Chloe Martinez

Still Life

 

Chloe Martinez is a poet and scholar of South Asian religions. Her forthcoming chapbook, Corner Shrine, was selected by Geffrey Davis as the winner of the 2019 Backbone Press Chapbook Competition, and her poems have appeared in Waxwing, Prairie Schooner, The Common, and elsewhere. She is the Program Coordinator for the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at Claremont McKenna College, as well as Lecturer in Religious Studies. She’s vaguely on Twitter @chloepoet; see more of her work at chloeAVmartinez.com.

 

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LaToya Jordan

Offering

The first time I birthed a blood baby it plopped to the tub floor and slid to the drain, trail of red staining the porcelain. I didn’t know what it was. It looked like a chunk of canned cranberry sauce. It wobbled in the shower spray, too big to be washed away. I pressed my big toe against its smoothness and smashed it down the drain in pieces.

The third time it happened, I picked up the thing to examine it, turning it around in my hands, soft and squishy like an overripe plum. “Keep me,” a voice said. I slipped and almost dropped it. I turned off the shower thinking the water was playing tricks on me. Trevor wasn’t home, so it couldn’t be him. “Keep me,” the squeaky voice said again. There was only this bloody blob in my hands. Sitting naked on the tub’s edge, I looked for a mouth. No arms or legs, no mouth or face, but its voice vibrated in my hands; it was all heart. “Keep me,” it pleaded.

I grabbed a towel, raced to the kitchen, and got a dessert bowl from the china hutch. I’d been saving the silver basket weave patterned dishes for a special occasion. After 12 years of marriage, I thought we’d have more things to celebrate. I thought there’d be children and chipped china. I wiped dust from the bowl with my towel and placed the blood baby gently in. I set the bowl on the windowsill that got the most sun. 

Every month a new blood baby came to join her sisters. The oldest lost her luster and shriveled to a burgundy-black pea. The youngest was silken, wet. I organized them around the bowl by birth date, a blood-baby-stages-of-metamorphosis clock. Trevor shunned the window, passing it with eyes focused on the floor or body glued to the opposite wall. Avoidance was his coping strategy.

I found joy in sitting by the window talking to my blood babies as they aged and withered. Sometimes we sat in silence. Sometimes they said sorry on behalf of my uterus. Sometimes I’d teach them songs we’d sing together in harmony, but I loved hearing them call me Mama most. Once they became crisp pebbles, I returned them to the earth, buried in our small backyard beneath a circle of smooth stones.

***

The doctor said I had abnormal growths called fibroids, but I heard fruit. One, a plum, another a grape. My uterus became a small orchard. I gave thanks to its inhospitable environment for sustaining fruit. I signed up for Your Baby’s Fruit Size This Week emails and learned a plum is the size of a 12-week-old fetus. I’d never made it past the blueberry stage with my pregnancies, but my fruit continued to grow. Plum became orange, grape became plum. They drained me as they grew. I craved blood, going from well done to medium rare red meat. I told the staff at the steakhouse near my job, “The baby likes steak!” Then grapefruit, then orange again. Out of breath walking up the stairs, stars in my eyes when I stood up too fast. Then honeydew melon, then mango. Strangers gave me their seats on the subway. I gladly sat down while rubbing my belly. 

My weekly baby-size email said I had heartburn, frequent urination, trouble sleeping, and my internal organs were being squished. It also said my baby could hear and its kidneys and liver should be fully functional. I wondered if Honeydew and Mango heard me when I groaned in pain. Did they feel responsible? My doctor said they were dangerous and had to be taken out. I woke from surgery with a flatter stomach, a new scar above my pubic hair, but no fruit, no babies. In online groups, no amount of calling fibroids fruit made people like them—they were always monsters. But I miss my little monsters and how they showed me what a pregnant body would look like on me.

***

My mother used to say to me, “Never throw your hair in the garbage because birds will find it, use it in their nests, and you’ll have headaches for the rest of your life.” As a child, I’d picture pigeons pecking my brain like worms. After cornrowing my hair, she’d put the little bundles of shed hair in an ashtray and light it. I’d watch, mesmerized by how the hair sizzled, quickly becoming ash. 

After the doctor said I couldn’t have babies, I began leaving gifts for the birds in our backyard. It feels good to have my own ritual now. My hair is perfect for nests, soft and coily, dark brown to easily blend with other nest materials, a few wiry grays for strength. During the week, I gather hair from my brush or finger detangling. I put the strands in the same bowl by the window my blood babies spent their short lives in; Trevor still avoids that window. By the end of the week, the bowl has sprouted. On Saturdays, after Trevor leaves to coach football, I scatter hair mixed with twigs and birdseed on the grassy section of our small yard. 

After the hair is spread, I sit in a lounge chair on the patio, sip chamomile from a silver-lined teacup, and wait. Two tiny birds I call Kiwi and Tan have been coming for birdseed for a long time. They like the hair, taking pieces in their beaks and flying up to the top of our towering London planetree. Their nest is hidden by leaves and branches, but I know they’re pleased with my gifts because they leave me trinkets near the feeder: feathers, ribbon, small colorful beads, a keychain in the shape of a house. It feels good to know that something beautiful can be made with my body. When the pain comes, it’s not a headache, but sharp beaks at my belly, pecking at my already mangled uterus. There’s still life inside me.  

 

LaToya Jordan is a writer from Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Thick-Skinned Sugar (Finishing Line Press). Her essay, “After Striking a Fixed Object,” is listed as “notable” in Best American Essays 2016 and her writing has appeared in Mom Egg Review, Literary Mama, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, and more. LaToya received an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. She is a mother to two amazing kids and wife to an English teacher. Follow her on Twitter @latoyadjordan.

 

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Carson Faust

Faces and Darkness Separate Us

I. Bloody Mary

It was the white God’s day of rest. That did not stop Vantrilla Friendly from sending her daughters out to fetch water. Vantrilla sat before the mirror every morning and pulled the strands of silver from her long black hair. She woke at dawn with her husband Carlisle. As he spent the morning working in another man’s field, she avoided all light that didn’t reflect from the glass. When she cooked biscuits for breakfast, the curtains in the kitchen were drawn. When she swept the living room, she would move between the patches of sunlight.

On days when the South Carolina sun beat on the fields and brought Carlisle’s skin from russet to red, she sent her daughters out to the well to bring water home. That way the light would not touch her. The light would not darken her.

Her three daughters. It was their fault. The lines in her forehead deepened and the rings around her eyes darkened and her hips widened every time she thrust one into the world. Vantrilla grew more tired every year since she pushed the first one out in 1905. Never thought she’d feel so haggard by age thirty-four. It worsened every day.

