Allison Akootchook Warden

let’s try it this way for the last ones

peace living on our own land.
                              an island, ocean freezes.
                                                                                                           berry spots for family.
                we kept moving, then settled here,
                                and the peace was here and it was good.     

butter was the emissary
         my great-grandfather would walk across lines that he didn’t know were there, across to get butter.  and there were other things at the trading store that he walked to in the Arctic with just his thoughts for days and days oh to taste the butter again and to bring it back to his family after walking back again,           singing an old song, maybe one forgotten now.       

        we had their butter and bullets and guns and candy and flour and flour sacks 
before we met them.

because of the trading, and we were not in their expansion pack papers. 
                                                                                                                                                   yet.
                                            we were in the area of the map that they hadn’t eaten.
                                                                                                                                        yet.            

             their bellies were occupied of trying new ways to 
      bring an entire People into submission
                   /we say that they trained all of us to hide who we really are but we never did submit in our hearts, that is why great-granddaughters today transmit signals it is finally safe to tell some of the stories but we did not have the arsenal that they did and the General really didn’t want to kill everyone in the village because they are on some new protocols that the psychologists want to try for their research study and so they /

                   just moved in.  
                                                                the worst neighbor ever, like a monster baby that cannot eat enough.                 the one from the long ago stories.    but worse than the old stories.
       their elbows poked in every direction and there were no points of negotiation

we were the brown ones that did not speak their language.
                                                                           yet we understood. 

            the last heathen savages to tame out on the wild frontiers, the ones on the very edges in the very hidden pockets in the Arctic Ocean, they saw us as something to stomp upon and to play with like a new toy and they get to try new things to press down on their new toy and.
                                                        we understood their motions.        we could sense their joy in the promise of destruction.   it was a never-ending hunger and after us they will have run out of places on the map to eat so this one,         t  h  i  s.         t   i   m   e
                                                                                 they    s    a    v    o    r     e     d      us.
              they allowed the researchers to come first before they bulldozed all of our sod houses.

      to make a runway.        
                                          so they could build a huge metal house where our village once was.

     this is a true story.   we still remember that day that the bulldozers came.

                          the researchers stripped our grandmothers and grandfathers naked in the name of science when they were just children and put them in an ice cold freezer to see if their young Eskimo bodies were more resistant to cold than their Norwegian bodies or other bodies that they had been prodding at from Africa or wherever they travel as part of the team. 

                    they pinched the fat of our Elders.
               with cold, metal utensils.

that is how we knew who they really are.

                  and you can still look up the study and see the percentage of fat and the skull size of my Ancestor that is just recently passed and.
                                                     it wasn’t hundreds of years ago.         no.    
                                                                                                                 it was not that long ago.

      and I know at this point of the story you might need to go to the bathroom to vomit or maybe you need to laydown and I want you to find it within yourself to keep reading because it is better to take it in all at once like a wash of energy that is felt this is a real part of what happened because today they look at us as drunks and dirty people who need to just get a job and become part of society but we did have a job and we did have a society and everythingwasatpeace and we did remember and do remember the balance and the long long ago stories so when you try to medicine us and tell us we are crazy and unkept and that we cannot stop drinking or smoking weed or pushing our own heads down into the ground it is because of this

                                                                                                                wound that YOU created.     
                            and I am not a victim here.     
                     we were in harmony with the land
      we had a job and we had no alcohol.
we would gather as a community.                                many many many many times.
                                                           not this solo adventurer thing you try to sell us as a dream.
     NO.

                   we still gather as a community.  we still gather as a community.  we still gather as a community and we pick the berries and we hunt the animals and share and we still know most all of the old songs and yes some of our people do drink.    it is none of your business.
                                                                                leave us the fuck alone now.    to use your language.

or better, fuck you and the horse you rode in on. but these hate words are not our ways, see you have even made the precious great-granddaughter forget her composure for a moment.  the true story memories shake stillness.  and yes, she carries the still water, the water that is still.  she carries the sacred water.     still.

                           the beat of her People push her through the needle.
                                           the beat of her People 
                                                       push her through the needle. 

                                                                     the beat of her People                                                           

                                                                                   p  u  s   h.         h.   e.    r.

