Melinda Freudenberger received her MFA in Poetry from The New School. Her poems have recently appeared in BARNHOUSE Journal, the New Delta Review, and Always Crashing magazine. She is an Associate Poetry Editor at West Trade Review. You can find more of her work on her website: melindafreudenberger.com.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIOIn this highly-unanticipated documentary
series, we examine the life of
critically-unnoticed artist Justin Davis through the whiteness in his immediate vicinity. We follow the drunk white woman running her fingers through his hair as she passes him in the brewery. When he drives through Missouri’s bootheel, we ask the white state troopers how many armadillos they’ve run over. As he fills up his tank off I-55, we shine the matte white ulnas of John D. Rockefeller. The whole time, his Vampire Weekend CD plays louder and louder in the background. And make sure you catch the series finale where we air an exclusive, never-before-seen interview with the artist as a newborn, sickly, so pale that the nurses thought his mom was trying to steal a white baby. This series has already received acclaim in places like every black square on Instagram, a $5000 bill, and the cheeks of NSA agents who may or may not be dropping in on Davis’ calls right now. We’ve been told it feels more honest than honesty. Like a case, it feels like it’s still making itself. We’ve been told it feels compulsively rewatchable, that the leery hills keep growing their eyes. It’s a cultural juggernaut you won’t want to miss stealing.
Justin Davis is a cultural worker and an MFA candidate at the University of Memphis. You can find his poems and hybrid work in places like wildness, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Apogee Journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, BOAAT, and Freezeray. He’s a past Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. He’s a proud union member.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIOI come from families where men don’t understand how to
love me I’ve seen their eyes I’ve lied to myself and everyone
else and still can’t seem to get it out of my thick skull It’s not
anybody’s job to love me I don’t think it’s a job at all I’ve seen
more women scarred than I’d like to I hate compliments as
threats Threats as men who should have been protecting me
Don’t you know what love means I come from families who
carry their secrets to the grave And we’ve all just been
endangering ourselves Lives whispering tomorrow away And
I can’t say that any of them know me Though I’ve cried and
stared dead in their eyes Open and shut I shout when I’m
alone and call it thick skin All these familiar hauntings I have
trauma and pain and knots that grind Sometimes I think
about men like fictional characters People who know what
love means Not the men I know God only knows the lives
they’ve lived and buried What other women hurt of them
And everyday I carry them in my worry like sling-stones to
my back I never know who to throw back I never know who
I’ll weep for first
Danielle P. Williams is a poet, essayist and spoken-word artist from Columbia, South Carolina. She is a MFA candidate at George Mason University. Danielle strives to give voice to unrepresented cultures, making it a point to expand on the narratives and experiences of her Black and Chamorro cultures. Her poems were selected for the 2020 Literary Award in Poetry from Ninth Letter. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Hobart, The Pinch, Barren Magazine, and elsewhere. For more, visit daniellepwilliams.com.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIOThe Korean American is a prideful sunflower
Twisting to its own image, rebellious as a
Mottled pear. Chartreuse hums juicy promises
Olive pigments lose to the cool and warm
Shades of skin flash dance in an ad for girls 12-14
Our colors baffle biological discourse
The pantone wheel shows no shade can be marketed
To all of us. At recess, I’m tired of identity so I
Sign up for sports. I dog the ball and shoot to
Shatter. Barely miss the goalie who withers thin before
A basket mouth of redwood limbs. As the ball connects
The goal shivers, grows tumescently above the field
I am frozen in my leap and kick. I blink
Darkness and collapse.
