Author: anmly_mpusod

M. Carmen Lane

Blood

I cut my hair first. The realization of her carrying me for sixteen years felt embarrassing. It was enough that I didn’t understand that I had flushed her down the toilet in relief. Perhaps it was the fact that I saw his child being loved by arms that had held me down. He applied pressure until he knew I would be still and unyielding. I put the hair in the rabbit skin for the next day. I went to bed with a tear-stained face and woke up with a large blood clot between my legs. Creator had given me a second chance to do it right. I grabbed up the blood the best I could and placed it in the bundle. Once it was tied, she came and hugged me as large as a she would have been in a body and the tears came. The deer knew I would need to come back. They had taken me to that place where they slept. None of this feels particularly reasonable, but it doesn’t need to be. When she was eight, she tried to crawl inside of me and be born. She didn’t know the process, only where she wanted to be. I bled for years after that. Dysfunctional Uterine Bleeding. Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. The endocrinologist said I “made too much testosterone.” I used to call it the butch body disease. There is no language for blood that is not born. When my grandmother was dying the hospice staff would not declare it as the truth. A ninety-five year old black woman’s body, dying, could not be believed. White bodies don’t have to deal with this kind of indignity—except for white bodies that are poor. When are they gonna realize their only right is to make white babies? My aunt thought she had taken a shit in the bed and called the nurses to clean her up. I stepped outside but in full view to give her space and dignity and to feel. One of the staff called me inside. “She’s bleeding, do you want to see?” She pulled open the white sheet to reveal large cochineal masses between her legs. It didn’t bother me. My grandmother was talking through the blood. This went on for about an hour—bleeding, cleaning her up, repeat. This body that had birthed and fed five children closing itself out. When I returned home she was waiting for me; a presence so much bigger than her body. I made a bundle, cut hair.

M. Carmen Lane (Tuscarora, Mohawk, African-American) is a two:spirit poet and cultural worker living in Cleveland, Ohio. Their poetry has been published in the Yellow Medicine Review, River Blood & Corn, and Red Ink Magazine. M. Carmen Lane 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 (GTK Press, 2015).

 

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Caitlin Cowan

WHEN I DIE, LET ME COME BACK AS THE EVENING

gown the tremoctopus gathers
around her in the sea’s dark. Iridescent,
and for once it’s the perfect word: her skirt
glows like a burning opal. She delights
in herself, six sinuous feet long. Her mate:
a walnut-sized afterthought whose arms
aren’t long enough to hold her down,
unlike some males of some species.
She does as she likes, posing for deep sea
paparazzi once every few years. Her mystery
makes each tentacle shimmer: a magic eye
painting that resists every shape
you long to see. Smart as a whip,
she’ll rip an arm from a man
o’ war: her clever weapon. Look
but don’t touch unless I ask, in which case
please. Touch me like a watercolor
that still isn’t dry. I contain everything
I’ll ever need. And if not the rainbow
blanket octopus, let me live again
inside a question: not why does she exist
but why are we built for beauty. What
is her purpose, they’ll wonder. And I’ll blink
the moon-white coins of my eyes.

  

PYROPHILIA

The fire has a woman’s face:
holds it in its liquid teeth. Tangerine:

it wrinkles into ember, into anecdote,
as it will someday or already has.

The fire needs constant tending,
starved for transformation.

What does your tattoo say? asks every man
who burns his body into my bed.

The fire leaves its own mark, an altar
of what was joy: ash and memory.

Like men, a good one needs less tending,
has tinder enough to last. It says

the fire lives inside me, in words,
in what has come before. If you let me

share your heat, I’ll scorch you. Smoldering,
ready: every kiss is wild as gasoline.

The fire dies down. I blow it back to life
or try, like my women have always done.

That’s cool, the man says, not knowing how hot
I run. Wand in hand, I can’t quit prodding

the fire: the warmth of two fools,
booze-blazed on what might be. Like the magazines

I feed the flames, good love catches quick
in a woman’s hearth. I remembered

the fire is all I am, I don’t say. Out of the ash
they’ll pull me, dry brush gripped in my hands.

 

ON LEAVING THE VACUUM OUTSIDE

They’ve invented a dress
that holds the heat of unwanted
touch, men’s hands fingerpainting
our hips and cruel breasts. Beautiful,

and not enough. We can’t stop
our fear by seeing it: the spider
tests the lucid walls of its prison.
We are fools to think we’ve solved
its grasp, its ceaseless hunting,
if we don’t end it while we can.

When you live alone, you have to kill
the bugs yourself. Helping hands
are hard to come by. But it’s in there.
And it’s so, so hungry.

