Category: AP25

Apocalyptic Luck

Some of us will be relieved when the world ends,
no more bones to shine.

When we see a comet dashing towards earth,
we’ll cheer, think finally— 

not because there’s an afterlife waiting
for us

but because we’re exhausted scratching at our scarred
etchings

day after day, tiny pluckings at the skin 
until we’re raw,

red at the helm of our flesh a hacked-on reminder
that there’s 

luck in an ending invoked, when we tell an apocalypse: 
come, do 

your fiery blaze
baddest,

ease our yoke with a shower of cosmic 
roses.

That’s what people like me call
triumph.

Invocation

Some people
leap or slice
to start over

I know too well
this urge
but also know
I’ll just be sent back
unglued

Despite 
constant tinkering
synapses don’t mend
so in short-lasting light
I conjure up 
a litany for Lucid

         praise Your steady
         guide my hands
         guide my feet
         guide my tongue

And this is how 
witchcraft began

stealing back 
a sober mind
through fiery prayer
but not to their god

Newark, NJ-based Ysabel Y. Gonzalez received her BA from Rutgers University, and an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. Ysabel has received invitations to attend VONA, Tin House, Ashbery Home School, and BOAAT Press workshops. She’s a CantoMundo Fellow, and has been published in the Paterson Literary Review, Tinderbox Journal, Anomaly, Vinyl, It was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip-Hop, Wide Shore, Waxwing Literary Journal, and others.  You can read more about her work, at ysabelgonzalez.com. 

This Land Is Where We Buried Everything That Came Before You: African American History and Concepts of Ownership in Early Elementary Education

Abstract:

Within the history of Afro-American existence much scholastic importance has been attributed to the weight of February. This is certainly understandable as Blackness in the pedagogical tradition is nothing if not a silhouette in a pelagic winter. However, understated in all of this is the significance of the “Token” as a kind of tragic hero in the tradition of sole survivors such as Odysseus. More specifically, how a boy might see his undoing and howl across the unflinching snow and never identify the echo. This Sonics of Blackness is a criminally under represented element of how one conveys to a room full of second graders the savage lick of a whip as a means of explaining an entire history. The question of this poem then is how the educator of the classroom approaches the subject of slavery when only one Black child sits in the room worrying at a shoelace, as if preparing. This poem takes as its primary subject a boy no older than 7 embraced by his white best friend as the white best friend states “I am glad slavery is over, I would have hated to own you.” Followed by the boy sitting on his hands until they are blood bulbous and no longer entirely his own. How he looks beyond the window onto the playground and beneath the snow imagines an entire country; beneath that country, another.

Frank Ocean Sighting #268: Frank Ocean Is Rumored to Speak of Rivers Which is Likely a Lie (Disc 1)

Junior year come around
& in my dorm room
animal level desire makes me
more me in some ways
My savage tongue drizzles
onto an empty bed
Empty         except me
      nothing new
to splinter the obese quiet
Lonely & holding court with stains
Drake vibrates through the next wall

Lust got loose in the hallway
sex echoes between melodies
I thumb at flakes of paint
I ain’t got nobody    no music
No woman    no man
this makes me the anomaly
again     My man handsome
as anything that don’t quite exist
My man just the hum glazing my fist
Beneath my nails    olive coats of landscape

Gossip tells us there’s two discs
Rumor tells us it’s posthumous
Sense should’ve told me not to sleep
with this white girl    knowing history
like I do     yet here    me frightened
me jutting my hips in the dull light
Gossip tells us one of the discs
is River     Booze shuffled off her lips
It never met my mouth     I quivered inside her
loneliness    she told me    You need to quit being
such uh bitch & fuck me    I obeyed     then exited


For weeks it goes like that
this memory I shudder to call
abuse     Yet it was
the story is gauze
I already bled through it
She called me a coward
for each of my refusals
I ask myself    why I stayed
The sex was bad    I was scared
of her solitude    her fragile quiet
her desire for me to be hers outside
Some vases shatter   get filled with gold
Some vases shatter   just become fragments
that hold my eyes    as I drop the lid over them
Leave their little trauma in the hallway