Her own mother had worn age with grace. Even when Mama looked like leather on her deathbed, her chin was high and her eyes glimmered. Vantrilla did not inherit this poise. Every line, every wrinkle, every gray hair weighed her down. If avoiding sunlight was the only way to fight, then that was what she was going to do. It wasn’t about beauty. No. It was about control. She couldn’t control how people saw her, but she could control how she saw herself.

Mama had worshiped the sun, like all of her mothers before her. In the stifling heat of summer, they would all dance for the Green Corn Ceremony. For the corn to grow, they had chosen to wither. Vantrilla refused to wither as they did, and the crop still grew. They were foolish. All that time in the sun made their skin so deep that when the white folk came around with their pens and papers, they marked them all down as Negro. As Vantrilla’s people lost their dances, their stories, all they had were the words that were written on those papers. That were written by people who knew nothing about them.

Vantrilla knew that Carlisle thought she was sick. Because she refused to leave the house when the sun shone. She knew that if he weren’t so beaten down by the end of every day that he would’ve taken a lover by now. If he believed in a hell, he would not be afraid to burn there. He burned all day long. Even if he had a lover, there was nothing for Vantrilla to do, just as there was nothing he could do to bring her into the sun.

The girls were old enough to do all of the work outdoors now. They had aged her enough already, so those tasks became theirs. Eliza was the eldest, almost a woman now. She carried the two largest buckets in, her cheeks flushed and dark. She was always the first one to return, long and lean like Vantrilla. Letha, though she was the youngest, usually was back second. She was nine and still got away with carrying only one pail of water. Rosalie was short and thin like her father. Carrying two pails was more of a strain for her.

With the water Eliza brought home, Vantrilla would wash the floors and boil corn for supper. The water Letha brought in would be for drinking. Much of it would be saved for Carlisle for when he came home. With the water that Rosalie brought back, the whole family would bathe. Vantrilla bathed last. Sat in the tub that she had lowered Mama into in the months before she died. As the water rippled, twisting the reflection, her face looked like Mama’s.

Rosalie made sure her sisters stayed awake past dark. After she was sure Ma and Pa were asleep, she took a candle from the kitchen drawer and the box of matches she had hidden under her mattress and the three sisters snuck into the bathroom. If Ma found them with matches, they would be in a lot of trouble. Not because the fire was dangerous. She didn’t care about that. She cared about how much the matches cost.

“I still think this is a waste of time.” Eliza said. She had the biggest bags under her eyes.

“We have to get up so early tomorrow, Rosalie. We got to do this tonight?”

“Haven’t you always wanted to see a spirit?” Letha asked. She was more excited than she let herself sound. Just as she was on the walk home from the well, when she planned this with her sisters. “Cousin Will said he saw one when he did it.”

“Cousin Will might be our dumbest cousin,” Eliza said. “And that’s an accomplishment with how many cousins we got.”

Eliza always joked that she couldn’t crush on any of the boys because they were related to all the boys. It was more truth than joke, though. Just about everybody left in Four Holes looked about the same. “Come on, it won’t take long. Y’all just scared.” Rosalie knew she had them now. Eliza was too proud, and Letha wouldn’t want to feel left out.

Finally, Eliza snatched the matches and lit the candle. As brave as Eliza pretended to be, she wouldn’t say the words. Letha and Eliza both looked at Rosalie. Rosalie did it, heart pulsing, but still only three faces flickered in the mirror. The closest thing to a ghost was the smoke from the candle after they snuffed it out.

yraM ydoolB .I

The mirrors’ eyes are open now. The girls stood before them in yellow candlelight. The tallest one had her arms crossed, waiting for something to happen. The smallest looked terrified, her face somehow chalky and dark. The middle one, they could see most clearly. Her face and body were wider than the other two. She was hardly taller than the smallest. She was the one who held the candle. The one whose voice they had swallowed.

Mirrors all talk to one another. Much like all rivers flow to a larger body of water, mirrors all flow to the same place in the end. The mirrors in the house watch them, all together. This kind of sight can grow. They see through the light reflected from windows and water. When the girls peer into the black eye of the well, the black water looks back.

The mirrors watch as the mother’s hair goes from black to silver faster than she can pluck. Her hair and skin lighten until she is pale and colorless and beautiful. White as a ghost. They watch as the father’s body breaks—his eyes become glossy, his back twists, his hands become raw. Their eyes are hungriest for the girl that woke them. They watch her grow. How her breasts and belly swell. They watch her weep after the well takes the smallest sister. That black eye holds that girl’s body forever and her rot poisons the water.

They hold the things that can’t be reflected. Each mirror holds the smallest sister’s face. Her dark body. When the mother passes, her body thin and white as bone, they take it from her. They put the dead mother and daughter in every corner of the room. The girls wanted to see ghosts, so they give them. The little girl’s dark body, ugly as it was, was perfect for hiding in shadows. The dead mother’s body—with its long arms and legs made pale and elegant by death—was perfect for reaching, for clawing. There is skin that gives back light and there is skin that takes it in. Skin that takes it in, like all things that take but do not relinquish, becomes impure.

II. Bloody Mary

Grandma Rosalie looked in mirrors even though she couldn’t see anymore. Back when Ariel used to visit Grandma Rosalie at her old place, her attention always turned to the mirrors. Now her grandma was staying in their guest room. Her eyes were getting bad, so Mama took care of her. Well, Ariel helped too. Mama stayed home with Grandma Rosalie on days that Ariel worked day shifts at the 4-Mart, and Ariel was her caretaker at night when Mama worked longer shifts at the hospital in Ridgeville.

Ariel liked their nights together. Grandma Rosalie told her things that Mama wouldn’t. She told her about Mama when she was a kid, how she used to get in all sorts of fights with the boys at school and how she’d spend half of her recess in the nurse’s office. She told Ariel about the way Mama used to carry around her doll, Little Opal, all weekend. She talked about how badly her daughter wanted to be a mother. And she talked about Ariel’s father, a white man named Earl Riche, and how he walked out on Mama when she told him she was carrying his child.

There wasn’t a single picture of Earl in the house. After Grandma Rosalie told her about him, she looked through every drawer and book and photo album. Nothing. Ariel had gone sixteen years without hearing more than a few words about her father, so any knowledge Grandma Rosalie had, she devoured. The stories distracted from Grandma Rosalie’s mirrors too. Ariel remembered how the mirrors in Grandma Rosalie’s old house used to scare her, and that was a feeling that never really went away. It was a feeling that was getting worse lately. Ariel covered the mirror in Grandma Rosalie’s room while she ate up her supper downstairs.

Ariel stayed as far from those mirrors as she could. It felt like something was moving underneath the sheet. Like something was moving underneath Ariel’s skin.

