oh Maker, have you ever loved/ or known just what it was?/ I can’t imagine the bitter end/ of all the beauty that we’re living in —Janelle Monáe
1 for those silent frantic chapters a long hallway I have ghost whispered at the edges of for centuries in this machination I called my warp of a brain, whirring/coils beneath the outermost layer of my fuselage where anyone who looked hard enough could see the way I either worked or didn’t
2a ragged prototype, work/half-life balance to perform, I engineered; adapted;
my mechanisms my fuck you anyway brand of coping shortcut production
flick the switch to feel happy blunt the crashing:
3 still, I fluctuate— mercurial, some would call it, when one is never the right amount
of lamplight, measly filament in an incandescent lonely
4 consider fascism, annew old reason to make every self-destructive decision possible approximately-organic shambles grappling with the threading; the cogs
5finally, I looked at myself & decided to act with kindness
improvised & twitching an unused muscle group
now, as I take the moment to stop, I realize how much I have continued holding in
A transdisciplinary writer, teaching artist, and facilitator, alex was born and raised in and around Ann Arbor, Michigan. Currently a lecturer with the Program on Intergroup Relations, they are the recipient of the 2019 Michael R. Gutterman Award in Poetry, Highest Honors in Creative Writing & Literature for their manuscript of poems entitled trans-corporeality in 2017, 2nd Place in the 2017 Current Magazine poetry contest, and the 2015 Jeffrey L. Weisberg Memorial Prize in Poetry. In addition to studying Creative Writing and Literature, they received their Master of Social Work degree from the University of Michigan as a National Community Scholar. With Yoseñio V. Lewis, they are the co-author of the chapter “Place, joy, and self: trans justice and community organizingwork” in Social Work and Healthcare with Trans and Nonbinary Individualsand Communities (Routledge, 2020). Their poetic work is forthcoming and/or has appeared in CurrentMagazine, Café Shapiro, the Michigan Daily, the anthology Uncommon Core: Contemporary Poems for Learning and Living, and others. Their poem “30 seconds to reboot” was selected for the Michael R. Gutterman Award in Poetry.
when I think about the future, I try to tap into the pulse of the past. I think about my (our) trancestors: Marsha, Leslie, Sylvia, Stormie, all the others, unnamed. what dreams of the future kept them up at night and which ones got them up in the morning? I use their intimacy, pain, and visions to help me survive. I believe in the backbones our trauma gives us. I believe that technology is not synonymous with violence. I believe that trans and gender non-conforming people are magical beings who have been sent here to change the shape and the shame of this planet.
I thought the internet was going to make us all love each other more
assume I’m not wrong assume the sun is a single mother who will never burn out assume your reservoir of heartbreak was man-made assume these men who broke your heart always (secretly) wanted to be carried out of the rubble of their lives in the arms of a cheerleader dad bod all seized up
assume that we all have pristine visions of the sissy inside us multiplying into entire orchards of sour shapeless fruit assume your gender is always under some process of crystal-ballification look at the fat clumps of data we’ve become walking through the matrix of intergenerational miscommunications
we lost: forests privacy the slowness of time
we gained: access
when this tree blossoms we will talk about the future
techno songs about heaven play on the radio
in the South they skin snakes summer is clean and streaked with bodies the soft, moldy eye of the storm winks & your gift is your shyness
the synthesizer urges you to come forward place your hands on the magic amputated strips of astro turf & inhabit your life
the new world will be built by allowing gentleness to gather within you subterranean trust in another person’s body breaking down, atomizing into sleep
ignore love name a planet after yourself memorize a phone number get held
today you are a teenager tomorrow you go
mud howard is a non-binary trans poet from the states. they write about queer intimacy, interior worlds, & the cosmic joke of the gender binary. they hold an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Westminster London and are currently working on their first full-length novel: a queer trans memoir structured like a tarot deck and packed full of lies. they have been published in journals such as THEM, Foglifter, and The Lifted Brow. you can find more of their work at www.mudhoward.com.
i found a flood in my parents’ house bubbling up the sinks the bathtub full of dandelions
i watched you sing through the glazed church windows
the flicker of candlelight dancing its love letter
as i slumped against the stone, bullied by the rain
i saw a bluebird break the glass halo of shards and snow
i could never hold a low note like you
a knuckle-shaped dent in the wall a curl of ivy, leaves like arrowheads
turned away from your outburst. i promised not to hurt myself for love
a broken beehive smothered in lilies is it possible to oversugar the earth?