My whole body an Achilles Heel
momma’s ever tender failing
destined for a puncture’s fame
The album was a hoax
I was just as depressed as before
& now mother to half a secret
Still I was ablaze with want
for sex     yes      but mostly
I just wanted it to end
My friends & their partners
are in the main room playing Monopoly
discussing gains & losses & losses
I’m invited as an afterthought
Still ablaze I put on my coat
It is 3am     and the downpour is torrential
I shouldn’t be going anywhere
I’m not sure I’m going anywhere
so much as testing if anyone would stop me
while I stroll past them        They didn’t
& when I stepped outside to quench
the gene which gives me my father’s sadness
it rained until every puddle was rabid

(Self) Inflicted

I enter this story by the same door each time. Sweet tragedy, honeyed tongue of the night bucks down my throat again and again. It is as common a myth as I can bear: Everyone Remembers Their First Time. Suppose I do, for argument’s sake. Suppose a memory knows violence inherently as a wolf knows that it deserves. Suppose we can call the result, result. That it is something more than my need to be sacrificed to myself. I did this to myself, the shots quivered, then didn’t.

My face made smaller and smaller in the dimming melody. Taint me in the glass, eclipse a flood a quarter inch at a time. I am saying here, that if I pretend I can remember much of anything, I like to think I could see my face in the shot glass. Self as parenthetical, self as wound framed by the less tarnished. I did this to myself, surrounded by my friends who are all prettier than me. Now, too drunk. Now, gone. Now, faded; life span of a bruise.

I wanted that, a reckless beauty; dauntless and inundating the room. I inflict myself on myself. Still. Hasty yes and yes and yes. I thought, even when surrounded, that I was alone. What is there really to learn from Troy, besides isolation begets permeability?

Sacrifice begets visibility; I am never more dazzling than when I’m sucking my own knife clean. I sprinted towards the light, nobody knew I was absent. Past that, desire begets a gash in the memory. I remember teeth, and how the blood didn’t leave my neck. Pooled instead. Bruised constellation. Botched hanging. Loud islands of regret. Too drunk. I make terrible prey. Mutter yes as if it can mean anything.

Oh teeth, my one clean memory, little disorganized search lamps, I count you as my audience; the way stars are beautiful until they are revealed as planes; the way what is touched erodes into an unremarkable darkness; the way the light of what is gone; reaches dim, reaches still.

Julian Randall is a Living Queer Black poet from Chicago. A Pushcart Prize nominee he has received fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT and the Watering Hole and was the 2015 National College Slam (CUPSI) Best Poet. Julian is the curator of Winter Tangerine Review’s Lineage of Mirrors and a poetry editor for Freezeray Magazine. He is also a cofounder of the Afrolatinx poetry collective Piel Cafe. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Nepantla, Rattle Poets Respond, Ninth Letter, Vinyl, Prairie Schooner, and The Adroit Journal, among others. He is a candidate for his MFA in Poetry at Ole Miss.

anxiety attack in a public university bathroom stall

i’m paranoid      everyone wants            to kill
me      well             at least        we have found
common ground           i want                 to kill
me too     do you want to help?      this can be
a collaborative project                     something
we can do together         be united        i guess
i’ve become           especially scared of people
lately                   but hey                 let’s plunge
the knife  together       call it solidarity   call it
ally-ship   call it abraham      on the mountain
doing the will of god                 but neglecting
the final instruction              i learned sacrifice
early       learned hate early           hate myself
often         it’s a viscous circle            maybe if
i flush myself            they’ll never       find me
someone hears my gasping sobs      walks up
to the stall door      knocks    asks        hey man
you alright? and i almost  say          naw    bruh
but          i’ll open the door        if           you want
a brown body         to use            as target practice
except for the tremors         i promise i’ll stay still

anxiety attack trying to remember the word for fear of irregular groupings of holes

this time the ceiling
opening dark spots
worms again fall
through onto the bed 
mingle with bed bugs
that aren’t really there

but still the itch feels 
like some microscopic
eating away at skin
growing openings
irregular everywhere

you ever want to just
scrape all your skin
off just all of it because
there can’t be holes
in what’s not there 
can’t itch what doesn’t 
exist maybe just get rid 
of it all with a knife 
or a potato peeler or 
my own nails or maybe 
there’s a way to make 
a single incision and boil 
myself so it’s all off at once

the whole thing detached
and whole and all of it
smooth and even and even
and even

Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit, and studied poetry in University of Michigan’s MFA program. His writings have been given homes by The Collagist, Four Way Review, The Journal, and Bennington Review, among others. He is an editor for HEArt Online, and you can find him on Twitter @Marlin_Poet.

