Category: AP28

AFTER THE THIRD BOTTLE OF PEROXIDE

                                                                                                         you start to collect what people say to you.

your mother:
is it permanent?

             as you lie on an ottoman,
              hair arranged like a chinese fan

                          you wonder if she understands that hair, like the forest floor
                           regenerates itself.

                                       being a bleached blonde is temporarily
                                       permanent, like a clipping tucked in soil:

                                                    every day it inches towards regrowth, invisible at first.

your mother, two months later, as you board the flight to see her:
are you back to black?

             your brother echoes the same question.

                          you picture them chopsticks in hand, picking up strands
                           of steamed kangkong and deliberating if you are sufficiently chinese
                          to be seen with the family

your spanish (one-time) boyfriend:
you will always look more natural with black hair.

him, while lying in bed after eating curry:
you’re asian, remember that.

                          as if to squash you
                          back into a mooncake mold.

your vietnamese-american hairstylist:
do you notice increased attention from men?

                          as if the most essential part of a salted egg yolk
                          is not its flavor but its yellow.
                          as if black hair means rice paddy.
                          as if whiteness is a country manor with acres
                          of hedge mazes and i am kissing the iron gates,
                          pleading with outstretched arms.
                          as if my most natural habitat is a landscape
                          wiped off a ming vase.

                          as if i need the colonial tongue to wag at me:                       
                          don’t try to be white.

waitresses at chinese restaurants:
you speak chinese? i thought you were korean

waitresses at korean fried chicken places:
you’re not american?

bartenders:
where are you from in california?

                                                                            ethnicity is elastic
                                                                            until it snaps.

            after the third bottle of peroxide you are the beginning of a joke.

man on the street:
a blonde asian wearing an ac/dc shirt walked into a bar

                          you start to wonder what futures can be derived
                          from peering at the sediment inside a bleach bottles –

                                                                 or if you are less chinese with all your pigment stripped.

Love Song For My Eyelids

my father’s cleaver falls like a bomb
and bone makes itself subservient, comes away
jagged like a beer bottle smashed on a railing.

            i have spent years saving up for someone to slice
            my eyelids, stitch skin to skin,
            create a crease.

standard pork belly is fifteen percent fat.
fatty varieties average thirty. my eyelids:
whatever percent, they cannot lift themselves.

            my eyelids are a tubby boy sleepily waiting
           for his mother. my eyelids try to slap themselves
           awake but droop their heavy heads.

until the gunshot of my father’s cleaver renders
every blink a beg. he hangs a cutlet,
red flesh, skin drooping in his window.

            sagging eyelids are the penance paid
            by a butcher’s daughter, for every
            pert and round thing dismembered in their place.

Janelle Tan was born in Singapore and lives in New York City. Her work appears in Arc Poetry Magazine, Bone Bouquet, and Stoneboat. She is the recipient of a 2018 Academy of American Poets Prize, and is currently an MFA candidate at New York University. janelle-tan.com.

 

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from A Death Diary: Day 10

I don’t know if there is a word for what I am writing: a death diary?

For years, you kept a record of each day: visitors, medications. Notable events.

Your caregiver’s name, the one with the red coat and yellow buttons. After dinner, she laid a hand on your shoulder, though you did not wish to be touched.

How sad it is that even this last memento of the dead should vanish.[1]

Your last entry was two weeks ago.

I did not know I was to continue your work in this way.

Saturday, the day of your last entry. Wednesday, the day you died.

Why do people keep diaries? Prisoners, explorers, regents—of course. But there are so many others, nobly addressing the entire future.[2]

In death, I can speak to you as I could not in life.

In death, perhaps you hear me as you did not in life.

Typing the words, The day you died, I have the feeling of someone watching over my shoulder. You are both here and not here.

Nothing is sadder than the time after a death.[3]

Sunday, you woke coughing, lungs filled with fluid.

Monday, you refused morphine, insisted you would not die.

Tuesday, you did not speak at all.

When I said goodbye, I did not know it would be the last time, though I felt it was possible.

There were sandwiches for lunch. In the kitchen, dozens of plastic vials, tagged with name and medical number.

They stopped giving you eye drops.

To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget.[4]

Afterward, I touched your cheek, which felt very cold but still very much a cheek. How my mother’s skin feels—soft and strangely intimate.

Though a cheek is not a particularly intimate part of the body.

Although to touch it is a different matter. Or to kiss it, which I did.

Paper cups and mouth swabs dispersed throughout the house, objects whose functions had ended with the same finality as your body.

It is sad to think that a man’s familiar possessions, indifferent to his death, should remain unaltered long after he is gone.[5]

Left in a pile on the washing machine: the flannel shirt you wore the day before your death. A cotton nightgown.

