often do you dream of home when it begins to burn?
we supplicate to the sun to dry out our skin until it turns fireproof.

the branches of what grows on the train tracks when it rains
are curved arrowheads—shaped like cactuses. it colors are the remains

of the blood that stains the ground before the rains.
I was born few days before a giant fire in Kaduna,

it is safe to say I was bred for falconry; we are always ready for flight.
in the direction of gabas, we journeyed until we find other tourists.

the train station is a purgatory of hope, we come here often
to tell ourselves of what we missed about our countries.

the cemetery and the train station have this in common; both have the incisions of the past
that refused our memory a flicker of solitude.

we left home in search of a name and became tourists of borders,
no matter how unsafe home is, I won’t identify as an alien.

Hussain Ahmed is a Nigerian writer and environmentalist. His poems are featured or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, Poet Lore, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.

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Abbigail Baldys

[1115]

from this bed the city
waits                on me half-awake                       (human suit!)                             watching
                                                                                                                                       the window washers saddle up high
                                                                                                                                       above river’s magenta
awnings
wavy    heat
melodramatic vista                          straight buildings stand far out

                                                                                                              of the water held
                                                                                                              in my hand

                                                                                                              every view’s a hospital

                                                                                                              i have been too

                                                                                                              honest about looking
he can’t find my veins

i was certain these clanking machines

the antiseptic
the sutures
the cytosine

[1128]

exhausted paradigms work, etc.

government takes it loans, etc.

                                                                                                 have not showered
                                                                                                 one tall wall      etches Monday caffeine
                                                                                                 a glass house (re-upped)

watching earlier: gravitational waves?
dark matter?

going to be late if i continue lifting my skin with the safety pin i recognize this i continue
lifting the safety

centifolia

in the garden i tell you
the old
roses were made
to gather
scent until scent
spat back wire.

the carnivorous pitcher
plant sways around
its prism. a green
frog clings
to the lip.
we both wonder.

noon’s target twitches on
our chins then
a host of cool
smoke. we see
ourselves tired of
bodies, warm shells—

we are cruel to the succulent
who grows as
a rock
performs
(safer than
itself).
outside the fence
a leaf tings
its cymbal. we
read the lines but still
can’t keep
the trail.
we know we won’t
be like other
makers, going far
in their borders
with nothing
sharp to say.

Abbigail Baldys is an interdisciplinary artist. She earned her MFA from Saint Mary’s College of California. Her work has appeared in 491 Magazine, Reality Beach, Three Rivers Review, Collision, and elsewhere. You can find her ignoring contact cement in South Williamsport, PA.