Category: AP33

The Chessmen

Note: this is a Square Poem to be read both horizontally and vertically.

Semiotics

Nkosi Nkululeko, a 2017 Poets House and 2018 Saltonstall Foundation of the Arts Fellow, is the winner of Michigan Quarterly Review’s Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets 2018. His work is published and/or forthcoming in journals like Oxford Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Callaloo, The Offing, Ploughshares, and is anthologized in The Best American Poetry and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry. Nkosi Nkululeko is a poetry, chess, and music instructor from HARLEM.

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Crevice Letter

Done plowing the fields,
the ravenous farmers doffed a cadaver

from the low branches
of a tree outlining the sky.

Their faces left no traces
of wide mouths and widest eyes;

yet, they slowly veered around their heads,
cutlassing the air

with imagined thoughts.
The low gradient of sunlight, through the gaps

of thick leafage of trees, dappled
the forest floor in uneven streaks of pearly lights,

telling of the descending sun.
The letter in the crevice

flicked like a star.
Its angle—a part of the edge. 

On a spring tree, a squirrel would unnerve
the farmers with cutlass and hoes

draped over slack shoulder blades.
A nest emptied of home smelled of

decaying innards—
of a sparrow—devoured by a heron.

The men stayed for a while,
speculating what to do with the form

festered by the breeze—
contemplating the murder of crows over the body.

Onyedikachi Chinedu is a Nigerian poet. They are a 2021 HUES Foundation scholar, a poetry reader for Non.Plus Lit and Guesthouse Lit; their works are published and forthcoming in Guesthouse Lit, Anomaly, The Cortland Review, The Hellebore, Rappahannock Review, Midway Journal, and elsewhere.

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prayer for us who await state execution

i wish there was enough quiet
for me to watch for migratory birds

to smell wet trees on a sunrise
and give up my medicine for
just a breath of air.

some hymns are loud—
too nestled in the nation’s mourning
for me to access their symphony.

so i hear the great thud instead—
the instruments finding their way to rest. 

i am many creatures 
that live sick at the bottom.
we chew at the cud of the captors

and pray to stay unseen.
but like my ancestors
who walked under the water
and made their last prayers 

in the moon fire,
the faintest chord still
sets my body floating up
to the source of majesty. 

exhume the Bodies that i might make them absolve us

i was birthed
screaming     in the middle
of a nation made of fire

but my people
bubbled me out of the Water.

i pray to Death—
draw me a map. 
send me to the water
and i will find who is
left of us.

i tread the path
the stories told—
into the river.
let her lick a lie
of sleep into my ear.
drowning comfortable

when it bursts.
finally i am ready
to listen my bloodfolk
who also chose the Water.

every time
that i
have sought out silence
it has not shot me down
on the street.

in that way
it is not like
America. 

i asked the tarot why it hurts when you’re inside me

1 the craftsman

maybe i am a seed
not the soil. 

perhaps the body was right
all along. 

a joke before
the harvest
                       to find joy 
                       to let you inside me
                       without a sound.

arms undone and around the world and maybe you find your way between them too.
is it fatherly to want to take you into me?
so the streets cannot smother you? 
if i laugh will it make you uncomfortable?

let’s make light feet into the water
and i’ll let you cry when you fuck me
like men do.

2 fog and his consequences

my grieving finds cover in the fog
               the shelter made up what is left undone
               at the end of the day.

i smell it when i go to rest but
the fog’s so thick and green we only ever
get close enough to grope 
at our moaning in the dark.

my vision got blurry—i can only assume you bent time around me.
if you think i fucked up you can just tell me.
              bite my lip so it bleeds
              clean me out with your fingers even when i close my legs

mother is angry i’ve let them make my waters dirty.
but at least she isn’t subtle.

try again.
i promise i won’t yell this time.

3 pilgrim

i have packed
i have not forgotten a companion
not again.

pillar 
person
bedside
box

undoing is walking toward morning.
morning is to be without bed nor fellow.

unmake love to me.
unfuck me then if it makes you feel less vulnerable. 

i leave at night
and the crickets tell me where go
where they are loudest. 
there is no way past the mountains
but still i leave them behind me. 

forward.
i’m clean now. so it’s okay to kiss me.

Tori Ashley Matos is a poet and performer based in New York City. As a non-binary and Afro-Taino poet, their work is always evolving, searching, muddy, and filled with ghosts, liberation, and freedom. They graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and they’ve been published in Curlew Quarterly, beestung, Perhappened Mag, No, Dear Magazine, and more. They are a Gaze Journal Loving Gaze Poetry Prize winner, a Brooklyn Poets and Lit Fest Fellowship finalist, and a two time DreamYard poetry fellow. Follow them on Instagram @ToriAshleyMatos.

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why are my hands wet

Content Note: This audiopoem is a ritual meditating on the internal expression of trauma activation; please exercise care in listening and reading, particularly if you have experienced trauma, PTSD, sexual assault or self-harm.