Crip Infinity

If my cane is a limb,
Then so is my pen
–         Maranda Elizabeth

1.        my friend asked her facebook feed what apocalypse would be too much for us. What we would
           really want to not live beyond.  Folks mentioned cannibalism, the end of the whales, I stubborn
           said nothing.
 I already died three times and came back,
I don’t fear death, I know her.
I trust this world’s mean gorgeous unrelenting surprise 
Like the best top,
 she’s taken me to the edge of death 
and brought me back 
over and over, transformed.
but if this world was sterile scrubbed held down of crip  genius
I would not want to survive that
I would not want to live in a world where my people had been eliminated
for our own good 

2.       my goal is to make the revolution irresistable, so listen close:

in the infinite crip crazy future, I am not eliminated
and neither are you. We stand sit lie limp freak out
infinite.  
There are kinds of crazy that we ain’t even thought of yet.
We are the walking dead         the dead femmes walking

There’s nowhere you can hide from seeing all these birth defects,
I mean people.                  I mean us. 
We really are everywhere 
puffing, drooling stimming
The quality of our pain has changed
because no shame is the most effective anti-inflammatory

When an autistic kid is born people jump up and down
and scream quietly, in our heads.  We are so excited to find out
what we can do.

The best stim toys and futures are made by our kind
who focused and focused and focused 
til we made something the most beautiful
and every one gasped with admiration
but never surprise

Nothing horrible happens
You are not taken away
I am not left to die
We take care of each other forever

Our crip femme brown  love is something studied  in school
How we loved towards each other, again and again
     –     how a million ideations couldn’t end this
We are an epic love story
We are one of many

All of us are worthy of study and  grants, in fact
I don’t mean the abled studying us,
but us studying ourselves.
We study ourselves
we check each other out in the mirror
We are the beauty standard.
We didn’t end.
Our wild minds make the future 

I not in need of a cure

I my own amazing future

and yes, I ask:

what will we know about the queer crip body?
what do we know about the divine?
Persistent like virus
and as holy

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (she/they) is a queer disabled nonbinary femme writer and cultural worker of Burger / Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish / Roma ascent. The author of Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, Bodymap  and Consensual Genocide, she is also, with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani,  co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. Her work has been widely published, most recently in The Deaf Poets Society, Glitter and Grit, and Octavia’s Brood. Currently a lead artist with the disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid, she teaches, performs and lectures across North America. Primarily, she is a weirdo who writes about survivorhood, disability justice, transformative justice, queer femme of color lives and Sri Lankan diaspora sitting in her room.

