Category: Writing Ourselves / Mad (Part 1 of 2)

Content warning: unsanitary, eugenic ableism, gore, ableist & anti-sex worker slurs reclaimed

we do not grant you title here

after htmlFlowers // grant jonathon‬

we
::
abhorrence of
violated future-lost revileds
dripping prophets of abled demise 
carriers of glib disease 
whoring our bodies to medicine while we
gutter roll the streets on our backs
begging violence from an emptied moon
that loves us through her fever
a buried ocean
that has forgotten how to sing her emptied wife through
birthing bloody fecal prayers
::
your funerals after endless apocalyptic hemorrhaging
the beetles and maggots consuming what you called you after 
funerals have gone out of style and we all
rot in the remnants of streets
gutted and fetid
fish caught and sliced and
abandoned
when oil slicks slip from our sclera
::
vicious snapping commodities devoid of capitalist gain
commodifying our snarling survival until we take you     into
our writhing underbelly    into
our oozing cunts     into
our hovels built of bone and gristle
intestine colon viscera festering under the sink piled     into 
your throat
::
all you hoard putrefying
all you press distant creeping close—
pink insulation sticky with nineteen thirty-nine consensual homicides in your attic
drywall peeling parting from grey sludge hidden between 
your world and what you
have graciously granted us
while we
overstay our unwelcome beneath your heavy feet
plastic doll heads filled with molding toothpaste
corvid skulls unearthed still gripped in tangling milkweed roots
algae growing 'round the edges of your eyes nostrils aorta vertebral foramen
::
well , come 
into this unsprung mattress
 , empty handed con man ,
if your answer sates our shrivelled cripple gut—
what offal bring you
 ,  to please our whoring hearts ?

q is a white queercrip dykefag artist, sex worker, and death doula, primarily living, working, creating, and dying on the land of the Ts’elxwéyeqw tribe of the Stó:lō nation. A formerly-homeless high school-dropout, its workshops and writing are grown from joy and spite found in Mad queer disabled and ill community.

 

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Content warning: drinking, domestic abuse

YOU EMAILED ME YOUR RÉSUMÉ

You were looking for different 
words to say good team player. I 
suggested you use  more  verbs. I
suggested you say you over 

saw the team. I suggested you 
call me. Together, we practiced 
for the part of the interview 
where they ask if you have any 

questions. I have a question. My 
question is, what team do we play
for. My question is, what did you
do, did you manage or over 

see, my question is, what did you
oversee, my question is why do we keep
using the same words and how would 
a wolf talk and what would it say.

THE WOLF EMAILED ME ITS RÉSUMÉ 

works well with others      magna 
no, summa     no, magna cum laude
feels at home     in competitive 
fast-paced work environments     no, 

thrives in     highly-structured, close-knit 
work environments     should i say
team, community     or should i 
say environment     should i say 

highly specialized     harder than 
bone     the one who went in first when
it heard the herd-lost     calf call out 
certificate program     master 

of business     administration 
highly motivated     who went 
in second when     it smelled the coat 
dyed red     words per minute 

experience with excel     and 
java     executed special 
projects     stumbled home the morning 
after wearing someone     else’s 

clothes     went in first and never 
once fell behind     not ever

THE ANIMALS IN THE ROOM 

You drank too much. The animals came into the room.
They saw your path to the exit blocked. Their herd-sense
calculated one or two escape routes, attuned
tick-bitten ears on your behalf to the exact
moment when you could have spoken up, turned an art
appraiser’s eye to silence, threw themselves into
the painting on the wall, the deer with hard black eyes
with one bright painful spot of blue in them. They came
into the room. Your terror wanted them to watch
what happened and your terror saw the blue spot and
your terror got a lichen-eating audience
to your bullseye focus on that blue-stained motel
deerseye, your terror drank too much, your eyes summoned
them, they saw your story shrink into a fist.

THE WOLF MAKES AN APPOINTMENT AT THE O.B-G.Y.N. 

I just had some quick questions. I was just calling for a routine checkup. My first question is whatare you saying. My next question is what do you mean by contraindication. What do you mean by sexual preference. What exactly are you offering me and can I avoid eye contact and can I say no thank you and

Look, is this one of those things where the story’s author finds itself complicit because I was just asking questions I was not following orders I was just writing things down and I didn’t ask for any of this. It’s not my fault if the cattle don’t keep track of their numbers, it’s not up to me whose clothes I’m wearing and if fawns go missing. What I am asking is,

Look, it was just body language. It doesn’t mean anything. I’m just saying I was hungry, it was just a hotel room I paid for. I was only baring my teeth for show.