Ariel took Grandma Rosalie upstairs after they finished their chicken and biscuits. “Can you please take that sheet down, Ariel?” Grandma rocked in her chair, knitting by touch. She stared right at the mirror.

“How’d you know I covered it even?”

Grandma Rosalie let out a dark laugh. “What good is having a mirror when you can’t even see yourself? That’s how you think, ain’t it?” Grandma Rosalie knew just how to make Ariel feel bad. Blind old bat had a knack for it.

“Fine.” Ariel pulled the sheet down and felt a rush of heat.

Grandma Rosalie was quiet for a bit. They listened to the cicadas screaming outside. “You see her too, don’t’cha?”

Ariel looked toward the mirror, waited for her grandma to speak again, afraid to speak herself. There was a shadow in the mirror that didn’t belong.

“I can’t see a damn thing, but when I look in the glass, I can see her. Clear as day.”

Mama and Auntie Eliza had told Ariel about little Letha. She died young. Auntie Eliza could talk about it, but Grandma Rosalie never really got over it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know you’ve seen her too. Just like my sister. Just like your mother. You can try to deny it, like they do, but it’ll only get worse.”

“Come on, Grandma. It ain’t real.”

It wasn’t real, and neither were the nights that Ariel dreamed of eating glass and woke tasting blood. And neither were the nights that Ariel caught glimpses of a red moon in the silver when the moon was supposed to be white. And neither were the nights when Ariel’s reflection was not her own, but a dark girl drenched in water. It was water. It was water, wasn’t it?

“She is.” It felt like Grandma Rosalie could see Ariel for the first time in years, the way she was looking at her. It made Ariel’s head feel light. “Ghosts are. You just don’t have any of your own yet. I’m sure mine will get passed along after I go.”

That’s when Ariel understood. That’s why Grandma Rosalie was finally telling her. That’s why it had been getting worse. Grandma thought she was going to pass this along. And she thought it would happen soon.

“You’ll believe it when you see it. And you will.” Grandma Rosalie said. “Just know that ghosts can’t hurt you. But they can try like hell to make your hurt yourself.”

yraM ydoolB .II

Call them Mary, if you must. Call them what you will. Those things that watch all people from behind the silver of mirrors. Some call these things Mary Worth. Some woman, some witch, unable to bear children. Covered in blood. Red from head to toe. Mary fashions Rosalie a ghost of her own. Little Letha Friendly, too young to bear children, and red from head to toe. Her skin, the same color of what lie beneath it. A monster in her own right. All she lacked was the blood, so the mirrors put the spirit into blood.

Rosalie becomes a mother to Esther, Esther becomes a mother to Ariel. The blood gets passed along, and so do the ghosts inside it. The silver eyes watch, in the glint of the scalpel, as Ariel is pulled from the womb. They watch as the doctors with lily-white skin, as lovely as the flower itself, cut Esther’s parts so she will never be a mother again. This unclean mother in sterile surroundings. She needed to be cleaned from inside out. Hollowed out. Nothing could be done about her skin, but the doctors stopped that darkness from spreading.

Esther did not want this, of course. She smiled as Ariel grew in her belly. She filled shoeboxes with little bibs and booties that her mother knitted. She kept them in her bedroom closet, next to her music box. She had a journal full of names. Names that she practiced saying with her daughter’s name. She did not want this, but it is for the best.

She weeps when the doctors tell her. She weeps in the bathroom while her infant sleeps in her crib. While Ariel toddles from room to room. After Ariel leaves for school. After Ariel takes the car to work. Esther clutches her belly as it aches for what it cannot have.

The mirrors can haunt her too. Show her little red babies. They have eaten the light of so many faces, there might as well be one for every name on Esther’s list. Their memories are exact. They drink Esther’s sweet tears. Just because they reflect a face twisted by sadness doesn’t mean they are not smiling.

III. Bloody Mary

Five years pass, and Grandma Rosalie passes with them. Three more years pass, and in them, Ariel falls in love with a man named James. Then nine months pass, and Ariel brings her daughter Elsie into the world. Mama is overjoyed when the doctor places Elsie in her arms. Mama always told stories of mothers that never got to hold their babies, whose babies were given to other families before they even stopped screaming. Mama cries happy tears that drip onto Elsie.

“You forget how warm babies are.” Mama says.

Helpful as she is, loving as she is, Mama nags. She nags that Elsie doesn’t have any siblings. Elsie is already five, Mama says. She needs a brother, a sister, she says. One that’s close to her age. She needs someone to walk through life with, to grow with, to protect and be protected by. But Ariel doesn’t have time for another kid, or money for that matter. Even with all Mama’s help, it’d be too much of a strain. Ariel works sixty hours a week at Ridgeville Clinic. James taught math at the school during the week and worked as a line cook at Hop’s Diner on the weekends.

Ariel and Mama hang the clothes out back, letting the afternoon sun pull the moisture from her linens and scrubs, from Elsie’s Sunday dress, from James’s trousers and button-ups, from Mama’s blouses. When the sheets sway in the wind, Ariel thinks of the sheets that she once used to cover Grandma Rosalie’s mirrors. She thinks of the girl she often saw in the reflections of shadows. She thinks of how much that girl looked like her daughter.

“You’re a wonderful mother, Ariel. Elsie is a beautiful girl. I don’t understand why you don’t want another child.”

“Want has nothing to do with it. We don’t have the time.”

“I’m here. Elsie is easy to watch. I can handle another baby. Wouldn’t be a problem at all.”

“I appreciate you looking after Elsie. But I don’t appreciate the meddling.”

“I just want Elsie to have what you didn’t.”

“I have plenty, Mama. It’s you that didn’t get what you wanted. No matter what I do, I’m not going to be able to give that to you.”

Dollhouse mirrors are always a little imperfect. They warp things in a way that real ones don’t. Strange that the doll has nothing inside of it but air. Elsie could squeeze the head with her little fingers and it would collapse, distorting the doll’s face, warping it into something uglier, something less familiar. Strange, too, that the the doll is so pale. Mommy’s skin doesn’t look like that. Elsie’s isn’t either. Though her skin is a little closer to color of the doll’s. Elsie notices the way that skin lightens for that instant when you apply pressure. Just a little bit brighter, if only for an instant.

Elsie knew her body wasn’t empty like the doll. She knew she was full and heavy. But the first time her skin comes apart, the first time that bright blood stains the world, she is not ready. She is playing. Running back to her bucket of chalk. She falls. She does not cry though. The strawberries inside her body paint the sidewalk, her hands. That prickly sting runs down her leg, like blood. And then through the rest of her body, also like blood.

yraM ydoolB .III

We are not cruel, nor did we ask for this. This is not our fault, but we are truthful. We are not the water, but the light that bends over it. We did not push the girl into us, she is not part of us, but we hold her. Yes, we were part of the scalpel, but we did not cut the young mother. Yes, we drink the water that flows from you, but we are not the reason you weep.