Fishtrap

       When I’m awarded a fellowship to study with Debra Earling, a writer hero of mine at a conference in the Wallowa Mountains, I accept even though I’ll have to read before the assembled conference. That’s how much I admire Debra and her work. The reading is five to seven minutes on Friday evening before the keynote speaker. If all goes well, I can do seven minutes. Sometimes, even after I’ve prepared and I think I’m okay, I shake and I can’t get my breath.
       On a Monday afternoon in early July, I arrive at the Methodist camp south of Wallowa Lake and settle into White, a forestry-service-style cabin under lodge pole pine. It’s named for a minister who lived at the camp, who called it “God’s Country” whenever he spoke of it. Of course. The Eagle Cap Mountains roll out from the lake formed by a glacial moraine. The Snake River Hell’s Canyon Wilderness runs on the east side. It’s stunning country that was Nimi’ipuu ancestral land. Nimi’ipuu or Nez Perce presence hangs over the country. The nearby town of Joseph was renamed for the respected chief, who was still alive when the town changed its name from Silver Lake or Lake City to Joseph in 1880, but although they admired him, he was never allowed to live in his homeland again.
       The conference is called “Fishtrap: Writing the West,” a mash up of Nez Perce fishing technology and a historic focus on bringing eastern publishers out to the West and introducing them to western writers like William Kittredge and Wallace Stegner. One of the co-founders was a white historian of the Nez Perce and over the years, the administrators tell us, they maintained relationships with the Nez Perce. Sometimes, like this year, they invite Native authors. The conference has a loyal faculty who come to fly fish and breathe in the beauty of the lake while teaching. There’s a progressive group of artists who live around Joseph; many of the workshop participants are white middle-aged teachers. It’s a conference with smallish workshops and a friendly vibe.
       Tuesday late afternoon, several women, including the three Native women in attendance, gather at Terminal Gravity, a brewery in Enterprise, where we’ll meet one woman’s husband. We sit around a table on the balcony, and three white men from the conference, who have the clean look of professionals, walk across the parking lot like they’re wading across a stream to reach us. One, who looks like Ernest Hemingway, clumps up the stairs and asks to buy us a drink.
       I remember him from previous conferences. At the end of the week during a panel he will ask how Indians are going to survive under Trump, as pitiful as things are. He earns a response from a Native that challenges him to describe the community that will support white elders when the administration guts nursing home funds. So, while the women reassemble with the fishermen at a larger table, I return to camp to prepare for the reading.
       In the past, I’ve tried to memorize my work as performance artists recommend. It hasn’t worked. I tried to recite a short piece at a big art gathering in Seattle. I remember how my husband sighed, frustrated that I left out an essential line. Anxiety blocks me; apparently I can’t pretend to be calm and think freely at the same time. I ask the other fellowship recipients, if they want to practice. Yes, but they can’t say when.
       As a writer, it’s not enough to publish beautiful, powerful words. You need to perform your work competently and speak fluently. The days of hermit, reclusive writers, refusing interviews, hiding out to write are generally over. I mean, writers have a responsibility to create a normal life in the midst of the hyper-competitive creative-writing industry. But writers who want to sell their books end up touring, working hard to get venues to read, to speak and teach.
       The faculty here, young and old, are promoting new work. I write books for the girl I was. I want girls on and off the Osage reservation to find books that reflect their experience, their families and worldview on the shelves at libraries in Osage County. I want a top tier agent for a chance at national reviews and wide distribution and compensation for some of the time that has gone into this work. It’s possible to write a book that interests agents, but when they meet you, they’re assessing your ability to communicate, your skill, age, and style. Your marketability. I’m not young and attractive, not spunky or hip.
       Thursday I work on the text, paring it down. Knowing the work intimately isn’t enough. Sometimes I’m too stiff, have the words mostly memorized and they’re flat. I want to preview the work with friends, who will be in the audience wishing me well.
       It’s hard for me to walk to the front of a room to read. I tell myself I don’t have the right clothes; I’m not what the audience expects. My voice is too soft. My mixed ethnicity is unclear, and I’m overweight, which some read as ignorant. I don’t accept all of the self-hate, misogyny, racism and ageism that the world distributes. I feel good about who I am, an Osage woman in her sixties, but the toxins are layered in. When I face my fear and read, as I have again and again, nothing is better than the deepening quiet in a room that tells me a scene is working.
       Friday, the fellowship recipients have lunch with the program administrator, and then we go to the White cabin and practice. It’s such a good feeling to listen to strong work, to feel the intent and to support each other. That night our readings are strong. The mock orange on the far side of the Fishtrap stage waves sweetness in the air. My voice doesn’t crack; I tell the story rather than reading it. Afterwards, Emily, Nellie and I stand together, taking pictures beside the podium in front of the Fishtrap quilt. We want to get a drink, but nothing is open.
       We sit in the lodge around a large table. Nellie has gone to be with poets in Naomi Shihab Nye’s class. They’re having a party tonight and will have another class tomorrow. Naomi is generous; her work and her countenance are like sunshine at the conference.
       A local poet and teacher comes to sit with us, saying how he appreciated me mentioning the Nez Perce elders who were here when I was some years ago. I’m glad you spoke, he says, there are two Nimi’ipuu families in the county, and the local ranchers are nervous about the 320 acres the Nez Perce bought for a Homeland Project near Wallowa.
       The man who looks like Hemingway appears. “Well, look where you are,” he says to the poet and pulls a chair up to the table.
       “We’ve had all female fellows for a long time,” he says. We were told they selected the top three applicants after a winnowing process. “When you can’t tell if the author is a man or a woman–that’s pretty good,” he says.
       “What?” I say, looking from him to the women, the stink rising. We know that agents request to see work more often when a man queries than when the same work is submitted by a female. Hemingway is saying we don’t sound female. I don’t engage with him, because I don’t want to hear anything he has to say.
       The morning after the reading, the Wallowa River is still roaring, heavy with snow melt, banging over rocks at a thousand cubic feet per second. The USGS says stream flow is dropping day by day.
       I drive north toward home through Joseph, where a new bronze statue of the chief, donated by a member of the Walton family, surveys the tourists and art galleries. The Nimi’ipuu have also recently dedicated a statue of Joseph, created by a Nez Perce sculptor near their casino in Lewiston, Idaho. I learn that this year, 2017, was the second consecutive year that all three fellowships were awarded to women. I cross my fingers for next year.