This is an account that has already ended. It is Day 10 after your death.

To write this diary, chronicling the days after your death, is to write past the end, into the silence that follows the final statement.

And so I write into the beyond—for me, a new kind of blindness.

The body is interred in some lonely mountain and visited only at the required times. Before long, the grave marker is covered with moss and buried in fallen leaves. The evening storms and the night moon become the only regular mourners.[6]

Is it possible for the dead to keep a pillow book?

Do I lack imagination, a Japanese woman poet writing in the style of Sei Shonagon?

Maybe I should write a novel. Dense, literary realism with a sweeping, masculine plot.

But instead, these airy, ethereal musings. My interest in ephemera. Today’s thoughts, which pass over the face like regret.

A new question: are you now a ghost?

What is the different between a ghost and an ancestor?

We do not by any means forgot the dead, even after months and years go by, but, as they say, “the departed one grows more distant each day.”[7]

I am adrift in the openness of this new time—there appears no beginning nor end.

---

[1] Kenko, “30,” Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko, trans. Donald Keene (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 31.

[2] Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015), 7.

[3] Kenko, 31.

[4] Manguso, 6.

[5] Kenko, 30.

[6] Kenko, 30-31.

[7] Kenko, 30.

Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Isako Isako, winner of the 2017 Alice James Award. She received her MFA from the University of Washington and is a Kundiman and VONA/Voices Fellow. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, The Yale Review, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. Read more at: miamalhotra.com.

 

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(Blood) Quantum Mechanics

:: the fundamental theory that describes
             nature at the smallest scale of energy

             from atomic and subatomic ndns ::

have you ever seen how the sun clears
             a saguaro? a billion phosphorous petals

ruptured on the spines of its fruit,

coming to bubble like diabetes-pricked fingers.
             my uncle told me that no one appreciates
ndn science—they could never know how
an auntie beads algorithms and protein structures
                          with just the
             right shades of blue and yellow.

these are original tricksters
bound to knowledge, without
needing words, to know what has been cannibalized
by colonial teeth.

how can you
measure genocide? by carnage, weak tongues,
             or fealty to blood laws?

could i know an elder who comforts this body
without gender but full of violence measured
                          against it?

                          [the uncertainty principle states
             that both the position and the momentum
of the free particle ndn

cannot be measured with complete white
             precision]

i learn to paint my face with patience
while my mind watches light refracting
between the window and a man’s eyes, belonging

to the hand who holds a depressor
             on my tongue, spreading papillae
                          like the legs he will attempt to explore later,

                          as he asks me if my family has a
             history of alcoholism? and did i
read about what is happening at Standing Rock?
             but is not interested in what i say,
                          until two days later:

             i crawl into the emergency room,
kidneys beginning to fail.
             the nurse asks why i didn’t come in earlier?
                          how did i even manage to get there?

             how do you explain that your dna
is fortified by braids of anguish? that after so much
             time and attempted assassinations,
                          even the smallest [subatomic] ndn
             knows every wound and how to survive it?

Loanword for a Body

the satellites above, in metal bondage, are trans-                                                                    mitting
             information to thankless people
             whose hands flicker each other’s holes,
             as the moon swallows the shadow of its former
the prairie, where I was born, was once trans-                                                                           sected
             by a pink sun, split open in the sky
             from my mother’s singing
             & my throat echoing her in cries
when Creator made me, they were trans-                                                                                   lating
             not-girls & not-boys into whole people
             w/ knees inventing new words as they opened & closed
             & when asked for my name, silent I’s dripped from my lap
on the day I return to the crows, my body trans-                                                                  gendered
             ceremony w/ yellow ochre swept on unzipped skin,
             my two young sisters will sing & cut apples
             to feed the feathered & femme pallbearers,

             who during my wake
              will feast & hold me as their own
              before letting the river silt
              know the true name of this body.

My safeword is restless

We have an apartment with a small patio
& we can hear every inch of rosemary
grow from the herb garden. We watch
cottontails scamper down the cement wall
separating us from “colonial”-style homes.
We stop making jokes about the houses.
We grow tired of ruminating on the same scab.
We know the past is preserved in error here.
We have no children & I start making tea
to make my body feel useful during the long
afternoons where even the breeze cannot fill
such absences. It is early summer & sweat
collects at the back of our knees. We explore
the salt of each other. I share with your mouth
& its wounds. We fuck carelessly, leaning on
the window, afternoon sun nesting on our heads.
We run our fingers through each other’s hair,
scalps warmed, & what we feel takes the place
of want. Do you think there is a universe where
instead of rosemary, the garden grows white roses,
& the cottontails turn into salesmen for vacuums?
Could we learn how to hold onto that life too?
The version where we make comfort from what
we are given? & the one where our want died
& was replanted in the soil? & the one where even if
we try to coax it out, our want feels no need to bloom?

syan jay is an agender, Dzil Łigai Si’an N’dee (White Mountain Apache) cyberbrat who lives in invaded Nipmuc/Massachusett/Wampanoag land. They are the winner of the 2018 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize by PRISM International. Their work has been featured in wildness, Barrelhouse, Glass Poetry, Palette Poetry, and more. Their debut poetry collection Bury Me in Thunder is forthcoming with Sundress Publications. You can find more of their publication history and additional information at syanjay.com, or on Twitter @mxsyanjay.