                                                                                                t   h   r    o     u    g      h

                                                                                                               t   h. e.      n  e   e   d.  le. 

                                            holding the still.   sacred.    water.  

               the water.   is    s   t   i   l    l              

                                          s     a        c        r       e          d.

         

                                                                  w e.      still hold.                 

                                                                                 the sacred water.    
                                                                                                          still.

 

Allison Akootchook Warden is an Iñupiaq poet and tribal member of the Native Village of Kaktovik. In 2022, her poem we acknowledge ourselves was featured in the Land Acknowledgements issue of Poetry Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review published her poem, portal traveler, and her poetry was part of Insidious Rising, a hyphen-labs project for Google Arts and Cultures. Her Twitter poems were part of the 2017 Unsettled exhibition, initiated by the Nevada Museum of Art. She is a 2017 creative writing alumna of the Djerassi Resident Artist Program. She lives in a cabin in Fairbanks, Alaska.

 

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Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arówólò

Tonight, I might commit the most grievous crime

(with a line from J.K Anowe)

he comes home tonight // with a bottle of Campari // a ripe disaster // nothing is better than a tavern // sprouting in the // mouth of a sot. //  which is to say,  father bellies an // alcove of all world’s booze. // once he thrashed mother // & she almost blanked out. // approach & dissect my grief & perform autopsies // —see how much damage it has done to my heart //  like a rust // chewing on the body of a metal.  // & again, my mother is a poem tonight // where the stanzas // become slurred by the cruel cadences of pummelling // & God!  i am the sad little audience to enjoy this frenzied fracas.  // call me a marigold // wilting from the sprinkling of angst // that gushes out every night from // the eyeballs of my mother. // at the exit of laughter // what else does a body perform // if not that it metaphors itself a riot against the soul? // which is to say this body balks over bliss // like a child deserting a musty doll // i want to break the foot of every shadow of him in this // room, blemish every inch of him with bruise // & let all the knives in the kitchen i hoist on his body witness his annihilation // the same way a bushfire watch //  a butterfly // reduce to ashes. // & my voice lacks remorse // like a snake depositing venom in a farmer’s leg.                   

 

Maybe, We Can Dance Once Again

after all the threnodies // these voices once twanged. // what spilled on the asphalt // last night? // the crimson of another boy // whose dreadlocks & Dior spectacles // threw a striking resemblance, // a reflection of cybercrime. // & often i am eclipsed in wonder // how somebody’s sartorial elegance // could be mistaken for iniquity // & bullets are always in anxiety // for the miracle of body baptism. // in the atrium of my heart // i found two tender songbirds // chirping unsung melodies // & before the night spilled over the roof // a curlicue of funereal crows stuffed with elegies // displaced their bodies. // who else dies again today—a boy, a grief-stricken child at the breasts of its war- ridden mother, the joy of a girl // limping home to brim her father’s soul // with a tale of rape. // a nightmare invaded my sleep // i saw my country morph into a wounded wolf // every howl of her for help // disembarked with a note of naught // until she whittled into oblivion. // here i offer // a spotless lamb // a dove // burnt incense // 12 sujuds // O Lord, take these as a sacrifice.                

 

Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arówólò is a Nigerian writer and a member of the Frontiers Collective. A Pushcart nominee, his works have appeared—or are forthcoming—in 4faced Liar, Fourth River Review, Rulerless, Perhappened, Lumiere Review, Temz Review, ANMLY, Tint Journal, Ake Review, Sunlight Press, Kissing Dynamite, Brittle Paper, Ice Floe Press, Afritondo, Better than Starbucks, and elsewhere. Currently, James Baldwin is his most-cherished essayist. Say hi to him on Twitter @eniola_abdulroq.

 

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Alyson Kissner

Field Notes

There are universal methods for training compliance,
to eradicate another’s sense of self

and selfcontrol.

In the 1950s,
a social scientist named Albert Biderman interviewed returned prisoners of the Korean war

to determine why US soldiers had defected.

His government was gravely concerned.

They believed communists had developed the ability to brainwash.

Their men’s actions did not make sense to them.

They informed on fellow captives,
gave false confessions,

broadcast live against their countrymen.

