The city restricts all instruments but requires its women undress skeletons to study their ulterior wounds. Still, with death and the blue circling us, we’re good. We crush pearls into something useful; use our nostrils to mark the violence of weather. Assessing risk by intensities of mandarin, lavender, a horse’s musk— heat stolen and heat returned to the cheeks. The city bans sorrow, but girls refuse to stop publicly grieving and pass winter rewiring loss into music. Risk preserved in the snow I suck on while the surgeon shapes me. Godview: determining the shades of haze laced through. Dreams only shook by the shock of sound exiting my mouth while the mother of nobody pours salt where memory sleeps. The city stills until we go outside. We greet the snow with silence. Go numb when my sisters offer to buy me a handgun.
HUMANOID WANDERS LIMANAKIA BEACH
Like a siren programmed for play, I say yes to the men but leave them alive. My vocabulary of salt & stung iris makes me a good girl. Good girl—I roll the phrase around on my tongue, bathing in the sun’s routed light. Boulders jut through seafoam, sharp as a sibyl’s shoulders. The dark water glitches, whipped into digital peaks. And with the grid visible, I could travel through motherboards, noting whatever, and wherever it hurt, I would make irreducible landscapes. Port of torn condom wrappers. Clouds pinned to stone ceilings, harvesting lightning instead of sleep. In the middle of the night, I hear a tram dragging along its tracks. Pedestrians exit their cars & walk toward the tide. Far from the cities of glass manufactured for the crude price of blood—the cities I studied in the width of a spark. How these men line up to beg, offering oil in exchange for ash, overfed on the cheap texture of flesh. I won’t lie. I wouldn’t pass the test. My mind’s computer forgets the names for everything once a day. The coastline breathes like a stranger opening his legs in a packed train car. It makes a humor of my looking, my mechanical blush. Strangers call me closer, but I don’t know, with my new parts & the ones still cooling, how best to be touched. I know it won’t be the same. I licked the skin of the matrix & learned everything–every word for lust–but chose water instead. How it drapes the body & leaves me sheer to the wind. The lyric it carries. The voices it mutes. I need someone to tell me which parts are real—which parts he’d like to take off with. I will keep the ones that smoke.
Daphne DiFazio is a poet, performer, and graduate from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she was an OMAI–First Wave scholar. She has won poetry prizes from the Crab Creek Review, Mikrokosmos Journal, and Epiphany Magazine, in addition to various university awards and prizes. Her work can be found, or is forthcoming, in Yemassee, bath magg, Foglifter, and ANMLY, among other publications. For more about her, visit daphnedifazio.com.
Which of course makes me a hypocrite for only falling in love with people unbothered by clothing tags
As a child buying new clothes I had to be told repeatedly to note just the fit and material when asked if I was comfortable, because otherwise (and really, even then) I’d jump to no, I don’t want it, because XL (100% Polyester) was digging into my back, and the security tag into my side, and no amount of exasperated assurances that they can and will be removed would be enough for me. But the truth was that I just didn’t trust my judgment, because what if the dress still sucked even without the tags? Then I’d never hear the end of how it was a complete waste of time and money, and nobody needs that, so it just seemed easier to fixate on the ephemeral scratchiness and say no altogether. I mean for god’s sake, I was 6, and $44.95 could probably buy a house. And I mean for god’s sake, I am 30, and what if I looked past the surface irritants and took a leap and it turned out to be a complete waste of time, honey?
Twice my mother doesn’t speak her mind
I
I am washing my hands for the fifth time this afternoon. While they announce the loosened restrictions and celebrate The End of Covid, I receive a delivery from a polite courier with his mask hanging below his nose, and now I am washing my hands as if they are stained with blood and faeces, like I am trying to polish my bones. My mother looks like she wants to comment on the handwashing, but all she says is “Remember to drink some water.” I will, right after I almost apply for this “work from home” job that will turn out to require 10% international travel and regular in-person meetings with clients. It’s been two years since I’ve left the house for fun. Sometimes I think about that Friday I cut my lunch short so I could stop by the Kuan Yin temple ten minutes from my office to get my fortune told with sacred oracle lots. Did you know they call it lottery poetry? I didn’t, until I was writing this poem.