 

Born and raised in the Midwest, Caitlin Cowan’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Pleiades, SmokeLong Quarterly, Entropy, and elsewhere. A finalist for the Levis Prize in Poetry and the BOAAT Book Prize, she has won the Littoral Press Poetry Prize, the Mississippi Review Prize, and a Hopwood Award. She holds a PhD in English and has taught writing at the University of North Texas, Texas Woman’s University, and Interlochen Center for the Arts, and serves as the Director of International Tours at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp. Find her at caitlincowan.com.

 

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Cassandra J. Bruner

What Swanplume Boy, through the Stall Floor,
                                       Hears the Chorus from THE SOIL

THE SOIL,                             Before we even knew how to pronounce murder, we wept over Abel’s stonebit
RAIN-GLOSSED                   corpse. Our aquifers, even now, kiss his bones to opaldust. Trust we will sound
                                                 the same lament, build the same plumdark for you.

                                                                They’ve plucked my feathers to famine. How now will he preen

THE HAWKMOTH              Hived in plagued heifers, we read the signs inscribed across their intestinal lining,
LARVAE                                 dimlit & peeling—

                                                 We know what traceless hands are reaching for you with declawing blades. With
                                                 bladder wash. With chemical castrators.

                                                                   me to a mockpearl crest, taste & know

THE LOCUSTS                      Listen, we understand. Though coated with an asphyxiating foam, we still eat
TRANSLATING                      the silver underfuzz of leaf–
THE NECK-SNAPPED
MICE                                        Understand fault lies not with desire & its objects, but rather with its intercessors,
                                                   hiding behind their padlocked crucifixes.

                                                                     the scar beneath shaped like a libation bowl

THE LYNX CUB,                     Some of you will die & be the bioluminescent stalks lining the country roads of
UNMOTHERED                      Sheol.

                                                                       emptying? I don’t know if he is.
                                                                                                                                 Closeaway, a dilation of time careens

THE WILD                                 Others will survive & be its unlanterned gatekeepers. Memory, a garter of molten
BLACK ROSES                          thorns pressed to your lips.

                                                                          through a mother’s car window, like a fruit of gods already weaned

THE STRANDS                          Remember how–come scythe, combine, or atrazine— we always reclaimed the
OF GOLDENROD                      prairies & hillsides. How we flashed our bare necks before the blades.

                                                                            worthless. She looks back & the minutes slow

THE HAWKMOTH                    It is already too late, forgive us. We have beheld the self described Perseuses
LARVAE                                       astride their carbonfiber carriages.

                                                                              to the stillbeat of a hummingbird her child holds,

THE LOCUSTS                          Already, forgive us, they’re delousing a bat-winged boy’s hide & power-washing
& NECK-SNAPPED                   his wings.
MICE
                                                                                wingbroke. Before the coming month of softsplint & birdfeed,

THE LYNX CUB,                        Already men in another room are heating the pliers, forgive us.
UNMOTHERED
                                                                                a passing truck casts light over her beak

THE WILD                                  [Silent, corollas closed to the wind, they shudder.]
BLACK ROSES
                                                                                 in the faint line of a grin.

THE STRANDS                          The prophets are whiskeydrunk & sleeping it off in the attic. The season of feast,
OF GOLDENROD                      forgive us, has ended.

                                                                                 Tell me, is the way I keep inventing lives a sin?

THE SOIL,                                    Forgive us, we must’ve not shattered our tectonic bones loudly enough, often
FLASH-FLOODING                    enough. Every warning, gone unheard—

                                                                                  Is each one, all rose-filigreed & streaked

ALL                                                O pleasure-nocked, O ensnared, O soonwidow—forgive us.

                                                                                   with sun, erasing the memory of him as it creaks
                                                                                   through? As if you might, or even could, remember his name, I listen—

 

Swanplume boy’s testaments

Month 1, Day 7                   I’ve kept to ritual. Pruned the newborn tufts & shafts before even
                                                light can bear witness. & in witness,
                                                remember.

Month 0, Hour 2                When I’m returned home, my mother keeps her hand, cane handle, silkspool
                                                tether tightened to me. Through tarslow, insomniac hours. She didn’t
                                                know my absence, nor the presences contained
                                                within. We’re both
                                                caught, then, in cocoons of silence.

Month 1, Day 7.5                 Sometimes, the puckered flaps of skin look like open mouths. Soundless, singing.
                                                 Throats stuck, protracted, on a stolen word—

Month -2, Day -19               The marsh harrier femme beside me has stopped talking.
      
Month 4, Day 14                  At the county lilac gardens, I saw the love who fled. He turned
                                                 away. A tiny bulge of muscle in his back, raised &
                                                 twitching, contained hours of conversation.

Month 13, Day 28                I walk into winter alone.
                                                 If I speak, the neighboring forests
                                                 could write answers into my fogged breath, their chill around my exposed
                                                 neck.

Month -2, Day -19.5            Unlit & picking at the moss clothing the baseboards, I consider
                                                  a folktale my mother once respun. Of a girl who escapes
                                                  her king-father’s advances by pasting & stitching
                                                  the sopping hides of animals over
                                                  her body, unseen. What

                                                  devices, what dresses will I need?