Despite reports of cruelty in the camps,
upon release,

many soldiers left for China,

denouncing their former lives for those who’d been their torturers.

What Biderman found,
however,

was not mindcontrol but a worldwide system of inciting submission.

He organised his research into Biderman’s Chart of Coercion,
identifying 8 categories of human behaviours.

8 categories which induced dependency,
debility,

and dread.

When linked,
he said,

these actions could break anyone.

Physical violence was not “a necessary nor particularly effective method” in controlling
one’s targets or maintaining devotion.

It was not violence but the fear of violence
which made them serve.

General MethodEffects (Purposes)Variants
1. IsolationDeprives victim of social support and their ability to resist. Victim develops an intense concern with self as a means of survival. Makes the victim dependent upon their captor.Although the cliché is that power corrupts,

The truth is that power reveals.

The first day you tested me was the first day we had keys.
2. Monopolisation of PerceptionFixes the victim’s attention upon immediate predicament. Fosters introspection. Eliminates stimuli competing with those controlled by the captor. Frustrates all action not consistent with compliance.Like windchimes before we hang them and the trees remember to quake,

Like like to the word likening when there’s nothing left to compare it to.
3. Induced
Debilitation and
Exhaustion
Weakens victim’s mental and physical ability to think, to reason, to resist.Never ask if I grew up without an eyelash,

Whether I’m washing my face with microbeads,

If I sound pretentious
when I ask waiters for meals without fries.

How wearisome to hold to one’s consciousness
like a favourite coat
fluttering mortality in a
storm flap.

How wearing to ask you to stay.
4. ThreatsThreats need only be veiled or implied to cultivate anxiety and despair.In 20 years from now there will be more female serial killers than men and they’ll target friends and family if you don’t behave yourself then I won’t be a part of this family I’m kidding you’re kidding me I saw a bus walking home and almost threw myself beneath it I know that I’m a narcissist but I might be a psychopath you have no idea what you’ve done to me I have no idea what I could do if you were threated if you threatened me in just the right way.
5. Occasional IndulgencesProvides positive motivation for the victim’s compliance. Hinders adjustment to deprivation. Will cause a spike of dopamine at the release of threatening conditions. Stress and release become addictive over time.I was so relieved when you touched me at the park, in front of our friends and family, when you had not looked me in the eyes for days—

—when you remember your keys
—when you lock up
—when you open the door
6. Demonstrating “Omnipotence” and “Omniscience”Suggests futility of the victim’s resistance. Positions the captor’s opinions, thoughts, and reality as superior to the victim’s own.—But I never look anyone in the eyes why would I have looked you in the eye why would you look at me?


Look at me.
7. DegradationMakes cost of the victim’s resistance more damaging to self-esteem than capitulation. Reduces the victim to “animal level” concerns.LovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovLovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovLovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovLovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovLovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovLovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove
8. Enforcing
Trivial Demands
Re-establishes the captor’s needs as central to the victim’s routine. Drains energy. Demands a constant focus. Changes goal-posts. Creates a relentless question—But you grew up with this too didn’t you this is your voice and your abusers’ and when their voices come first how can you tell where his ends and where you begin where she ends where he ends and where they begin how can you tell which self is the one which means to hurt you if you deserved it if you asked for it if you liked it if you did this all to yourself?Lay your tables counterclockwise,

Set your orchids out of season,

Stop verbalising this poem you write to get clean.

Then lay your head
against your mattress,

For as long as night lays its head against shipwrecks underwater.

Your thousand ghosts are not worth spilling to the dark.1

1 The following chart is adapted from Biderman’s Chart of Coercion, also called Biderman’s Principles, published by Amnesty International in 1973. Denoting the universal tools of torture and coercion, my “Effects (Purposes)” column has been lifted almost verbatim from this document. Diana Russell, Judith Herman, Jess Hill, and other feminist scholars have since noted the similarities of these methods to the patterns of domestic abusers. The only difference they found was that, unlike soldiers or kidnappers, abusive people perpetuate these actions without being trained.

 

Alyson Kissner is a Canadian-born poet completing her doctorate in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. In 2022, Alyson was co-winner of the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award for Scottish-based poets under 30, as well as shortlisted for the Rebecca Swift Foundation’s Women Poets’ Prize. Her writing has appeared in various journals including The Rumpus and Frontier Poetry, with work forthcoming in Anthropocene and Longleaf Review. She can be found on Twitter @alykissner.