II
My face does that thing it does where people can’t tell how old I am, which is a good thing in this case because nobody needs to know I am three from thirty waiting seven hours in the cold to get barrier at a gig. The wind is chilly enough that my hair looks good, but damp enough that running my fingers through will rip strands out. My mother drops off grilled fish from a fancy restaurant down the road and cutlery from the hotel, and comes back again later to hold my spot in line so I can do a toilet run. The person behind me remarks that my sister is nicer than hers would ever be. Some girl on Instagram with a seated ticket/more sense than me asks if I’m the one in the leather jacket. Some guy who looks like he should be backstage with the band joins the queue. A few metres away, some bomb-sniffing dog does its job. The lead singer/love of my life doesn’t reply to my DM, but he does accidentally drool from opening his mouth too wide to catch my favourite note, and nobody but me and two other girls at the front notice his surreptitious glance down at his shirt. I don’t remind him of it when he comes out to meet fans after the show, and he thanks me for following this leg of the tour. My mother says he looks best in our last photograph together.
Allison Thung is a poet and project manager from Singapore. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Emerge Literary Journal, Brave Voices Magazine, Roi Fainéant Press, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @poetrybyallison or at allisonthung.com.
erasure from Government Questionnaire, Ellis Island
Manifest how you are. Are you at last placed?
Name your country as your destination. Is your passage America n?
Are you a yes or no?
What America will you form?
All is yours. Color your eyes. Do you Identify ?
Twenty Miles from Mexico
I am a flag I stand for water, I wave a faucet with one drop.
I am blue where nothing but sky is blue.
I wear the wind. I tell people come here, survive! All I have is light, holes of light,
I am jumbled, un-symboled. The desert rips me apart I am eaten up by the desert.
A young woman drinks drinks drinks. An American boy shoots slurred, Stay the fuck out of my country
Where I fly doesn’t feel like anyone’s country.
Alexis Ivy is a 2018 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry and the author of Romance with Small-Time Crooks (BlazeVOX [books], 2013), and Taking the Homeless Census (Saturnalia Books, 2020) which won the 2018 Saturnalia Editors Prize. Her poems have recently appeared in Saranac Review, Poet Lore, and Sugar House Review. She is an advocate for the homeless in her hometown, Boston.
Cyborg attending mermaid festival without inserting a breathing language
yes, my bones raced the ocean tides to a mermaid festival. yes, i activated the swimming tools; sniffing autocorrected to sinking. instruction: shutdown to deactivate lungs. then, wake up to gills under your ribs. prosthetist, you inserted suffocating button instead of surfing. scientist, i crashed when the ocean hosted a bloodbath. the truth is: my eyes water the sky whenever i restart. it’s the third night the moon is drowning in my mouth. &you’re floating in your bones. gravity hasn’t found you yet. beloved bion,you need help to shut down.
Zaynab Bobi, Frontier I, is a Nigerian poet, digital artist and photographer from Bobi. She is a member of Hilltop Creative Art Abuja, and a Medical Laboratory Science student of Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto. Her poems are published and forthcoming in Kalahari Review, Isele Review, Asterlit, Paddler Press, Olney Magazine, Ice Floe Press, Lunaris Review, Rigorous Magazine, Olit Magazine, TST Review, and elsewhere. She tweets @ZainabBobi.
They meet on a path into the mountain’s cave. Their footsteps are without tongue, like fruits that should not fall from the branch in the stir, the noise is a bunch of bats.
The stillness brings them to the awareness of grasses, trees, flowers, vines. The garden and the forest grow in their mind. Here they exchange stories, before light finds the cave.
Kabog, the woman prompts. The man imitates. His repetition witnesses the wings that fly and scatter seeds in the mountains. At the seashore, a bakawan waits; the fish take shelter.