i came at night to pick the lock with a drop of amethyst
i could hear your voice, backbone of that chorus, notes gathered like starlings in the rafters
i asked them to make me one of them, the only way i know to get my name in your mouth
when you come back, you better be desperate you better burn through me like fire through the containment crew
the prayer book states: beg forgiveness the prayer book begs: stay exactly as you were
Ethan J. Murray is a queer, autistic poet loved into existence by 12 headmates. They want to help make the world kinder for every neurodivergent person. Their work is forthcoming or published in Occulum Journal and Sidereal Magazine, and you can find them on twitter @ethanandco.
For me, transness is a perpetual search for the “right” self-presentation: a version of me that’s accepted and authentic. This search often causes me to feel otherworldly—maybe my truest form isn’t as any kind of person, but as a bird, a season, a note of a song. My trans identity is also affected by my love for other people. This piece helps me explore the relationship between changing myself for a particular person’s affections and evolving in search of a more individual (or universal) truth.
In 2017, as a visiting scholar at l’Université Francophone de Cap-Haïtien, I gave a research paper on Haiti’s secondhand clothing and garment assembly industries in Haitian Kreyòl. In my critique of the secondhand clothing system in Haiti, I cited the poem ‘Ayiti pèpèrize’ by the Haitian American writer and scholar Emmanuel W. Vedrine. Pèpè is the Kreyòl term for used clothing in Haiti that has been arriving in tightly-bound bales from the United States since the 1960s, under President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress Latin American assistance programme (Shell 2006, 154). As I recited Vedrine’s critique of Haiti’s increased dependency on foreign ‘hand-me-downs’ and external interventions to the detriment of local industry and entrepreneurship, audience members began to accompany me in my reading, prompting a call and response participatory performance. Vedrine’s accusations were all too familiar to a Haitian people, who since defeating Napoleon’s troops to gain independence from France in 1804, have been forced to pay for their ‘exceptional’ freedom. The French colony of Saint-Domingue boasted the most prosperous sugar plantation economy of the New World in the eighteenth century. When France finally recognized Haitian independence in 1825, they burdened the fledgling Black republic with a crippling indemnity payment (of 150 million francs) to cover losses incurred by plantation owners. Fearing the spread of Haitian revolt amongst slaves throughout its southern states, the US imposed a trade embargo which shunned and isolated the new nation, preventing its participation in international commerce. The US only recognized Haitian independence in 1862. This global ostracization and exclusion of Haiti has persisted to the present day, a legacy not only of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath, but also of US imperialism (solidified most notably during the US occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934) and postcolonial authoritarian regimes that have mimicked the racialised colonial ideologies of the oppressor.
In the wake of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti on 12 January 2010, killing over 200 000 people and leaving more than 1.5 million people homeless, a ‘humanitarian occupation’ of Haiti (Schuller 2016, 228) has resurfaced, prompting Haiti’s recent nickname as the ‘republic of NGOs’. The aftershocks of the earthquake, the collective trauma and destruction, provided what Naomi Klein (2007) has conceived, in her writing on Hurricane Katrina, as a blank slate, a tabula rasa, onto which a nexus of international donors (NGOs, US policymakers, the Inter-American Development Bank [IDB]) could impose their plans to expand low-wage textile and garment production sites under the pretext of ‘development’ (Shamsie 2014, 82). If, for Paul Gilroy, plantation slavery was ‘capitalism with its clothes off’ (1993, 15), the economic success of which was based on commodity production for export, Haiti continues to be viewed an atelier of external capitalist development today. Since Haiti’s inception as an independent post-slavery state in the nineteenth century, Western powers have ensured Haiti’s economic dependence and enduring servitude to global capitalism.
This short essay will imagine the global itinerary of a T-shirt assembled at one of Haiti’s export processing zones, the Caracol Industrial Park, located in the north of the country. Under the pretext of post-earthquake ‘development’, this low-wage textile and garment production site, built on fertile farming soil and financed by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the US government, opened in 2012. The t-shirt, once discarded by the US consumer, will eventually end up washed up on the shores of Cap-Haïtien port in northern Haiti to be resold as pèpè in the global export trade of used clothing. The second part of the essay will consider how visual artists from Haiti have used secondhand clothing or textile fatras (waste) in their work to critique the disposability of Haitian lives within an unequal capitalist and racialised world system.