Month 0, Hour 4.5               Our bodies
                                                  have formed a parabola of unsaid I’m sorrys. Neither of us can see
                                                  the end.

Month 37, Day 17                 Name me the tendon threading spirit and body.
                                                  I’m done singing them as two,
                                                  alone.

Month -2, Day -19.45          Stillwind years in wilderness. The girl, gone foxish, dwells by a lake till
                                                  hunters encircle, march her to the country where she peels
                                                  off skins till nerves leaf with memory. Then

                                                  marriage & the promise of forever-soft
                                                  copper, kind aristocracy. Of romance dreamt in fresco.

Month 4, Day 15                    I lied in half. I saw my ex when—before breath, before thought—
                                                  he spilled out my petname. A river, opening
                                                  on bare heights.

Month 13, Day 29                 Overnight camped beside the creekmouth. The point it feeds into
                                                  an unnamed lake. Its stillness a falsehood. Beneath
                                                  its thin transparent pane, schools of minnows circling around &

                                                  around the skull of a snapping-turtle. Alert, waiting.

Month 37, Day 20                 Funny how I’ve kept to this record, this practice of promising
                                                  nothing.

Month -2, Day -19.4            Two weddings. Two runaways. A cloak of furs
                                                  & a handful of shorn quills. Why do so many narratives require these
                                                  cold symmetries?

Month 14, Day 30                 Outside my tent—a male marsh harrier wearing formel plumage. Small. Outside
                                                   my tent, bones which house all names. As it pecks away a snow hare,
                                                   the men passing above pay no mind.

Month 0, Hour 5                   Quilt, an illusion of safety. A resolution with no arc. Meanwhile morning deepens
                                                  its pockets. So I tell her a story. One she knows. & outside—
                                                  crickets, or are these thrushes now?

 

Noli me tangere

written as A., in memory

Say     because a man pressed her against a longhorn skull

                                            Say     then after    the surrounding acres mulched

                silent     Say       she was only a runaway     a girl

                                                       with a head full                     of thistles & hornets–

        Each rumor    a shorthand eulogy   siphoning my breath

                                / /

        St. Teresa envisioned God as the sweetness
                                of excessive pain                 a tongue of sun
                    whisking along every nerve–

What is desire but faith made flesh?

                                One body rising to another                 a mouth
                                                                        contracting in worship–

            how         stunt cock lashed around my waist                     I straddle
                                                                                             a man who again & again
                                        moans for his god.     Even Christ

                                                       felt the alure of Lucifer’s hips
                after forty days of caressing sagebrush
                             & whispering to locusts.                     Didn’t my father

                                    ache too, as he rubbed perfume into my mother’s wrists,
                                                                zeroed by illness–

                                / /

To long after         the dead is to long

            for the divine–                                     For a touch

                            which fills all absences or

            an absence which negates all touch

                                / /

I dream I kiss my mother back
            to life  as antlers fan from my back.

                            They snap off in a man’s belly when he yanks
              my nettled hair back.

        Upon waking                 coughs flecked with blood
a faint hoofmark at the back

                of my throat     meaning I don’t need
                                a clinic to tell me there’s no going back—

All afternoon I spit a mixture of
                                                             chaw & pomegranate at the backdoors

                           of former friends                     knowing evening will find me
    curved like a switchback

                                                  on the shower floor.                 Hair whitening
in the heat     steam rising from the small of my back.

                                / /

     The gifts left at my doorstep:
                                          floral lotions    pink pastel wigs
                               bombshell push-up bras–

                    Ways to nudge the body
into its former shape       to conceal
                                        the hollows     the bone-flowering

                                         Face sagged like a bloodhound     the crust punk next door
                  hands me a choker     clasped with a thrush’s skull.     I wear it
                                                                                      till it slides lose into the well of my neck.

                                         Till my skin sheds all kindnesses.

                                / /

Don’t make me a saint—what I first say when my friend explains
she’s writing me. I know her love will cast me in stainglass,
resplendent & fragmented. Infused with roseate light &

flattened to a frail sheet. An art object. A thing to adore.
You understand? Don’t whore-with-a-golden-heart me. I liked the work.
I liked to fuck & be fucked. What I leave unmentioned: How she only sold

her body out of abandonment, out of a need to unravel then recover.
Little icon of wreckage. How she hasn’t called in months.
When she phones again, we swap stories from the missed time—

Her sex toys, lost in transit out west. My partner’s proposal.
Her early months on estrogen & our bodies’ tandem pains, the way
she fills out as I winnow. The poem? I ask, & she admits

I’m still peeling off a few veneers. Describes layer upon layer she’s trimmed—
A pagan folktale overlaid onto mine, a girl who clothes herself
in dirt & animal hide to avert a kingdom’s gaze,

a litany of figures from my Catholic upbringing.
I’m not close enough yet she says. We’ve always comforted each other
poorly. You know I want to stay, right—more command than consolation—

but it’s not going to happen. Read to me or drop it. She starts crying,
cracks a dumb joke about how I won’t miss her handwringing.
Next call, she reads: “There’s no land left for the young & ill./

If St. Aloysius were to return, he would dissolve/into a pile of ruptured
condoms by a county road—” No—I cut her off—don’t you dare.
Don’t you dare leave me on my deathbed twice.