                                                                  the tears.                                                                                                                                              where did the tears come from? the eyes.
                                the blood.
where did the blood come from? an opening.                 the ducts.   what wrings the ducts?
                                                                                                                                                             grief.
                                                                         the dishes.
what made the wound? the knife.                                  
                                                                                                                 where is the grief now? pickled.
             where is the knife now? clean, in the dish rack.
    where is the wound? top of the thigh.
                                                                                                                 what made the chest tight? the heart.
what does the thigh want? to be touched.                                               
            what does the thigh want? to be touched.
                                                                                                                  what made the chest tight? grief.
                                                                                                                             what made the grief?

            what does the thigh want? to never be touched.

                                                                                                                             how does relief come? pickled.

where is the knife now? the drawer.
            what does the drawer want? an opening.           
                                                                                                                 how does relief come? clean, in the dish rack.
  what made the hands clench?
                        what made the grief?
                                                                                                 where is the wound? hidden.     where is the wound?

the eyes.    where do the eyes go? my hands.                                  
                                                                                                what does the thigh want? an opening.
                                                                                                                     what made the grief?

    how does relief come? the knife.
           how does the heart come?
                                                                    the blood.
                                                                                                  where is the knife now? my hands.
                                                                                                                           what does the heart want? an opening.

        where do i go now? grief.                                          where do i go now? an opening.
                           where do i go now? my hands.                            where do i go now? to be touched.

Ars poetica as / Self-portrait as / Late Heavy Bombardment¹

consider the picaresque of one woman (told to another woman told to another woman told to another)
                                                                                                                       whose mind traps her in a room for hours
                      at a time—lost to reason / she’s back
                                                                                                              at the cataclysm / fragile crust caving
                           under each concussion

                                                                                               as I / too / have been tumbling back—
          down into that same old crater
                                                                                                    with my sample jars / this incessant arm
of curiosity / scraping at hoary lunar soil
                                                                                                                    for buried memory / I’m hankering

     to know how we’re propelled                       
                                                                                                   / can’t stop searching for some engine / a ballistics
thru the firmament / to twin these tiny motors
                                                                                                    of my fears / which rumble at the limits of my senses
   like starships on unseen screens—

                                                                                                    where nothing grows / I’m tempted to believe
in stasis / not the wheeling gyration of bodies
                                                                                                                   I can still call / heaven / though I know it as
                     / up / or / around / ––
                                                                                                                                        a hollow myth––     
                         last night / I dreamt again of
                                                                                                                    being entered in darkness / roving under
my bombarded skin / & there I froze
                                                                                                again / my dream screams soundless as space—
                           scrabbling out of sleep
                                                                                                                      I’m ravenous / fumbling for any theory
    to sate my evidence / tonguing at mined shards
                                                                                                                 from a mind knocked loose as teeth—

        I wonder how any of us consent to
                                                                                                 say: keep loving / knowing the next impact could
                  come at any time / like this:

                                                                                                                   —suddenly young again / at the shore—
              I tire / of playing catch / with a partner
                                                                                                       but covet the ball itself / a small red
 satellite / I can raise / aloft in one hand /
                                                                                                               slam / over & over
                                  against soft / white sand

                                                                                                                     where the wallowing tide slacks &               
                   shaved clean of kicked phosphorescence
                                                                                                               longs to become high
                                         / sky-slaked & violent with stars

¹ Also known as the lunar cataclysm; a theoretical spike in asteroid collisions with planets and moons of the inner solar system hypothesized to have occurred roughly 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago. Experts remain divided as to whether there is enough evidence to conclusively prove a heightened incidence of damaging impacts.

KT Herr (they/she) is a queer poet, songwriter, and curious person with an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. KT has received creative support from G.L.E.A. and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Currently, they are a board member with Four Way Books and an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor PhD Fellow in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston. Their recent work appears or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Frontier, Barrow Street 4×2, and elsewhere.

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Maybe: God

the existence of bad words implies good ones. you believe
saying yes is good even when you don’t want to. if there are
bad girls who curse and spit and sit like men then there are
good girls who don’t. you wonder if girls and words are ever
just those things without dichotomy. you spend a lot of time
closed—your legs and your lips—trying out goodness. god,
like any parent, will be very nice to you until displeased, you
learn. you say yes, you don’t have much space to take up
anyway. it is before the iPhone and you only have 200 texts a
month to use sparingly. you make each one count so as not to
spark a back and forth you’d have to pay for. never I feel only
yes okay sorry. all arguments cost you something. plus, you
learn, anyone bigger than you can tell you what to do. a boy
bigger than you says be a good girl, don’t say a word. you
reassess—there are no good words. girls are good when
silent and open at the command of someone bigger. god is
good, see how god is silent? you should be smaller than
everyone. parents, like any god, speak in parables. bad girls
end up dead or on the streets. they do not mention who killed
them, who closed their doors. your phone bill comes, rewards
your lack of questions. your parents call. you are scared to
pick up.                                                                                                     

II.