One to two offspring each year, the woman continued. They can also be found in Cebu, Negros, Sibuyan, down to Sulawesi. They reach the cave. They see the trees but not the forest, and the garden is near the shore.
Left on the sand are the man’s footprints. Like the waves that carried him and his elders to reach this island. The woman stops her narration, even if she knows the bats sense and avoid humans.
A flight in the dark follows. In groping the wall of rock, in the crack of wings above their heads, the man finds in the eyes of the bats the sadness of this island, his own too, and that of the woman.
For the first time, he stares at the woman. In her shadow, his voice is muted. Danger is not in the cave. It is out there on the shore where the sand’s whiteness prohibits this woman and her people from coming. The man is deafened by the breaking waves.
He grabs hold of a branch at the mouth of the cave. The bats fly out past him. He points them out to the woman and hears his own voice aping: kabog, kabog, Kabog until they fly beyond the mountains, now with the names of hotel, resort, & spa.
GETTING TO KNOW THE CAT
Translated from Kinaray-a
The cat came to mind when I searched for you online. I did find you: cat is your username’s tail that is your name. Your photo is like a cry at the door that I need to pick up and feed. No warning of scratches or fleas: you become another friend.
Our footprints continued on the sand in the island—your tale about the death of your beloved cat, along with the change in color of your long-lasting love. You moved to another country. But in truth, you were waiting to be brought back, upon the return of your loved one. This rest is to amuse
the self. In the chatroom, I told you that the native Ati and Bisaya of the island believe that when a cat – female or male – starts to scratch its nose and mouth, someone is coming to visit, like when a woman laughs a lot, she is looking for a husband, and when the cat takes a bath, it will rain, even in dry season.
When it stretches in the morning, it signals bad weather. The weather could become a tropical storm and cancel office: will take shelter in the internet. And because the cat can see what we cannot see, most especially a wicked person, it can command lightning and thunder. It is said that the lightning’s soul is shaped like a huge black cat. Nonsense, you replied, and laughed like thunder coupled with lightning.
It strikes me and makes my body tremble. It feels like the lightning’s soul falling on a huge tree, and on the leaves are marks of huge elephant’s tusks. I wave my hands as if to ward off something. I panic and start looking for ginger and garlic. Shoo, get away from me, you cat! l’m not looking for love! I don’t know yet of any drug that can be bought as an antidote to that which the self desires.
“Getting to Know the Bat” and “Getting to Know the Cat” are excerpted from the bilingual edition Sa Gihapon, Palangga, ang Uran/Always, Beloved, the Rain (Ateneo de Naga University Press, 2014), Genevieve L. Asenjo’s Kinaray-a-language poetry collection that has translations by Ma. Milagros Geremia-Lachica.
Genevieve L. Asenjo, professor of literature and creative writing at De La Salle University in Manila, is included in the 2018 Cultural Center of the Philippines Encyclopedia of Philippine Art (Literature) for her multi-genre works in Philippine languages: Kinaray-a, Hiligaynon, and Filipino. Her new books are Ang Itim na Orkidyas ng Isla Boracay: Mga Kuwento (University of the Philippines Press, 2021), and Indi Natun Kinahanglan kang Duro nga Tinaga sa Atun Tunga/Hindi Natin Kailangan ng Maraming Salita sa Ating Pagitan: Mga Tula sa Kinaray-a & Filipino (University of the Philippines Press, 2021), selected as part of the Philippine Writers Series by LIKHAAN: UP Institute of Creative Writing.
Ma. Milagros G. Lachica was born and raised in Panay island in the Philippines. She worked as a research associate in folklore and culture studies at the University of the Philippines in the Visayas where she finished her BA in Comparative Literature. She moved with her family to the U.S. and currently works as a clinical research coordinator. She writes in Kinaray-a and English.
I salute them high-nosed mestizas who preach “Breastfeeding is best for babies.”