 

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Hands Open for a Ricochet

                                          (a golden shovel after Kesha)

My breath comes cold, a sort of invitation—the light’s been
waning thin like the iron in my blood. You’ve underestimated
the ink stains on my tongue—now the gap in my teeth is my

personal vortex of filth. I’ll sway the sinister with this entire
mouth filled with flickering candles and salt sparkling to life,
just letting go of secrets, my hair laced with truth. Tonight I

believe in satin and stereo and, from the windows, I know
vitriol—and I ask it to dance. This city is a place for people
who would rather be birds; I hide the feathers. I’m gonna

spin in the stars if the blood lets me, a ghost coming to talk
trash at the threshold and on the street. I’m breaking the shit
you left on the high shelf—glass turns to bees. Look up and

taste the ending now on my lips to live and to burn. Darling,
I’m the root of the apple and the heart of magnolia—that’s
how I’ll bend and break to sting you and how I’ll still be fine.

Girl Is a Fever to Burn the Brick

                                          (a golden shovel after Kesha)

I can’t wait another day to turn the lights on. Using my mouth I
tear myself from this page at dusk. The body knows—it’s been

my flannel and silk to sink into the savory, to hold onto bad living
and more crows tapping at the window. The oak presents itself in

splinters, slides into my skin. I drink myself like a rich red tea, a
warm reminder of the ash and the vein. Seeds are the lonesome

chords striking my vertebrae, the overripe fruit of an entire galaxy
come to die beautiful in garbage. When I wake I am nothing but

little orange bottles. And I am the dirt and the gravel the roses in
my teeth the yarrow down my arms the stiff feathers set to let my

fingers loose to touch the rough bark of the world. These are my dreams
floating in water. No, drowning. No, walking in waves, foaming breath. I

wash my hands in a puddle of apple blossoms, crush the flowers, see
that tired coyote, her teeth out. I take your cooling embers, put them

behind my lips, wear them like diamonds. I’m here and I come
to claim the magic of paper and silver, the mystery of heart and

snake. I let the lace touch my knees and step outside to rescue
myself from the duality of virtue, a human touch to haunt me.

E. Kristin Anderson is an author, poet, Starbucks connoisseur, and glitter enthusiast who formerly made magazines with The New Yorker and read submissions for Found Poetry Review. Currently she’s an assistant editor at The Boiler and an editorial assistant for Sugared Water. She is the editor of the literary anthologies Come As You Are (Anomalous Press) and Hysteria (Sable Books, forthcoming), and is the author of nine chapbooks including Pray Pray Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night, A Guide for the Practical Abductee, Fire in the Sky, 17 seventeen XVII, and Behind All You’ve Got (forthcoming). Kristin grew up in Maine and has a B.A. in Classics from Connecticut College and currently lives in sunny Austin, Texas.

 

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SEX DREAM IN THE KEY OF APORIA

I half-wake in sudor, queer vernacular forgotten in the sinew of sleep.
Wetted by a man whose saunter turns

                                                                            my breed diaphanous,

I fasten myself to his shared anatomies while he ascribes me
to the shades of children we’d make.

                                                                            Sex, my choice

harness for affection, I falter before unreining curiosity.
Trans time and space,

                                                                            I follow the russet roads inside

myself, Accra lanced into my neural system still. My intra-continent sweats
through shirts, and drinks stout,

                                                                            though it tastes of displacement.

I still have a penchant for what misconstrued me, to live among kin in exclusion.
Awake, I don’t conflate touch with knowledge,

                                                                            so my projected selves approach

the helm as nimbus parts me. Their mission is simple.
I buck their tether

                                                                            They tighten its hold.

Never have i ever

            dated a Black person – my father, 2019

never knowing
            the sun’s blue genus

lipped along the back
as the light of a new day

            presses infinitesimal color
into the both of you

there is for me no other
way to tether love

between this vessel
            and the luminous spools

I cast against my ocean’s skin
at the hull of me latent lyrics

            at the helm an onyx compass
-wielding child

villageless in all their wanting

Xandria Phillips is a is a poet, educator, visual artist, and the author of the chapbook Reasons For Smoking, which won the 2016 Seattle Review chapbook contest judged by Claudia Rankine. Xandria’s debut poetry collection, HULL will be published this fall through Nightboat Books. They are the poetry editor at Honeysuckle Press and the curator of Love Letters to Spooks, a literary space for Black people. Their poetry is featured and forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere.