 

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Leslie Benigni

Green Fuses/Halcyon

               I walk this way every day. 

Potential student candidates gather in the Floor 1 Lobby with their parents and university coordinators.

               The flow is out of sync.

               Exhalations become more apparent.

               I notice more than ever that I am shoulder to shoulder with every other student.

               Floor 1 Lobby is shaped like an eye in its ENTERING and EXITING.

               Parallel lines and then curves in the center to make way for the center circle the potential students are gathered around. 

               They’re peering up at the prized possession of our campus:

                     [one of the last remaining trees on
                                                                           earth.]

               We’ve been told it’s an ancient oak tree collected before the fourth World War when plants use to filter and create oxygen. 

               Before the discovery of catalytic oxygen transmitted from the surface of metal.

               Students have been told it cost the university millions of dollars. 

               Something to be proud of.

               {It feels somehow unnatural here.}

               The lobby is relatively dark except for the 

               large round artificial light that shines down on 

               the tree–

               I think I probably should since this is my last semester and will never see a [marvel] again. 

               I’m the only one in the swarm that turns my head to consider it

               (at least from what I can see.)

               The sight of the wisping, 

               strong, leaved tentacles 

              fill me with the fear of giants but the

              [serenity?] of going home.

               I can feel my breath smoothening, the edges of anger rounding out. 

                                                ***

               I come home from campus after midnight.

               I hadn’t realized how late my stay at the library was.

              The evening train was the same.

              I was no one 

              and everyone—

              My silhouette stays within the doorway (I see my black presence in the window).

               I’m in my own space alone.

              The small blinking blue light from the living room means my forgotten laptop is finally charged.

              Flips on the lights.

              Flips off all lights except one by the desk.

              My presence is one large sigh, even in my own home.

Dr. Abdur Raqeeb Bashir
Mon 3/15/2109 5:32pm

To: Silas Angharad
Cc: Neve Szinger, Micah Welch +2more

Hi Silas, 

Hope all is well this semester as you wrap up your National Remembrance Reports. Sorry for the delay in response, but the folks from the Library of Remembrance (some of whom I’ve cc-ed within this email) were trying to remain concise with their information before I relayed their answer to your inquiry. 

I need to warn you beforehand that depending on the timing of all this, you may be barraged by the media. It appears your missing thirteenth person for your report is what the LoR folks are calling a “special once in a lifetime anomaly” (folks, correct my verbiage if needed) and completely unprecedented.

Your thirteenth person is rather special, and Northeast American University is proud that a student of ours has been selected to send in their NRR under the special circumstances that the subject of the report is still alive. You’ll be receiving a different list of forms as an attachment to this email. 

Please note that Student Account will be depositing $2000 for your travel expenses as it appears Prof. Dunbridge is located five hours north of the city in the town of Castport.

Do not hesitate to contact me should any questions or concerns arise, though for this case, perhaps any if all should be directed to the representatives of LoR. These folks will remain in contact with you after today to acts as aids, ask questions, and be there to answer questions.

Best, 

ARB

Dr. Abdur Raqeeb Bashir (he/they)
Professor and Director of Anthropological Studies
Northeast American University


  





































































































































































I stare at them and stand for some time, enough for the eventual sound of a light breeze through the grass to slither past.

They’re still and though they do not emit any ill-will, I simply feel it is time to pass.

Off to the far right is a black square doorway filled with undergrowth and weeds and I find my way through there.

I stumble across a third man, in black and tan. The square doorway is for a room with fallen trees, stumps, and the man looking up at the tallest live tree amongst the undergrowth, his one leg bent and placed up on a log.

               He’s gazing up at the height of the tree, which went through the ceiling through a clean-cut hole. 

                                           up and up.

               He’s gazing 

               The man will not talk to me and I brush past him without seeing his face. I do not need to see it to know it is there. 

               The loneliness of feeling unseen by others is as fundamental a pain as physical injury, but it doesn’t show on the outside.

