Category: AP36

Animashaun Ameen

Oil and Water

We’ll knock your teeth 
out, bury you
in a wooden casket. 
You can’t be queer
and Moslem. No,
you can’t be. 
You shouldn’t be. 
We love you, Habibi,
but not tonight. Wait,
you shouldn’t sway 
that way. 
We’ll cut off your hands, and 
hand them over to you. 
Open your mouth— 
let’s pull the blackness out
of your tongue. Let’s gouge 
your eyes out and help you
wash them clean. 
Listen, Habibi, 
this is the only way. 
Hold your head still
underwater; let the Lord
do His will. Thirty lashes
on your back, twenty
on your palms. Let us 
draw out the darkness

inside of you. Let us stone 
the back of your head. 
This is the only way. 
We love you, Habibi, 
just not tonight. 
Close your eyes, let the water
wash over you. Please, 
just close your eyes, 
and let it happen.

 

Animashaun Ameen is a poet and essayist. His works have appeared/are forthcoming in Salamander Mag, Third Estate Mag, Roadrunner Review, Vast Chasm, and elsewhere, and he is the author of Calling a Spade. He lives and writes from Lagos, Nigeria. An oddball. A butterfly. He tweets @AmeenAnimashaun.

 

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Bryan Okwesili

How to Go to God and Remain There

I am terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long. They really don’t think I am human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters. —James Baldwin.

And this day is not such a different one, except for the heightened rage of the sun; except for the strangers in the street circling a body like vultures; except for their voices trying to name this body before knowing it, before killing it; this body; a kneeling boy, wearing the face of one who loves boys, who knows how to love boys; and these people know this face; they must peel it; must undo; how else to erase the error in a book; a tyre for his neck; a stone for his head; a fire to smoke him straight to God; an offering to purify, to cleanse, to take God’s hands and do His work; except they don’t become God; but monsters, intentional about sin; and they watch the boy burn; the boy, who searches their faces for what he has deprived these strangers of; their air? their happiness? their milk?;  the boy who, in the hell, is eager to go to God and remain there; and does; in a rising of grey smoke; and no one knows his name.

From my window, the whole madness is a movie scene; except I am an actor; and the burning boy a looming foreshadow; except I have a name, yet.

Originally published in Isele Magazine.

 

Bryan Okwesili is a Nigerian poet and storyteller. His works explore the interiority and tensions of queerness in a heteronormative culture in which he imagines a world of inclusivity. He is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist for the Tupelo Quarterly Open Fiction Prize. His works appear in CRAFT, SLICE, SmokeLong Quarterly, Isele Magazine, Foglifter, Tupelo Quarterly, QWERTY, Brittle Paper, PANK, Litro Uk, and elsewhere. He is currently a student of law at the University of Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria. You can connect with him on twitter @meet_bryan_.

 

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Kei Vough Korede

Pelagial Affinity

The sun coruscates through  pellucid water.
In pelagic nearness, waves falter to our feet,

and you zest. 

You prance the littoral spread.
You, in a teal windbreaker, break the width 

of gales. 

You pick up conches, pick me up where I lie defying
belligerent glints of sun, and smother my face with

spontaneous kisses.

We raise the effervescent content of our glasses,
exchange our flip-flops in their resplendent hues.

I’m made possible by your perennial love;
that daunting extension of adherence.

In this coastal encounter,
the sea is sprawled endlessly before our existence—

we stand before it, until we suffice. 

 

Convalescence

We robbed the disease of its nefarious glory.
Our triumph was commemorated in ululation.

In the clamor of surviving, our eyes opened
and we sought to hide from the world.

Revelry in this dank now:

The night, femur-long.
Suds overwhelm the vitreous inventions

of man. Our voices levitate without
wings; and to what extent do we hold this zeal,

to deride the conviction of dawn? 

We chose to be in delirium.
Preferred our jejune plight.

The sex, good.
Better though, 

the staggering force of love’s righteous gravity.

 

Kei Vough Korede (he/they) is a bi/queer Nigerian poet. He has works published with Woodward Review, among others. Reach him on Twitter @KayVough.

 

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Olúwatamílọ́re Ọ̀shọ́

Slutty Prayers

God is a woman
and she bends into a perfect arch,
           her fleshy altar nestled between sturdy-soft thighs.
My tongue finds worship,
spewing incantations of reverence.

This woman breathes life

into my being. Her body,
a pilgrimage.
I long to journey into her depths.

She draws her breath across my body
mapping out new cities, imprinting her soul
on mine, whispering love
into my skin.

She tells me “Open Sesame,”
and my legs part
like the Red Sea leading Israel to promise.

Her fingers drip honey as they find their place in me.

                  Here, our desire sings.
We make righteous sex,
baptizing ourselves in holy flame.

We burn and burn  until left basking
in our true form,  drinking in the sight
of each other,  our eyes leaking love. 

                       Here, we holy.
                   Here, we sex.
            Woman, loving woman.
      Clit to clit.
Breast to breast.

There is no abomination here. Only grace.

bisexual anxiety

On the days a man’s mouth
takes me to the heavens,
I question my sexuality.
I have had more male lovers than female. My best friend tells me that I could not love a man and a woman equally.
A man I loved yesterday told me I could not
be gay if I moaned his name in pleasure. I tell him to take his homophobia off my body.
On the days I imagine crafting a life with a man, guilt nibbles my mind.
Am I less queer for finding love in the arms of a man even though I also want to walk down the aisle with a woman?

 

Olúwatamílọ́re Ọ̀shọ́, Frontier XVII, is a writer, poet and creative director from Lagos, Nigeria. Her writings negotiate sensuality, familial dynamics and identity. Her works have been published/forthcoming in online literary mags namely The Roadrunner Review, Olney Magazine, ANMLY and elsewhere.

