Ashley Yang-Thompson

Spicy Village Break-Up Anthem

I am in a savage mood.
& I AM GOING OUT WITHOUT YOU.
& MY HEART IS POUNDING AND THIS BLACK-VELVET-FISHNET-EXPOSED-BRA LOOK SCREAMS ALT SLUT SABRINA THE TEENAGE WITCH.
& YOU HAVE BURNED THROUGH MY NERVES such that I AM HIGH OFF OF THE ABSENCE OF PAIN.
& I AM FLUSHED WITH TSINGTAO.
& I am listening to the Fugees cover of “Killing Me Softly” on repeat.
& I can feel rage pounding against my skin.
& maybe I require you to tear into me
but instead you brought a bizarre elongated pillow with a man’s naked torso into my bedroom WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THAT??
A plastic Happy Meal stork brought me dreams of your public humiliation.
I WILL WAX YOUR FACIAL HAIR WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECT IT.
AND YOU WILL EAT ME OUT LIKE MY VAGINA IS A DELICIOUS STUFFED BEAN CURD.
AND I WILL CALL YOU LITTLE BITCH.
AND YOU WILL ACCEPT MY LIP HAIRS.
AND YOU WILL ACCEPT MY WORDS AS GOSPEL.
AND YOU WILL COOK ME WOODEAR & CABBAGE & PERFECT YOUR SCALLION PANCAKE TECHNIQUE. AND YOU WILL BRING ME COFFEE IN THE MORNING. AND YOU WILL LIST FEMALE ARTISTS OF COLOR AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE STATISTICS WITH A PASSION. AND YOU WILL DOUSE MY BODY IN LAVENDER OIL TO RELIEVE ME OF STRESS. AND YOU WILL FINALLY VENMO ME THE SEVEN DOLLARS YOU OWE ME. AND YOU WILL LEARN TO NOURISH ME BY BELIEVING IN MY DANCE. AND I WILL DANCE FIERCELY WITH AEROBIC TECHNIQUE. And you will see me.

(fictional) product reviews from a white supremacist who only buys white things
(username: generalheartbreak):

White Windows

White windows are my passion.
Instead of glass, you have a solid, white mass.
This way, your children are safe because they won’t be tempted to jump out of windows when they aren’t loved back.

White Tack

When my husband blinds me with a white silk scarf & caresses me with the tip of a white tack, I feel as if I am upgrading to a whiter shade of white.
& when he whispers “pro-white” into my ear as he binds me to the train track with floss, I am so wet that a pool forms around my body, & the children gather round with straws.

White Inflatable Pool Slide

Let’s just say I woke up atop this white inflatable pool slide with my limbs surgically rearranged to resemble a walrus.
Forty years later, & I’m still stuck in this wildlife sanctuary, translating the English in my head to a gurgling phlegm.

The product of a Chinese immigrant and a white polygamist from Fort Scott, Kansas, Ashley Yang-Thompson has been a performance artist since the day she was ruthlessly shoved out of the safety of her mother’s womb. She works in a wide range of media, from hyperrealist oil paintings to coloring book memoirs to VHS Poetry.

Seema Reza

I can’t sleep

Last night the yellow teacup cracked clean in half while I washed it
& when I went out on the balcony to smoke a cigarette

the handle of the sliding door came off into my palm. My phone screen
is cracked & my favorite rings won’t stay round.  

In the bedroom you lay prone, parted lips twitching into an almost-smile
your eyes rocking gently beneath their lids, long arms reaching

toward my emptied space. It isn’t that I don’t love you just
things fall apart in my well-meaning hands.

Muslim Community Center

             stiff doc martens billowing silk salwar kamiz
             hemp bracelets brown eyes rimmed covergirl black
             soft-cheeks vixen lips cleavage cleft and long necks
             our shameless laughter and foreign whispers

our mothers watch
envious & ashamed
our bodies like theirs & alien
they block our periphery with headscarves
& teach us to move shoulder to shoulder:

bending at the waist, hands flying
to thighs, alongside ears, crossing the heart,
index finger stabbing the devil  
spines curled over femur bones
forehead to prayer hall carpet
face right then left to greet angels
in unison

led by the hungry men
whose desires we must somehow
learn to manage from behind

Amma, what do women want?

