Category: AP35

The Dude

My dad says a famous gunslinger is our ancestor

I still don’t know if it’s true

I once read the last part of a letter he wrote
before his murder

I wouldn’t be able to write you
anything half as eloquent,
paint a world in which this string
of words and em dash are enough
are all

I wish that when you looked up the old west
this was all you found
love sealed in ink sealed in wax
gun parts melted, sweethearts’ promises abound
whites never feeling the urge to build a ship,
one sturdy, able, thick pulse of a thing to withstand the non-Atlantic

Land never having left the hands of those who come from it

Who do I go to with this one?
I grow up with some Annie Oakley crap
and lies about the praries while perched near the Ala Wai
when 4,389 miles away 
half of my heart is missing me
my ancestors have been holding it and waiting
but don’t know where I’ve been stashed away

Can’t call me home with pūtōrino or pūrerehua
when I wouldn’t be able to recognize the sound

Does anyone else know that kind of feeling?
You know the one
where the blood is knotted so close together
it starts fighting itself,
a petition to move across the body, another limb
a different artery,
away from the parts that it finds savage
strayed from God
foresaken

What a strange life it is—
the offspring of Anglia digging generations deep
into Texas soil,
a meeting house just minutes away
from where Horouta beached in Te Tairāwhiti

Beneficiaries off the butchers for the New World
a people who saw home fires snuffed out in succession
both lines burn hard in me
a mixing
a legacy in two parts
an attempt to reconcile
so as to unearth some sort of beauty

Ngaio Simmons (she/her) is a Māori/pākehā spoken word artist and educator born and raised on the island of Oʻahu on Kānaka Maoli land in the unceded nation of Hawaiʻi. Now permanently residing in her ancestral homeland, Aotearoa, she is still writing about diaspora, identify conflict, and what it means to be Indigenous and queer in a world that repeatedly rejects both. She has been published in Contemporary Verse, Flux Hawaiʻi, Literary Hub, Ora Nui, Hawaiʻi Review, and Bamboo Ridge, among others. Her poem “Whānau” was recently featured in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series for AAPI month.

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TIERRA O MUERTE

The seasons were punctuated by extremes. Long, bitter winters with endless snowfall and hot, summer days giving way to monsoon and torrential downpour. Though they called it a valley it was really a slope, an upland mesa, formed by erosion over millions of years, since the earliest days of the planet’s existence, carving out mountains and cliffs made of metamorphic rock, rugged and craggy, casting deep shadows when sunlight descended below the horizon. 

And the sun shone a lot. The land was first green though eventually they named it yellow. But it was also often golden, when the aspen trembled and changed colors beside the spruce and evergreen. Truthfully, the land was mostly brown. A color no one likes to talk about. Rich with mineral, viscose and muddy. The animals certainly didn’t care: grazing even-toed ungulates that were splendidly horned, packs of canines, and birds aplenty.

Many people were born there but more just showed up, or were brought – by their husbands, or as captives, or forced by the will of their god. They claimed, and intended to cultivate the soil but over time only choked it with tillage and crops, stealing water and making dams, with beasts of burden trampling the land. Eventually boundaries were drawn, barriers arbitrary and destructive, gifted by monarchs on other continents. Those who were born there defended it but the boundaries changed hands, different owners maybe but still the same old thing. 

The people blended and blended and forgot how they started. Names and cultures persisted but many more were eradicated. Isolation was pervasive. And most of those who remained never thought that inaction was a form of collusion. A courthouse was built, emulating a society purporting to rid itself of excess, without ornamentation, with the insistence that empire was the birthplace of living. A new identity mounted under the banner of freedom, flagpoles proudly displaying their inclusion into a culture that does not want them. 

Nowadays it’s a ruin – just decrepit, old houses forgotten. A ballroom with no ceiling. A barn that’s collapsing. The people used to proclaim, Land, or death. But I think it might be and.

Dowsing

July fizzles. It languishes and snaps, then ends, again and again. So you pursue moisture. Rippling off of your skin, packed into venues, incessantly sweating. You are overdressed and ashamed to be wet. But you’ll never be younger and just love to dance.

Dive into the ocean, its warm buoyant waters. Trust your body to float; become the girl from Ipanema. It curls around and within, lowering defenses, letting a man suck on each of your toes. But spit is mostly water too, so be careful. Sickness follows you.

It surrounds you. Nearly eight-hundred thousand gallons at once. But it’s still not enough. So you hunker down and stay in one place where the tap water is celebrated, traveling through pipes where there’s nothing to waste. 