The Korean American disintegrates
Twisted nettle. Proud armor for a lunchtime
Game. The goal shivers, ruptures grass in the field
Unctuous earth bubbles loam and in the
Turnover, a pear hums to keep its
Juices. Baffling biological discourse
Olive pigments army crawl in the
Skin towards each other
The pantone wheel shows no shade can be sold
To all of us. At recess, I’m tired of identity so I
Become a worm. I dig in the earth for
Shatters of dirt. Barely register the basket
Mouth of redwood limbs creeping above
I normally feel everything around me.
we tongue our losses
we weave songs from pulsing
and nothing else
a jubilee of blood butting
tenderest wrist
we beat the air in C-major
until our shoulders shake
center keys lightning eye between eyes
central root ruptures
earth-made filia fray down
a red-centered plume
takes the belliest cake
we tongue our losses
we weave stories
from what’s happening
and nothing else
it happens now
everyone I’ve ever scared is
already scared
everyone I’ve lied to is here now
all the music of my youth
has gone to bed
fifth chakra stutters
as I swallow kumquat
my neck reads : a debilitating mass lives here
trust no neck no wrist
no frail parts of you
hidden in pits
we tongue-sing a happening
and nothing else
we beat ourselves pink
we bust down
we bus it downtown
we ride our crowns to after home
we take the drum in our skin to mean
our bodies live
we tongue our losses
we weave ourselves into cilia
until the room is warm
Mihee Kim (she/they) is a Queer, Korean-American artist and poet. Her work has been nominated for a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize. Recent publications include: Asian American Writer’s Workshop, Foglifter, JetFuel Review, Apogee Journal, and poems are forthcoming in Anomaly. She earned a B.A. from UC Berkeley and an MFA at California College of the Arts. She lives, organizes and creates on Chochenyo Ohlone land, also known as beloved Oakland, California. Mihee is also Managing Director of Kearny Street Workshop, a longstanding arts nonprofit for Asian Pacific Americans.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIOIt’s the eyes slit into walls, half open lids
that tricks. The lips beneath the eyes blue & frost-bitten.
Corpse pose. But a crowbar jams against cut and quartered,
clicking tongues to find the jigsaw of other parts.
A foot in the door, a silent wrenching turning beneath the ground.
Nearing exhaustion, slit eyes with lids half closing. Half breathing.
Feeling for the one other body part, a hand, a rib, a foot,
a labia at a time. Where are you, the inner thigh calls to vastus lateralis.
Furrows of corpse flower, quartered and twinned yet firm against cuts & crowbar.
A jaw’s gotten free and is having dinner with the dandelions.
Behind the supper party, a knee and a femur knock on the door
with cracked walls, shutters half open. Let us back in.
Outside loose limbs make cacophony with their reaching
and clacking, hitting elbows into table corners, crowns into leg bones.
Knocked out into corpse pose. Waiting vultures in fours opening beaks like crowbars.
The unpeopled people make slits into walls, can see half
dissolving selves in parts, whole, or half-rendered.
The crowbar useless to the coffin.
But it’s corpse that feeds the fauna, forests the tree its crowns.
& only the mouth drops into the earth, only voice textured in fur,
velvet in fissure and sediment. It can never be lost without its tether.
From under the earth, waiting to hear what I’m doing
just yet and what mercy opens its eye.
Inside ourselves, we
are folded:
lines for future folds, reference
points, hidden or interior lines.
An old recipe of heart songs
and nightmares.
Folds get unfolded: the blood, the veins,
the cells, the bones.
Collapsed, secreted, warped.
A traveling purse that takes a virus whole
and lets it burrow into the spirit-matter.
This is how a year of illness
sheds leafs from a fever-tree.
The in-and-out sight of your last love, his dark lashes.
*
Bloody coughing, half-sleeping, breathing cut
and rough,
do the body and the mind exist in the mirror images,
combined with double squash, swivel fold? Everything hazes as they
exist side-by-side, in this common valley of sick.
Points are brought together at a single spot of destruction
to believe that we are so irreducibly complex—all it takes is one blow.
Folds get unfolded, in any case. The inside reverse fold, used to change
direction of a flap, and inside the body’s well sits mountain,
valley, rabbit-ear folds creased along the walls:
birthing flaps that wave like tattered flags
the white flutter of surrender
or the triumph of a woman’s skirt in spring.
I’m going to die like this.
*
Winter had ended and still I could not sit up.
Leave me here, I tell my husband.
*
The mind the body the mind the body
I am the object combined in three easy steps:
pre-crease forever, then collapse and collapse.
