Category: AP32

Ghosts and Harms

There are no bars in my eyes, see.
My experiences keep staring 
at the arts made by my footsteps.
Above this statement sits a history asking for a recall:
moments that became keloids. 
My great grandmother’s lineage has the marks of abandonments 
and her palms are memories of skived poppies.
I keep asking for the meaning of love and progress
and institution and preservation and memories
and gardenias and reformation and librarians
and reinstallation and liability and functionality.
My people have known the whips of wadding in water.
Where should I character in this story?
How should I tend and tender these mistakes?
The godheads and ghosts in collared coats keep burning 
the evidences, burning the facts, and clipping the anabasis.
Is knowing the golden handle of voice?
Is knowing a rebellion conceived?
Our children are shielded from the colour of our teeth.
Our children don’t know.
And our children are walking with eyes open yet blind.
At my backyard I am growing a garden 
where flowers remember.
I can mail you the scents.
I am arranging the un-deductibles into catalogues.
It’s such a burden caring alone, asking alone.
It’s such a drowning that you don’t care about these things and pasts.

 

Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto (@ChinuaEzenwa) is from Owerri-Nkworji in Nkwerre, Imo state, Nigeria and grew up between Germany and Nigeria. He has a Chapbook, The Teenager Who Became My Mother, via Sevhage Publishers. He won the Castello di Duino Poesia Prize for an unpublished poem, 2018 which took him to Italy. He was the recipient of New Hampshire Institute of Art’s 2018 Writing Award. His works have appeared in Lunaris Review, AFREADA, Poet Lore, Rush Magazine, Frontier, Palette, Malahat Review, Southword Magazine, Vallum, Mud Season Review, Salamander, Strange Horizons, One, Ake Review, Crannòg Magazine, The Question Marker, and elsewhere.

 

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Shot #2

It’s true. I cannot kill a pig with my bare hands. It’s a hard rule 
to live by— not distancing ourselves from the terror that brings 
us joy. I want to feel good after a meal without the smell of death
on my hands. After all, unfortunately, the pig gives me so much 
pleasure. Every morning, I wake up & offer myself humanness. 
What does it mean to be human? To be the opposite 
of a machine, of course.

I want to be as flexible as my glass-covered father.   Instead,
I bend to the mistake of the habitual; mess up             until 
the messiness compounds into something I can’t ignore.                      
I gave up womanhood to be a cyborg.             I want to be as impulsive 
as a computer program—everything all predetermined & bending 

to human           composition.     Every need thrusting into me
long enough to drain the womb from my palms. Let’s continue                         lubricate my vessels
& store my emotions                in a blender.                      Pick      a task for me
to do over & over—        wash the dishes—     fetch the remote—

suffocate the girlhood from me— I’ll shoot up
any microchip if it makes me into a god. The god that I know even said
I look more like him.

It’s true. I cannot kill who I used to be           even with
technology. What does that mean for me then?

 

KB is a Black queer genderless poet, educator, organizer, and student affairs professional. They have earned many fellowships and publications, most recently from Lambda Literary, Cincinnati Review, The Offing, and Equality Texas. Catch them talking sweetness and other (non)human things online at @earthtokb.

 

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When the Root of Apple (תפוח) Sweetly Exhales 

separate the skin / from the apple /
manzana  / sounds like mechitza  /
mitzvah / it is a good deed /
to separate / his meat / from her milk

 

Ars Poetica #____

I was already thinking 
about the future

of holding 
the damn parts in place

(my arm, my breath,
your face):

the arm as practice
for blood drawn

because hospitals
scare me, 

and I’m still clutching
my stomach, 

breathe, you tell me 
so I kiss you instead

(that’s a practice
in halation of sorts)

before I catch
my throat thumping

as I merge
on the freeway

I’ve almost
fallen off

of you inches
away from bed

or your arm
has fallen asleep

from my back’s
pressure on it

before it happens
it had already occurred

in my imagination
aren’t I always

anticipating
“earnestly 

desirous”
and isn’t that

what I’ve been
trying to do this

whole time
through the full

unfolding 
of this poem 

persuading you 
to lean

into the ladder
of me 

escalate
scale 

the most
heightened 

catastrophes

and get you so 
worked up 

you’ll end up 
________

 