 

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sterling-elizabeth arcadia

two texts

I.

both of my legs are bruised and it has me thinking about you. the blue-green-yellow-red hues. the rainbow between us. the rainbow between us

i think about your clumsy, about your 11-something cats & your late grandmother (like mine)

i think about the all-female brooklyn brass brand we saw, in prospect park. i think about when i got to meet your wife & didnt know what to say, so i commented on her haircut. how i miss you. how i love you

II.

hey bb, been thinking about you,
praying to bb trans gay jesus for you,
etc, etc

ive loved you longer than a year now
& still it stings, thinking about you
alone & cold, in that heartless chicago

so when i pray to bb trans gay jesus heres what i say:
may mathilda be safe. may mathilda be a bird.
may mathilda be called a faggot by her friends at the next transsexual brooklyn orgy

i would top a twink to see you stay warm this year

 

sterling-elizabeth arcadia (she/they) is a Best of the Net winning and Pushcart Prize nominated trans poet, diy tattooer, and lover of birds, cats, and her friends, living in Philadelphia. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in venues including Delicate Friend, HAD, New Delta Review, beestung, and Verse of April. Her debut chapbook, Heaven, Ekphrasis, is available now from Kith Books.

 

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Chamomile Wheatley

Sunsimmer gratitude

for Isa Pickett

    Porch cactus  catches the sun 
and lights-up like a cellphone with good news

       Below the balcony  
the young family from Bethlehem
roasts salmon  over  charcoal
    Conversations   of warm weather  at-last  and
pinewood derbies             rise
                                  with zucchini smoke           
                                                carried away
                                  with cicada  ocean  song

       I-40 stirs a lazy tide
   even the willows  wave  safe morning

               I know holy neighbors!
                  Robins bawuing from brown sugar nests
           Brier Creek testing new directions  
                 the wild honey caps   ready to spread on toast       
and   You      
                                                          four-hundred miles away   picking figs  in a cemetery
                                                                        under the same trans-pride   sunset

                                           I have news!                   I started HRT! I caught this song in a jar!
                                                My hair   is wisteria
                                       and my body is sunsimmered chapel glass!
                                           Look through me from each direction
                                           That’s where god rests

 

Chamomile is a peripatetic word wrangler & a friend to small critters. Her work has also appeared in Five South.

 

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Reyna Rosales

First Love in Moon Park

In a drunken daze words pour from my mouth of their beauty
of their gorgestness as the world’s rotation counters my own 
spin on the dance floor and I am trying to write 
of love because I know now that it exists

Planetarium shows us among the stars and our newest
journeys through telescopes and it’s silly how we look
up into space to compare it to home Pillars of Creation 
are elephant trunks or desert rocks but made of cosmos

Me and my love are made of stardust too we change
our silhouettes by our own command and
leave people wondering in awe of the constellations
of stories we write for our own bodies

I pour out my heart knowing they will live
because of the stars and because of my writings

 

Reyna Rosales is a Queer & Trans Filipinx writer born in the Philippines and raised in Los Angeles. Their work has appeared recently in Rituals from Marías at Sampaguitas and elsewhere. You can find her @tsismosx.

 

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Gwyn Hill

AFTER YOU TOLD ME ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE

As a child I collected cicada exoskeletons—in my closet, a box of ruptured enclosures.
I wondered how they knew when to wake up; what to leave behind; where the edge is?

Struggling to parse where “I” end and “you” begin, I reach for where the pressure holds
all of me without crossing your limits—stretched taut but not cracking—testing my edges.

When I cut my hair short and saw the boy hiding in my own jawline for the first time, I snapped 
photo after photo, finding just the right light to show off my new-found edges.

On a hike, I stumble across a speckled kingsnake, admiring how rigid scales together link 
to shield a spiraling body, and lean toward this lesson on the fluidity of edges.

Rewatching New Girl to confront my inner Nick Miller, I realize that I, too, relax 
into myself in a flannel or henley with a wink of collarbone exposed where the neck slouches.

As muscles harden and form new angles, I’m surprised I now admire the soft curve 
of my unbound breasts after years hiding—hunched and out-of-place in dresses.

I always felt trapped by the name my mom claimed meant crone: White. Woman. 
Witch. Magic I may be, but bent for a better fit—call me Gwyn—king of the fairies.

 

Gwyn Hill is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and earned their MFA from the University of Arkansas. As the former grant writer and accessibility coordinator for the Open Mouth Literary Center, they spearheaded efforts toward creating accessible literary programming. Their work was named a finalist for Wick Poetry Center’s 2020 Poems for Peace and Conflict Transformation Contest, received support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and appears in Prairie Schooner, Painted Bride Quarterly, Split Rock Review, and more; under another name. They are excited to start building new credentials with their real name.

 

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Isaac Campbell

Change

People change
Many say this in a lamenting way
“He’s just not the same” 
“She’s a totally different person”

I love to change
My hair, my style, my viewpoint, my location
It’s one of the best things about being alive, being human
Being nonbinary is a gift I never tire of receiving and opening each day

Some try to ignore change, but it lives everywhere 
Between the couch cushions,
Spilling out of pockets when trying to find your car keys,
In the tip jar of your local coffee shop,
In the cup of the beggar one street over
I keep my change with me, always aware of it

Change is one of the fundamentals of life
Its cousin, variety, the spice
They say nothing in life is guaranteed except for death and taxes
I disagree
One can say change flies in the face of Death
To change is to live, to grow, to evolve

 

Isaac Campbell is a queer and nonbinary creative from Massachusetts. They have always been a writer but this is their first publication. They hope to use their poetry as a way to challenge others’ perceptions and get people to question the roots of their own identity.

 

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