Leslie Contreras Schwartz is the 2019-2021 Houston Poet Laureate. Her fourth book, Black Dove / Paloma Negra (FlowerSong Press, 2020), is a finalist for the 2020 Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has appeared in Missouri Review, Iowa Review, [PANK], Verse Daily, Pleiades, Zocalo Public Square, and Xicanx: 21 Mexican American Writers of the 21st Century (University of Arizona, 2022), edited by ire’ne lara silva, among other publications. She is a member of the Macondo Writers’ Collective, and is a proud disabled Mexican American poet with roots in Texas and Houston going back several generations. She teaches writing workshops in the community. She is also currently a faculty member at the new Alma College’s MFA low-residency program in creative writing.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIOif it’s the summer of 2016 & drake drops views, then you’re 27 and this album becomes the soundtrack to ur life, a lifeline maybe. u start to understand his sentiments abt money being a worthy alternative to love. u understand what he means when he says “all of my let’s just be friends are friends i don’t have anymore.” u start to abandon the stifling politics u have abt urself. it sounds liberating but u know that u are not becoming free so much as u are numb. u are moving towards ur detonation. u do not know how to slow it down or stop it. do you even want to slow it down or stop it? u do know, u will not be sober for ur own implosion. u hope to wake in the aftermath of it and u promise urself u will not notice all the debris. u will pretend it never happened. u learn how to breath in and out and never really exhale. u bloat.
each day u examine ur aging form in ur full-length mirror. it doesn’t matter that it lies to u. the truth is, ur ass and hips sit lower now. and if it’s one thing growing up girl has taught u, is that the hips don’t lie. as ur body shifts and u try to figure out a place for it, u meet a man. u immediately want to love him but u know better. he is beautiful but u know better. u expose the truth of ur body to him. u think, he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that u are never present. then one day, he confronts u, points out ur detachment. his observation vibrates ur body. it rings thru out ur old apartment that has become a grave for ur ghost-self and a few roaches u don’t care to exterminate—being alone is too heavy. u let the roaches have the kitchen. u let this beautiful man have ur new body. u let him have u to a soundtrack of alt. r&b, emo rap & trap music. u let these sounds fill the spaces where ur feelings used to be. hurt turns hard, u can almost feel it happening in real time. u fade.
not long before the beautiful man notices ur ghost-self, a different man made ur body a ghost town. he turned ur lullaby into heavy metal. sleep eludes u now. it dances around ur bed and taunts u, daring u to come and get it. u use the new man as pillow, as armor, as a goodnight song. u attempt sleep but the scent of a past love haunts the place. it’s on the sheets no matter how u wash them. the cushions of the sofa hold the scent. u are convinced the scent is coming thru the pipes. it’s in the water. it’s not just the apartment, u smell it everywhere now. u smell it in the emotional rappers coming thru ur speakers. u smell it in older women who, in the past, were too old to understand u. or, u were maybe too young to understand them. u smell it in rage. u smell it with a raging red. u smell it in blues. it stinks like ur twenties going bad. u think ur past love made off with ur youth. u are right and wrong about this. u are learning the nuances of scent. u inhale.
the call center job u stumbled into allows u to disconnect and provides a paycheck big enough to send ur sorrows into outerspace. u stay at the job. u are mostly late, always disengaged. it is too safe. u use lunch breaks to finish blunts from the morning and to mix red wine into ur passion tea from sbux. u use lunch breaks to wonder if u should attempt ur dreams again. u wonder if u should try reconnecting with ur family, try to feel something for them. u smoke again and top off ur cup because the thought of trying pains u more than your stagnancy. each morning on ur transfer from train to bus, u grab a smoothie from the supermarket on grand & chicago. u don’t care that it’s overpriced and packed with sugar. u only care that u look like u care. u ask urself if this is what being woman looks like: overspending on junk on ur way to a job that is draining life from ur body? the answer has been on ur mind, on ur tongue, before u cld speak it. u swallow it again because u are still unwilling to stop buying into ur own facade. u hide.