Ruby Hansen Murray is a writer and photographer, whose work appears in World Literature Today, The Rumpus, As/Us, Apogee, and Yellow Medicine Review. Winner of the 2017 Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction, she’s a Jack Straw and VONA fellow, awarded residencies at Ragdale, Hedgebrook, Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She received an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2017. She’s a citizen of the Osage Nation with West Indian roots on her mother’s side, living in the Columbia River estuary. 

The Therapist Speaks on Mania

I put up a Craigslist ad: looking to smoke weed then fuck all day. Dan writes back. He says he is free after 3:30 p.m. and he doesn’t smoke weed. Dan is a straight white man. Dan is the only graphic designer I know who doesn’t smoke weed. Dan knows he does not meet my two criteria and expects to be chosen anyway. Because I am too eager to compromise my needs, I invite Dan to my place. Dan says he will lick my asshole. Dan says he will take his time. As we are fucking, he panics and asks what time it is. I tell him 4:00. He says, “I have to pick up my kid.” Dan goes to stranger’s houses for sex, instead of picking up his child. What the fuck, Dan? I get off of Dan. He leaves the condom on my bedspread that’s now soaked through with his sweat.

I see a tote bag on the Internet. It says, “Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man.” I only apply to jobs I’m qualified for. There are probably jobs I’m qualified for that I don’t apply to because I don’t think I’m good enough or I don’t know about them or I lose them to assholes like Dan.

When I ask, why is _______ so shitty? The answer is usually white supremacy. When I ask, why do I do these things? The answer is usually mania.

My Facebook friend starts a hashtag: #ThingsIDidWhileManic. I read through the comments and see things I’ve done. I want to comment. That I’ve shaved my head. I’ve intentionally slammed the brakes and swerved and sped when my mother pissed me off. I fucked four men in four days (not all protected). I’ve stood in my hallway naked, waiting for my neighbors to see me. I’ve drunk a bottle of clementine vodka and eaten three weed brownies. I’ve dated a man 38 years older than I am and dumped him for his son. I’ve smoked a pack of menthols in one sitting. I’ve hit my ex. I’ve hit a different ex. I’ve written 20-page love letters with hidden read receipts. I can’t bring myself to comment. I am studying to be a therapist. My professors and textbooks tell me not to reveal anything about myself. To be a blank slate. To never admit I’m not okay, either.

My ex-girlfriend is a therapist. My ex-girlfriend is a gay white woman. She and I break up because she’s not okay, either. Because she’s like Dan. I told her sex is a mandatory part of a relationship for me. We didn’t have any. At all. Aside from the one time she thought we were scissoring and she was just humping my thigh and I just laid there.

I tell my girlfriend, she isn’t fulfilling my needs. She says, I know. I cannot get angry without somebody calling me crazy. Because of my past. Because of my skin color. I am not allowed to fall apart. To be anything less than what anyone expects. I am not okay. And isn’t that the opposite of mediocrity.