               There’s mossy furniture, chairs and tables, on the edge of the otherwise white room filled with wildness. Filled with trees and trunks and everything that reminds me of leatherback journals and childhood into adulthood.

                                           up and up.

Going

What cannot be contained cannot be contained.

                                           ****

It’s sunset upstairs.

I can finally see my own shadow on the wall and I realize that the sky is creamsicle and salmon.

My silhouette is a picture frame in an abandoned white warehouse like room with shut off lights above, beams showing depth.

Childhood, childhood, childhood.

Summer in the country. Full of June nights and sunsets: that’s what this room contains in its empty canvas of color.

But there are dried leaves on the floor. Fresh petals plucked by someone. 

Who else is here?

Gray brown
                             ferns feathering, 
                                  sweeping,
                                  creaming,

                                                         Dreaming.

               There are windows on the walls on this
               floor and it fills me with an unknown
               joy.

               The walls are peeling, exposing peach colors, matching whatever wonderful sunset is outside.

Reflections
in geraniums in 
the purest of magenta 
and violet
and elephant ears drumming against the
walls.              

               I make my way past my own shadowed silhouette and beyond the dark beamed room. Beyond that is a room of natural light, no sunset, nor lights ahead and it reminds me of my grandmother’s grand hallway to the foyer. How I released frogs for races and clammered sneakers across tiled floors…

               Pale French window doors open on either side of me and at my feet are all unbloomed lilies, only the spikey, dark green, spear-like leaves bending, pointing and leaning. 

               All of the people are gone, they’ve left
               this space, this place. 

               This is my grandparents’ house, this part of the building. Down to the scent of fresh laundry and cigarette smoke. The almost muted jingling of my grandmother’s bangles and the tapping of my grandfather’s shoes to the radio.

              All snippets contained in the peelings of these walls.

               But I must move to new rooms.
               It is a compulsion, a destiny of sorts. 
               I am meant to as it is passage.

               Plant-filled skylines and window shafts
and bees on sedums and succulents (greedy little buggers)
                                      and creeping myrtle invading 
more rolling knolls but in living rooms and in bedrooms
        and ferns that grow behind curtains and light, 
        such wonderful, fading sunshine light is this
                         that creeps down and forth 
                                              unto nothing and though
                                                           I feel nothing I can
                                                               feel the warmth.

                                              ****

Memory is a glorious and funny thing.

It’s glorious how down a hallway with small budding grape hyacinths and dandelion freckled grass, it is that hallway with a light at it’s end that I am reminded of my office on the university’s campus. Glorious how I feel I am treading down to my office or to a class to see my students. There’s nothing like the feeling. Such a feeling at all.

It’s funny how through a glowing light of a door with water and reeds at it’s feet, I find myself outside, actually outside with no building or form of place behind me once I leave, and the patches of moss clawing into a small ox-bowed stream is the same that led to my greenhouse.

I see myself as a young man laying amongst the sparse, young trees in a clearing, sleeping.

at
the
tall
trees
(that give and take away shade with a passing
breeze)

                                       up and up
Then opening my eyes and looking
               We could almost say, a living being is a memory which acts.

               I am light in a field.

 

Leslie Benigni is a recent MFA graduate of Bowling Green State University where she was also a staff fiction editor of the Mid-American Review. Her work has been published in *82 Review, OvergroundUnderground, Goat’s Milk Magazine, Not Deer Magazine, Analogies and Allegories Magazine, Quibble Journal, and more. She currently resides in Pittsburgh, haunting art museums, looking for new inspiration in the antiquated. Find her on Instagram and Twitter, as well as her website: lesliebenigni.weebly.com.

 

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Nandini Dhar

Warscapes

This return is a wilted and brown lemon rind–the deafening 
memory of how I have evaded one war after another. 

A slow crumbling evening, and  beneath a billboard
where starlets pose as obedient daughters to army generals, 

I imagine: what it means to try to shut one’s eyelids
while being bombarded by something as simple as street lights.

I suck a copper coin, my tongue numb and cold
against the metal. The city’s rickshaws honk

breath across my knees. 
On the pavements, rickety little girls learn to play with their fingers

touch the aroma of the coffee-cup along the glass walls, commit 
to memory. Commit to memory the fact that walls can shine

from inside, that walls can invite one in, without offering
anything real to eat–this city, indeed, 

is an exercise in staring. 