We have followed you through eighty years of blood. We have swallowed your kin. Once the water has been tainted, all you can do is pull up rot from the well.

 

Carson Faust is a queer writer, and an enrolled member of the Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe of South Carolina. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in TriQuartely, Waxwing Magazine, Foglifter Journal, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Minnesota.

Amelia L. Williams

Cookery in the Time of COVID

Mouthing Off

Survival guide

folded cootie catcher poems

 

Amelia L. Williams, PhD, is a medical writer, hiker, and eco-artist in Nelson County, Virginia. She coordinated The Ties That Bind, A #NoPipelines Collaborative Community Art and Story Project of over 250 fabric braids made by citizens to protest proposed fracked-gas pipelines in Virginia. Her book Walking Wildwood Trail: Poems and Photographs, benefits regional #NoPipelines causes. Her poems ae forthcoming in the Healing Muse and The Hollins Critic, and have appeared in Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry, Nimrod International Journal, 3Elements, Origins, K’in and elsewhere. Website: www.wildink.net, Twitter: @wildinkpoet.

 

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Tasha Raella

Unruly Gravity

 “In a groundbreaking article, ‘Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,’ Johanna Drucker offers a definition of the term data (here in the context of a discussion of the digital humanities) as capta, a French word that is the third-person, past historical singular of the term for both ‘capture” and ‘sense.’”

—from “Mad Data: Between Symptom and Experience,” American Quarterly

2019. I’m on a swing. My father is yelling, “Pump, pump!” but that’s the last thing I want to do, because my heart is racing and I keep swinging higher and higher, no matter how still my legs and eyes are. I can see pieces of plastic, like two sides of a box, and plants. There are plants everywhere.

No.

I’m totally blind and I don’t know what a plant looks like and my father is dead. I’m at my sister’s engagement party and I’m not on a swing, I’m sitting at a Greek restaurant in a garden somewhere in Florida and if I can just force my feet to stay on the ground, maybe no one will have noticed that I took too big of a hit off my sister’s fiancé’s vape pen and that it’s just caught up with me and maybe gravity will start behaving like it normally does and maybe I’ll be able to breathe again and maybe I’ll stop interpreting my body’s own movements as sensory data, which I’ve read is a symptom of schizophrenia. Jason, my sister’s fiancé’s brother, is getting loud. Lines of conversation snake over and to the left and behind me, like scaffolding.

I can feel people’s eyeballs pulsating. I lean over, tell my mother that I just saw a ceramic flower pot. She asks me how I knew; the pot is to my left, but actually there are pots like that all around us. I say that I tuned into its frequency. My eyes are only building more momentum. I’m running on a treadmill that I can’t stop. The world is too fast. I can see but I can’t breathe.


“Under this hypothesis, I usually tune out the visual signal, as it has been proven to be unreliable. However, marijuana causes alterations in the precision weighting of the visual error signal, so that it becomes more salient. I make better use of the visual error signal, which leads to updated predictions that match the error signal.”

—from “Observing My Cannabinoid-induced Visual experiences from a Predictive Processing Perspective,” an unpublished paper by Tasha Raella


2009. I have trouble telling this story in the present tense. The first time I learned to see, or rather, realized that I was seeing, I’m at my family friends’ lake house. It’s dusk, and I’m smoking a joint on the deck with Jack and Kevin. They’re old camp friends of my dad’s, and they’ve known me since I was a kid. Kevin checks the time on his phone, and I’m startled by the brightness.

“I wonder if it’s the pot,” Kevin says, almost to himself. Jack blows the possibility off, laughs his jaded Jack laugh. But Kevin remains curious. He downloads a strobe light app. The light jumps toward me. It keeps changing: pursuing and retreating, shrinking and thickening and sharpening. First, it’s a spooling thread, then a rope, then a gauzy curtain, then a block of wood, then the glint of a knife.

“Those are colors,” he says. “You’re seeing color, Tash.”

I learn that black is big and white is sharp. Kevin starts to teach me to put names to sizes, his Israeli accent deepening, his voice becoming more and more animated. Without his customary cynicism, he sounds like a small boy, or like someone who would narrate an audiobook about British schoolchildren. Our usual banter is replaced by awed silences. Then Jack sings out, “Who’s ready for tequila?” and all is forgotten.


“In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll introduced the concept of the umwelt. He wanted a word to express a simple (but often overlooked) observation: different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on different environmental signals. In the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and the odor of butyric acid. For the black ghost knifefish, it’s electrical fields. For the echolocating bat, it’s air-compression waves. The small subset of the world that an animal is able to detect is its umwelt. The bigger reality, whatever that might mean, is called the umgebung.”

—from “The Umwelt” by David Eagleman


2014. A month before I leave for grad school, I try hash oil for the first time, and the effects linger into the next day. We take a friend’s young daughter to the aquarium. I don’t panic when my mom believes that I saw the jellyfish, but I skirt it, taste the metal of it. The jellies are like those orange gummy candies people hand out at bar mitzvahs. We leave the aquarium and sit down for lunch at one of those overpriced cafes on Newbury Street. I borrow my mother’s sunglasses so I can stop replaying their glide projected onto my lips and upper teeth.


Each person’s belief has a different taste or texture, and some are more sustaining or less pleasant than others. My mother’s is like cane sugar, the kind they put in Mexican Coke. Kevin’s used to taste like honey. Dr. Ashtari’s feels like the corduroy pants I refuse to wear. It burrows under my fingernails, soft but not soft. My whole body tenses with the chill.


2012. We’re in the kitchen, doing that awkward Jack-and-Karen ritual where we stand around for hours while Karen and my mom make guacamole and charred broccoli. I start walking towards what I think is a chair, but that thought is based on a slippery, opalescent knowledge, the kind that’s only found in dreams, so I distrust it.

“Where were you going?” Kevin asks.

I look down, abashed. “I thought there was a chair there.”

“Well, is there? Go and see.”

I still hesitate. I was able to describe the triangular fireplace two minutes ago, and I’m loath to be wrenched away from that rightness.

“Go on,” Kevin prods.

I take five steps forward, find the chair. I want to lick the belief off his fingers.


2014. My roommate Sarah and I are lying by the river. I’m supposedly writing an essay about unschooling, but her brother’s hash oil is so potent that I can’t do much of anything. I feel like I’m on a slant, even though the ground is flat.

“You’re seeing the railing,” Sarah tells me. “Look to your left. Can you see the water?”

I can’t, but I think I can see a fence, which is just as fascinating to starving retinas.

Other things I see that week:

* The cups of ice cream in Whole Foods, stacked on top of each other like castles.
* My other roommate’s hair.
* The couch.
* A stack of plates.
* Everyone’s hands.