Clayre Benzadón is an MFA graduate student at the University of Miami, managing editor of Sinking City, and Broadsided Press’s Instagram editor. Her chapbook, “Liminal Zenith” was published by SurVision Books. She was also awarded the 2019 Alfred Boas Poetry Prize for “Linguistic Rewilding” and has been published in places including SWWIM, 14poems, Crêpe and Penn, and Fairy Tale Review’s Gold Issue. You can find more about her at clayrebenzadon.com.

 

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How to Define Depression

The last three movies I’ve watched depict
nature and sexual violence. Been trying to
speak for hours, but my lips are fish fading
in the dirt. My wife holds my head in her
lap, and snot rivers from my nostril to her
thigh.

There is something broken. A moment ago, I was laughing. Now, I am a berry bush, trying not to be poisonous. I think, I am not good enough. And the sentence wraps my body like a ring toss. Again and again, until
I cannot tell the age of the rot.                     

I splash water on my face, a self-baptized flower, and wipe the weakness away. I can’t help but consider it all a waste of time. I could have been doing more productive things. Like ridding myself of the infected trees. Like deforestation. Like spray painting
a bright red X on my bark.                   

 

Lannie Stabile (she/her), a queer Detroiter, is the winner of OutWrite’s 2020 Chapbook Competition in Poetry; the winning chapbook, Strange Furniture, is out with Neon Hemlock Press. She is also a back-to-back finalist for the 2019/2020 and 2020/2021 Glass Chapbook Series and back-to-back semifinalist for the Button Poetry 2018 and 2019 Chapbook Contests. Lannie currently holds the position of Managing Editor at Barren Magazine and is a member of the MMPR Collective. Find her on Twitter @LannieStabile.

 

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Diagnosing C-PTSD

Sarah P. Strong is the author of two poetry collections, The Mouth of Earth (University of Nevada Press, 2020) and Tour of the Breath Gallery (Texas Tech University Press, 2013) and two novels, The Fainting Room (Ig, 2013) and Burning the Sea (Alyson, 2002). Their work has appeared in The Nation, The Southern Review, Poet Lore, The Sun, River Styx, Southwest Review, and many other journals. A recipient of grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and Connecticut Arts Council, they teach creative writing at Central Connecticut State University and live near New Haven, Connecticut with their spouse and daughter. www.sarahpstrong.com

 

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Elegy for the movement of elegy

arousal          the harbinger of a flood of blood
blood sprinkles on a country’s fresh map          vermillion—

          vermillion           parting desire on a wife’s perceptible head
          head butt to crash a legendary World Cup           dream—

dream           emboldens synonyms into antonyms’ golden teeth
teeth not transmitting from master to apprentice        smiles—

          smiles           an earnest man signing his marriage certificate
          certificate the nature of my clumsy talents          forgettable—

forgettable          first words of manhood clasping a cresting wonder
wonder how you tolerated for so long my gasoline           breath—

          breath           taken away from those who went to schools unblessed
          unblessed light in sooty warehouses crossing out little    cheeks—

cheeks           docile turning right to left found blued indescribable dead
dead clad themselves in shrouds of roses smelled wholesome sad—

          sad          the untainted hurt of fruit ripened swallowed unbitten
          unbitten remains the altar of my tongue’s accomplished lack—

lack          in the shape of grace every vanquished body realized
realized a future mother waist deep in marriage miscarriage—

          miscarriage          a world I sailed past pushed by inconceivable arousal

  

Satya Dash is the recipient of the 2020 Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize. His poems appear in Waxwing, Wildness, Redivider, Passages North, The Boiler, The Florida Review, Prelude, The Cortland Review and The Journal among others. Apart from having a degree in electronics from BITS Pilani-Goa, he has been a cricket commentator too. He has been nominated previously for Orison Anthology, Best of the Net and Best New Poets. He grew up in Cuttack, Odisha and now lives in Bangalore. He tweets at: @satya043 