When chased away, the girls leave behind–the hint
of grease, the imprint of their nose–tips 

on the irreproachable glass. Do not worry. That 
slight etching, too, would soon be wiped away– 

the teenager who would perform 
the act of erasure, has lost 

his village to a legislative burial. 
Before stepping into our city, 

his tongue was a stranger 
to the taste of coffee. 

 

Nandini Dhar is the author of the book Historians of Redundant Moments (Agape Editions, 2017). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review, Epiphany, Fugue, diode, Memorious, New South, Best New Poets 2016, and elsewhere. She teaches literature and gender studies at OP Jindal Global University, India, edits the bi-lingual journal Aainanagar, and divides her time between Delhi, the national capital of India and Kolkata, her hometown.

 

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Rona Luo

On Sitting In A Formal Garden After Explaining To A Curator Why A British Institution Shouldn’t Sell Original Cultural Revolution Posters In Its Gift Shop

Tulip buds in a dense perfect circle 
amist lawn that needs no sprinklers. I think of California’s
layered air, driving past patches of blackened forest,
the smell of burned couches and electric pressure cookers
through our masks — I removed mine to kiss her goodbye.
Pins of rain waken me to this garden, petaled 
flowerpots on pedestals, mothers gliding prams on 
oversized wheels, lanes rounding the lawn. Or are they
buggies or are they pushchairs?  Willows accompany 
two parallel ponds. In a corner beyond my eye, 
the raised bed where my daughter sowed wildflower 
seeds provided by a curly haired park ranger,
tiny hands now patting, now scraping, now massaging, 
now tunneling into soft composted earth. And what of these posters,
some even possibly drawn by my twenty-year-old mother,
glad for any commissioned break from her shift on 
machines spinning cotton. How her fingers curled
as she shaded sleeve to collar, handle to the neck 
of a hammer, the clock ticking as she practiced lips. 
How her breath quickened in the last minutes before
her return to the floor, erasing errant pencil lines. 
And where did the posters live after they were peeled off walls – 
rolled into calendars featuring Teresa Teng every month? 
Folded and tucked between books with covers wrapped 
in newspaper, their titles penciled over newsprint, the posters
biding their time through market reform, knowing they’d be 
wanted again in a London home with vinyl records?
Or perhaps the posters are not originals afterall – a British
gallery cheating British gallery goers, and have nothing
to do with cotton, or Teresa Teng, or my mother. 

 

Rona Luo is a poet and acupuncturist based in London, UK. She currently serves as a mental health consultant for Kundiman, a non-profit dedicated to nurturing Asian American literature. She is working on a hybrid manuscript on her family’s role as Han Chinese colonizers on Hmong land.

 

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j. kleinschmidt

moon.sun

First there was the moon. Almost like I could touch her just out of reach. Sometimes I felt like I could do anything. Did you ever howl at the moon did you ever show her your self your full Self did you ever surrender to her? She knows. She listened. In the night she watched me nurtured me like a mother her child she took care of me she kept me safe. And how she kissed my nose and cheeks and the crook of my neck and my collarbones my breasts the knuckles on my fingers my hips and feet and knees. I stood. I stood. I kneeled. And got up. She likes when I look up at her but she hates being above me. Always out of reach and just close enough to never touch but I swear she is here. In the way I drink her in. And how she wanes. And is gone. But she will. Come back, she always comes back for me I don’t need to ask where she’s been for when I stand beneath her cold white light I am safe forever and there is no past and there is no future and I am hers. 

Then there was the sun. He comes between. And burns. My skin he touches. Glowing hands. He breaks you down. Forces. How you like it. He is far away when I can look him in the eye but so close when above dizzying he is all encompassing and I cannot stand I always fall into. Red on my body where he touches the burn on my skin forever. Yes. And sometimes hiding for days he doesn’t show. Himself like a ghost but they say he is always there even when I can’t see him I can not take it sun burn me again for the absence of pain is the absence of. You. Desire. Please but. Stay longer sun you are so bright you are everything the world kneels before you you. Need you. Stay forever but he’s going again but what a spectacle he leaves. Purple and orange and red like sun-kissed skin. He always comes back for me I don’t need to ask where he’s been for when I kneel beneath his fiery hands I am small and there is no past and there is no future and I am his.