THE WOLF RETURNS YOUR CALL 

It has a question. 
It wants to know what 
you mean when you say 
Seem. For example, 
when they say that You 
don’t seem like yourself, 
it does not know what 
Seeming is, so it 
can’t tell. You tell it 
this is a question 
of taxonomy. 
This is a question, 
this is not a pet. 
This is a question, 
a wild animal. 
Do not touch the bars. 
Keep your hands to your 
self. Come home wearing 
someone else’s clothes. 
Don’t be mistaken. 
What do they mean by 
Do not feed. Do you 
understand what that 
means. Do you find it 
confusing for some 
reason, when it licks 
your face and asks you 
questions. What happened, 
it asks. You’re crying. 
What does crying mean.

Meghan Kemp-Gee was born in Vancouver BC and writes poetry, comics, and scripts in Los Angeles. She won the Poetry Society of America 2014 Lyric Poetry Award. Her work has also appeared in Copper Nickel, Helen: A Literary Magazine, The Rush, Switchback, and Skyd Magazine. She teaches written inquiry and composition at Chapman University.

 

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Content warning: unsanitary, death

I’m here

Here is my brain. It is writing this. For you. In Times  New Roman. To make us both feel. Better. We feel  even. Here is my brain. Here is my brain on drugs.  No eggs this time. Only the good ones. The doctor  ones. Perfectly legal. I feel fine. Perfectly regal. I  don’t feel pain. The earth is. Rotating on its axis and  so. Is this room. And so are you. We are. Fine.  Welcome to my book. 

Here is the world. We are in this together. The body  pulls. In towards itself and towards all of us. That is  all we need. Am I doing this right. Where was I  again.  

Here is the body. Of water. That you were looking  for. Take a drink. Kiss the mirror. It will last longer.  Don’t forget. To call the pharmacy again.  

Here is the state. Of things. We are in this together  and the room is moving with us. How nice. How  orderly. How together we are. I love you for being  here with me. We think about hop scotch and that’s  fine enough for now. I offer us a cold beverage. We  love cold beverages especially when it’s hot out.  How nice.  

Here is the fire. Place. It’s warming us up. We  needed it. We feel safe now. We breathe it in. The  smoke that’s good. We’re saw dust. We love this  stuff. We’re so happy we’re here. Did you see the  moon. Landing.  

Here we go again. It’s hurling towards us. Look out.  That was close. Let’s take a bath. Let’s promise each  other we’ll never bathe again. That will make us  proud. That will make us eat peaches. It doesn’t 

matter what we think. We forgot to call the pharmacy  again.  

Here is your brain on. Music. I’ll give it to you  Einstein. I’ll take you on a boat and make you watch  it sink. Do you believe me now. Is anybody alive out  there. Can anybody hear me.  

Here it is. We’ve been looking for you and here you  were all along. That’s the nature of it we figure. Hide  and we’ll seek. Do you think we can find it by smell.  Should we bake cookies. Can we find our way home  from  

Here is an orange. Let me show you how to slice it.  First you take an orange. Then you stick your thumb  in it. Then you hold it up to the moon. This step is  important. Don’t think about it. Think about orange  juice. Think about swallowing. Spin it like it’s the  earth. Now you can eat it.  

Here is that memory I wasn’t looking for. You  brought it back all of a sudden in a little tote bag. I  had forgotten all about it and now here it is. What a  surprise. Did you bring a gift receipt. 

Here is the new one.  

Here is my dusty balloon. I unpacked it just for you.  It will stay put if you let it. Give it a kiss.  

Here is my note. I am writing to you. To express my  gratitude for your prompt response. It is nice to be  thought of so quickly. I’ve been thinking about what  you said about jam. I am with you for the most part.  Have you given any thought to peaches. That is the  only hole. 

Here. I said here. A little to the left. A little more. A  bit higher. Not that high. But a little higher. Yes. 

Here’s your hat. What’s your hurry. 

Here I’m giving you an out. I’m giving you an out.  Well if you don’t want to take it. That’s not on me.  

Here I am. Surprise. I got you this time. You should  have seen your face. You looked like an icicle. You  hardly knew you were dangerous. You keep dripping  in my eye. I shouldn’t keep looking up. Let me know  when you spot the moon.  

Here we go again. 

Here I will read it back to you. So do you love it. You  can be honest. It won’t hurt. My feelings. Well you  could have been nicer about it.  

Here are my keys. Now get lost. 

Here is my urine. Sample. I made it just for you. I  hope you like it. I wiped the outside with toilet paper.  I even signed it. I packed this silver tray just to  deliver it to you. I hope you don’t mind the garnish.  I couldn’t decide between turnips and peaches.  

Here comes trouble.  

