These poems are excerpted from Feisal G. Mohamed’s work in progress Nowhere is Safe in Gaza, a book-length erasure of South Africa’s December 2023 application to the International Court of Justice charging Israel with violations of the Genocide Convention.
an apartheid regime
an apartheid regime discriminatory land zoning and planning
punitive and administrative house demolitions Israeli army incursions into
Palestinian
villages towns cities refugee camps routine violent Israeli raids on their
homes arbitrary arrests indefinitely renewable administrative detention
Palestinians
without basic protections
Israeli settlers
with full due process
WCNSF
hundreds of multigenerational families have been killed
in their entirety with no remaining survivors mothers fathers children siblings grandparents aunts
cousins often all killed together
medics in Gaza have had to coin a new
acronym ‘WCNSF’ meaning ‘wounded child no surviving family’
‘I have never seen such a thing before’
Israeli bulldozers excavated and exhumed a hospital
mass grave in the besieged Kamal Adwan hospital on 16 December where 26 Palestinians had been
buried Hossam Abu Safiya Head of Pediatric Services
stated “[t]he soldiers dug up the graves this morning and dragged the bodies with bulldozers
then crushed the bodies with the bulldozers I have never seen such a thing before”
Feisal G. Mohamed is professor of English at Yale University. His latest book is Sovereignty (2020).
i miss you the way polaris parkway mall has a grand piano at the base of the escalator in the pink carpet pink wall department store. when it was empty, papi would play the three keys to the pink panther theme song. i miss you the way i knew how to do it perfectly, once upon a time, i miss you the way i miss pressing my tongue to teeth until a faint impression makes a jangle out soft chord percussion. i miss you the way i miss all the fireflies once they spray pesticide. one night i woke up to a dark so vast not even the moon could touch me. i miss you the way i miss the mall. arm in arm and ankle aching. for the last year, i’ve only eaten unripe fruit. i miss you the way i miss summertime wildberries. i miss the soft bite of peach. the sunlight on the peel of mango. i kiss my last box of strawberries into the yard and hope they come back to me wanting. i do miss wanting. i miss holding my breath. i miss turning my lungs inside out. i miss myself into frown lines. i miss you into ribbed over xylophone. when i unbox the house, i leave all last impressions of you up. is this a selfish poem? this is a selfish poet. i miss the long line. i miss the decanter of crystal and tropical storm. i miss you and all the pastel houses on the shore. with hurricane season coming, i miss clear skies. i miss the impression of wood. i shred into tissue-vein paper. i paper-mache a mirror. i miss the reflection. i miss taking the outerbelt home. i miss the abyss of forest. i miss the time before i knew the outerbelt was called the outerbelt. i miss keeping my eyes closed. i miss enjoying my voice. i miss pulling into the space next to the space by lettuce lake park. i miss looking. i do miss looking. i’m sure it had a name, once. i miss remembering our names vividly. i miss us into an oblivion. i miss you into a new language. we break/shift into a new mode of conversation. i miss you like i miss the landline. i do miss the landline. i always loved everyone at the end. briefly, i reconstruct my whole life.
iram of the pillars
ENTER:
LIMINAL SPACE: we all become other. sudden. everything i do, we did. before. clay tap these pillars up there on that slant.
ENTER:
SINKHOLE:
I WOKE UP IN AGONIZING ANHELO. I SAW, THE TWO OF US A FAR OFF PLACE A HOST
LIMINAL SPACE: of every desire, the most tangible that i whisper, then dissolve y además, lo coloqué en encounter chance & entangled sweating y lo prometo SINKHOLE:
YOU’LL FIND ME HERE AGAIN. CAVERN CRACK MY JAW REMOVE MY RIGHT HIP IN THE CURVES OF COCCYX A CITY IS HOME, A DNA PRINT A DUST DANCE
OH, WE WERE HERE ONCE, ONCE, ONCE, LIMINAL SPACE:
HERE IS THE TRUTH — THE STORY LONG SUBMERGED + UNDISCOVERED — NO — ERASED — WE REVELED IN SOFT UNDERBELLY — CITY SUNK LIKE AN ANCHOR THROUGH DIM LIT SUN — FINGERS ENGULFED DEEP IN FLESH FLOOD — SMELLING OF SWEAT + SOAP — UNDER EONS OF SAND I UNCOVER A WATER BREATHING — LIFE — UNHOLY — I COWER — BURY THE GLASS SHARDS — WHEN THE WORLD FLIPS SOMEONE TURNS MY REFLECTION INTO JEWELRY — SOFTENED — ENMESHED — IN LOVE — PALATABLE SCORCHED DAYS GONE, GONE, GONE! UNIFORM, FINALLY! FINALLY! FINALLY! FINALLY!
sara h. hammami (she/her) is fragmented between language(s) & is always thinking & dreaming of life underwater. she has poems living with DEAR Poetry Journal and Grist.
Every time I start to laugh Somebody invents a new way of laughter I run to the closest mirror Burying my swollen face Counting my disappointments on my fingers No music in the background Only the cracking of my bones Do you hear it? I see you on the walls Your purple face waving Like a curse I put a hand on my right chest Singing as if the world dissolved Between my knees In this story Adam didn’t eat the forbidden fruit Just Eve who did He was busy Creating a sudden plot twist God upstairs Watching in silence In the mirror I see your favorite song Turned into a worm Crawling toward my belly Your face Without features I ask you Are you hungry? You ask me How did you survive? And the rest is history.