2015. Sarah and I are shopping for lipstick.

“What red do I want, Tasha?” she asks. I expect her belief to have a taste, but it’s bland, like water. At grad school I’ve reinvented myself as the Blind Girl Who Sees, and Sarah’s never met the version of me who doesn’t understand what red is. She knows me as someone who makes startling eye contact sometimes, and unnervingly canny comments about the paintings we’re looking at in our Art and Understanding class, so it’s not surprising she’s treating me like a real girl. The two reds she is considering have different weights, different viscosities.

“The scarlet,” I tell her. “It suits your complexion.”


“A brain-imaging study of 12 people who had been blind from birth, and 14 sighted people, published recently in Nature Communications, shows that while for sighted people, sensory and abstract concepts like ‘red’ and ‘justice’ are represented in different brain regions, for blind people, they’re represented in the same ‘abstract concept’ region.”

—from “Making Sense of How the Blind ‘See’ Color,” the Harvard Gazette


2016. I’m at a barbecue at my mom’s house. My eyes are too far away from the rest of my body. I’m sitting in a chair, but they are all the way at the edge of the deck, and I’m stuck, imagining what it would be like to step off that drop, jolting myself over and over and over again. My mom’s friend is asking me a question, but I have no idea what it is. Something about where to get good Thai food in Brookline? When she repeats it, I make my voice extra loud, extra lucid, but the light someone has just turned on starts yanking my hips in the opposite direction. I can’t generate enough force to resist.

Then, Kevin The Psychiatrist is there; Kevin The Friend is absent. “Your jaw is tense,” he says. He takes me inside to wash my hands, tells me to splash warm water on my face.

“Does weed give you panic attacks?” he asks later.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “I can make them stop.”

“Or you could stop smoking.” His disapproval has the same chalky consistency as my father’s.

“I’d miss the colors too much,” I manage to get out. I can tell that my lips are still tinged with blue. “They have twelve-step programs for that,” he says. “There’s no glory in anxiety.”


“Lead researcher Dr. Manzar Ashtari said: ‘What we saw should cause alarm because the type of damage in cannabis smokers’ brains was exactly the same as in those with schizophrenia and in exactly the same place in the brain.’”

—from “Brain Imaging – Cannabis and Schizophrenia Look Similar,”  The Daily Schizophrenia News Blog


2017. It’s the Fourth of July and I’m sitting on a blanket with a college friend. The fireworks are like burning sponges, or paintings with no peripheries, or French castles set ablaze by a particularly heinous enemy. I mourn their stability when they wink out, and my friend mourns with me: my burning sponges usually line up with hers. At work the next day, I hold onto the memory until it shrivels, lies limp in my arms. My tutees, with their endless demands, their baggy sentences and rumpled paragraphs, are always there to help me forget, if I want to let them.


From: Joseph Carroll <[address redacted]>
Sent: May 15, 2015
To: Tasha Raella <[address redacted]>

Tasha:

Unfortunately, biofeedback is not my area of expertise.

As for Leber’s Congenital Amaurosis, I don’t think the eye movements are interfering with the eyes’ interaction with visual stimuli, there is a more serious underlying degeneration of cells that prevent light absorption. Cannabis is known to increase cortisol and reduce visuomotor integration, so noticing differences in your eye movements or perception is not too surprising.

Best,

Joseph Carroll
Professor of Ophthalmology
the Medical College of Wisconsin


2014. Two weeks after that day by the river, I learn that if I can shift all my weight into my eyes, I can climb the walls with them. My concentration slackens. I do the wrong reading for one of my classes and raise my hand to say something irrelevant. I sleep late and get up late and when I show up at my internship at a middle school with my freshly gelled hair, it looks wet, unfinished.

I meet my mom for coffee.

“I want to talk to you about something,” she says, handing me my Rooibos latte. “When I have friends over, I know you like to smoke pot and see and that, but it’s not the right time and place, if you know what I mean. Do it when it’s just us, rather.”

“Why?” I ask.

When it’s just us, there’s too little motion and too much predictability. My face turns to sandpaper. I’m remembering last night at Jack and Karen’s. My mom shows Karen a picture of the view from her balcony in Provincetown, and I catch a glimpse of it. I have twelve questions about what I see (what do all the prickly lines mean and why do I feel like I am sliding and what gives the picture so much depth) but I tamp down my exuberance and ask just one. I learn that the prickly lines were edges.

“It hijacks the conversation,” she says. “It’s fine to do when we’re at home, but just not socially.”


2015. It’s Julian’s birthday and all the people in my grad program who smoke are shoved into someone’s bedroom. I pass my pen around. The floor tilts, suddenly. I’m on one of those centrifuge rides that spins so fast you get stuck to the wall. There is something glass in front of me and I can’t pay attention to anything else, even though someone is talking about the professor I have a tiny girl-crush on. I keep projecting my eye movements to my feet, sliding up and down that glass.

“Sorry, I have to sit down,” I say. My classmate Ava walks me to the living room, hands me some too-sweet juice. Her belief is alcoholic. There’s a pillow on the couch. The pattern seems infinite (it’s flowers, I can somehow see the fucking flowers). There’s such a thing as too much certainty. My teeth are all in the wrong places, and the room doesn’t have any edges.

“What else do you see?” Ava is an art teacher, and she asks the question like we’re at a museum looking at some unreasonably abstract painting.

“Nothing now,” I say contritely. “It’s all right,” she says. “What you have—it’s like a staticky radio signal.”


“Sinha showed me a video in which a teenage boy, blind since birth because of opaque cataracts, sees for the first time. The boy sits still and blinks silently, the room around him reflecting in his eyes as a kind of proof of their new transparency. Sinha believes these first moments for the newly sighted are blurry, incoherent, and saturated by brightness—like walking into daylight with dilated pupils—and swirls of colors that do not make sense as shapes or faces or any kind of object.”

—from “What People Cured of Blindness See,” The New Yorker


2015. It’s late April and Sarah says I can use her semi-porch for my quasi-date. Eiton is at MIT and is working on a project that allows you to listen to the sound trees make through bone-conduction headphones. We eat pad thai and French fries dipped in coconut curry sauce and we talk about what it means to be present. We agree that David Eagleman is a bit of an ass, and the idea of being able to feel Dow Jones scores as vibrations through a vest is gimmicky and capitalistic and a little douchey, but the concept of an umwelt is pretty cool, or at least the word is fun to say. We smoke some Blue Dream and I have one of those moments where I’m transported back to that theatre exercise where you move your arms and your partner mirrors you. Really what I’m doing is making eye contact with Eiton. But I’ve forgotten that it’s not summer yet and that recently weed has started making me cold. I can’t stop shivering, even after we go inside and Eiton piles all the blankets in our apartment on top of me, even after I try to engage in normal conversation for ten minutes, even after he says he hopes I feel better, even after he leaves and my roommate comes home and everyone goes to bed.