u wonder why u look so much like ur mother now, wonder why the thought of calling her throws u into a panic. she was ur age when she had u. she was only a few years older when she left ur father in chicago. him in his addiction. her with her 8 kids in tow. u start to wonder if you’re more him than u thought. it’s not only ur alcohol intake. u now crave the little pills that remind u of vitamins from ur childhood. u make a case for the tiny crystals the beautiful man places on ur tongue. u tell urself u work too hard to be sober. u become agitated easily. u decide to tattoo ur chest just to feel the buzz of the needle. u spend money on everything but rent and u wait for the bottom to fall out. u pacify.
ur womb starts to cry out for something to hold. this beautiful man does his part to fill u with life. u are not ready to become a home. there is no cub. finally, there is no address. u lose the apartment and are relieved for it. the season wants to wane, give out, but not before a few suffocating dog days. u spend these intensely hot days figuring out an escape. this planning is not new to u. in fact, u can’t remember what it feels like to not want to run. u think as far back as u can but can’t recall a time when fire wasn’t in ur feet. u plot.
u are unable to recognize urself. u are living for this feeling of feeling dead. u want more of it. u want to never make the mistake of loving again. u think it’s easy to replace Love so u frequent petco. u buy fish that die off. u buy a bird that u eventually set free. u want to be the bird but u are becoming the fish. it’s not okay but it’s inevitable, u think. u believe it’s possible to outrun urself forever and so u plan to. u start at lake michigan. ur fear of drowning is alleviated by this new secret u have found about water. u are discovering its healing properties, its remedies. it becomes ur baptism each day after the call center. u think, maybe, u cld make this living thing work after all. u float.
this man, beautiful as he is, is too close. just the thought of seeing him again makes u uneasy but u crave it. he is both a danger zone and a safe place. u circulate from one extreme to another. u don’t know if he is too good for u or vice versa. somewhere between lake michigan and ur apartment u decide it is neither. u decide, his thorns are like ur thorns, so even though it hurts, it’s not a new kind of pain. u melt into this theory, try to find solace in it. u shatter.
u cry but can’t produce tears. u spend hours by the lake contemplating the thought…u disconnect from him. u depend on him to save u. u forget urself. u remember urself. u don’t understand it, u just know u don’t feel the same and it’s time to surrender. and so u do. u surrender over and over. u do this all summer ’16 until u fall.
-lake michigan, ‘16
R. Tiara Malone is a Chicago born writer living in New Orleans. Her poetry has been published by Partial Press. Her stageplays have been read in Chicago, Atlanta, and New Orleans. Her essays have appeared in Prairie Schooner and Peauxdunque Review (forthcoming). Her essay “Mikey Go Boom!” was a runner-up in the 2020 Words and Music Festival. She studied Media, Communication, and Theatre at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. She is currently working on a lyrical memoir and is the owner of Minimoon Massage Studio (@MinimoonMassage) in Nola. Never tweeting @ascribecalled.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIO爱： (Ài / love) celebrates the roof of the mouth and ”eye” halves the poet halves the name given by
爸爸： (Bàba / father): bisector / point of blame: one-side source material for a poem about language loss
and so will not be mentioned here.
西： (Xī / west) at five years old compasses left: the departure of word as name like arrival of
第： (Dìdi / younger brother): names me (Jiějiě / older sister) with sibling spite though in the late hours I sit on the bed holding his head like a globe.
一： (Yī / One) school one alphabet to rule all alphabets against language without alphabet against
发： (Fā / hair) static-charged on its brush: the loosener of things, as Fā diverts to “far”–
I am, I swear,
吉： (Jí / auspicious): “conductive to success”: filament glow not cowprod discharge, see! I am
很好： (Hěn hǎo / ”very good”) the teachers say the father says the mother does not say “Tian-
爱： Ài, let’s speak Cantonese for a minute.” Now Dìdi says “Tian-Ai” not
姐姐： Jiějiě “because I’m not a baby anymore.” And I’m a baby with no globe anymore, now in the late hours on the bed
开： (Kāi / open)ing the writing hand, mouth in muscle fibers praying quietly:
留 ： (Liú / stay) please, I
没有： (Méiyǒu / don’t have) you
内： (Nèi / inside) anymore.”