Twelve Thoughts on Depression

I.
My grandmother calls herself a “Depression Baby.”
Born in 1933, she came along at a miserable time.
She says her family got through it
by refusing to show signs of weakness.

II.
She says she worries about my nerves.
She whispers, as if covering up a dirty habit.
I ask her why she cannot call it what it is.

III.
The first time I told my mom I was depressed,
she laughed. “But you have it so good,” she said.
After that, I took “sad” to mean “ungrateful,”
and thought asking for help was a sign of weakness.

IV.
He and I feared becoming zombies.
We can tell “smart” from “obedient.”
We know that doctors prescribe Prozac at the drop of a hat.

V.
My aunt’s pet cockatiel takes Prozac.

VI.
He said, “All great writers are depressed.
Why quit the tortured genius club?”

“Why apply for grad school?
Let depression be your terminal degree.”

VII.
I said, “Medication treats symptoms,
but does not cure them.”

If sickness ever disappeared completely,
the drug lords would go out of business.

They’d have to sell their vacation homes,
and who are we to deny them relaxation
from the stress of honest work.

VIII.
Rock bottom is everything they say it is.
Like heaven or hell, it is not a place,
but a language you cannot understand
until you have nothing.

IX.
It’s been a year since I started medication.
I wonder if he yells “traitor” in his sleep,
if he dreams we’re Bonnie and Clyde,
and I’ve turned us into the police.

X.
My psychiatrist says that one day,
I can come off the pills completely.

I hope sooner than later.
I have always wanted children.

XI.
At the hospital, a baby was born broken.
While pregnant, his mother had stayed on her pills.
It was either this, or the risk of her killing them both.

Sometimes, I wonder who decided
that it’s fine if you are damaged,
as long as you aren’t dead.

XII.
My grandmother calls herself a “Depression Baby.”
Born in 1933, she came along at a miserable time.

I worry my son will, too. That he will be born
broken, and will gorge himself on tainted milk.
That he will inherit a sickness he never asked for.

I hope he never learns the language of rock bottom,
but if he does, it is a language I still know how to speak.

What does it mean to have empathy
for the very affliction you caused?

It means that there is no one else
better equipped to love him than me.

Lauren T. Yates is a poet from Oceanside, CA. In 2012, Lauren earned her B.A. in English with a Creative Writing Emphasis from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Bettering American Poetry 2015, Rust + Moth, Hermeneutic Chaos, and Connotation Press. Lauren’s work focuses on her identities as a queer black femme living with C-PTSD. In her free time, she enjoys watching RuPaul’s Drag Race, dancing to Joy Division, and eating gyros. For more information, visit http://www.laurentyates.com.

Ghazal for Sugar Hill Secrets or Lullaby for Harlem

Mama’s lover was a secret,
wrapped around decades of bittersweet dreams

When sleep visits, I mimic Mama, 
escort secret lovers into my dreams

I think we are all, always dying here,
these bodies buried under dreams

Grandma Pearl lived-in with rich white folks on Sutton Place,
scrubbed their dirty clothes, while folding up her dreams 

Weekends brought Grandma back to Harlem,
her pot liquor so exquisite, it lives on in my dreams

Sugar Hill stories still run through these veins,
summer stoops hold old men’s shattered dreams 

Mama strutted across runways in her heyday, proud to be the first black model 
in Harlem who couldn’t pass for white, not even in folk’s dreams 

When she strolled up St. Nicholas, with her high yella baby in tow,
neighbors cooed, Look at that good hair, ain’t she a dream?

Mama hid behind an exquisite mask, on a ledge of black joy, 
then swallowed bottles of pills; nearly crushed both our dreams 

Alone, at night, I’m just a scared little girl screaming, Please Mama wake up!
while EMT’s who found Mama’s pulse, still haunt my dreams

Sugar Hill, she be smooth like Ella’s jazz notes, 
belting Dream a Little Dream for Me

One Sunday morning, church elders on Lenox Ave whispered 
Ain’t she the Pastor’s child?  as they washed away my dreams

Yes, I am that light-skinned fractured flashback,
Mama’s love child, snapshot of her wildest dream

Still, in silence of night, I hear her whisper,
Juliet, baby, you were Mama’s best dream. 