Itinerary of a T-shirt Fè an Ayiti (Made in Haiti)
At the Caracol industrial park, the South Korean textile and clothing manufacturer, SAE-A under its Haitian subsidiary S&H Global currently employ approximately 10 600 workers. The fabric used in their factories is spun in China and imported to Haiti to be cut and sewn1. The minimum wage for garment workers in Haiti is currently 350 Gourdes per day, which is approximately 5 US dollars. A basic cotton t-shirt assembled by a Haitian worker is then shipped to the US to one of their retail outlets that include Walmart, Target and Old Navy. The t-shirt is purchased for around 10 US dollars and its practical service life (how long it is worn) will be much shorter than its technical service life (how long it could be worn) (Zamani, Sandin and Peters 2017: 1368). Once discarded, the garment will either end up in landfill or enter one of the other reuse channels, such as charitable donation. If the unwanted t-shirt ends up in a clothing donation bin in Miami, it is highly likely that it will be taken to a sorting depot to be sold for export to Haiti. The clothing is sorted according to style (baby clothing and underwear from abroad are particularly sought after items as thought to be superior to local choice) and quality and then sold in bales to Haitian traders (often members of the diaspora who have migrated to the US) who pay approximately 3000 US dollars for a container which fits between 35-40 bales of used clothing. The shipment takes a week to arrive in the northern port of Cap-Haïtien and then a further two weeks to clear Haitian customs. A team of local transporters use large wooden trolleys to deliver the bales of clothing to central depots in the city.
Women traders then buy the bales paying between 8000-9000 Gourdes (125-140 US dollars) for high quality, pèpè bon grenn, and 3000-4000 Gourdes (47-62 US dollars) for lower quality, pèpè mwen bon. The traders pay a man with a wheelbarrow to transport the bale to the pèpè market. As the bundle is opened, and its contents revealed, the event usually attracts a crowd of anticipant customers.
At this stage the t-shirt may be bought by kliyan (customers) or other women traders who plan to resell the garment. In both cases, the kliyan may then require the services of marketside tailors and seamstresses who set up their sewing machines every day under canopies (made with pèpè) and charge between 70-100 Gourdes to alter the fit, or mend a damaged piece of clothing. Women traders may buy a much smaller bundle for around 100-200 Gourdes, selling each piece for around 50 Gourdes on the streets of oKap (as the regional capital is known). Alternatively, on Tuesdays and Saturdays, many traders arrive at the pèpè market from the Haitian border town of Ouanaminthe to replenish their stock. If selected for resale, the t-shirt is rerouted eastwards aboard a taptap minibus and sold in the binational market in Dajabón on the Dominican side. Twice a week on Mondays and Fridays, Haitian traders are permitted entry to the Dominican Republic to sell used clothing, US-grown rice, beans and garlic, imported from Miami. If bought for resale in Dajabón, the t-shirt could eventually end up in a bundle, transported by Dominican or Haitian pepeceras to the market of Santiago on the eastern side of the island (Shoaff 2017).
If, however, the t-shirt does not make it this far, and after two weeks has not been sold, it will most likely be discarded on the streets of oKap and end up as textile waste or fatras, sedimented amongst the banana skins, coconut hulls, spaghetti packets and styrofoam containers that you find lining the streets of the city. Swept outside people’s homes in small piles, washed into the drainage gullies, in the sea and piled in drifts on the beaches: this is fatras. As Haitian conservation scholar Florence Sergile points out, manufactured goods discarded in this fashion are not counted as rubbish by the Haitian authorities, and so left to pollute the environment.2 They are often left to compact into the earth or burnt, emitting polluting gases into the environment, which can be dangerous to public health. Although the t-shirt has been destined for reuse in a Haitian market, it also must be discarded at some point and enters a Haitian waste management system without the resources to enable its ecological disposal. Even in the US, ‘only 15% of textile waste is diverted from landfills even though most of it is 100% reusable or recyclable in some form’ (Lewis, 2015: 233).