                                / /

            Carrying me over the bar’s threshold
my partner fantasizes about my ass         as if it weren’t
                                               twin nubs of bone.
                                       As if kisses alone don’t mean fatigue.

                                            I want her anger–
                                                                        an admission that lack flickers
                                                          through her     aching, that we’ve both
                                            cracked dry with famine.

                                            Swaying           I lean
                                      against her sternum–
                                                          an offering of air.

 

Cassandra J. Bruner, the 2019-2020 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow, earned her MFA from Eastern Washington University. A transfeminine poet and essayist, their writing has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Muzzle, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Third Coast, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2019 Frost Place competition, her chapbook, The Wishbone Dress, is forthcoming from Bull City Press.

 

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makalani bandele

after ect

august came in with the living room a killing floor.
the first day i painted the baby grand blue,
air soughed all around, an unrubbing

rubbed us all wrong. a warbler in the poplar
woodshedding second branch from the
top, a flutter about debussy. leaves didn’t catch

the light right, they didn’t twist easily in the breeze.
a courtship loud and wild in the treetops.
forecasted bach inventions dead in the center

of a ring of dope fiends. i come here every day in notes
to self-adhesive. i looked out when they closed down
the ferry to the land of intervals, there was no glow

about her through her lithe insignia. hard to anticipate her
timing in time.  she arouses in me: bouquet
of dead butterflies. at a place in my parabola, where every

instrument had its own room. my breathing played
with me. their charge and denials of discharge
chased all the clouds away that hide me from fulcrums.  
the fewer voices in the voicings, simpler.

 

étude op. 8, no. 2

(eight piano voicings of brutality)


skunky reefer with aspirin and whiskey chaser 
all the way home to keep bearings from winding out.

little sips of johnnie walker red on down the nice cop’s beat giggling. 

the night is philly and full of pigs’ whispers, razor promises—no good nigger.

remember april 

bloodied and splayed across whole tone scales?
civil defense sirens blaring between your shoulders, batons
 
 test the mettle of your skull. 

                                                          bits of face spilling onto some ground. 
this dissonant vengeance of disfigured 
                                         shapes. 
back slaps, bootkicks to the ribcage, spleen, and pancreas, 

and you piss yourself. 

split-lipped, busted-eyed run 

of as much blunt force head trauma
the laws can get away with.

 

étude op. 11, no. 11

(last piano voicings of a monarch)


hard to keep him on the bench,
how loose are the bolts in the floor? nerves

raw as licks are rapacious, and lonely
hours between possessing all ears.


matter of fringe’s hortative verve, tempo:
chimeric. incite keys to riot out. but if he won’t come

down, don’t call the fire people who will send
the police, because they barely come to his block

even when it’s on fire. has a look in his pocket
that was through you and everything around

you, but what was actually seen was
for what it was somewhere else. heard that way,


too. a single note’s muffled thump like lone gunshot
reporting in the backwoods at night.

seminar in still after echo. incognito
between sets, vinegar-bitten air was a walk

through a wall, a heavy dose, but also spoon-
cooking, blood drawn into barrel,

the plunge that loosens all holds, all cozy, friends don’t let
friends, friends that are users and not friends.

nobody knows about the raucous all taut
and entertained, ears color struck, these black tar apparitions,


fields of mauve and fluted caps, fields of nothingness,
withdrawn, withdrawal, and further withdrawal

from the grasp most people need to hold to.
how funky are his fits of lucidity? when


little sequences of consequences conference
there is subtle curling of the right hand slightly

as awareness come back more aware
of itself gliding along a light interrogative.

not unlike a monarch that knows to float
somewhere it’s never been,

arrive eager, predisposed, only then knowing
this was the destination all along.

 

étude op. 15, no. 03

(four for therapy)


 

makalani bandele is an Affrilachian Poets and Cave Canem fellow. He has also received fellowships from the Kentucky Arts Council, Millay Colony, and Vermont Studio Center. He attends the University of Kentucky in pursuit of an MFA in Creative Writing. His work has been published in several anthologies and widely in print and online journals. Most recently work from an unpublished manuscript, under the aegis of a winged mind, appears or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Foundry, 32poems, and North American Review. hellfightin’ is his only full-length collection of poems. Find him on Instagram: @makbandele.

