Author: anmly_mpusod

Fortress Fails: A Cow’s Retort¹

1.           The fortified field—ancient-lined with stone pulled up from volcanic history—walls
              our arrival into sun-warmed grasses. Our life is a mouth in wait. Incisor lops.

10.         The cow knows the score. The cow watches and moves, always held, vanity of
              the brand as a map of scar tissue, singed hair (there is no return), vanity of fence
              as a system a lexicon imagined logic of enclosure. The cow knows there is no
              way to shut the gate here.

20.        We receive what the earth yields to us and we give it as love our waste.

21.         The cow terraforms a field with e[i-e-i-o]missions. Toxicity is a matter of numbers
              when a field is used as a site of discharge, as a bin to feed.

22.        The scrub of our teeth over blades welcomes what remnants of waste and 
              whose. Hooves stomp, do not dig like nails uncovering the direction of water or
              what it carries sick to our regulated chewing and swallow of land.

23.         The cow welcomes contaminant into its stomachs. It passes unknown at the 
               technical and scientific levels.

24.         These walls were never made to shield us.

---

¹ Homophonic translation of excerpts from the 47th Portugal-U.S. Standing Bilateral Commission report

Air Base as Assonance²

1.         The first heft of a base is a messy realization of death as elemental to your 
            everyday enterprise of living. You estimate the size of your share of dead bodies.

9.         This pile is an impossible integer so you instead include just the illness and listen 
            for coughing fits.

10.       The hope of faux statements shows you are guarding the most rose-colored 
            home and so don’t know you are a posed flamethrower cut off from the blow of 
            the burn unit, its sorrowful moans not soaking the hold of your dome, no toll of 
            church bell or slow tableau of dark robes overflowing their woe in the road.

12.       Fuss deterred, you lust for stuff fit to the cuff of a uniform—what want you are.

---

² Homophonic translation of excerpts from the 49th Portugal-U.S. Standing Bilateral Commission report

Air Base as a Path Toward³

1.        Toward the sea from the flight check, from the sea toward the flight line—the 
           forward advance of the base as a crossroads.

20.     The base receives and expels, misses and longs for arrival yet is only ever on 
           the way to fill.

21.      The base took note of its shrinkage, its omission of family, and traced the 
           suturing of its rupture, empty folds tied back with a belt.

22.      The base is afraid of its future—sand covers so much it irritates its field of vision, 
            sand-scarred cornea, fine laceration (the Air Force calls them cuts). If forward, if 
            a word allows for a field to continue to feel like a home base and not just a 
            between site, a preservative.

23.      The base knows and does not know what floats like a covering of skin on the 
            water. The monitoring well is certain. The movement of release is certain. The 
            swell of the wave of cancer is certain. The emptying of fuel into pipes of fuel into 
            tanks into us into us is certain.

  29.     The base is on the way, uncertain the way to undo but to end.

³ Homophonic translation of excerpts from the 48th Portugal-U.S. Standing Bilateral Commission report

Ryan Clark is a documentary poet who writes his poems using a unique method of homophonic translation. He is the author of Arizona SB 1070: An Act (Downstate Legacies) and How I Pitched the First Curve (Lit Fest Press), and his poetry has appeared in such journals as DIAGRAM, Interim, SRPR, and The Offing. He now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with his partner and two cats. You can find more about him and his work at ryanclarkthepoet.com.

 

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Reading in the Dregs of Forced Displacement

I. She reads the past in coffee dregs

“We descended from the mountainous clouds.
On bent backs we hauled barrels of olive oil,
handfuls of sacred soil and burlap bags
of lost and displaced farming memories.

We wandered in a withered procession,
between pale surnames of rephrased cities,
hauling our own bulbs like orphaned lilies
on the humps of ancient curvy letters,
laden with red exclamation marks
and diacritics of anxiety.

We were bullied, shackled, stacked on lorries,
transferred, expelled to a bitter exile.

Bitter! Add some sugar to my coffee.

Stayed the predestined nights. Not one more night. 
Named “refugees, bugs, beggars, petty thieves.”


We returned when the moon refused to shine,
that moonless night, on our knees, arched backs
bending forward like heavy ears of wheat,
two months after that summer’s lost harvest.

We went back in the dark, dodging bullets,
travelled between written lines and took sharp
turns at proper nouns of cities and towns,
arrived at streets we could recite by heart,
we could not enter, nor could we depart.