But you’re restless, you know. You head north to the tides, sinusoidal and flat, to a place like New Brunswick that gives while it takes. Learn what it means to prevent your escape. 

Choose to go without and retreat back to drought. Take it wherever it can be found. Watering holes, brackish and green. Sneaking into hotel swimming pools. The Sunset Marquis. You try not to be seen. House-sitting. Your high school friend’s wedding, cigars and cheeseburgers in a jacuzzi.

Some islands unnerve you, saline reminders of absence, while glacial lakes fold and envelope, water too cold to provide for your body. 

But eventually you learn how to make do with what’s what. Shorter showers. Less is okay – it’s still a lot. Daily hydration, don’t forget. You are a fish with horns. Sweat is just sweat.

Some merciful rivers continue to flow, cascading off granite – reminders each summer that you are a visitor still. And when July returns, you come to a hole, jack-hammered through a foundation, and are told all about an artesian well. Sources of water that can be nearly infinite. And you stop to think, Can you believe it? Abundance.

Greg Luna (he/him) is a queer Chicano writer and filmmaker. His work has been supported by the Kenyon Review, Tin House, i-D Magazine, Interview Magazine, and NewFest: The New York LGBTQ+ Film Festival. He is a graduate of the Kanbar Institute of Film & Television at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and lives in Los Angeles. He is currently at work on his first novel: an intergenerational family saga set in the American Southwest. He can be found on Twitter at @gregluna.

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Arrival Form

                                   erasure from Government Questionnaire, Ellis Island

            Manifest how 
                      you are.
                      Are you 
                                    at last    placed?

            Name      your country 
                                             as your    destination. 
                                                        Is your passage
                                                                      America n?

                                                          Are you 
                                                                        a yes     or no?

                                                                                     What     America 
                                                                                                    will you     form?

                                                                                                     All is yours. 
                                                                                                                  Color     your eyes.
                                                                                     Do you 
                                                                                                     Identify                     ?

Twenty Miles from Mexico

I am a flag 
        I stand for 
              water, I wave a faucet 
                            with one drop.

                            I am blue 
where nothing but sky is blue. 

              I wear the wind.  I tell people
                            come here, survive! 
  All I have is light, 
              holes of light, 

                            I am 
                            jumbled, un-symboled.
              The desert rips me apart
              I am eaten up by the desert.

A young woman drinks drinks      drinks.  
                                                     An American boy
                            shoots slurred, Stay the fuck out 
                            of my country

                            Where I fly 
doesn’t feel like anyone’s 
                                      country.

Alexis Ivy is a 2018 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry and the author of Romance with Small-Time Crooks (BlazeVOX [books], 2013), and Taking the Homeless Census (Saturnalia Books, 2020) which won the 2018 Saturnalia Editors Prize. Her poems have recently appeared in Saranac Review, Poet Lore, and Sugar House Review. She is an advocate for the homeless in her hometown, Boston.

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Cyborg attending mermaid festival without inserting a breathing language

yes, my bones raced 
the ocean tides to a mermaid 
festival. yes, i activated 
the swimming tools; 
sniffing autocorrected 
to sinking. 
instruction: shutdown 
to deactivate lungs.
then, wake up to gills 
under your ribs. 
prosthetist, you inserted 
suffocating button 
instead of surfing. 
scientist, i crashed 
when the ocean hosted 
a bloodbath. the truth is: 
my eyes water the sky
whenever i restart. 
it’s the third night
the moon is drowning 
in my mouth.
& you’re floating in your bones.
gravity hasn’t found you yet.
beloved bion, you need
help to shut down.

Zaynab Bobi, Frontier I, is a Nigerian poet, digital artist and photographer from Bobi. She is a member of Hilltop Creative Art Abuja, and a Medical Laboratory Science student of Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto. Her poems are published and forthcoming in Kalahari Review, Isele Review, Asterlit, Paddler Press, Olney Magazine, Ice Floe Press, Lunaris Review, Rigorous Magazine, Olit Magazine, TST Review, and elsewhere. She tweets @ZainabBobi.

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Answering Whatever a First-Time Feels Like

newness starts you off on the page asking no questions,
like book knowledge opens to you when people do not

new kid, def not from here

with a hot cup of coffee staving off proper addictions 
you fill up pages of good and bad,
stressing on the first of dents, their odds and ends

first real loss//first grounded ignorance//first real joke//first interstate pullover

                                                       you save first fear and first scare for last

darkest face among rows//pining tears// and buoyancy that launches itself

in a new life, how often you are asked for the proof
                                                       of commencement
                                                       to explain why life continues and there is no viability

how often the steps questions come. like how many of such you took to split. 
“how many official renunciations…? 