 

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Teo Mungaray

Elegy

for MB

  

I’m thinking about how light has texture: falling
on a wall, sharp, and on carpet, fuzz-edged, frayed,
as if made of snow.
                                    And snow, which appears soft,
until compacted or until melted or until examined
under the eye of a microscope to see the edges of the crystals,
which, I think, it never meant to hide. They were merely small,
like many things are: viruses, powders, gestures, words.
The snow is sharp, like the light it refracts, but each edge is so fine,
so minute, that it feels like fluff, same as how a bed of nails
doesn’t puncture the skin, the iron spikes close enough together
to bear the weight of the flesh.
                                                          Then, like needles in their casings
which appear blunt, until the spring-loaded button is pressed
and the needle jabs in. The syringe, hidden underneath the safety
of flat plastic; the snowflake, hidden behind its minisculity; the light,
cutting through panes of a window, striking the wall in slats,
hidden behind its intangibility.
                                                           I am naming things to avoid the truth,
which I hardly know myself: that a sharpness in things lives obscured
until a condition is met, like how obsidian is a stone until chipped
to a biface; or snow, soft until magnified; or light, until it burns the skin;
or a white powder, nothing until dissolved, loaded into the warm needle.

 

Teo Mungaray is a queer, chronically ill, latinx poet. He holds an MFA from Pacific University of Oregon and is pursuing his doctorate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is a co-founder and co-EIC of Cotton Xenomorph. His poems have recently appeared in or are forthcoming from Gulf Coast, The Shade Journal, Waxwing, Sycamore Review, Drunk Monkeys, and Birdfeast. He has a cat named Lysistrata.

 

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Sara Ryan

Look What I Have Done

I welcomed you like a hood of antlers.

like bone broke down to velvet. like growth
and the wind that raised me. in my mind,

heaven is full of animals the earth didn’t get to keep.

nice things taken away from a shrieking child
with red cheeks. the do-do. the Tasmanian tiger.

the hartebeest. the passenger pigeon. inside me:

some goddess of war. maybe she carries a bow
and arrow. maybe she is sculpted of marble.

it is Friday, and I am swallowing the sun.

the rats in my parent’s backyard are so big, so strong,
that they take the traps with them. they snap

in the night, but the yard is empty. my womanhood

hibernates in the winter. blows shrill whistles in the damp
mornings. croons the dead birds into small funerals

of feathers. I must stay calm so as to preserve my wings.

you could destroy them easily, just like that.
with the bark of a tree. with a small gun.

 

Sara Ryan is the author of the chapbooks Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned (Porkbelly Press) and Excellent Evidence of Human Activity (The Cupboard Pamphlet). She was the winner of the 2018 Grist Pro Forma Contest, and her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Pleiades, DIAGRAM, Booth, Prairie Schooner, Hunger Mountain, and others. She is currently pursuing her PhD at Texas Tech University. See more of her work at www.sararryan.com.

 

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Annie Blake

Hell is for children

my mother told me she was afraid my miscarried child was in hell / because i probably didn’t bless the right thing / it had crossed my mind before / i keep telling myself i’m a masochist  

/ logic tells me she’s the one in hell and she’s not my responsibility / the glass glaze of her eyes / ice addict / bird screech / makes the sound of twisted wire / razor edges of her eyes / port and starboard / bow and stern / blinks of a swallow / concrete of headsmen

driving my children home from the shops / dead body / in a white bag / small / balance of my skull / i should have waited until it was placed in the ambulance / for their sake / i didn’t / they just said / because they couldn’t see a face / lucky / there is no body there

i still think of her voice / bird of wire / my body / jesus’ edged arms / crust of bread /

i am here / typing on a chair during the day / the moon is just a stamp / white ink like bleach stains on my pants / she told me my father locked her out of the house because / he saw her dance / in church / do you remember the times you locked me out of your house / her face / scrunched flowers / fire and petals / eyes full of hot water / fish bowls / pupils like fish / bumping into the glass / ever since i disowned my parents i have stopped pointing the gun / unloosening the crust is an art / the unspilling of the core of the bread like warm butter

i am a woman / i only open when i am beautiful and full of wine in their proper glasses because /

i am afraid of all men
and especially god /                                                                                                   seduced by his misery

if i lose this marriage / i will have to go to war

the outside will never become the inside because / i don’t understand how the doorbell sound climbs  through the wires without losing its breath / it rings high on the wall where i can’t reach / i am photo-framed / a vignette / ovalled  / with dried flowers / bouquet of my wedding day

the moneyed clothes of children / unworn skin / jesus was a child before he broke on the cross /

god is a child still / he hasn’t learnt that floods drown more than clothes / i let his body melt in my mouth / i taught him to paint a mask in art class / all the children used the same template / he used to hide under tables because he was so afraid to speak / i found a gun in his own handwriting / between the pages of his homework book / i reported it / they told me i / think too much