 

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Just The Absence

Stone trees laden with pendulous fruit
     Clack: We’ll be your volcano, 
Grant you just the absence of the boot
For one spurt of lava. Go
     Baltering then to defy the storm

Your dreams are now entangled
     With the threads of this tapis woven 
By small hands gnarled and mangled
Hunting in lurching looms their stolen
     Bread, water, school uniform

 

Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Bandit Fiction, Shot Glass Journal, Across The Margin, Panoplyzine, Feral, Literati Magazine, and a number of other literary magazines. Studying life, languages and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a particular fascination for her. linktr.ee/HibahShabkhez.

 

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Our bodies are not crime scenes

Every morning
       ‘I want the President’ to answer the invitation—
              not crime but aftermath of statistics laws colonised language

I babble in aching logics, curling
       watchful onlookers
              into microselves. My rage writes      Nudity’s script

soothes tired habits. A deregulated algorithm observes
       every precipice, kicking        words won’t cut it
              still I come to them        Flesh ushered

onto an upholstery train
        can only follow the Paddy Wagon
               of direction      ancient rhythms      humming their lines

Love is rejuvenated in spectral conspiracies
      against the woman’s protest. She consecrates every sin
            Naked passion postpones catharsis, is catharsis

Pulled out of the building, she swims strange backstroke
       through the camera’s gaze       reordering distress
             with the authority of an apocalypse

Reckoning maps around her ankles
      her movement an ablution
                                                         releasing

genderless strength, loosening along
      its equations. And in that dream my woman laughter wanders
              forever. She is narrative unmoored       throwing facts into the sea

Morning spills out      infecting neighbouring villages
        I am just a schoolgirl      sampling
               the cave’s warm tang—clothes around my ankles—

And in that dream I fall but I keep moving. Her protest
       shapeshifts, slicing waves      alive to the body’s continual
              palimpsest      how it remembers backward      to an unmade choice

Note: Quoted text, including the title, comes from footage of a woman arrested after a protest in Pretoria: News24 YouTube.

Fleur Lyamuya Beaupert (she/they) is a queer Australian writer of Tanzanian and Anglo-Indian descent. Fleur’s poetry and prose have recently been published in Not Very Quiet, Speculative City, Rigorous, Social Alternatives, Scum and Meniscus. They work as a policy officer in disability advocacy.

 

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Hole Poem 1

 

Hole Poem 2

 

Melinda Freudenberger received her MFA in Poetry from The New School. Her poems have recently appeared in BARNHOUSE Journal, the New Delta Review, and Always Crashing magazine. She is an Associate Poetry Editor at West Trade Review. You can find more of her work on her website: melindafreudenberger.com.

 

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Critical Whiteness Studies (2020)

In this highly-unanticipated documentary
series, we examine the life of
critically-unnoticed artist Justin Davis through the whiteness in his immediate vicinity. We follow the drunk white woman running her fingers through his hair as she passes him in the brewery. When he drives through Missouri’s bootheel, we ask the white state troopers how many armadillos they’ve run over. As he fills up his tank off I-55, we shine the matte white ulnas of John D. Rockefeller. The whole time, his Vampire Weekend CD plays louder and louder in the background. And make sure you catch the series finale where we air an exclusive, never-before-seen interview with the artist as a newborn, sickly, so pale that the nurses thought his mom was trying to steal a white baby. This series has already received acclaim in places like every black square on Instagram, a $5000 bill, and the cheeks of NSA agents who may or may not be dropping in on Davis’ calls right now. We’ve been told it feels more honest than honesty. Like a case, it feels like it’s still making itself. We’ve been told it feels compulsively rewatchable, that the leery hills keep growing their eyes. It’s a cultural juggernaut you won’t want to miss stealing.

 

Justin Davis is a cultural worker and an MFA candidate at the University of Memphis. You can find his poems and hybrid work in places like wildness, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Apogee Journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, BOAAT, and Freezeray. He’s a past Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. He’s a proud union member.

 

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