Category: Poetry

Enter someone seeking guidance.

Enter BB box we requested. Lazy susan chair cover enters. Enter exasperation. Enter things that lie an individual down, on the ground, and have them leaning up against corners. Eyeglasses enter. Attention enter. Judge enter. Teacups enter. Common room enter. Enter black twisted hairs. Enter a cell phone. Enter a ball cap. Enter a phone call. Enter in balmoral. Gravemarker write K.F.B.L.I.O.R. in a book. E.R.K.A.A.D.E.W.O. must be written in the appropriate spaces. Enter visitors. Gravemarker write J.U.L.Y. on a stone. Enter ivy growing where he took his life. Enter the sound of visitors’ footsteps. Reenter into the sound of noises that should still be in your ear because they have been entered and not exited out.

 

Enter backwards.

Enter your memory. Enter rememory. Enter air conditioning units. Enter grass in a garden. Enter baby’s breath flowers. Enter John. Enter knowledge that this John is not the same John previously entered though this John is died and gone too. Enter trust. Enter the distinctions comprising a unique name. Enter hence. Enter Martinez. Enter more than enough worthlessness feelings. Enter a different energy. Enter a kitchen table and stuff to sit on the table. Exit a body. Enter a hearse backing up exiting. Enter what seems like a glowing white coffin. Enter cremation. Enter legs crossed but private parts still raped. Enter progeny.

 

Enter semen.

Ovum enter. Enter breeding bucks black. Enter Donnie. Enter new. Enter a colored section. Exit new energy. Enter large male shorts. Neutered cat enter. End enter. In enter. Sight enter. Otherwise of black experiences enter. Enter another coffin. Enter more not guilty verdicts. Enter your own momma’s fears. Enter adaptations to address fear. Enter frfr language. Enter patience. Enter communicative words. Enter workrooms that are hostile. Enter the same suicide thoughts. Enter jailhouse mannerisms. Exit patience. Enter dicks in. Enter the time it takes to endlessly move. 

 

Exit big dicks.

Enter hunger. Enter stomach gurgling. Enter communication. Enter big black dick. Enter unresponsiveness. Enter more worthlessness feelings. Enter words that encourage. Enter your neighbor’s God. Enter one million attempts to feel safe. Enter putting it on your tongue. Enter negotiating for your support. Enter one million attempts to get help. Enter unresponsiveness. Enter worthlessness feelings. Enter suicide ideation. Exit families. Enter a calculator. Enter a Tuesday. Enter the August month. Gravemarker write the numeral 3 on the internet. Enter electronics. Enter the time exact she passed away. Enter accessible doors with handles, without handles, and electric doors. Enter acceptance. Enter tension. Struggle enter. Enter Love. Historicism enter. Enter human conditions. Enter roadside. Gravemarker write L.I.V.E.B.E.T.T.E.R. on a wall. Enter chirping bird sounds out of the corner. Enter music mixing up into chirps. Enter rememory again. Enter your thought. Enter empathy and critical engagement. Enter the seventh month day. Enter time that past quickly. Enter present time. Enter the other John who will get shot and later die. 

 

Remember Angela who will collapse and later die.

Remember Angela is written with a surname that is Williams. Remember general. Remember generational designations. Remember John is written with a surname that is Crawford. Enter a supermarket. Enter in seconds. Enter ink. Gravemarker write generational designation (III or the third) on paper behind name John Crawford. Enter garments for attending a funeral. Enter diverse bodies who will celebrate in those clothes. Enter Oh’happyday lyrics. Exit hearses past coffins. Enter gold. Enter desperation. Enter expectation. Exit a crowd pleaser. Enter a good beat tho. Exit families.

Enter blessings. Enter humming. Enter ownership. Enter America. Enter scared to open the door. Enter worship. Enter to walls being built. Move death’s standing next to scared and to. Enter scared to death. Enter intimidation. Enter at work. Exit things that belong to them. Enter more things you personally need. Enter equality. Enter crying. Enter another ask for support. Enter Unresponsiveness. Enter providers. Enter degree credentials. Enter more worthlessness feelings. Enter intimidation. Enter unresponsiveness is typical. Enter great resources.

Enter paper on the floor. Enter what a God can do. Enter a land surrounded by water.

Isolation enter. 

Bridge to what is next enter. Enter rivers running deep. Love enter. Enter island. Enter Ti Moune characteristic. Enter preparation for burial. 

 

Enter Erzulie.

Enter sea. Enter sheol. Enter fashion. Enter sagging pants. Exit fashion. Enter your rights. Agwé enter. Wrapping waves enter. Enter sweet smelling perfume. Enter time that is closer to an end. Enter cold. Enter fatalities. Enter gravemarker. Enter decomposition process. Enter heat. Enter bed sheets ripped. Enter nightmares. Enter assignments. Enter families. Exit families. Enter the seashore. Enter Papa Ge. Enter debate. Enter risk. Enter love. Enter being carried to shore. Enter psychological distress. Enter suicide in trauma survivorship. Enter being wrapped by waves. Enter a human turned into a tree. Enter recycling. Enter a pact to enter into real love. Enter a noose rope tie. Enter some studies. Enter suggestions. Enter intimidation. Enter a body bag. Enter success. Enter boundaries to it. Borderlines enter. Enter more worthlessness feelings. Enter ignore. Skeletons enter. Enter intimidate. Enter a comment posting. Enter ignorant. Enter physical illness. Closet enter.

 

Rodney A. Brown is a poet, writer, choreographer, and interdisciplinary artist whose work draws on he(r) experiences with AIDS, mental illness, and homelessness. He(r) writing has appeared in the Journal of Pan African Studies, and their performances on black lives and mental health have been sponsored at the Society of Dance History Scholars Congress on Research in Dance and the United States Conference on AIDS. They taught as a choreographer at the university level and attended the Saint Francis College MFA program in Creative Writing. Rodney recommends the Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation. Author photo by Hubs.

 

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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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black out

1.

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.

2.

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.

3.

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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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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[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.

 

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