the world is a cup we keep breaking / hands of wire and rockets to mars / the reenactment of traumata and the drama of war / eyes and mouths of fish rise out of their tank to gasp for air / of children and their dead wheel of recrimination

the awakening of shields instead of swords / swallows that fly / the rise of air grained with soil / feather roofs / mixture of diamond jewelry and my children’s teeth in my antique vase / feather tail of a tower in the clouds of a church / choices of cheeses / i curl sticks into hooks / cervix / spout of a watering can / erectile function / god’s staff looking / for food for snakes / swan necks / upended in lakes / fish in their baskets / coins in caps / hands covering my laugh / he yells because she hides under me / his hand is stuck in my body like an axe in a table / i continue polishing trays / set them in the middle / i am the moonrise / pegasus / white horse / the hippocampus is responsible for memory and emotion / it looks like a sea horse

box of rooms / scum of unwiped showers / i wanted to save it in a jar just to make sure / my husband unclasped my fist to let it flow / the tap water is still running / clean / the windows in my room are corniced / webbed and spidered / and shuttered

my father never sat me down and told me it was wrong / i heard him say in the kitchen that he didn’t know what the circumstances were / and it was none of his business / i learnt from psychology books that children can never be blamed / even if they get caught masturbating / my father never hit my mother / but i saw him wield a chair / i was in a rocking chair in the air / my husband never hit me / with a chair / my mother didn’t call me by name / i was known as slut / but in a different language

our conversations / the embedment of dormant sticks in bushes

one day i felt the fully gathered frill / the tight knits of ribs in feet / i taught my daughter how to pull cotton through fabric before / she entered school / you teach children how to read by waiting for them to swim the syllables of words and / then / encouraging them to re-read the sentence to let that obstacle word float in

i told my son it was okay to be angry and write / fuck / in his journal

self-correction of human hands / not the way i hold hands with street wires / even / fingertips will do

i took out a pen from my bag and / lent it to my mother / she said she gave it to me for my birthday

there is a box of pens near the bank teller / most people don’t take any because / it is embarrassing / to take things for free / a couple take one / i swipe the whole box

writing is the thick sick in your stomach / intestines snaking in hulls / expunges of hells /

i’m afraid that cleaning up the undigested from stomachs will lead to the whole family catching gastroenteritis / feeling sick and caring for others makes me feel like i’m dying

i’m not a narcissist / i do not sit at a certain time / i don’t stop when you tell me to red the light or /green it / this narrative is not a performance / i’m not on a stage / i’m in a temple / the sick crow eats from my hand / the remarkable result of the medical report with / the intention to infect

all letters are in lowercase for /the hubris in some words contain the salience / of / conjunctions and determiners / the droughting of passed waters / the surety of the present and the future that never rolls far enough down my tongue to break through my teeth

flamed firewood and cooking smoke / air as shaved as water

i have naturally strong thighs / my physiologist asked me if i was a dancer / feet tapping on  coffins / hardwood / the springs in my back

unhooking my origin is the skinning of my culture for it is a palm that does not maintain its curve / the flaccidity of fingers / non-cradle / there are simply no peels to pick up

suicide bombers become terrorists because / that is their only culturally acceptable way to escape

i have a propensity to stare at my kids when their eyes are closed / i am afraid of what i am able to create because / of what i able to take away / i want to feel love between us but / i have never felt it myself

o death, where is your sting / i keep chewing on this soft wedge of death / if i have never loved then / i don’t ever to pay

i still find it difficult to spear the fish / hoist them into their innocent yawns /  heavy necklace / sun rays around my neck / anger / in my mouth curdled / between my legs / the violation of  a hard tail / high heels like phallus sticks / ankles of our infant stems

i wake from her bed of  bone

she sails into the eastern sun / leaves / swords that have been swallowed /scarves tamped in gaps in stone barns / like rapunzel’s hair / fibers of  thighs unfolding / undoing the stone of his tower / vines / veins of worms sliding in the middle of his body /                                 the billowing of his gowns

THE END

Annie Blake is an Australian writer and divergent thinker. She is a wife and mother of five children. She started school as an EAL student and was raised and, continues to live in a multicultural and industrial location in the West of Melbourne. Her research aims to exfoliate branches of psychoanalysis and metaphysics. She is currently focusing on in medias res and art house writing. She enjoys semiotics and exploring the surreal and phantasmagorical nature of unconscious material. Her work is best understood when interpreting them like dreams. She is a member of the C G Jung Society of Melbourne. You can visit her on annieblakethegatherer.blogspot.com.au and on Facebook.

 

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Logan February

Honey Everywhere Even The Mask On My Face

                                           after Heather Christle

Seamlessness

                                           for Arielle

We refined the whole earth so we could live here.
Polished the grass with foolish dancing. The sky
at night is painted in a different myth, some dirty
legend of oppression. Rumors in the honeycombs.