The moon stands high on the horizon, quiet. 

 

diary #1: self

Dear diary the other
day i said people
online aren’t real because
it’s the same thoughts and feelings and words
overagainandagainoversaturatedagain
and then i went
and pretended i didn’t. so maybe
i’m not real because
i keep coming back for
more but diary we already know
i have a problem. with
substance because i mean the things i say
but that’s about it really

i say i’m a nihilist because i’ve
gotten used to saying so but i
really am searching for meaning
in the forest song about the witch and the changing of my bedsheets
and the five letters when i cum and how i end things
without changing. how
i let them in and out of my life
in and out in and fuck. out
like how i keep objectifying myself and
how i write in blue ink although blood is
supposed to be red.

I guess there’s meaning in my falling
canvas hearts and blood baths in the way
i’m calm and loving but if you’ve ever
heard a pig screaming
on their way to slaughter then i’m afraid
you know the deepest parts of me
and you’re braver than i am because
i haven’t been there in at least 162 days but
anyway what a shame
the machine keeps on going
like the pulsing under my skin and the ocean rain

 

j. kleinschmidt is a writer and university student. In their writing, they draw from their experience as a queer person growing up on the internet to explore the spaces between love and obsession, desire and pain, and the occasional love letter to the moon. Follow them on Instagram @dancing.sirens.

 

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Letitia Jiju

This Too is a Poem is a Prayer, Unclasping

over the crest of memory:

O gold-rimmed matzo: tremble.
O teeth; stigmata—

then I peel the hard-boiled egg of my own grief.
& what is life but a breaking in

                    someone’s hands?

Somewhere 
                   fireflies limn the shore of 
his limbs celestine. I rend as I remember 
I no longer god-walk this sea. 

                          Nor rest the weary hind legs of 
a kiss by his ear

                           breath unbridled 

from the silt-slippery conch-shell of my body:
                                   listen. Hold me and listen 
to an ocean 
                                                   thrashing—

How to wring myself out of this washcloth of remembrance? 
I have sopped up the last of his gravy. I am

                            stained      by his laugh.
On my skin on his skin.

& what is love but a seeping in

of sorts?

A running under water, 

                    a gentle rub

                                                a squeeze,

a laying out?

Originally appeared in Tigers Zine.

 

Letitia Jiju is an Indian poet who through her work explores the intermingling of mother tongue, religion & generational trauma. Her poems have appeared/are forthcoming in trampset, ANMLY, The Lumiere Review, Moist Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She reads poetry for Psaltery & Lyre. Find her on Instagram/Twitter @eaturlettuce.

 

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Alison Zheng

Idols

Perfect Blue (1997), a film by Satoshi Kon

These women who perform as idols, who feel like friends, enter the stage. The white ribbons on their bare shoulders and the pink of their crinoline skirts flutter as they dance and sing. 

These women who perform as idols are ballerinas— I mean, schoolgirls—I mean, Sailor Scouts—
Do they know that this audience of exclusively men—and me—have a soft spot for women who wear bows in their hair, who smile with enthusiasm? 

These women who perform as girls dance in perfect unison, crooning their siren song: Look! Can you see her white wings? Those eyes gazing at you. That sweet voice, and those gentle hands. They exist only for you. 

All the men are watching and some of the men are taking photos and some of the other men are holding camcorders, recording every breath and every twirl.

I’m no better than these sallow, indoor-skinned men—just more beautiful—After all, don’t I have an affinity for small hands too? Doesn’t the fire in my body long to know the fire in theirs too? 

 

Simulation

Perfect Blue (1997), a film by Satoshi Kon

The actor says I’m sorry before the scene begins.

The actress smiles a dazzling smile and says It’s okay.

A camera crew surrounds them. The flashing lights are relentless. 

The director yells Action and it begins. He towers over her. Her body flails.  

The director yells Cut and it stops. He towers over her. Her body lays limp. 

The director yells Action and it begins. He towers over her. Her body flails.

The director yells Cut and it stops. He towers over her. Her body lays limp. 

The director yells Action and it begins. He towers over her. Her body flails.