From: Bronstein, Adolfo, Ph.D. <[address redacted]>
Sent: December 15, 2015
To: Tasha Raella <[address redacted]>

Dear Tasha, thanks for a nice comprehensive email. A detailed discussion would take a lot of time but let me say a few things. Over the years I have seen a handful of patients whose tremor or nystagmus improves under alcohol or marihuana, so I fully believe your story. However it would be nice to see at some stage your subjective and objective data set side by side. Generally speaking a good vestibular therapist should be able to help you to increase vestibular cues and Dr. Merfeld might help on this too. Finally and this is not just a legal disclaimer but plain medical advice, make sure you don’t overdo the dope or get hooked. Discuss this with some campus counsellor?

Sorry I cannot spend more time right now and I hope these few comments help.

Best wishes,

Adolfo Bronstein
Professor of neuro-otology and consulting neurologist
University College London


2015. Dr. Ashtari can only talk at night, so our phone conversations are always hushed and brief. During the days, I collect my visuals like dead mice.

“You need an amplifier,” she muses once, “something to boost the signal from the retina.”

The next night I tell her about the pink fairy lights I saw in Sarah’s room (the pinkness is real, and it smells like Toys “R” Us).

“Be careful with the marijuana,” she says. “I’ve researched this. I don’t know how strong the stuff you’re using is but it can be pretty abrasive. It can lay down pathways but it can also erase them.”

(Like the time my mom ripped up the carpet in my childhood bedroom to replace it and for a while, there was just the bare cement.) That night I have a panic attack because my eyes spend too long playing in the grid of the heating vent, and then skating up the white, white walls. I don’t tell Dr. Ashtari this. She’s not interested in panic attacks, or flickering radio signals, or ambivalence.


2013. I can’t eat eggs Benedict without making a mess and I can’t make a mess today because Meg and I both have our laptops out. We’re workshopping poems at our favorite brunch place, Misery Loves Company. I’m proud of the imagery in my latest poem, but Meg seems less than enthused.

“I’m noticing something,” she says. “Do you know how many of your lines start with ‘he told me’ or ‘Kevin told me’ or something like that? It’s like, you’re writing is always being strained through a filter.”

This must be payback for the comments I wrote on her latest poem, the one about her “winter boyfriend.” They hit too close to the mark. She must have seen me flinch because then she reaches across the table and pats my arm.

“How sightist or whatever of me,” she says. “I forgot that the rules are different for you.”


2012. Jack and Karen’s again. My mom is cutting open something round.

“What is that?” I ask Kevin. Jack is putting his son to bed and Karen and my mom are cooking, so for the moment, I have his full attention.

“What do you think it is?”

“It looks like a stemless goblet.”

“Interesting,” he says.

“Actually, it was an Asian pear, but here, check this out.” He hands me a potato and a glass, shows me how both have the same contours.

“I thought the Asian pear was a glass, but cutting up a glass would make no sense!” I say. My laugh fizzes, as contagious as a child’s. I pick up the potato and dance across the kitchen.


“Drucker is not suggesting that data be abandoned as a scholarly term, but she does ask how humanists might begin to conceive of data as being ‘constituted relationally, between observer and observed phenomena.’ Drucker makes an important point about data in terms of their inextricability from associational interpretation and additionally highlights the intra- and extra-relational nature of data.”

 —from “Mad Data: Between Symptom and Experience,” American Quarterly


2019. After dinner at the Greek restaurant, we’re walking back to the hotel. We’re in a parking structure, on a narrow strip that’s just meant for cars. An urban jungle, my stepdad calls it. My cheeks still feel as if they’ve been slapped, and there’s too much tension between my arches. When we emerge onto the street, which is lined with high rise apartment buildings, my eyes keep shooting upward, throwing me farther off balance. My ridiculous wedge sandals aren’t helping. The quality of the air here reminds me of Vegas. I have no language to explain why. I mistake a neon sign for sunlight.


Tasha Raella’s work has previously appeared in Wordgathering, Breath and Shadow, and the anthology Barriers and Belonging. She has been totally blind since birth and holds Master’s degrees in social work and education. She is an academic coach at a college in Boston.

 

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Chavonn Williams Shen

Press Release

 

Walthall County

I. Ode to the Sidewalks that Lead to My Grandfather’s House

My father once told me 
how his father often pushed him 
into the street. No traffic to fear
in this small town, just white folk mad
that a Black boy almost brushed
the hems of their shirts.

 

II. Ode to the Tree Near My Grandfather’s House

Its branches built for swinging,
rope wrapped round its boughs held
a cast off tire in place. Older cousins taught
those younger how to lean back before their feet met the grass.
How to twist the rope so tight
that heads spun with each release.

 

Trees (noun)

A plant native to the Americas, trees are like graves, except trees can grow by themselves.

Used in a sentence:
Magnolia trees are a pastoral scene of the gallant south” *
That tree across town has the best figs. But after last summer, I won’t go near it.”

Synonyms: uncle, cousin, brother

* This line contains a quote from the song “Strange Fruit” written by Abel Meeropol and
performed by Billie Holiday

 

Chavonn Williams Shen was a first runner-up for the Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction Contest and a Best of the Net Award finalist. She was also a Pushcart Prize nominee, a winner of the Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series and a fellow with the Givens Foundation for African American Literature. A Tin House and VONA workshop alum, her poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in: Diode, Yemassee, Cosmonauts Avenue, and others. When she’s not teaching with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, she can be found in her house obsessing over her plants. Photo credit: Peter Limthongviratn

 

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Taté Walker

I Like Tacos

I want you
an ache 
deep in my core
drives me
to collect the pieces of you
scattered around
like raw promises
waiting for me
to feast

I lick my lips
salivating at the thought
of your splintered fragments
coming together and reforming
into something beyond both of us
it makes me 
come
undone
I work my fingers
through a mound
of your sticky recipe
kneading every part of you
letting you rise
just
high
enough

you like it rough
a slap here
a pull there
tugging
pressing
stoking the fire
and stretching your limits
until gently
so gently
I lay you flat
not to rest
but to burn

you writhe for me
sizzling with expectation
I wait
impatient
and hungry for you
it is ecstasy to watch
your hills and valleys
slick and glistening
and drowning in the pop song
of anointed blue birds

but we’re not finished
just as you’re about to combust
I flip you 
and start the mad process over
your body undulates for me
and suddenly
the hot
brown perfection
that is you
is ready for my tongue

sometimes we play around 
with honey
when you’re feeling soft
sweet
and warm
or sometimes we get wild like rice
but tonight
there’s only meat
lettuce 
experiment on your commod bod
with dairy-free cheese
that melts in my mouth
and my hand

round in all the right places
your lovely lumps
taste so good
and I moan your name
thanking the ancestors for the gift
that will forever sit
upon my soul
and thighs
you are my deliciously undeniable
Frybread