                                                       and you answer truthfully, 
                                                       say “you’d see to believe.” 

with thoughts unresolved on the page, 
this newness unfixes you

your craving of latter days//and their simple greens//the new sense of duty a place fixes you with //junkie of labor//in and out of creased worlds//sometimes lost as casual forgetfulness

and when there aren’t more of these worlds to traverse, 
intensity, or more magic to thread with
horror starts you off on a closed page 

with no words in view
your new sight begins as a first prone to things 

a cat struggling to reach//some weird shit called music// tongue growing alien//while still attached

Chiagoziem Confidence Jideofor is Queer and Nigerian. Her poems have appeared or are scheduled to appear in Reunion: The Dallas Review, the minnesota review, Yaba Left Review, Passengers Journal, Rigorous, Untitled: Voices, Versification, Ghost Heart, and so on. Also a self-taught illustrator, Agoziem has worked on several book covers and digital arts collaborations, and is currently an in-house digital artist at Arts Lounge Literary Magazine and Cooking Pot Publishing.

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Cocaine Bear

Cocaine Bear is a bear 
who ate a duffel bag of cocaine.

The man who performed its necropsy 
said it died of everything: 

stroke, heart failure, renal failure, cerebral hemorrhaging.

Still… 
shame to waste a perfectly good, dead bear… 

So it was stuffed, sold to a pawnbroker 
who sold it to Waylon Jennings.

The Outlaw gave it to a hustler in Vegas. 

When he died, it was bought by a Chinese herbalist.  
Then he died, so his widow sent the bear back to Kentucky
Home state of the man who had dropped the cocaine,

who did a poor job bailing out of his plane,
found dead in a driveway 
(Can you imagine – your driveway?) 
His parachute opened too late.

Now the bear stands up in the bed of a pickup
where he takes pictures with tourists. 
He wears a jaunty, Kentucky hat 
and a gold chain that says Pablo EskoBear

But the bear is not aware
of his impact on any of them.
He’s not privy to this piece of his own story. 

He just got into something he shouldn’t.
And it tasted so good until it didn’t.

Cowboys and Indians

As children,
my father and his brothers
played Cowboys and Indians
and always wanted to be cowboys

So while they ran around 
looking for Indians to kill

My grandma would turn 
to my grandpa and say,
“You need to tell them that they are the Indians.” 

KL Lyons is a writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma and a citizen of the Muscogee Nation. Their work has previously appeared in ANMLY, Room Magazine, Eye to the Telescope, and Variant Literature. You can find them on Twitter as @dystopialloon.

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Ballet Slippers

On Eid in Tucson, I paint my turmeric-stained fingernails pink, so I can meet my friends. Under a bottle brush tree with the flow of the wind, people, a landscaper tinkering with a cactus behind my station on a concrete bench, the city debris sticks to my nails and fossilizes as I blow on the wet paint. Preserves the day, the city, the low air quality warning, the carbon from the towers of the largest employer in the city that makes missiles, missiles that are probably in my country right now, my other country, my actual country. And maybe pollen from mesquite flowers and Japanese privet and the long orange flowers that hummingbirds love. Maybe a hummingbird’s spit. So I walk down the square of shops glittering in the sun— there I am in the coffee shop’s dark windows, breasts rounded by a Victoria’s Secret bra, face under a hat that keeps my skin beige, not my subcontinental farming ancestors’ dark, and with this face and these hands, these fossils at the ends of my fingers, I feed my friends. The last little Cinnabon Delight we split four ways, lick its creamy filling off my pinky, eat the pollen, the missile dust. “You’re dressed like a lesbian’s upscale apartment,” my friends tell me, and I wanted to match the desert, but even this is funny, how I didn’t even have to try. Like how I’m afraid of skin cancer, but even this will make my mother happy, my mother who wants from me, the colorist brand of respectability. Like mosquitoes in amber, the empire lives in my nails, dulls the lacquer of layers of Ballet Slippers— the Queen of England’s favorite nail polish.  

Dure Ahmed is an immigrant Muslim writer from Pakistan. Currently an MFA student at the University of Arizona, they have work appearing, or forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, and The Lumiere Review. Follow her on Twitter @dure_ahmed.

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