哦哦： “(Oo / oh)?” they laugh,
放屁: “(Fàng pì / bullshit).”
气： (Qìgōng / Breathing),
二： (Èr / two) lungs coded to exhale an impossible sound
是： (Shì / ”yes”), but like trebuchet only,
踢： (Tī / kick)ing counterweight: this poem, quickly, shoot too late temperate tympanic tadpole—
—but
I’m sorry
u: mom says
v: no words start with these.
我： (Wǒ / I) said, it doesn’t matter,
谢谢： (Xièxiè / thank you), I
有： (Yǒu / have) some
字： (Zì / words) now.
Previously published in Pleiades: Literature in Context, Volume 40, Issue 2, Summer 2020
昔者庄周梦为蝴蝶
Two hundred years ago the coast flooded a hundred miles inward, cities dissolved in Pacific: Tailiang swallowed kind enough to leave survivors
and our children still came, but with each flush something faded, in desperate nets fish slapped their tails extinguishing incense which refused to burn in new humidity, smoked fibers of our thousand-year poems that refused to regather from the sea back to our hands back to our mouths feeding back what we had forgotten.
栩栩然蝴蝶也, 自喻适志与，不知周也。
The consequence is now.
Buildings caterpillar to the sky flushed together,
the thickest fog demanding nothing fed by exhalations
demanding everything.
On high balconies grow lamps feed
lychee trees, staining the fog
razor purple;
looming tired tangles of concrete,
scaffold and wire hanging from air conditioner boxes
doing nothing for the condensated windows,
everything only a grey suggestion.
No cars on the streets, not today. Only the hum of the boxes
whirring fans coiling the fog disturbing
telephone wire
spider legs
above the street.
Neon signs float rectangular to a vanishing
point, fog hands over their mouths
muffling their beckoning to:
俄然觉，则戚戚然周也。
Mercy came once in an unearthed erhu,
Cradled from a waterlogged basement like an infant.
We did not know it was an erhu then but we wanted to so badly
That we knew it without name.
Tatters of snakeskin framed its wood hexagon
A cane clacked to the floor
The elder scrambled up the eucalyptus
Descending with a python
Slit down the middle with his pinky nail.
Eight sons to stretch its skin across the box
Eight more to seal it,
The old man flicked his fingernail
二
Two notes that drummed the river
Ricocheted across the city a million
Pulses synced to silence
Shrine to a new and fleeting God.
Once a boy stole it
Strung it with bra wire and bowed:
胡
A soft wail traced spines top to bottom
Vibrato smoothed down vertebra with its single finger
Shivering the trees retracting their plums and the mothers
Pulled for them finally finally—
A week later cityfolk found an instrument
Snapped in half
Swallowed whole by a boa;
A week later they found the boy
Shot dead in the evening,
Rosy under the traffic light.
不知周之梦为蝴蝶与，
No one admits we’ve started praying again
so the procession is quiet. The fog has thickened, but lanterns border the
streets,
orbed hearts guiding the parade: the people in black
robes, bodiless if not for the drifting
ceramic masks of tigers monkeys dragons cranes women,
drumming out their prayer: summon summon
Men: frustrated, drool seawater as they sing
Women: humming mouths sticky with
lychee eyes,
stomachs full
of unripe
things.
Above the street
I watch wet-mouthed
at the window.
Grandfather smokes the long pipe on the couch,
its long crescent channels drags in quarter notes,
smoke wafts S’s out the window
joining the fog–
One time this was a snake
He says.
I lied. I don’t see him. He died years ago.
I don’t see him so violently
I see him.
蝴蝶之梦为周与？
The drums persist:
communion communion
Little girls’ heads above
dart in and out of windows, salivating for red.
My brother, mask of a crimson ox
drumming away something
dad put inside him.