The Darkest Everything

i am buried 
so deep
and dark
in your glorious universe
the obsidian space around 
everything 
so rich with unexplored life
my joy stretches like 
summertime shadows
felt in your vivid 
blacks and browns
shades of warmth 
and strength
protection against the bright white
that exposes all our faults and fears
there’s a lie in light
burning us away from one another
turning our underground ceremony 
to ash
tricking us into believing that dirt 
with its endless possibilities for growth
is unclean
its glare tries to colonize 
our hopes with dread and disdain for 
everything
the dark offers
as if the expansive unknown
isn’t always a
mysteriously murky adventure
where we find ourselves
rooted together
ready to bloom
two spirits
rising together 
with winter’s new moon
into the darkest 
everything

Viral Aspirations: A Love Story

once upon a time the Earth was overrun 
with those who filtered Themselves against reality
hiding behind perfection and capitalism’s illusions of security
They grammed and primed while the world burned around Them
everything’s fine, They tweeted alongside a photo of an “I Voted” sticker
baby steps and bootstraps, They reminded the rioters
just use a metal straw and remember: not all white people 
lol #like4like #makethisgoviral

when the Pandemic came
not even Google could save Them
They mixed boredom and privilege into an infectious cocktail of meme-ific sinophobia
Am I worthy? They asked with every mundane rendition of the latest 20-second song
Their posts pleaded for connection
so They connected in the toilet paper aisle
spreading panic faster than any virus
quarantined, Their own company proved unbearable
even from behind 10,000-square-feet of living space
have hope, They said
as They tried to save the world with Netflix and food delivery
wearing jammies in Their suburban and gentrified prisons

there were Others, too, impacted by the Pandemic
but since they’d been practicing for—or forced into
lifelong social distancing
the bougie-panic seemed out of touch with the Others’ reality
wash our hands? some of us don’t even have running water
the airlines might shut down? and I was really looking forward to that Fiji trip 
once my ungodly student loan bill was paid off
the virus restricts breathing? it’s killing folks? what—
police, oil companies, and Republican health care policies are taking a break?

the Others weren’t being glib
the Others cared—the Others knew better than anyone 
the disposability of life for those considered “at-risk” 
with or without a virus
the virus represented just another uncontrollable agent of Death 
waiting to meet the Others 
for a chance encounter on the subway, or on a sidewalk, or in a grocery store
the Others still had all the “ism”s and “phobia”s and knees pressing down upon them 
what the fuck was a 20-second song really gonna do, anyway

the Earth changed, as it’s wont to do
things that once seemed untouchable
professional sports, school calendars, Tax Day
police, prisons
capitalism
suddenly had their arbitrary natures exposed
pushing everyone to adapt and innovate—or be rendered obsolete
and those who had been Othered their entire existence 
found themselves capable of weathering 
panic-induced storms of empty shelves and isolation
the Others took charge and detonated long-buried but oft-maintained 
weapons of mass creation
mutual aid-based survival was in their genetic code
or at least in their coping strategies
the Ancestors of the Others had experienced the plural of apocalypse
yes, the Others knew the destructive power of a well-aimed germ
but also knew the ceremony secrets of washing away toxins
knew community power could bridge any divide
knew medicine isn’t only what a doctor prescribes 
but also what grows from the ground 
or from a laugh 
or from a social distance powwow

the pyrophytic Earth that bloomed from the Pandemic fires
flourished through love and selflessness
They thought germs would break the Others
but collaborative ceremonial art became the key 
to open the door to the Other side of this latest apocalypse
eventually, lost lands and languages were reclaimed
non-human relatives were returned to their rightful place of honor
and the colonial endeavors that once extracted 
the essence of humanity with every dollar earned
were dismantled
small communities of care emerged from the mega-industries
and those with feminine energies gifted the world with leadership
that transcended privilege and inequity
wellbeing spread like a virus
caught and held up like the sun
encircling the Earth with a corona of possibility

Taté Walker is Mniconjou Lakota and a citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota. They are an award-winning Two Spirit storyteller for outlets like The Nation, Everyday Feminism,  and Indian Country Today. Their work also appears in FIERCE: Essays by and About Dauntless Women (Nauset Press, 2018), and their first full-length book, Thunder Thighs & Trickster Vibes, is forthcoming from Mango Publishing. Taté uses their 15+ years of experience working for daily newspapers, social justice organizations, and tribal education systems to organize students and professionals around issues of critical cultural competency, anti-racism/anti-bias, and inclusive community building. Learn more at www.jtatewalker.com

 

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M. Carmen Lane

That Fucking Cunt

For Na-te’

This was the beginning. A white man needed to be put in his place and instead a young black woman became the target. His punk ass wanted to stand up for himself and choked. Didn’t believe he was worth it. She said her own trauma kept her from intervening. She was uncomfortable with his behavior but froze. The so-called past was present. They should feel good for being rewarded a stipend. Tell me why your art is good. Make a video because you don’t need to know how to read or write. To articulate your practice. Show me your brown skin so that I know you are the one we should pick to pimp through our social media. See, we aren’t racist. We get money to feel good about giving money to young people of color who make shit. We have always had niggers and prairie niggers and sand niggers sing and dance for our enjoyment. This is the prize. That fucking art cunt cried in my arms and thanked me for helping her see the error of her ways. I, had, invited her into the circle. Instead, she hides and snakes around to keep her power. Instead she promises to course correct. She plans her escape and plants a dirty bomb before the leaving. That filthy fucking art cunt hates women of color and two spirits who get the attention of white men, even if that attention is vitriol. Objectification without being shaved and a maintained blonde.

Art cunts are white and over fifty; they don’t make shit and hate you for having a creative imagination ancient as this river infinite to their finite miseries. 

 

Born Blue

S/he speaks to you through the waves. You pretend you don’t see its trajectory change direction, foamy hills move towards your body—hit rocks in a rhythm that has your attention. Gurgles everything you’ve ever needed to hear. She says the blues are the sounds we heard in nature and sang back to our Mother. I sing back to you. You ignore me, but that song got into you. Hold, envelop, make sure they do not cover my face when they lay my body in this river. It’s a body, it’s a body, it’s a body bag. It’s a swaddle. They carry him out of the sooty shit of life to free—this is the blues. Oshun. An indigo pussy and out he come, unborn. still. An ancestor returns and asks you to complete a task. Burn it blue. Map it. The cartography of a life that has wrestled with mud and muscle, bone and an ash that irritates. Soothe it blue, Slim. We are in this river together. Her mama, whose name I’ve only heard her speak once. My daughter, who hugged me back into life from blue AND your son, your son who lives in the headwaters of the Mississippi and the Cuyahoga; calls to you from the Missouri—this fresh water waiting for the salt of you to return to it. Birth it blue, Slim.