The lore of our ancestors.  My sorrow!
Some lines erased, bent over other lines
others rephrased with foreign characters
cast like concrete angular cubicles.

In time, we backtracked to one proper line
and got stuck on its deserted margin
like fortuitous ink stains, present there,
we were, but deemed absent in the feigned
demography of foreign characters.”

II. On the mountain of sorrow, the fortune-teller went silent. But her misfortune emerged after a while in the dregs of another coffee cup

“Fifteen barrels of olive oil
five or six burlap bags of wheat
three jars of bee-honey so sweet
and I had just baked flat bread
not one hour before we fled
all left behind…  oh my sorrow

three cows,  two horses, the chicken
a hundred and twenty acres
and many other farming nouns
all left behind … oh, my sorrow
became outcasts in our own land.

Without nouns, the verbs of farming
become stop words at coffee time.
Enough futile stop words for now.”

III. And she coiled up in her seventy-five-year-old inner cubicle, refusing to read any past in any type of dregs

That, what she would never read,
forever rings in my inner ear.

IV. The dregs of forced exile
I’ll always remember her solemn voice
in the ancient tales about ghouls and jinns
about villagers hypnotised by wolves
and hyenas, and taken for pale prey.

Indeed, she believed all the fairy tales
but she utterly refused to believe
the fabled fiction tales of presence-absence.

My grandma denied all forms of Exile
their adjectives of ecstasy; the cold
foreign cubicles, their secure pleasures
of triumph; emasculated the pages
of absence, their margins and the bloody
surreality of presence-absence.

She died wearing with pride all synonyms
of sorrow and a blue tattoo of a cross
on her bare forehead. And we inherited
the empty space she had to leave behind.

Here, where the lilies grow in plastic pots
but die of old age, I write my chapter
of forced exile, with angular letters
building concrete cubicles.  My sorrow
for the lost words. The lost diacritics.
the lost curves. My sorrow. Oh my sorrow.

 

Khalil Sima’an is a Palestinian poet living in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His poetry appeared in Fikra Magazine, The Palestine Chronicle, and will appear in a forthcoming collection of poems. Prior to immigrating to Amsterdam in 1989, he published poems in Arabic language magazines Al-Jadeed and Al-Ittihad. Khalil works as professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam.

 

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Serial

It’s true New York must always follow Shanghai. A wide river
exchanging hands with the drowned valley. All cities are the same
during the right season, enough cold to bury difference, be it
anger or language. That first year in America I learned to cut
my nails so short they bled, lived comfortably off instant coffee
and laxatives. Sitting on the twin mattress with a fruit knife,
I was so beautiful I couldn’t even be recognized. My mother,
cheeks the dark hollow of nickels, tires out of performance, says
we were not made to stay in this country. Our skin and temper
too brittle, our humors lilt in the wind’s extremities. Growing
mousy in Manhattan, she thinks each brownstone is haunted
by its architect. Of course, she would know. She was a doctor
until she smelt the bodies; a romantic until she had a daughter.
Everywhere I go, there are arrows in my eye that flint and flicker.
Their angled path toward anger is one I walk again and again
on every continent. Each bearing the same lessons: all food
tastes the same coming up my throat and onto the curb. I am
so liberated I should start wearing dresses. I tape down my tits
and show the bare skin on my arms. It’s a challenge.
I want you to look at me. How much I’ve wanted
to change. How much I fall helplessly over
the next closest thing to home. Even with
all the dead weight and words I’ve lost, I’ve found
I still look like my father. I can never lose his nose.

 

Mimi Yang is currently based in Providence, but they are always dreaming their way home to Shanghai. A Best of the Net Nominee, their work has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers and the UK Poetry Society, and appears or is forthcoming in The Margins, BOOTH, Penn Review, among others. More of their work can be found at mimissyou.com.

 

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chandrakant

i eat mwezi under cover
moonrise / midnight mahina
bright enough to read your breasts

by / inhale / inhabit your breath
suck moonbeams lick laline
flesh / cotton-candied tsuki

sapphic snake tongues thrust / lap
moondust / between saffron sheets
we strum salted mawu nipples

sugared stars inyanga crystals
you moan deep / rouge / maha clouds scat
blues riffs / till blood moon kisses dawn

 

At Carnegie-Mellon University I earned a BFA in Drama then had an acting career.

At University of Houston, I earned an MSW in clinical and political social work and served in correctional, medical, and psychiatric facilities.