Seema Reza is the author of When the World Breaks Open (Red Hen Press, 2016). Her second book, a collection of poetry, is forthcoming in 2019 from Write Bloody. An alumnus of Goddard College and VONA, her work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Beltway Quarterly, The Feminist Wire, HerKind, Duende, The Offing, and Entropy, among others. She coordinates and facilitates a unique hospital arts program and posts weekly writing prompts at seemareza.com.

Olatunde Osinaike

Due Diligence

             to claim history is some sort of weathered
joke is to say this is a déjà vu in which i am not unlucky,
             stratagem just sacrilege enough & always
                          has been since the last best war
             in the budget, always has been the grime on the leftmost
                          machine in the laundromat, there’s bleach as veneer
             everywhere & the worn porcelain floor shines like a hazard should
in this case, the proprietor tells me to be
                          careful, a tip which is only the half of it

                          \\

                                       of the other half
                          all i have to do is watch my step –
order my durable in whatever
                                       word that will have me –
             which is good since my bones
                                       know this routine know i’ve been reduced
                          caricature by caricature
                                       cracked over easy know how
             i wished myself exempt all last year:
every word is opportunity for revision
             or derision, just depends
                          on how you’d like
                                       to press your lips to foment, what more
                          can you make of a mouth

                          \\

             even without an incentive,
                          my body is light enough
to be flammable & flame enough
             to wash away the night
                                       of what is left
all that i am is a tear without scent,
                          some oxygen but mostly time
                          & this is what keeps me guessing
& it’s not like we haven’t been here before
i can make a handle out of anything
                                       including my tongue
but this is not to say
                                       i can twist the heat
into some sane covenant

                          \\

let me begin once more
between two-way traffic
in the hood staring at the vending machine
through the rain-stained window  
foot over a misplaced penny
& the tv humming in devotion
             what i mean is we all have the need
to start again the sky for tomorrow
what i mean is i just left
                                                       the family dollar across the street
nine minutes later with a mop
                         that only cost me seventy cents & some empathy
             with a caloric sense of humor   

                          \\

                                       so say next
                                      say the heart knows what it wants
                                                  say leverage
say disaster is natural       again
                          but also say how dirty our skin isn’t
                                        & the water isn’t washing
                          the way we’ve come to expect
          say the floor isn’t clean yet
say i paid for this
                     say i paid for this

Olatunde Osinaike is a Nigerian-American poet originally from the West Side of Chicago. He is Black, still learning and eager nevertheless. An alumnus of Vanderbilt University, his most recent work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Apogee, HEArt, Hobart, FreezeRay, Glass, Up the Staircase, and Split Lip, among other publications.

Jacqueline Balderrama

My Life

But I had no appetite / The storm had puddled all color into one dark sea / Revived memory or premonition / which is to say / Goodbye to the mud houses dissolved / Goodbye to the unlucky newspapers / If we had left ourselves out there too / in the current to some void / they were blank faced and tired / like all our givings up / Current versions would have to suffice / I tell myself / Let us imagine the renewal / First signs of life—green / green / green—from the winter water burial / or our ancestor creatures driven to the water’s edge / to march the shore / or to line the sand with their heavy tails / Starting fresh is starting nowhere

The Other Side of Giving

In the town of still shadows, hand stitched life-size dolls
stand where husbands and sons used to be.
The dolls wear their old clothes, their belts, their socks,
but the boots are still walking since wife and daughter put them on
to muck out the chicken coop, to push the barrow of dry earth,
the women wishing for rain, for water.
In the women’s dreams, the dolls promise money
is on its way. There will be enough soon, enough.
The women can’t say this. Their eyes smudge, as bits of their bodies
fall loose into the wind. They can’t say this as they kneel
before the land in which seeds blow away.