 

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Horse Blood

However determinate one’s genetic inheritance, it must still, as it were, be woven into the present, an activity that necessarily involves both receptivity to the specific shapes and textures of that present and a spontaneous creativity in adjusting oneself (and one’s inheritance) to those contours…that we speak of by the term “perception”.
-David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

The abject is an end of one kind of organism,                     meaning

we are birthed into the rhythm of                            human

until shocked into the pace of a flayed antelope     seeking safety.

How this run from community      undoes         all dialectics.

Art loses value.           Only speaks toward         commodity.

We call this the near future               or a parallel now.

A human                       on all fours

or injected                      with horse

blood.                      A beating heart           beaten

backward taking           vitality soaking          the sun

red or                               ridding                       we.

Personages                    swell into         disarticulation.

The shape of stratum then rounds into

an engorged                           timeline  ;

it’s gritty with bits of                  fossil too

much death to contain it all.             We

say take time to grieve                         to find

a creativity that erupts out from         nothingness.

We suppose a nothingness    always         we say

sight will lead us without worry             no

touch to lead us through             “those     contours”.

We call this growth        really           booming

out from the inherited                   forcing

everything into                    something     ,

but what of                         entropy    ?

Grossing your         self out            enough

to shock the system         into change.

An antelope        with thread and needle

cannot suture                itself–       withers.

Upending the Illusion of One

Borrowed Catharsis

The ground rips open &
I know this isn’t cosmopolitan
but it feels productive.

At dusk, I grow
as vibrations charge
& settle in my feet,

reaching roots
infused with
total chaos.

I shiver, then
the chasm
shifts.

Dirt falls
inward like
a fragment.

I borrow a neighbor’s
catharsis, craft a ball
of it-gets-better

suck it dry
hand it back.
It’s how I know

I’m alive.
I’m hungry &
my arms stay put

like wet tree leaves,
I glow briefly but
been boundless

too often unaware
of the heaviness
peace harbors.

I dim.
The sun’s down &
fog leaves me

all milky
slick &
functionless.

A corpse
A this-work-needs-grounding
A finger flinging dirt

Or my father’s
arms in water,
around me –

The quotidian is gross
like that. A sentence
working in tandem.

A winter cloud is grey
never pink
nor white.

Perfect strangers lay
against grass against
me in this thicket saying:

when you say, oh no division
you say, oh no division
say, oh no division

oh no division
no division
division

& if the voice
no longer heals you,
cradle the body.

m/ryan murphy lives in Brooklyn, NY via Mississippi. They were named a finalist for The Poetry Project’s 2018-19 Emerge–Surface–Be Fellowship. Some of their work exists in or is forthcoming from Entropy, The Felt, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Cosmonauts Avenue, and Bone Bouquet. The rest explores nonhuman rights, caesurae, queerness, and language’s existence beyond the confines of the page. Virtually friend them @mryanmurphy.

 

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To Woman (Persona as Dirt)

Litany in Addition and Subtraction

Figure 1:

If a girl has six plums and gives five away, how many plums does she have left? How many seeds? How much skin?

Answer:

A girl has one plum. No seeds. No skin. Just a moon-ripe fruit, bitten down to jagged core.

Figure 2:

If a girl has six children and gives three away, how many children does she have left? How many fingers? How many eyes?

Answer:

A girl has six eyes. Sometimes brown. Sometimes blue. A girl has thirty fingers, all of them stained with plums and plums and plums.

Figure 3:

If a girl has six hearts and gives two to her mother, two to her daughter, two to a stranger, how many hearts does she have left? Will they grow back like rough-cut violets? Will they bruise when they are touched? When they are not?

Kathryn Merwin’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Cutbank, Passages North, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Birdfeast, Sugar House Review, Prairie Schooner, and Blackbird. She has read and/or reviewed for the Bellingham Review and The Adroit Journal, and serves as co-editor-in-chief of Milk Journal. She received her MFA in poetry from Western Washington University and currently lives in the District of Columbia. Connect with her at kathrynmerwin.com.

 

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triptych

notabody

give it to me straight, doc

a medical event, in 3:

Kinsey Cantrell is a Brooklyn-based poet. Her work has appeared in Datableed, New Delta Review, Bomb Cyclone, petrichor, Rogue Agent Journal, and elsewhere. She is on the social media and events teams for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and she received her BA/MA in Creative Writing from Miami University of Ohio. She can be found online at kinseycantrell.com and on Twitter @kinseymads.

 

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