At Boise State University I earned a BFA in creative writing. My nonfiction appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, and in The Texas Review. My fiction appears in North American Review and in The EastOver Press Anthology of Rural Stories, 2023: Writers of Color. My poetry appears in The Indianapolis Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Minnesota Review, in ANMLY, and is forthcoming in The Normal School.

 

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Naming the Dead

the bullet hole in my sister’s head opens like morning/ like light waterfalling into my eyes/ the last time i bled/ my brothers mistook it for water/ & drank till their bellies groaned in satiety/ months later/ we are squatted by the riverside drinking from the blood of our sisters/ the sea reeking of death/ a morbid stench strangulating our noses/ the rosebush breathes/ so i know blood has life/ mid-october/  i cup my sister’s body in my mouth/ because here safety resides in the mouth bridged with walls/ the dead reincarnating in our elegies/ their names like a song/ clanking on our lips/ the dead resonates in the spirit realm/ phasing us/ shaking up the kitchenware in our closets/ they answer when we call them/ wind/ rushing at us/ formless & here/ wind/ sister/ father/ brother/ the muezzin in me singing the names of the dead//

noun: wind
1. the ability to breathe easily /
2. the region of the solar plexus / where a blow may paralyze the diaphragm & cause temporary loss of breath or other injury /
3. living remnants of the dead /

usage:
     i/ [    ] thing/ because the wind will not leave me//

 

A Year of Blood

           after Adedayo Agarau

it’s raining sharp knives & machetes/ the city irrigated by blood/ & bodies harvested as sacrifices in a sacrilege/ the evening moon casts an halo of lesions over the sky’s face/ & beneath a beige/ a company of little children hide under torn cartons/ a man smokes the atmosphere with hemp/ his breath saturated with grief/ a young girl raises her hand to the rain/ cups the water for a drink/ & it becomes blood in her mouth/ tonight in the music of the weather/ we waltz along like monarch butterflies/ our soft wings dispersed into dust/ the stereo crooning a litany of eerie ballads/ we are romantics in a matrimony of living cadavers/ & above our heads are constellations of fireflies/ their flamy wings dampened/ somewhere in a hamlet/ a bevy of quails circle a farmstead/ & in a cottage nearby/ a father barbecues his daughter/ christens her death an art of grace/ humbling his act of devotion/ i beseech/ how do we decide what is allowed to live/ & isn’t/ somewhere in a temple in the city/ a young mother seeks to prey her dead son’s body into the mouth of a figurine/ say there is enough hope to bury us/ & at nights we make incense to the sky/ burying our dead in the sea of the stars/ in the floods of their haemorrhage/ ’til they return as rain/ as testaments of our soft bodies/ in this water cycle of gore/ & gall//

 

Adesiyan Oluwapelumi, TPC XI, is a medical student, poet, essayist, & Assistant Editor of Fiery Scribe Review from Nigeria. Winner of the Cheshire White Ribbon Day Creative Contest (2022), & 1st runner up in the Fidelis Okoro Prize for Poetry (2023). His works are published in Fantasy Magazine, Poet Lore, Tab Journal, Poetry Wales, Variant Literature, & elsewhere. An Adroit Journal Summer Mentee & a SprinNG Writers’ Fellow, his works were selected for inclusion in the Annual Outstanding Young Writers Anthology (Paper Crane, 2023). He tweets @ademindpoems.

 

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Umami

Silver, gleaming – the dead river fish in my father’s hands. He holds it up like a
trophy for the photograph. He adjusts its head on the bothi, gently scraping the
scales off its back. Oil sizzles in the kitchen, mortar and pestle brimming with the
paste of mustard seeds. I inherited the staleness of desire from him. In America, I
cut open the pack of refrigerated tilapia, season it with ginger garlic paste. This is
muscle memory – to touch what is raw and open. I marinate it in yogurt, sprinkle
paprika all over its moist body. The wetness of fish alive in the tip of my fingers.
The first time I picked out a fish bone, it pricked my forefinger. The blood mixed
with the rice and my father joked how it enhanced the taste of the fish curry. We
keep fish bones in a glass jar. My father’s dying wish is to eat Sitol fish – a rare
delicacy in our Rohu-Bhokua household. To separate the bones one by one, like
strands of hair parted for a French braid. What doesn’t have a name doesn’t exist.
My father slices its throat. The fish flaps its tail.                        