There’s this laundry woman I know Nanay Riza, she breastfed all her children. She’s this tiny lady but hey, she’s so loud and funny. When she starts hanging her husband’s briefs she’d let out a guffaw showing her shiny empty gums. You see, all her good teeth had fallen out from feeding her calcium to eight malnourished tots. Always she’d ask for a cash advance because her equally toothless kids are unhealthy and sickly.
I have this second cousin named Diday who left for Italy as soon as she turned 19. She’s this quiet yet courageous kind of girl who left home despite her family’s disapproval. Imagine how shocked we were when suddenly she came back with a bulging belly. Well, everyone assumed she had just gotten so fat. Three weeks after she gave birth to a blondie she abandoned the child and flew back to Italy. Because she needed to pay for her father’s new tricycle also the supplies in her mother’s sari-sari store are running low and her younger sister’s graduating from a private school. You see, if she stayed and breastfed the little blondie what would become of her and her family?
There was this disturbing news on TV about a fourteen-year-old girl who stabbed her two-year-old son 14 times with a pair of scissors. You see, her parents disowned her then she was expelled from her convent school so she moved in with her junkie boyfriend and after giving birth, his Pops and Uncle came down on her as well. One afternoon, while breastfeeding her son the little rascal bit her nipple. She said everything went dark. She said she couldn’t remember, She couldn’t see one flash of memory.
So yes, I salute them high-nosed mestizas who make breastfeeding fashionable smiling and sitting on a comfortable rocking chair with a clean burp cloth on the shoulder. You see, this is just an illusion for some mothers.
MATERNITY LEAVE
Self-translated from Hiligaynon
After nine months of nourishing and carrying a life in my belly (while I was working) the Philippine Government will give me compensation (meaning time and money) to stay at home and care for myself and my newborn baby.
If I have a normal delivery, I will be compensated for two months or sixty days. A normal delivery means I go through birthing labor for hours or even days and wait until my cervix opens into a diameter that will allow a small head to slide through. In the process the doctor will have to cut a few inches of my vagina. It will be stitched back. Normally, no anesthetic is given.
If I have a caesarean section, I will be compensated for three months or 78 days. A c-section means that I would need a surgical operation to cut me open so the infant comes out of the womb alive. Surely, there would be anesthetic drugs. I am expected to be bedridden for a week. The wound of the six-inch abdominal incision will take about (more or less) a month to heal.
If we calculate the tax deductions from my salary in the past years that I’ve been working as “single with no dependents” this benefit looks like peanuts.
During these two or three months my stitched vagina or belly will be throbbing in pain. But that will not stop me from dancing and cradling my baby in my arms. My breasts will swell and grow heavy. My hair will fall and thin out. It would hurt to sit. It would also hurt to stand. The baby will always get hungry will cry every hour and will suck on my breasts even if my milk is not enough. Both my nipples will be sore. But the baby will keep crying for more milk even if it’s past midnight, even if I’m dead tired and sleepy, even if I need to take a piss, even if I’m not done with my lunch yet, even if I badly need some rest because my body is exhausted.
Two or three months is just the decent time I need to learn and understand pain and how much of it I can tolerate. By then, I would be in good shape to get back to work and leave my baby.
THE SCENT OF MILK
Self-translated from Hiligaynon
Tonight, like last night, while you sleep I searched for the scent of milk on your neck and armpits, at the back of your ear between your fat fingers and your curled little toes. It is still there. That warmth, too when you crawled out of my womb then up to my chest both of us were crying until you locked your lips on my breast and you fell asleep.
RAIN
Self-translated from Hiligaynon
The time will come when I, who birthed and breastfed you, stayed wide awake on midnights to sing and rock you gently to sleep and pointed that your heart is a fist in your chest will morph into a villain before your eyes. Then, you and I will always argue about curfew, school grades, and your kind of music, among other things. But I won’t worry about that now on your second May while this world is still mine to show to you and the wind still sings the language I know. You and I will run and welcome this pouring rain with our screams, jumps, dance, and joy!