He doesn’t tell me much about it, only that
in the night
dad stood over the bed
while he slept.
It slipped from the mouth
and buried into his.
I asked him what it tasted like.
He said a dog’s tongue,
loving too hard.
Tian-Ai (天爱) is a diasporic poet, musician, and visual artist from Seattle. She is a fellow of the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets. She appears in Asterism literary journal, with work forthcoming in Flock Magazine, Pleiades, and others. More of her work can be found at tian-ai.com.
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Alina (Ali) Viknyanskiy is a cartoonist and writer who works with traditional media to tell stories through comics. Her writing consists of short memoirs and observations and her pieces are created with heart and shameless freedom. She graduated with Graphic Design and Illustration degrees from Missouri State University in 2018 and is currently based in Springfield, MO. Ali’s work has been featured in Driftwood Press, Issue 6.2, and in Aquifer: The Florida Review Online. The best way to keep up with Ali and her work is through her Instagram page @hey.grandma.
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Andie Frein is a Missouri comics artist and illustrator whose work can be found online @andiefrein.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIOAn artist-poet goes to a party in Hout Bay in Cape Town. The hosts are a white photojournalist and his wife. On the wall in the kitchen is a photograph of the journalist in Rwanda holding a black baby. The poet is struck by the expression on the man’s face. On closer inspection she realises that the infant he holds is dead – there is a bullet hole in the middle of the baby’s forehead. The journalist tells them how, when he returned from Rwanda, he had the smell of death in his nose. His wife nods as he speaks. He tries to get the smell out of his nose every morning; he rinses his nostrils out with soap, uses sprays, plunges his nose deep into bouquets of agapanthus. One day his wife tells him the smell is inside his head and he needs to see a doctor. Everyone nods sympathetically.
vernix sweat cheese / stuff of life
skin smear dank birth
saki-tomboy pepper-mash mackerel
silver sting cook / palm street pan
chewing gum powder / light sweet
car nook hides tin foil-wrap
alpha-biscuit vanilla warm
almond-heat shortbread / guests due
rubric red earth / salt tar soil
cheetah dash shapes floodlit
woman stage dances / turns
to paper strips / burns to ash
butter-white breakfast bread
rolls Elder Dempster ship
grey Chorley rain marks
pavements in coal
(eavesdrop)
Milk-white skin dished on perlemoen
sushi SQ in top clubs don’t-ask-pay-later
pink tuna crabsticks sashimi eat me
fat black fingers pluck salmon from nipples
liquid libations BEE2 Tables have turned
they say Fear of a black planet they laugh
Trump understands better than Obama
Bombay Sapphire rinses raw fish
gold toothpicks flick spittle on white girls
Black capitalism don’t bend at the knee
for who Jay Z? What hero takes rain-check
kill their own talent? Good-looking fool in an afro
We done with slavery, apartheid runs deep.
Equality? Pipe dream. Folk need system and queues
Poor people rather fuck than work
Why those make money run to the shacks always?
Who laughs the longest stays richer
wink at white-girl plate swallow seaweed snacks
Baby it’s our turn now they say
Gi‘em a taste of their own medicine
wear township trials as prestige badge
high-price mouthfuls the freedom spoils
1. on a South African restaurant menu S.Q. refers to Salon Qualitaire or quality determined by the establishment. A more direct translation is ‘subject to quotation’ due to the practice of weighing certain foods such as shellfish
2. BEE refers to Black Economic Empowerment
Amanda Holiday is a UK-based artist and poet. Her chapbook The Art Poems was published in 2018 by Akashic Books as part of New Generation African Poets. Her text “A Posthumous conversation about Black Art” was published in 2019 in the 1st edition of UK visual culture journal Critical Fish. In 2019, she completed the MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at UEA with Distinction. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, South Bank Poetry, and Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal (UK). In 2020, she reached the final shortlist for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize and established the UK’s first crowdfunded poetry press Black Sunflowers. She live in South London with her teenage daughter.
“A whiff of something” and “Sushi SQ” previously appeared in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal.
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