JP Howard’s debut poetry collection, SAY/MIRROR, was a 2016 Lambda Literary finalist. She is also the author of bury your love poems here (Belladonna*). JP was a 2017 Split this Rock Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism finalist and is featured in the 2017 Lesbian Poet Trading Card Series from Headmistress Press. She was the recipient of a 2016 Lambda Literary Judith A. Markowitz Emerging Writer Award and has received fellowships and grants from Cave Canem, VONA, Lambda, Astraea and Brooklyn Arts Council. JP curates Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon, a NY-based forum offering women writers a monthly venue to collaborate and is an Editor-at-Large at Mom Egg Review online. JP’s poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Academy of American Poets, Apogee Journal, The Feminist Wire, Split this Rock, Muzzle Magazine, and The Best American Poetry Blog. JP holds a BA from Barnard College and an MFA in Creative Writing from The City College of New York. Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

4th Time Around

Milk of Magnesia Pt. 2

Having Now Fallen In Love Again 1/3

The Intended Taste

Caged Bird Blues

Slumberland

Twenty-six-year-old award-winning Screenwriter, Playwright, Filmmaker, and Multimedia Visual Artist Isa Benn is currently based out of Toronto, Canada. She is a first generation, Toronto-born, of African-Canadian and Caribbean-Canadian descent. With several highly visual-sensory ‘handicaps,’ including synesthesia and or ideasthesia, she has parlayed these long-time impediments into an extraordinary understanding of visceral-visual language and expression. Her stylistically introspective work deals predominantly with experiential culturalism, colour, class, sexuality, gender, and magical realism.

Haunted

In the dark I said to her
these two things should not be wed
in one hand I held surrender
in the other I held mauve
the dream cloud had me caught
while behind her a cloaked pillar
a shadow
fringed in ruffles like midnight’s abalone
towered as a grim love

I traced the lines of her face
leaving a dotted trail of mauve marks
like stitches
sewing onto this unmemory
a face I’d like to forget

*

They woke up the deadname and said that I had died / said that I had killed myself / how many of them are there that deadname me / a family made of mismatched broken cups / they say to me in their own minds that you’ll always be my Jacob / the mauve breath of selfishness disguised as love / an abuse scar / a fever fall in the pregnant mauve dark / the way the deadname wafts up as a miasma of loss / how spent the effort was to get you to call me by my actual name / my self-erected oracle / mauve: the color of the bruise that rests right where the name hangs on me / continues to hang each time it is ever used

*

I am a house full of ghosts
in a world without sage, without
stars, without light or salt.

I am a study of the way gray looks when they’re royalty.

How many ghosts must I always carry with me?
How much more must I expand to accommodate?

I heard once
that trauma is a sliver in the brain
and flashbacks are your brain’s way
of getting the sliver out

Memory is a mauve ghost
hanging like a cloth, years
the breeze that unsettles the panels
just before the recollection
Mauve: the cold flame of air
of twilit skies, grey and red
like the neurons of the brain

When you’re dead to so many people
who’ve taken away your name,
isn’t it your holy prerogative to burn
the ghost of them out, the lamp
shuttered like a house?

Future arsonists:
Will it always burn?

MEDITATION ON GARDENIAS

the petals         decayed white         nicotine patina         yellowed lace         tea paper
petals         white         pungent         denatured in self-acid           delicate, lonely parfumerie
petal and stem           calling through olfactory neurons the edges of a distant memory
exchanged, electrified data             petals recalling a memory a vacuole of air from long ago 
housed in the brain         admixture of molecules imprinted         petal-matrix         stem and leaf
bone, mitochondria         placental ridges         scents         odors         petals pressed into fat
enfleurage         fat absorbs scents         fat holds onto hormones         memory confit
petal-memory:   to smell a flower, to place it on a coffee table, to watch it rot over a few days time
petals         so delicate they brown the same day the flower was picked
so pungent that the aroma still rises from the trash bin                petal-memory:
the bushes taller than me         white petals as big as my hand         the ants drowning in the sink