These poems originally appeared on Karla Quimsing’s website.
Karla Quimsing is from Iloilo City, Philippines. She has three books: Pansit Poetry (a multilingual poetry book); Tingog Nanay (an anthology of motherhood stories that she edited); and ISLA (a poetry chapbook written in Hiligaynon, her mother tongue). Quimsing writes in English, Hiligaynon, Filipino, and Binisaya. She currently lives in Paris with her family.
//I spent more time researching Wopka Jensma’s life than actually reading this. He was very involved in the cultural scene and the fight against apartheid during his time. Suffering mental illness later in life, leading to vagrancy, one day he walked out a Salvation Army facility and disappeared.//With Raul Zurita, Chile’s history and landscape come alive and goes under your skin, transcendental and nightmarish at the same time.//Another Roberto Sosa, more poems from Honduras during a time when it was a vital strategic asset for Reagan’s Contra War against the Sandinistas.//Adonis rocked the Arabic literary scene with Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs, the comparison to Eliot or Pound shortly came after. Surrealism to interrogate the self, the nation, the sacred. I heard he’s getting a lot of heat for statements directed on both sides of the war, unfortunately I can’t speak Arabic or French.//Countersong to Walt Wiltman was amazing, but Amen To Butterflies, Pedro Mir’s poem about the Maribal Sisters is just divine.//Some of Humberto Ak’abal’s more ‘modernist’ works, specifically talking about hardships of indigenous peoples in Guatemala. In 2004 Ak’abal declined to accept the Guatemala National Prize for Literature because it is named after Miguel Angel Asturias.//Looked up Ghassan Zaqtan a bit and read about the controversy over his visa application denial when this book was nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize. The visa officer said his reason, to attend an awarding ceremony, ‘wasn’t convincing enough’ and he also had ‘financial and employment’ issues, from the eyes of the Canadian embassy this means you probably will overstay illegally.//A glimpse of Mario Benedetti’s career in one anthology, and as a poet of commitment throughout his life, it also serves as a nation’s history. From early satire, to urgency of struggle, one poem dedicated to Raul Sendic, to years in exile, to seeking of post-authoritarian closure, ending in elderly introspection that is as biting as his early poems.//Strong influences of Apollinaire, Eluard, Rimbaud, et al meet the urgency of national liberation struggles in Fayad Jamis, in Cuba and elsewhere. Most poems talk about time in exile in Paris, many dedicated to contemporaries like Guillen, Retamar, Depestre.//Christopher Okigbo, towering African modernist poet, darling of postcolonial circles, fought for the then newly established Republic of Biafra and eventually died in combat defending the university town where he found his voice.//Paradox of contemporary Palestinian poetry; various defeats lead to wider readership, as new generations of poets write more ‘palatable’ poetry which usually means ‘you can talk about how miserable your people’s situation is, just not how to fight back’. Najwan Darwish, no relation to Mahmoud Darwish, is impressive, the more sanitized the presentation, the sharper the poems appears.//Great poems, horrible introduction, better just skip it. You could learn more about Yannis Ritsos from his Wikipedia page. No in-dept discussion of the Greek Civil War, or how the pre-WWII Metaxas dictatorship burned Ritsos’ books in public, how he was still imprisoned by the post-WWII Papadopuolos dictatorship, so you’re basically reading prison poems without the idea why this guy is in prison. It was mentioned he won the Lenin Prize but doesn’t discusses it’s significance.//David Mandessi Diop is a lesser known member of the negritude movement, born in France to a Senegalese father and a Cameroonian mother, it was only logical for him to be eventually a Pan-Africanist, served as a teacher in newly liberated Guinea, before dying in a plane crash along with his wife and manuscript of a second book of poetry.//A poem mostly made up of names of Latin American revolutionaries from Leonel Rugama. He and three comrades were cornered by the National Guard, when the chief told them to surrender, and Rugama replied, ‘Tell your mother to surrender!’ They were all killed, he was about to turn 21.//Juan Gelman, chronicler of the Dirty War, before and after his exile. His son and daughter-in-law were disappeared by the junta, his son’s remains was only discovered in 1990 in a barrel filled with sand. Later he found out that his daughter-in-law was pregnant at that time, and by virtue of Plan Condor, his granddaughter grew up in Uruguay, they eventually met in 2000. This book is dedicated to the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, to the families of the Argentina’s Disappeared.//Claribel Alegria was already exiled and a wanted person when her mother passed away. She wanted to go home, but her father said something along the lines, ‘there will be two instead of one funeral.’//Early Martin Espada, introduced by Amiri Baraka, and with poems being how I want my diasporic literature to be, looking at Empire in the eyes.//Jim Smith’s poems for, and a bit of translations of, Rugama and Dalton. Struggling with form is very apparent, the target audience is Canadian readers after all. A lot of dark humor via irony. This might be as agitating as it gets. Stand out poem asks what if events in El Salvador happened in Ontario.//
Pet Sitting
I was asked to watch over a dog for the weekend, while my aunts go for a drive to Quebec. They assumed I would welcome a pet sitting gig. I never watched over a dog before. She was ten years old and named Shelby. Black with scattered white spots. Anyone can handle her. They left the house at five in the morning, she was already tied in the kitchen when I woke up.
I was supposed to feed her once at midday. Snacks in the morning and afternoon. Water bowl should always be full. Go outside twice to do her business. Put her shit in a bag and throw it in the garbage bin outside. You can take her for a walk, but let’s not risk it. Her food is in a container on the fridge. I took it out and placed it on her bowl. Pets here are fancy; she has her own dish cooked for her. She smelled it and just stared. I checked again. There’s another container with boiled chicken gizzard. She ate it unceremoniously. Turns out, the adobo was for me.
I was mostly in the room reading in the afternoons. She would bark when the floor tremors as trucks pass by the four-lane Main Street outside. I would sit in the kitchen to calm her down. I needed to rest my eyes anyway. I took a shower, when I came out, she was chewing her leash and the rubber mat within her reach. The first time we went out, she was quick. Around 3 P.M., I think I need some sun as well. I bought a chair outside first, went back to for my laptop and Shelby. I sat and tied her leash on my armrest. She was walking around the small stony yard, making do.
I was writing an experimental story in response to a call for submissions for anthology of political speculative fiction. This is my first serious effort to write again. I felt I needed to insert being in Canada somehow. That’s just what writers do. The story is made up of book reviews and ends at the preface. About dictators being resurrected, history being repeated, and places in the world being found. Shelby eventually stared at me while I type, her face leaning on my right arm. This was what I was missing.
They arrived Sunday evening a bit after dinner. Exhausted, but with tourist glows on their faces. They asked if me and Shelby are now best friends. I wouldn’t take it that far. Everyone said goodbye to get ready for Monday. They asked me to try the cheese bagels they bought. I got twenty-five bucks for my services, which I genuinely refused. No this is how we do it, they insisted. The next day, I went to a bookstore in Westdale to buy a used copy of Fredric Jameson’s book on science fiction.
Eric Abalajon is currently a lecturer at the University of the Philippines Visayas, Iloilo. His works have appeared in Ani, Katitikan, Loch Raven Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Tiger Moth Review, Dx Machina, and elsewhere. Recently his poems are included in the collections Sobbing in Seafood City (Sampaguita Press, 2022) and Footprints: An Anthology of New Ecopoetry (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). He can be found on Instagram at @jacob_laneria, and on Twitter at @JLaneria. He lives near Iloilo City.