a good listener is just a bad conversationalist. so my
arguments with god are one-sided long paragraphs to which I
see read at [day/time]. I am proud to admit I speak enough to
have my phone determine my frequently used words. so by
now I can use predictive text to pray—
Hello
God 
Dammit 
I 
Am 
Still 
Trying 
To 
Talk 
About 
It 
With 
My 
Mother 
OK

Sanctity: An Exposé

           Historically¹, divorce rates have increased.² Thesis: like gym membership, marriage be seeming like a good idea at the time. Then after a while you look at it and go—ehhh. They look at me expectantly and say we are ending.³ I am wearing cargo pants and a tank top⁴ sitting on the edge of my puffy comforter. I wonder what this means in terms of dinner. This time I have nothing to say,⁵ though I have been through more devastating things.⁶ My father’s eyes are begging.⁷ I refuse, trying to look busy, I scan the app store for another virtual pet.⁸

¹ as of yesterday
² there’s one more divorce in this family
³ marriage
⁴ a phase, unlike the girlfriend
⁵ who would
⁶ in my lifetime, after the end of Webkinz
⁷ give me something
⁸ to hold on to

Jae Nichelle’s work has been featured in Vinyl Poetry and Prose, Muzzle Magazine, The Offing, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She was a 2020 Watering Hole fellow, and her chapbook, The Porch (As Sanctuary), is available from YesYes Books. Find her work on her website jaenichelle.com.

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ZX Spectrum

Sam Kemp teaches creative writing at the New College of Humanities in London. He’s an experimental poet who enjoys appropriating and misappropriating found texts and messing around in Photoshop. You can find more of his work at www.samkempoetry.com.

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lung volume

OPEN       as a window of a message      as a door to a daughter       as a line of
communication punctures     as mama can i tell you      something    as yes
looking up     from the window of the message       as yes you can tell me as
mama i need you to look at me   do this move     as don’t stop     looking as
one-hundred and six days and   counting             at home where the rule is OPEN
the door so i know you are safe in there       as OPEN         mama keeps the glass
coffin of each    message      window         ajar for her    daughter     to crawl 
inside with her         this fairy tale of life      outside this story of a woman 
who lived      with small men in the woods and stood    too close to a stranger 
so now she no longer breathes         OPEN as a vein to each question.               retract 
a little blood first and then       push through

CLOSE as a store we do not go to anymore as a lock the bolt
as nightmares set wrinkles in my unwashed face as a safety
measure as a minimum safe the word safe means secure the
word safe is a box that you can CLOSE to render something
you love distant from air & its many eager fingers. CLOSE
which is proximity and CLOSE which is proximity’s defeat
a clipped reel stop baby mama needs a moment yes mama’s
cheeks are wet you are okay we are okay come CLOSE to
me CLOSE to me as an anti-social distance.    CLOSE to me
       as a no               that never            names my face           

the morning OPENS with a monitor hemmed to my gut              this string of need.
i walk to the room where my children hit me.             she had a nightmare again.
this one about a deep fat fryer built into her stomach.             i cut apples and hide
the knife after.            our home is glass and breathing and this          is too much for
the children.           we OPEN our devices.               learning is a removal of thread
remote stitching back the broken skin            of another room.          i tell my girl
yes this is so hard and you are doing great               at being in this impossible. 
we are OPEN to the possibility of full in person learning this fall. full is a word
for drawing complete breaths. person is a word for the smallest coffin. learning is 
a removal of needle from glowing stone. fall is this, is what we do. an OPEN future
of obedience to gravity.

the evening CLOSES with this gut sunk
knuckle deep in worn claws to the sound of
constant urgency. whimper in the monitor i
walk a quiet hallway to the room where my
children hit upon notions of everything
somehow ending.              none of us sleep
we only CLOSE our crying for the day
that this changes. sometimes the whimper
never stops and i lie      alongside my son
until my breathing lets him sleep again
CLOSE to a candle for his fifth birthday
there’s an eclipse on           the fourth of july 
i don’t blame the sky for not looking not
even now, just to check on his sleep make
sure he’s still breathing.                                  

the function of a lung is to constantly undo its own work. 
closing to open. opening to close.

the function of a state is to constantly undo its own. 
too close to opening. barely open to closing.

a lung can OPEN 
the top hatch of the bar graph that has more death to name

a lung can CLOSE 
to a needle line of conversation, a heartbeat’s second wave

a lung can OPEN 
like a home for someone else when rent gets missed

a lung can CLOSE 
like a bank account when there’s nowhere left to bleed

a simile can mimic the work of a machine that breathes for the penultimate line
a word is not a ventilator because there can always be more of these

Jessica Lawson (she/her/hers) is Denver-based writer, teacher, and queer single parent. Her debut book of poetry, Gash Atlas (forthcoming 2022), was selected by judge Erica Hunt for the Kore Press Institute Poetry Prize, and her chapbook Rot Contracts was published summer 2020 (Trouble Department). A Pushcart-nominated poet, her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Entropy, Dreginald, Yes, Poetry, The Wanderer, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere.

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