Cruel whispers in the field, a bird chirping on and on
about ugly terrors. Who is listening? What use is
a mirror when all behind us is past? Friend,
I brush your exquisite hair in the darkened now.

I sprinkle you with valuable oils. Are you happy?
You have to be happy. I’ve made you this dress,
I wove it out of dandelions. In a few more hours,
no time at all, the pink sun will filter down

and you will be the single wisp of bright fantasy.
We are surrounded by so much clear water.
Can you hear it? Morning will come, I will run
with you to the river and show you your lovely reflection.

Logan February is a Nigerian poet. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Washington Square Review, The Adroit Journal, Vinyl, Paperbag, Tinderbox, Raleigh Review, and more. He is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, and his debut collection, Mannequin in the Nude (PANK Books, 2019) was a finalist for the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. He is the author of two chapbooks, and the Associate Director of Winter Tangerine’s Dovesong Labs. You can find him at loganfebruary.com.

 

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Jacqui Germain

What is known as paranoia or maladjusted self-defense

There is never any warning.
To be honest, I tend to create
the history after the fact,

once the face is shattered,
the bridge full of tumors
and rotting wood. I discover

the long-oozing sore, the burning
path that might suggest
a long-standing infection,

evidence which here
means, I am not paranoid;
see, the line of ash and arson,

collapsed metaphors that
might tug the condemnation
free, if only—if only—

but it has always been
this way, without warning,
after the first—suddenly

recognizing no one and finding
the weapon in all of it.
I am so afraid I am

embarrassed, attacked vividly
somehow, by every expression
that even creases their lips

to say, I swear, what I know,
what I know they must
believe about me, must

see across the glass, the
worst remains, bloodless,
heartless, an old, aging monster

perhaps. I lick my nails
until they glisten, slicing
the light to ribbons, clawing

the faces, the memories,
the open curtains and
upholstery, shattered glass

between my knuckles. Once
home, after, I swear, I know
I have defended something—like

myself, perhaps—I coddle
the lonely, rich with isolation,
near gluttonous with it, an

excess of self-absorption probably, but still,
the walls, now six guillotines high,
just as precise and unforgiving,

circle my wet body, supremely naked
and de-skinned, stinging and
joyous, cringing against the cold

air like a newborn, or something
feral and suddenly so clean it does not
recognize itself, beneath

the moonlight, tiny dots
of blood forming slowly atop
the freshly raw casing,

that skittish layer of under-flesh
that peels its eyes open, stunned
and aware—but calm, finally.

We called it a ‘war’ because it was useful, or Alternate Names for Teargas

after Danez Smith

1. blossoming poison

2. forced abandon (before the handkerchiefs)

3. coward’s fire

4. what came without warning, at first

5. the only indictment for miles

6. what came after a warning, eventually

7. America’s presumed mercy—which of course dissipates in the wind, which of course is a choking gratitude in the void of massacre, which of course is our most humble foreign policy

8. nightly ghost brand

9. perfume of the streets

10. measured plague and almost certainly someone’s evidence of god

11. permissible burning

12. summer baptism at the curb’s alter, anointed before heaven & hell & everything in between

13. an extended metaphor

14. front line testimony & bastard badge

15. not water hoses (yet/anymore) at least—which is almost certainly a kind of progress,
no?

Flatland

          For Canfield

We were obnoxious lovers then.
Loud. Urgent. Seeping fists
through our sun-darkened skin.

A mass of questions marching
across the city, wailing against
the pavement and always returning,

prodigal-like, to the seed of the shattering.
This ravenous freedom, young, brave
and stubborn, so desperate to see itself

it presses everything into a mirror, warps
into a shrieking mouth when the glass breaks.
We loved you, loved you, loved you, lo-

ved you pressed against camera
screens, stoop niggas and gold teeth
strained through protest chants,

a child’s bicycle overturned
beneath our urgent, urgent feet.
The bowl of the neighborhood,

a temporary arena, displaced gladiator
stage where we bent our shoulders
towards the blood, thirsting for it,

drunk on any evidence that someone
like us was alive. That the face in the glass,
across the street, had a heartbeat, too. Once.

Jacqui Germain is a St. Louis poet and freelance journalist with work appearing or forthcoming in The Offing, Muzzle Magazine, Blueshift Journal, The New Inquiry, The Nation, Bettering American Poetry, and elsewhere. Her poetry often involves an excavation of history and memory, challenging linear assumptions of time, progress, power, and experience through an intimate lens. She is author of When the Ghosts Come Ashore, published in 2016 through Button Poetry, and has received fellowships from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Poetry Foundation’s Emerging Poets Incubator, Jack Jones Literary Arts, and the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission. jacquigermain.com.