 

Shlagha Borah (she/her) is from Assam, India. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Salamander, Nashville Review, Florida Review, EcoTheo Review, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is an Editorial Assistant at The Offing. She has received support for her work from Brooklyn Poets, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and The Hambidge Center. She is the co-founder of Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India. Instagram: @shlaghab. Twitter: @shlaghaborah.

 

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Someday I Want to Have the Courage of Old People Who Ask Strangers Countless Questions

Their mouths form into an O / and I know they are about to birth /
a universe of questions / I stand in line waiting for my turn / and it
feels like I have been in line / all my life / all my hours spent /
listening to other people find their way / out of the dark / and into
their astonishment / here where they are holding / Turkish bread
fresh from the oven / where they learned about the taste / without
tasting / where they understood for the first time / that dates are
both time and fruit / I am saying my knees / are not as forgiving /
but I stand where I am / because I am meant to witness / how
wonder makes its way into the world / and I suppose it’s not the
questions / but the unabashed gesture / of asking what something
is called / of calling forth a name for a thing / of no longer being
afraid / to look the fool / listen I can’t go back / to being eight and
peeling / the skin off my lips / unaware blood comes / after blood
/ I can’t unknow / what I know / and pretend I won’t get hurt
again / but I can count the change slowly / while asking and what
about this one / and this one / and can you tell me / again, my dear
/ how to get home from here / yes / I am saying / when all that is
left is this body / I can still lean into wonder / I can forgive myself

 

T. De Los Reyes is a Filipino poet and author of the chapbooks, And Yet Held (Bull City Press) and Woeman (Hawai’i Review). Her poems have previously appeared or are forthcoming in RHINO, Narrative, Hunger Mountain, Birdcoat Quarterly, Pleiades, among others. She is the designer of Nowruz Journal and a poetry reader for Split Lip Magazine. She lives and writes in Manila, Philippines. Find more at tdelosreyes.com.

 

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African Sonnet

Shall I run, shall I walk, will I catch up to the Oba?
Shall I run or shall I walk? The tale is all abroad
that the Whiteman’s taken captive even the Oba
of Benin; and they are deporting him. Shall I run,
shall I walk? Can I catch a glimpse, O! What a tale!

              [A Ballad For Oba Ovonramwen Nogbaisi]

The trees are gnarled. The earth is desolate. There is no love here.
What drums are singing this slit elegy? What piercing instrument
of the clavicle stretches towards this sunrise? On all four, I watch
the mornings crawl back to me. My tongue arrives earlier than the
stars—native chalk drawn all the way up to my throat. Nothing can
hold. Minds feasting through the dark like warring termites do the dew.
From the roots, we try to speak of it. Speak of it as a worn out coat.
If I said the ridge in the field was swallowing everything before it; if
I said the pianos were plotting silence with the fingers, would you think
it to be a joke? A reminder of dry riverbeds where strangers’ weary feet
are eroded walking across homelands. Slavery is no love; so we come
with kernels, oil, and pomades. They reciprocate heat, and the salt it
thaws. They talk with bird mouths, things pleasant to the ear. The ears
now have edged out cold. Swollen with absence. There is no love here.

 

Prosper C. Ìféányí writes from Lagos, Nigeria. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, his works are featured or forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, New Delta Review, Salt Hill Journal, South Dakota Review, Magma Poetry, Obsidian Literature, ANMLY, and elsewhere.

 

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Desire at the End of the World

Finally, it ends. In empty space, bodies collide, heat without the production of form, just release. I feel so greedy you say, as your hand creeps down your thigh, but greed is want constrained by extraction—here, awash in the orange of what could have been, there is nothing left. How desire makes scarce the flesh we find inescapable. Deeper, then, into pulsing membrane and nerves entangling violence into pleasure, our slick guts held in by the dim pressure of distant constellations. A debris cloud stalks the horizon, sweeping decades of spent casings across polished floors; an exhausted animal rests its head on scorched earth, texts loved ones I hope you made it out all right; everything eventually looks the same, you on your knees, begging for the rhythm of catastrophe. There is no beginning again. Better to plant your hands in scabbed soil, our well-watered roots recalling the forest, not the axe. There is only our warmth—soon, indiscernible beneath the sun.

the end unfurling
your throes steadied by my hands
scars fade from our palms

 

Justin Aoba is a writer and editor based in NYC. His work appears in the Oakland Review, Black Stone / White Stone, Five South, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He is Deputy Poetry Editor at Identity Theory and a member of Heung Coalition, where he helps organize a weekly writing workshop.

 

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