Earlier in the chain, textile offcuts or rejected garments are disposed of at the site of manufacture. At Caracol, SAE-A have an incinerator and burn their scrap fabric to produce steam for their iron presses. The fabrics used in production are predominantly made from synthetic fibres which have been criticised for their higher greenhouse gas emissions during manufacture, their non-biodegradability and toxic pollutant emissions during waste management (Muthu, 2014: 14). Sergile points out the contradiction in this textile disposal cycle when she problematises the received notion that ‘tout le monde a besoin de la nourriture en Haïti, mais pas l’environnement’ (everyone needs food in Haiti, but not the environment). Climate vulnerability and the impact of disasters does not help the problem of food insecurity in Haiti. In 2012 Hurricane Isaac destroyed crops across the country. In 2016, the grade 4 storm, Hurricane Matthew, killed over 800 people, decimating homes, crops and livelihoods for thousands of Haiti’s rural population in the southern provinces considered to be Haiti’s ‘breadbasket’. The onomatopoeic goudougoudou – used to refer to the 2010 earthquake in imitation of the sound of the earth shaking – is now used to denote the rumbling of empty stomachs.3 However, a decline in Haitian agriculture must also be attributed to transnational economic deals and foreign trade interests. The increase in women’s factory work in export processing zones such as Caracol correlates with a decline in food production networks that, as Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote, relied on women as the ‘backbone of the Haitian marketing system for local food crops’ (1990). Farmers grew plaintain, beans, corn and manioc on the rich agricultural land of the Caracol valley before they were displaced to make way for the garment assembly plant.4 An even clearer example is that of subsidised rice imports from the US (diri Myami or Miami Rice), which since the 1980s has led to the collapse of domestic Haitian rice production. Instead of increased dependence on cheap imports (manje pèpè), Haitian farmers are demanding food sovereignty.
´Lakansyèl’ by Barbara Prézeau Stephenson, 2013. Photo: Josué Azor.
Layers of Lives Lived on the Periphery
Haitian performance artist, Barbara Prézeau Stephenson, in her critique of rad pèpè (imported secondhand clothing) and homofobi pèpè (imported homophobias), has intervened in the lifecycle of pèpè goods using these castoff garments to contest bodies rendered castoff or disposable in Haitian society. Prézeau’s performance entitled ‘Lakansyèl’, meaning rainbow in Haitian Kreyòl took place as part of the ‘Atis nan Kay la’ series in October 2013. The organisers, Akoustik Prod, selected traditional gingerbread houses in the Pacot neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince for the staging of artistic interventions in an attempt to promote the preservation of this unique Creole architectural heritage. Prézeau’s performance, lasting 25 minutes, took place on the liminal veranda space of the famous Viviane Gauthier Dance School. Dressed in white, the colour worn by ‘servers’ of the Haitian Vodou religion, Prézeau knots together pèpè garments, sorted according to the seven colours of a rainbow. Adopting ritual postures and gestures inspired by Vodou dance forms, the artist knots together a lifeline of used clothing that can be said to represent the dependency of one small nation on a much more powerful other. As the colour-coded clothing entangles the performer, there is a sense of suffocation, mimicking the drowning of local industry by US exports of secondhand clothing.5 The staging of the performance in the threshold space of the veranda, at the intersection between inside and outside, also evokes the in-between yet peripheral status of same-sex loving individuals in Haiti, who are both accepted within the religion of Vodou and largely ostracized in a wider Haitian society that remains heteropatriarchal and homophobic. This performance in the space of the in-between is furthermore a reminder of Haiti’s externally-imposed status on the periphery of the periphery, recently recycled in demeaning and dehumanising terms by the Trump administration.6
Prézeau’s performance recalls the work of Cuban American artists Alain Guerra and Neraldo de la Paz who source materials for their sculptural installations from the waste bins of secondhand clothing shipping companies in Miami’s Little Haiti. Known collectively as Guerra de la Paz since 1996, the artists would scavenge through the sea of castoff clothing discarded outside their studio by export businesses and create work using the pre-worn manufactured garment as a starting point.7Tribute (2002) is a heap of clothing collected and sorted into a rainbow spectrum, while Indradhanush (2008) forms a physical rainbow that you can walk through. Both pieces are concerned with refashioning the unity of a diverse community as well as exploring the footprint of these objects not only in the physical environment but also in the psychosocial environment. As the artists describe ‘used clothing is charged with layers of history’.8 In revealing these layers of past lives, the sculptures of Guerra de la Paz and performance of Prézeau intervene in the chain of the secondhand clothing trade between the US and Haiti, evoking a history of dependency and secondhand colonial ideologies.