 

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Caroline M. Mar

Stage 1: Cold Shock
THREAT NO.1: LOSS OF BREATHING CONTROL

Gasping

There are an average of seven drownings per year in the lake, most due
to cold water shock, even among those who are capable swimmers. Or were
before the water folded them into itself:
                                                                           a pocket of failure, a slipped
                            seam of darkness out of the summer
                                                                                                       sun’s light.

Hyperventilation

My body in the summer heat, skin a prickling of sweat, the stick
of flesh to seat before I rise, look out over the edge, and dive.

My lungs seizing together inside my chest: a cavity curling inward.
The body, built for survival. The water still icy from snowmelt.

Difficulty holding your breath

It takes a certain force to move your limbs
               as you tread water. Remember to cup your hands,
like this. To kick just so, and steady.
               To keep your neck above the waves, to gulp air
like guilt, to hold it before you let it go.

Feeling of suffocation

I have felt this shock in my own body. The delicate line
between body and brain. The pain
of doing the thing that keeps you alive.


Italicized text from National Center for Cold Water Safety, “Cold Shock.”

Stage 1: Cold Shock
Threat No. 2: Heart and Blood Pressure Problems

Cold water immersion causes
an instantaneous and massive
increase in heart rate and blood pressure because
all the blood vessels in your skin
constrict in response to
sudden cooling, which is far more intense
in water than in air. In vulnerable
individuals, this greatly increases
the danger of heart

my body to shudder, to shock,
exuberance and joy,
there is racing doubt, possibility of failure, might explode, or might survive, might
the body? A live wire, electric, dangerous, it is
against the water’s conductivity, deeper
cells, the cold awakens something,
my certainty that my life has meaning.
silly heart, hopeful heart, busted heart, swim through

failure and stroke


Italicized text from National Center for Cold Water Safety, “Cold Shock.”

Stage 1: Cold Shock
Threat No. 3: Mental Problems

aquaphobia: fear of water, specifically of drowning
claustrophobia: fear of suffocation and restriction
hydrophobia: fear of water
               though the human body is 80% water  
ichthyophobia: fear of fish
               that time we ate lobster on a beach in Cuba and you laughed and laughed, delighted
               that your fear had subsided, you no longer believed
               it was swimming around inside you
xenophobia: fear of the unknown
chromophobia: fear of a color
              in this case, I suppose the color
              would be blue
achluophobia, or nyctophobia, or schotophobia, or lygophobia: fear of darkness
               most children have this, it is not abnormal
               to fear the loss of a sense, sight being
               one upon which we rely heavily to understand what is happening
               around us, just look
               how many names, though none
               are clinical
thanatophobia: fear of dying
phobophobia: fear of fear
              : fear of not being found
                             those rumors, again—
                             all those bodies
              : fear of being found
              : fear of being too late

Stage 2: Physical Incapacitation

When the waters rose, the forest stayed. What else can a forest do
but stand. There would be no fire inside the lake.

There would be no ground to tumble down. Just water rising,
cold and blue, the floods of the next era.

Sometimes the change comes over you like that all at once. A drowning.

Hundreds of coolies were tied together and weighed down
with rocks. Straw hats removed, queues tangled, thrown in to save

the cost of their pay. The historians say this is unlikely. Given
the railroad payrolls showing each Chinese contractor paid,

given how little Chinese labor cost, given the distance
from the Truckee railroad camp to the lake. Given

every other history I know:
chains, bodies of water, ghosts—

Sometimes a person isn’t a person at all, but a weight
to be freighted onto someone else’s shoulder.

Why not the silent lake? Why not a flood of furious bodies
fighting toward the coldest surface?

The forest stayed, and drowned.

Stage 3: Hypothermia

The lake is steel-shirred grey, a sheet of velvet,
soft-napped. Water barely stirring. The snow
is loud as an earthquake, house shaking

with dropped weight as the slide overcomes
the roofline. Winter’s thundering reminder:
some things cannot be stopped.

The snow is loud beneath the plow, its spray
an arc of meditation. The snow clings, a sticky sheet
to the sides of the sweating trees. This cannot last

forever. Snow melts into the lake, the icy rocks.
Winter: grey and grey and grey; crystalline
whiteness. The greydark water will not freeze,

the lake too deep. And what can survive
that kind of cold? Nothing, nothing, my mind’s
lie: the fish are fattening, swimming slow.

Yes, too, the snow is quiet. Muffling every sound
but the crunch of my footfalls following
the shape of your boot prints, as I follow you.

Stage 4: Circum-rescue Collapse

an erasure


Original text from National Center for Cold Water Safety, “Cold Shock,” found at www.coldwatersafety.org/ColdShock.html

Caroline Mei-Lin Mar is a high school teacher and poet. A San Francisco native, Carrie is doing her best to keep her gentrifying hometown queer and creative. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, an alumna of VONA Voices workshop, and a member of Rabble Collective. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, New England Review, Connotation Press, and CALYX, among others. You can follow here work here: http://www.rabblewriterscollective.com/caroline-m-mar.

 

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