 

Birth In The Mourning
sound piece, 2020

The babies. She came in love, forged in quiet violence. So did he. The oceans, the salty Atlantic. Why did she want to stay? Why couldn’t she stay? Why did you follow me? It was April, it was the water. The water wanted to enter the womb but it was dry—is dry, it’s dry. I am so dry. A heart beat, a drumbeat, a heart beat, a drum a heart—out of time. The wood floating on the water. Darkness. These chains are shakers. They used the iron as shakers and sang. This dirt is red too. I smell shit and salt.  I see my mother’s body on the shore, bloated. Oh this food is dry rot,  put it in the pot, let the water bring it back to life—eat, eat, eat. Eat. My lips are cracked. She said this bear grease would work on the wound. She wants to talk about many things. I am bursting wide open with the smallest gesture.  The kitchen was white and the light was dim when she ran in and wrapped her arms around my waist. I turned in a startled motion to her absence. Amala. This body could not forget how she came to be—rejected her need for entry. When I was in her bed, joy spreading over skin, she wanted to crawl in, crawl inside and come. She could not stay, flesh could not form, she could not form. But, she could not form. They say it’s structural racism. They say it’s a policy that needs to change. They say it’s institutional. They say it’s because we’re alone and need someone present. They say we need better food, more attention. We say listen. We say hear me. We say white supremacy. We say violence. We say please. We say stop. We say change. We say stretch. We say grow. Ancestors. The Ancestors interrupt and call: in our return you will simply need to get out of the way.  We are coming. We have always been here. The babies. We come into the world and breathe with you. You hold us. You held us. We were held. The social workers bring boxes and plastic and powder and liquid in cans. Do not connect with your mother’s body. Do not bond, perform. It’s warm, then less warm. It’s time to go. Do not wake. Do the ceremony, wrap me in skins, cut your hair—I’ve walked with you for sixteen years. This is now complete. Let me be born to someone else this mourning. Amala. Twenty-eight. Sixteen. Fifteen. Thirty-two. Twenty-four. One Thousand. One. 

 

M. Carmen Lane (Tuscarora, Mohawk, African-American) is a two:spirit artist and writer living in Cleveland, Ohio. Their poetry has been published in the Yellow Medicine Review, River Blood & Corn, and Red Ink Magazine. Carmen contributed to the Lambda Literary nominated anthology Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literatures. Their first collection of poetry is Calling Out After Slaughter (2015).

 

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Romeo Romero

Patrias Futuras//An Infinite Kind

I want to know 
your mundos alternativos. 
The ones we call 
patrias futuras
in our sleep. 
Quiero vivir alla 
contigo. 

siempre estamos escribiendo 
an answer 
una medicina 
por el piel roto. 

Si solamente soy  
an atom 
a cell in a body that is 
not-mine
not-yours 
que no es de Diosa
que no es de God.

y si el cuerpo 
es de an infinite kind. 
sin un fin
Then the edges of it 
no pueden ser tocados. 
and Perhaps 
no puede tocarme 
tampoco

Creo que todavia
estamos conectados 
con las cosas 
that cannot yet be touched.

Pero, Si yo podria poner mis manos 
en el mar
Se que yo podria tocar 
my ancestors.

There is no wave in the ocean 
que puede tomarnos mas lejos 
que hubieremos sido tomados ya. 
Colonization already took our land. 
Ya destruyó the sea. 
Ya nos dio este dolor 
que llevaremos siempre 
in our broken skin.

Mis raices no tienen 
Un hogar
en la tierra anymore. 
Now, their way
es el ahogar.

Do not see this as a death
no hay razon por el miedo 
de un momento sin breath. 
Seriamos como un bebe
sloshing in the womb; 
Do not look for la muerte porque
estamos aqui
in the conditions necessary 
por la vida.

esta es la fuerza que escribio 
nuestros suenos de mundos alternativos
en nuestros cuerpos. 
this is the stuff que fue escrito 
en nuestro DNA
antes de any invasion.

We have found a way to touch
las cosas que no pueden ser tocados. 
las cosas 
sin un fin. 
las cosas de algo de an infinite kind. 
Por el mar. 
Through a map left to us
in the carving of our skin. 

I want us to give away
all that we learned 
from los ahogados.

quiero vivir aqui contigo.
I want to give up the possibility 
que podriamos salir de este mundo 
without first breaking its thirsty skin 
without watching it drink the ink that pours
from inside our veins
without first seeing through that this freedom 
seria tocado por todos de los manos.

 

Romeo Romero (they/them) is a gender-fluid two-spirit boricua/jewish poet currently residing in Northampton, MA. They are the author of a full-length collection of poetry, descendant, and chapbook, diasphoria. Their work has also been featured in Trans Bodies, Trans Selves (forthcoming), Who Heals the Healer (forthcoming), On My ChestLabyrinth, and Nishmat Shoom Liturgy. 

 

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Noʻu Revilla

Myth Bitch

Before we stopped speaking, my mother told me of an all – woman island. My side of the family, she said, her mouth twisting like a sick branch. And the women are witches. I have since dreamed of women with heads of barbed wire. Torso in the bedroom, breasts in the sink. Legs divided between O ʻahu and Maui. Is witch the right word? When I sleep with a new woman, my mother whispers fetus into her fingers and sews my mouth shut. The fetus of a witch becomes a bitch. No daughter of hers will sleep like that. For the self-segmenting woman armed with needle and thread, rhyme is a mnemonic device. Repetition is rope. I will always look like her. Repeat: say nothing, daughter. Repeat: sleep alone, daughter. Daughter the word for stitch her close. When my blood touches her blood it means my mother spits needles. When I dream of women and wire it means I fuck like a woman at war with her body. Where is my rope? I am a witch. Or I am an island. Or am I a love story misinterpreted? Fetus eating with a face to memorize. Mother, I am the myth bitch you dream about.

 

Photo credit: Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada

Noʻu Revilla is a queer Native Hawaiian poet, educator, and aloha ʻāina. Her poetry has been featured in Poetry and Literary Hub as well as the Honolulu Museum of Art. Her latest chapbook Permission to Make Digging Sounds was published in Effigies III in 2019, and she has performed throughout Hawaiʻi as well as Canada, Papua New Guinea, and at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York City. This past summer, she taught poetry at Puʻuhuluhulu University while standing to protect Maunakea with her lāhui.

 

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