Here you went. I let you die without asking. I could  have done it. I could have made it easier for all of us.  But here you were and I couldn’t say a thing besides  no I am not my mother. It was too late for talks about  The Great Depression. Our great depression. I don’t  know why but I knew. I will save them for us forever.  We will live on forever.

Olivia Muenz is an MFA candidate in creative writing at Louisiana State University. She received her BA from NYU and is currently the Nonfiction Editor for New Delta Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Salt Hill Journal, The Boiler, Pidgeonholes, Heavy Feather Review, Timber Journal, Peach Magazine, Stone of Madness Press, and ctrl+v. @oliviamuenz

 

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Content warning: anti-Blackness, slavery

our greatest ambition, to be met somewhere other than the middle

passage—just a shadow but sometimes
it’s hard to walk around in your own 

worn shoes like an old truth, grotesquely
retrospect of addressed flesh & grit 

teeth. across a sea that is big & was
already old, what survives may not be 


               pretty: what color could shadows
               be once this present is subsumed? 

answered in that familiar hush,
saved for spaces where your life is

the one game in town. so many bodies 
find predicaments, but it’s rare
 
to worry over naming 
blame while they are still 
 
only named bodies, haunting  
us like a ghost that isn’t quite
 
friendly yet carries along with you  
knowing you need the company  

for the habit of horror.  
a habitat teaches you to remain

resilient or alive. most times  
that is enough to be and joy  

is safely ignored, but when they demand 
to hear mourning you can remain 

enough, be made sacred by silence &
 
leave them to listen & listen & listen
for the stillness of no  

sound at all, running head 
long for your brilliant, elated pause.

in the absence of a parrot 

                                                      a nature curated in the obverse  
                                                      self we have always craved as conquerors
 
                                                      airbrushed past all recognition 
                                                      of our predation, a shadow at the whole 

                                                      which word alone cannot erase  
                                                      from the geologic record 

                                                      expanding as we are into time measured  
                                                      in strata, the historical record keeps 

the familiar shapes of our noses, the color  
on our backs and our shoulders, the voices  
trapped as legacies of legacy invested in ornaments  

like truth, molded into anachronistic  
oddities waiting for their day to be
  
sold at market literate in the value of remains  
grown small with time, even our oak shriveled, softened 
 
for the hands of children elastic as they wiggle  
the rods, rattle bladeless sabers, able to imagine  
they never sought blood, never drained color from any face
 
recognizable as man; how inviting these artifacts
as they approach dissolution. even waves turn  
static waiting for break, distance decays, even 
 
the sand slows itself from melting as glass resting 
between you and drowning, an imagined protection 
 
                                                      expanding as we are into time measured 
                                                      in strata, the historical record keeps 

a hilly cemetery nearby in the tall weightless grass, an old
barn melting into ground across the bay, a good place  
to share with a cat or something else to outlive, accessories 


to remember instead of leaving behind. the world at my back,
exposed to nothing but the humming drone of nothing, the rest  of
the world all in process. become this thing we tell ourselves we are 

                                                      expanding as we are into time measured 
                                                      in strata, the historical record keeps  

the grief which your cat lacks when it fails  
to miss you, or your own
  
nostalgia, an evolutionary wedge which found a way
to process loss as promise, holding on 

to every one of our mistakes, until mirrors  
fade back into sand and we drown
 
                                                      under the weight of it all  

                                                      the historical record keeps  
                                                      for its sheer number of things 
 
                                                      expanding as we are, the time 
                                                      to answer question is past.

for all the broken things unfixed with nothing  left but time to fix them 

we’ve discovered whole vocabularies 
of disappointment; maybe I am 

as old as we all feel, detached 
as we all think. what if all this talk 
 
of new normal is nothing more  
than old rumor finally hitting the fan 
& we all see the very same thing 

in the inkblot splatters on separate walls 
& can’t chalk it up to happenstance, again. 

what if all this distance is is 
a really big mirror facing 

the wrong way. what if the universe was not 
such an unspeakable terror
 
for its endlessness & my hands, 
pale palms unburned & open, 

tumbled each and every one of you 
I could ever imagine loving, breathing 

& petrified, into the inert 
vision at the ends of my own 

go-go-gadget arms, finally enough 
to fold each and every one

within a single shared thought and not 
recognizing the universe in deference 

to its scale we always mistranslate 
as endless difference. will each and every
 
or even just one of you 
please pity me with this simple kindness:
 
tell me it’s okay that the universe is so big 
that it must be ignored.

Isaac Pickell is a passing poet & PhD student at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he lives & studies the borderlands of blackness & black literature. His work’s found in Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Fence, Protean Magazine, and Sixth Finch, and his debut chapbook everything saved will be last is available now from Black Lawrence Press. 

 

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