Haitian artist, Céleur Jean Hérard, one of the founding members of the Port-au-Prince based Grand Rue collective, has used pèpè in his work to send a message to the international community. His sculptural relief made with secondhand shoes that have been sent to Haiti as in-kind donations from the US draws attention to the recipient of these unwanted items. The sculpture questions the performance of giving, a hypervisible participation in global aid, which involves the disposal of unsolicited and often useless goods on the doorstep of those deemed in need, who are rarely consulted in the process. Following the 2010 earthquake, Haiti was flooded with international donations, a post-disaster phenomenon known as ‘material convergence’ (Holguín-Veras et al. 2013). The amount of goods arriving was unmanageable and ‘about 80% of clothing donations were useless’ (6).This logic of giving at the heart of post-disaster development narratives tends to maintain inequalities between the helper and the helpless, echoing colonial binaries between the white ‘saviour’ and the black ‘primitive’ in need of saving.
In the context of Haiti, Colin Dayan reminds us that Haitians themselves have often been thought of as disposable, when she points to a racism ‘that depends for its power on the conceptual force of the “superfluous”, what can be rendered as “remnants” or “waste” or “dirt”… to be “disposable” is not having the capacity to be dispossessed, to be nothing more than dispensable stuff’ (2015: 93). The art of salvaging (as performed in the work of Prézeau and Hérard) becomes therefore an important means to highlight the persistence of a racialized global order and question the ongoing pèpèrizasyon of Haiti and its people, who do not necessarily want or need a hand-me-down t-shirt from the West. In 2017, Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, announced that Rwanda plans to ban imports of secondhand clothing by 2019, despite threats from the United States, currently the largest exporter of used clothing, that they will withdraw preferential trade benefits for Rwandan goods in the event of a ban. Proponents of the secondhand clothing industry, facilitated by economic liberalisation agreements between the US and Haiti over the past sixty years, have foregrounded its potential to generate employment, stymy the environmental impact of textile consumption, and ‘help’ people who cannot afford locally made new clothing (Gasseling 2017: 1282; Lewis & Pringle 2015). While officially prohibited in Haiti, the secondhand clothing industry continues to thrive as domestic textile production dwindles.9 In one boutique of Cap-Haïtien that sells new clothing, a rare find in the city, the owner explains to me that, due to high import tariffs on new goods, he must hide stock that he wishes to import from Miami within larger bales of secondhand clothing. While this is a prime example of an innovative management of a trade system that privileges a unidirectional flow of US imports and castoffs into Haiti, this case demonstrates how open borders remain firmly in the interest of the dominant global players, not the local community.
¹The company will benefit from the US trade agreements, the Haitian HOPE (Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement) Act and HELP (Haiti Economic Lift Program), till 2025. These agreements allow manufacturers in the garment assembly sector in Haiti to profit from duty-free exports to the US market. Together with reduced transport costs due to the proximity of Haiti to the US, this is currently the main advantage of working in Haiti for firms such as SAE-A.
²Sergile discussed the problem of fatras in Haiti during her keynote address entitled ‘Vision 2020: reconnaissance, réflexions et chantiers’ at the Haitian Studies Association 28th Annual Conference in Cap Haïtien, Haiti, 2016.
5School uniforms remain some of the only garments that independent Haitian tailors are still regularly asked to sew and are a reminder of how existing textile manufacturing has been displaced with donations from the US or garment assembly development models that largely serve North American economic interests. See Leah Gordon’s photography series The Tailors of Port-au-Prince: http://leahgordon.co.uk/index.php/project/tailors-of-port-au-prince/.
6See Haitian author Edwidge Danticat’s response to Donald Trump’s racist labelling of Haiti as a “shithole country”, Miami Herald, “Haitians are used to insults. Friday, we mourned. Today, we fight”, January 12, 2018. http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article194492199.html.
9In an effort to redress this imbalance, the Chambre de Métier et de l’Artisanat d’Haïti (CMAH) has set up an initiative (together with Oxfam and the Groupe d’appui aux repatriés et refugiés (GARR)) to support and offer training to tailors and seamstresses working in marginalised rural communities of Haiti.
References:
Dayan, Colin. 2015. ‘The Gods in the Trunk, or Writing in a Belittered World’ in Kaiama L. Glover and Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken Revisiting Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.
Gasseling, Kelsey. ‘The Threads of Justice: Economic Liberalization and the Secondhand Clothing Trade Between the U.S. and Haiti’. Boston College Law Review 58 (4): 1279 – 1319.
Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso.
Holguín-Veras, José, Miguel Jaller, Luk N. Van Wassenhove, Noel Pérez, and Tricia Wachtendorf. 2013. “Material Convergence: An Important and Understudied Disaster Phenomenon.” Paper presented at WCTR conference, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. London: Penguin.
Lewis, Tasha. 2015. ‘Apparel Disposal and Reuse’. In Sustainable Apparel : Production, Processing and Recycling. Blackburn: Woodhead Publishing.
Lewis, Tasha L., and Anne Pringle. 2015. “Local Buttons: Sustainable Fashion and Social Entrepreneurship in Haiti.” Journal of Contemporary African Art 37: 114-125.
Muthu, Subramanian Senthilkannan. 2014. Assessing the Environmental Impact of Textiles and the Clothing Supply Chain. Oxford: Woodhead Publishing
Schuller, Mark. 2016. Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Shamsie, Yasmine. 2014. “La construction d’un parc industriel dans l’arrière-pays rural d’Haïti. Quelques observations sur le partenariat État-société et les capacités de l’État.” Cahier des Amériques latines 75: 79-96. doi: 10.4000/cal.3131
Shell, Hanna Rose. 2006. ‘Textile Skin’. Transition 96(1): 152-163.
Shoaff, Jennifer L. 2017. Borders of Visibility: Haitian Migrant Women and the Dominican Nation-state. Tuscaloosa : The University of Alabama Press.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1990. Haiti State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Zamani, Bahareh, Sandin, Gustav, and Greg M. Peters. 2017. ‘Life cycle assessment of clothing libraries: can collaborative consumption reduce the environmental impact of fast fashion?’. Journal of Cleaner Production 162: 1368 – 1375.
Charlotte Hammond is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Cardiff University, UK (2016-20). Her current project examines modes of solidarity and resistance between women garment workers, and the formation of sustainable fashion communities, in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. She is the author of Entangled Otherness: Cross-Gender Fabrications in the Francophone Caribbean, published with Liverpool University Press in 2018.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Can I call myself a witch if my only rituals revolve around a migraine I get roughly every one PM on a Sunday? Brunch seeps through my skin, maple syrup curses and hexes against dippy eggs, brunch is a curse we have given ourselves when we decided that breakfast could be called something different when 9-to-5’ers aren’t 9-to-5’ing, and so maybe all food service workers are in someway mystics for bearing the burn of a decision hubris created.
Shed the layer of skin that is all coffee ground and honey stick, my skin has never been softer than after the 9 hours behind a la marzocco, and for this I’m conflicted, but no one needs to call themselves fancy for drinking orange juice and Andre (maybe this is Andre’s curse, something aggressive and full of headaches).
If working Brunch makes me a witch I do not want magic in my world, I want dippy eggs at home, in bed, alone. If being full of magic means spending that energy at work, please fire me for my insolence, pyre this body against the flat top grill, fry me over easy. If it isn’t too much, over medium.
Joan D’Arc, what kind of egg did they burn you at? Sunny side? Were you poached in gods mouth? At least I have enough power to stop a spell asking for poached witches with their toast for 7 dollars an egg. There might not be much use for breakfast magic in anything but denial, so I know I will deny away until my paycheck denies itself into groceries or rent instead of a knife slicing down the middle of me in anticipation of something dippy.
POEM IN WHICH I TRANSITION INTO MITOCHONDRIA
the powerhouse of the cell.
a waitress goes viral bodyslamming a pervert – rejoice! I want to body slam everyone who ever hurt me
but I am weak now so it is time to work on getting swole until it’s possible to body the world.
Remember when milk was supposed to give you strong bones? I stopped drinking dairy and now it just gives me strong gas
so maybe bodyslamming is off the table, but I could chokeslam with my unfortunate bowels – rejoice to your distance: for being downwind(?) from me.
I used to be fit and even than I was better at running away from my fears, then running into the flames of unforgiveness.
When I was young, I remember running from anything that could bite into me, whichever way that would be.
One of the last memories I have of my brother is restraining him from swinging fists at me and my mother.
He was a powerhouse of the cell, the cell being the family. I need to get swole so I can do more than just run or restrain –
I need to not be afraid of my mortality so much that it overtakes. But I am afraid. If they recorded it, my first autonomous feeling
would probably be fear. Fear of myself, of the world, of mankind. Being alive is a shitty undertaking. I need to undertake getting swole.