The director yells Cut and it stops. He towers over her. Her body lays limp. 

The director yells Action and it begins. He towers over her. Her body flails.

The director yells Cut and it stops. He towers over her. Her body lays limp. 

The director yells Action and it begins. He towers over her. Her body flails.

The director yells Cut and it stops. He towers over her. Her body lays limp. 

The director says It’s a wrap. She puts her clothes back on and goes home quietly. 

 

At night, when she believes nobody’s watching, the actress cries over her dead fish still floating in the fish tank. She thought about the camera crew, her management team, the writers, the producers, the directors, the other actors. People always talk about speaking up as though it’s obvious. She couldn’t think about herself. She tears her soft white comforter apart. She curls into herself. 

 

Crying Whilst Listening to 90s Cantopop

I take a Hong Kong Film Class thinking
I’ll meet someone like me

Instead, I meet a bunch of gwai lo
who want to fuck Faye Wong. 

               / / 

We watch 2046. Wong Faye plays 
a broken robot train attendant—

Her functions have been exhausted
from overwork and thus, her emotional

expressions are often delayed. 
Still, men love her—or at least, what she represents.

She stares at her reflection in the train window.
Her doe eyes. Imprinted onto my mind.  

               / / 

I sob through every movie that quarter,
even Rumble in the Bronx 

which seems to confuse a classmate
though it doesn’t stop him from hitting on me. 

What disturbs me the most is me
I’m flattered by his inquiry. 

               / / 

I look up reviews for Infernal Affairs
One of them says The Departed is superior,

because despite being a copy, at least it has soul.

               / / 

On Youtube, I watch some Mandarin bitches
stumble their way through Leslie Cheung’s

“Love Of the Past” from A Better Tomorrow
and I seethe with jealousy—My accent is perfect,

according to my mom, but I cannot read so I will never
Cheung K in the way that my ancestors want me to.

               / / 

My favorite Wong Faye song is a Mandarin song. 

It’s called 悶 which means bored or depressed. 
悶 is 心 (heart) with 門 (door) surrounding it.

Depression or boredom is when something,
such as a door, has closed on your heart. 

               / / 

If Mandarin were skin
it’d be the milky white supple expanse
of a maiden’s midriff

Cantonese is more like 
the frizzled plumage of a Silkie chicken 

               / / 

My research says one should sing to speak in Cantonese: 
si ( → ) is poetry
si ( ↗ ) is history (or poop)
si ( → ) is try
si ( ↘ ) is time
si ( ↗ ) is market
si ( → ) is be 

               / / 

Everybody, including myself, forgets
that English is my Second Language.  

“I didn’t learn English until I was five” feels like a lie.

               / / 

My parents said we had Aaron Kwok’s
對你愛不完 on cassette and that I loved dancing to it 
and that I kept dancing until one day I realized 
people could see me and then I stopped.

Listening to 對你愛不完 now, 
it sounds familiar 
though I can’t tell if I’m unearthing a memory or if it’s just my desire to remember
projected onto a pop song that sounds familiar in the way that all pop songs do. 

               / / 

You can save space on Apple devices
by offloading memory. This means

deleting an app’s data whilst keeping
any documents or settings tied to it.

Cantonese has been offloaded from me

The texture of the language is still there
and not much else. 

 

Alison Zheng (she/her)’s writing is published or forthcoming in The Margins (Asian American Writers’ Workshop), Black Warrior Review, Copper Nickel, and more. She is a MFA Candidate and Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fellow at University of San Francisco.

 

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Travis Chi Wing Lau

Feverish

At first flush,
I could not tell if it was

a fever or the heat death of the world,
so I confided in you

about my burning
only to learn I was a nuisance,

a worm your ear never craved but
came to nurse

because you pity little things
like a voice that carries

its hurt modestly, that covers up its
shame with its own hands.

But those hands cannot cover what
exceeds them—

this body now put in its place
but teeming with other burnings

that beg your pardon
as much as your attention

(a care that cannot be
learned).

 

Travis Chi Wing Lau (he/him/his) is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, Lapham’s Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and Hypertext, as well as in three chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019), Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020), and Vagaries (Fork Tine Press, 2022). travisclau.com.

 

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