Jacqueline Balderrama is pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah. She serves as Poetry Editor for Iron City Magazine and Assistant Editor for Quarterly West. Her work has appeared in Cream City Review, Blackbird, and others. Visit jacquelinebalderrama.com for more.

Diane Glancy

We Played in the Sandbox Building Jamestown

The crossing was a voyage that absorbed us.  
When we landed our ship
we began another passage.  
We saw the savages.  
Their walls and longhouses always on hilltops
from which the distance could be seen.  
They had platforms along the walls for weapons.  
Their longhouses were upright structures
covered with bark.  
They stood in rows with storage space
and outside the walls
the fields of corn beans squash.  

We built our own barriers on which to post our cannons.  
We molded walls.  
Inside the walls we shaped block houses
with packed sand.  
We marked rows for crops with twigs.  
We had a few small stones for animals and a gate
from which we left with our muskets to hunt.

It was simple.
Build forts.  
Plant crops.  
Establish trade with the Indians.  
Who could not thrive?
We built a little church and a glassworks.  
We made a few barrels for tar.  
The summer was hot.  
The winter bitter.  
The crops failed.  
The animals scattered.  
The Indians made war.  
We suffered hunger, cold, diseases of the most putrid kind.  

The next ship found us Cryeinge owtt
we are starved we are starved.
We were forced to eat horses
Doggs
Catts
Ratts
Myce
Vermin
Bootes or other leather
Starch in our ruffs.

Later ships found the walls of Jamestown tourne downe, the portes open,
the gates from the hinges,
the church ruined and unfrequented,
empty howses…rent up and burnt…¹

They found our sandbox where holes were poked
with twigs for graves.


¹ Percy, George, “Trewe Relacyon,” Governor and Council of Virginia to the Virginia Company of London, July 7, 1610

Diane Glancy is professor emerita at Macalester College. Her latest books are Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education (creative nonfiction), University of Nebraska Press, 2014, and Report to the Department of the Interior (poetry), University of New Mexico Press. 2015. in 2016-17 Wipf & Stock has published several books including Mary Queen of Bees (novella), The Servitude of Love (short stories) and The Collector of Bodies, Concern for Syria and the Middle East (poems).

M. Soledad Caballero

Rebellion

My grandmother asked if I would ever
have a garden. In the end, her body pulsed,
pumped rabid cells. Her skin radiated yellow,
the color of dying lights, nothing like the color
of her roses when I was child. She did not wear
gloves to sculpt the flowers in the front yard. Even
in winter, she lifted out life, one mound at a time.

When I landed that July, she had not seen
her garden in decades, its thick, delicate vines
the color of coffee, strung together with twine.  
The head of each rose a hat, some timid, slight,
others anxious shades still waiting for water
and sun. She loved them with blades and blood,
spent her days coaxing them into colors.

In the time of Pinochet, the flowers grew
under her hands. They clung to her voice.
Prayers for children, a son, a daughter hunted
into exile. They fled to live, to escape the general’s
machine of torture invading the ocean, the vineyards,
the mountains. Left behind, she pruned in silence,
planted flowers of rebellion, waited for the fall.

When I saw her last, I lied about having
a garden. She grew so small, the yellow-green
of dry, withered ferns. I would have garden
somewhere in the hills of a state she never knew
about, could not pronounce, find on a map.
But she willed it into being those thirty years
before when she planted my return.    

M Soledad Caballero is Associate Professor of English at Allegheny College. Her scholarly work focuses on British Romanticism, travel writing, post-colonial literatures, WGSS, and interdisciplinarity. Her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Mississippi Review, the Iron Horse Literary Review, Memorius, and Crab Orchard. Her poetry manuscript-in-progress is titled Immigrant Confessions and explores immigration and migration, state violence, and masculinity.