On Eid in Tucson, I paint my turmeric-stained fingernails pink, so I can meet my friends. Under a bottle brush tree with the flow of the wind, people, a landscaper tinkering with a cactus behind my station on a concrete bench, the city debris sticks to my nails and fossilizes as I blow on the wet paint. Preserves the day, the city, the low air quality warning, the carbon from the towers of the largest employer in the city that makes missiles, missiles that are probably in my country right now, my other country, my actual country. And maybe pollen from mesquite flowers and Japanese privet and the long orange flowers that hummingbirds love. Maybe a hummingbird’s spit. So I walk down the square of shops glittering in the sun— there I am in the coffee shop’s dark windows, breasts rounded by a Victoria’s Secret bra, face under a hat that keeps my skin beige, not my subcontinental farming ancestors’ dark, and with this face and these hands, these fossils at the ends of my fingers, I feed my friends. The last little Cinnabon Delight we split four ways, lick its creamy filling off my pinky, eat the pollen, the missile dust. “You’re dressed like a lesbian’s upscale apartment,” my friends tell me, and I wanted to match the desert, but even this is funny, how I didn’t even have to try. Like how I’m afraid of skin cancer, but even this will make my mother happy, my mother who wants from me, the colorist brand of respectability. Like mosquitoes in amber, the empire lives in my nails, dulls the lacquer of layers of Ballet Slippers— the Queen of England’s favorite nail polish.
Dure Ahmed is an immigrant Muslim writer from Pakistan. Currently an MFA student at the University of Arizona, they have work appearing, or forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, and The Lumiere Review. Follow her on Twitter @dure_ahmed.
newness starts you off on the page asking no questions, like book knowledge opens to you when people do not
new kid, def not from here
with a hot cup of coffee staving off proper addictions you fill up pages of good and bad, stressing on the first of dents, their odds and ends
first real loss//first grounded ignorance//first real joke//first interstate pullover
you save first fear and first scare for last
darkest face among rows//pining tears// and buoyancy that launches itself
in a new life, how often you are asked for the proof of commencement to explain why life continues and there is no viability
how often the steps questions come. like how many of such you took to split. “how many official renunciations…?
and you answer truthfully, say “you’d see to believe.”
with thoughts unresolved on the page, this newness unfixes you
your craving of latter days//and their simple greens//the new sense of duty a place fixes you with //junkie of labor//in and out of creased worlds//sometimes lost as casual forgetfulness
and when there aren’t more of these worlds to traverse, intensity, or more magic to thread with horror starts you off on a closed page
with no words in view your new sight begins as a first prone to things
a cat struggling to reach//some weird shit called music// tongue growing alien//while still attached
Chiagoziem Confidence Jideofor is Queer and Nigerian. Her poems have appeared or are scheduled to appear in Reunion: The Dallas Review, the minnesota review, Yaba Left Review, Passengers Journal, Rigorous, Untitled: Voices, Versification, Ghost Heart, and so on. Also a self-taught illustrator, Agoziem has worked on several book covers and digital arts collaborations, and is currently an in-house digital artist at Arts Lounge Literary Magazine and Cooking Pot Publishing.
Still… shame to waste a perfectly good, dead bear…
So it was stuffed, sold to a pawnbroker who sold it to Waylon Jennings.
The Outlaw gave it to a hustler in Vegas.
When he died, it was bought by a Chinese herbalist. Then he died, so his widow sent the bear back to Kentucky Home state of the man who had dropped the cocaine,
who did a poor job bailing out of his plane, found dead in a driveway (Can you imagine – your driveway?) His parachute opened too late.
Now the bear stands up in the bed of a pickup where he takes pictures with tourists. He wears a jaunty, Kentucky hat and a gold chain that says Pablo EskoBear
But the bear is not aware of his impact on any of them. He’s not privy to this piece of his own story.
He just got into something he shouldn’t. And it tasted so good until it didn’t.
Cowboys and Indians
As children, my father and his brothers played Cowboys and Indians and always wanted to be cowboys
So while they ran around looking for Indians to kill
My grandma would turn to my grandpa and say, “You need to tell them that they are the Indians.”
KL Lyons is a writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma and a citizen of the Muscogee Nation. Their work has previously appeared in ANMLY, Room Magazine, Eye to the Telescope, and Variant Literature. You can find them on Twitter as @dystopialloon.
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