Take the rug from under myself, I don’t get to decide that this world is worth being strong enough to destroy me.
The Undertaker chokeslams Mankind through the top of the cell in ‘98 – when I’m swole I’ll chokeslam mankind too
and through that will know if it’s worth it to live long enough to die for a world destined to overpower you.
POEM IN WHICH I TRANSITION DURING A HUNGER STRIKE
I can’t talk about gender without also talking
about hunger / I salivate for neither and
eclipse my body in androgyny / Bless the hot
takes that say white androgyny isn’t the same
as noncomformity / I need to know my body
isn’t what I should run after / yet I run after it
/ I have been hungry for as long as I have been
uncomfortable / with my monikers / with the
sound of my name in your mouth / call me
what you will / just don’t call me late to a
dinner / I wouldn’t show up at to begin with /
an unconscious strike against masculinity /
women cook / men eat / and I wither / I can’t
talk about being a trans feminine body
without talking about the hunger I hide from
/ in the darkest parts of the water / catfish in
the mud / me, a woman / me, a heart so slow
/ you could mistake it for your own / I’m
ashamed I wasn’t born with a skeleton as
delicate as my self-esteem / so I stale my
bones / peanut brittle body / I can’t talk about
my hunger without talking / about my gender
/ my moon and my sun / constant eclipse of
wanting / I ask for progesterone to
redistribute the fat in me / I redistribute my
time to avoid meals until there is cleavage /
the second I start thinking of my transition /
as against something I cannot control / is the
same second the penned my date of birth / it
can be recorded once more when I tried on a
dress in a friends dorm room / a sweet sixteen
of bones / I drown in my saliva and a man I
don’t know / calls me sweetheart / how I wish
to hydrate off of my own blood / bite the
tongue that feeds you / and I am tongueless /
show me a way to avoid mirrors and I will /
show me a way to avoid meals / and I will /
and I have / I work 8 days a week and don’t
give myself time to eat / and yet only my
muscles wither / okay google “how to shrink
your skeleton” / okay google “how long can
you strike against hunger” / my gender is in
solitary / until another queer calls me a babe
/ and I drink my way into desire / drink desire
to fill myself / full house of liquids / must be
a siren / must mermaid my body against a
current / the moon is full against the sun / and
I am blind to my exposed ribcage / curious
that I’ve never lost my voice / but never
known what song to sing to be ravenous for a
meal / I can’t talk / about gender / or hunger
/ without reference to the absence I salivate
for / my gender is a burning star / my hunger
the rock that wanes in orbit around me / my
body stands in solidarity against myself / I
drink and it refuses to eat / I eat compliments
about my body as they crest the jetty of my
skin / so soft and without / fault / so when I
talk about my gender / I talk about my hunger
/ my little titties and my fat belly / so empty
and wanting / hiding behind every excuse /
manmade levees / child of poverty / my
stomach learned from my cabinets how to be
so empty / my one excuse / I never learned to
eat / so I swallow my saliva / I never learned
how to be a woman / so I become a monster
instead / all ribs / the hull of a ship I build
with my bones / polish with my pills / use the
fat I grow chemically to hold myself together
/ the tides are changing so I need to learn to
float a full feminine body / I won’t make it to
the bottom of the ocean / no matter how small
I make myself
POEM IN WHICH I TRANSITION AWAY FROM PERSONHOOD¹
¹“If the state is taken as an actant then there is little need to decide whether it is an actual “person” or not . . .” –Stefanie R. Fishel, The Microbial State: Global Thriving and The Body Politic
Starting a habit takes a reminder, a routine, and a reward. I don’t want to keep waking up if it means I’ll be reminded that life is a routine where the imbalance of power rewards those that strip away everything from the people I love.
Aeon Ginsberg (they/them) is a writer and performer from Baltimore City, MD. They are the author of two chapbooks: Until The Cows Come Home (Elation Press, 2016) and Loathe/Love/Lathe (Nostrovia! Press, 2017). Aeon is a Taurus, a barista, a bartender, and a bitch.
Yongyu Chen studies Comparative Literature at Cornell University, where he helps edit the Cornell undergraduate poetry review Marginalia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, BOAAT, DIAGRAM, jubilat, Indiana Review, and Sonora Review, among others. He is from Beijing and grew up in Knoxville, TN.
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