*

Our  grandparents  had  a ten-foot  long  row  of  Gardenias  in  the
back   of  their  house  and  their  yard   was  home  to  a  variety  of
tropical  fauna:  Mountain   Apple.   Guava.   Avocado.    Tangerine.
Plumeria.   We’d  pluck  fruit   right  from  the  trees   and  bite  into
succulent,  raw  flesh.  The Gardenias we’d gather  and  we’d wash
in an ancient sink caked with laundry detergent and lint  from  the
dryer  that had gotten wet and dried  over  in  successive  blue and
pale-blue  generations.   Some   petals  would   fall  into   the   dirty
basin.   We’d  check  the  white  flowers  for   black  insects   before
dousing  them again  with  cold,  cold  water,  shaking  the ants off
like  poppy  seeds.  We’d  eat  the  fruit  and  smell  our  bounty  of
flowers   before   deciding   who  we’d   give  our   flowers  to:   the
largest to our mother,  the second largest to our grandmother,  and
the  remainder  to  our bedroom  for us  to  smell.  There  would be
piles of dead flowers  around us  as  we  danced,   and  we’d smell
them,  the piles  of petals,  as we huffed  in the hot  air.  The  petals
would rise  with  our self-made  wind and as  we  finished,  they’d
fall all around us like feathers.

*

If I could keep only one memory, it would be this:
                                                  My grandmother and I – alone at the table. 
                          She uses her fingers to pick up pieces of kugel and roast.
                                    She – our bright genetrix – bites her teeth in worry.
                                                               A bowl of Gardenias sit between us
              Between us – like the cancer cells, like the gap of so many years
                                         the gardenias will sour with the passing of days
   Sour – like the body sours with disease, the body like a wilting flower
                          Here, before the corruption, this moment this singularity
But I cannot keep only one memory; 
I must keep them all. 

Chloë Rose’s gender is Rilke’s dark god: a webbed scrim made of a thousand roots drinking in silence. Also known as B’ellana Johannx, she/they are a fat, queer, femme, non-binary womxn-of-color living with disabilities and their cats Franz and Pepper in Tacoma, WA. Rose/Johannx has been published in The Wanderer, Dream Pop, and Aspasiology, with Pushcart and Bettering American Poetry nominations henny, so watch out! Tweet them about conlangs, antifa, witchcraft, and drag names @llanaandsuchas. If you are a faggot, you are her/their kin and they love you. May the peace of the Goddess and God be upon you. #SMIB

In which a Mother Discovers She is God, While a Child Discovers Baseball

And does not cup
her mouth in horror.
She knew all along
this sweet blasphemy
was coming. How else
can you explain that patience
and its imperfect holy.

And he asks himself again:
what am I doing in this shadow
of a country? Men in tight trousers
dart across a field, while he basks
in whatever sun Connecticut has to offer,
a crude joke of a Spring.

And she is relieved, for once.
And he forgets the rain falling on him passively.

And they will meet again,
in an empty airport
and remember
their skin.

Excavation of Hazem’s Mouth

         hello again
                  fag mouth
         pride hole
                  keeper of secrets
                  sometimes
         releaser of dreams
                  have you come
         to taunt me
                  tightfisted mouth
         clenchedattheseams
                  alwaysreadyforafight mouth
         gobacktowhereyoucamefrom mouth
                  didyourayrabfamilyteachyoutospeaklikethat mouth
         fantasizedaboutfirebreathing mouth
                  where
                  is my epic now
         shattered boys crouch between
                  these yellowed teeth
         and i lick them all
                  between meals
         ill come back
                  with a cigarette
         tomorrow
                  and suffocate them

Hazem Fahmy is a poet and critic from Cairo. He is an Honors graduate of Wesleyan University’s College of Letters where he studied literature, philosophy, history and film. His poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming in Apogee, HEArt, Mizna, and The Offing. His performances have been featured on Button Poetry and Write About Now. His debut chapbook, Red//Jild//Prayer, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press this Fall. He is a poetry editor for Voicemail Poems and a contributing writer to Film Inquiry. In his spare time, Hazem writes about the Middle East and tries to come up with creative ways to mock Classicism. He makes videos occasionally.