Prayers from Our House Roof
We were boiling bananas on the roof of our house. Mother’s laughter clutched the heart of my ears. She was gossiping with a neighbor. Mother was storytelling, sweet as poetry. I loved To watch her tongue play the music of conversation. They worked on their knees, their noses colored by wood smoke. Boiling bananas was like a prayer We whispered, sang with faces lifted up, We made art through peeling bananas, slicing them into pieces to boil on the fire, hoping for a kiss on a cheek From a bird; an old hymn bathing our exhausted souls. At the roof’s edge, I overlooked a cavernous grotto, and I saw God cooking for children like me. I watched him prepare the dinner table for them in heaven, A kingdom of mercy. I stretched my arms to touch the magic, then ran to my mother, whimpering That I saw God cooking for the children. She smiled but continued talking with her neighbor. I yelled At my mother for attention, pointing, but she just smiled. I kept watching God make delicious food for one hundred children gathered on their knees around him, longing in awe. I waved to them, But they didn’t notice me. I imagined the smell from our rooftop carried a kind of hope. Under my bare feet, bananas peels and two bowls, one for us and the other for the hungry people In our neighborhood. It became a ritual ever since one hundred children had died of hunger, One hundred innocent souls vanished. I swear I saw God cooking for them, but no one believed me; they just kept smiling.
Amirah Al Wassif has two poetry collections: For Those Who Don’t Know Chocolate (Poetic Justice Books & Arts, February 2019) and the illustrated children’s book, The Cocoa Boy and Other Stories (Poetic Justice Books & Arts, February 2020). Her poems have appeared in print and online publications including South Florida Poetry, Birmingham Arts Journal, Hawaii Review, The Meniscus, Chiron Review, The Hunger, Writers Resist, Right Now, and several other publications, and her upcoming poetry collection, How to Bury a Curious Girl, was published in April 2022 by Bedazzled Ink Publishing, LLC, Fairfield, CA.
as mosquitoes a forgotten dark sliver in the canopy more poison than blood streaming through my veins my body so hot my mother said it almost glowed
as ostrich meat that my father made us eat i regret nothing more than eating speed on land as if it was nothing but a skewer
as lichen i turned into dustto try and be algae & fungi & a mirror for insects to be used for everything that needs to be built
as sea lettuce sticking on the soles of my feet often picked up & held against the sun to see its lack of veins sometimes shredded like tissues rarely deep fried & crushed between teeth
as pigeons whose corpses i almost stepped into more times that i can count their necks bent at too acute angles i meet them on every street as if they were dropping from the sky instead of rain
as someone i was not is sleep really that similar to death? asleep i have been everyone and someone else: a woodpecker a cowboy a werewolf even a sea storm even my past self
as deep deep purple could rot ever bruise? could it ever match my skin when i press fingers into flesh and let them sink too much hoping to reach deep within the soil
like when in summer the asphalt slightly melts and my thumb can feel hot softness giving in
Robin Steve is a trans queer poet and researcher. They live in Dublin, where they are pursuing a PhD in creative writing. Their research, funded by the Irish Research Council, focuses on the intersections between trans poetics, trans ecologies, and trans temporalities. Their poetry has been published on Honest Ulsterman, Abridged, and Impossible Archetype. They are a member of the Trans* Research Association of Ireland (TRAI), which you can find here. You can find Robin on both instagram and twitter at: @robinsteve189.
i eat mwezi under cover moonrise / midnight mahina bright enough to read your breasts
by / inhale / inhabit your breath suck moonbeams lick laline flesh / cotton-candied tsuki
sapphic snake tongues thrust / lap moondust / between saffron sheets we strum salted mawu nipples
sugared stars inyanga crystals you moan deep / rouge / maha clouds scat blues riffs / till blood moon kisses dawn
At Carnegie-Mellon University I earned a BFA in Drama then had an acting career.
At University of Houston, I earned an MSW in clinical and political social work and served in correctional, medical, and psychiatric facilities.
At Boise State University I earned a BFA in creative writing. My nonfiction appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, and in The Texas Review. My fiction appears in North American Review and in The EastOver Press Anthology of Rural Stories, 2023: Writers of Color. My poetry appears in The Indianapolis Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Minnesota Review, in ANMLY, and is forthcoming in The Normal School.
Shall I run, shall I walk, will I catch up to the Oba? Shall I run or shall I walk? The tale is all abroad that the Whiteman’s taken captive even the Oba of Benin; and they are deporting him. Shall I run, shall I walk? Can I catch a glimpse, O! What a tale!
[A Ballad For Oba Ovonramwen Nogbaisi]
The trees are gnarled. The earth is desolate. There is no love here. What drums are singing this slit elegy? What piercing instrument of the clavicle stretches towards this sunrise? On all four, I watch the mornings crawl back to me. My tongue arrives earlier than the stars—native chalk drawn all the way up to my throat. Nothing can hold. Minds feasting through the dark like warring termites do the dew. From the roots, we try to speak of it. Speak of it as a worn out coat. If I said the ridge in the field was swallowing everything before it; if I said the pianos were plotting silence with the fingers, would you think it to be a joke? A reminder of dry riverbeds where strangers’ weary feet are eroded walking across homelands. Slavery is no love; so we come with kernels, oil, and pomades. They reciprocate heat, and the salt it thaws. They talk with bird mouths, things pleasant to the ear. The ears now have edged out cold. Swollen with absence. There is no love here.
Prosper C. Ìféányí writes from Lagos, Nigeria. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, his works are featured or forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, New Delta Review, Salt Hill Journal, South Dakota Review, Magma Poetry, Obsidian Literature, ANMLY, and elsewhere.
J-Lo wraps herself in a Puerto Rican flag wrapped in an American flag,
and a collection of chords bundles into a skeleton. Diva wrapped in two flags, voice wrapped around songs marching one long funerary procession.
How natural it is to sing American. How natural it is to hope this cacophony maps us a country: collection of chords, bundle of skeletons,
repetitive rhythm this empire’s lesson. The coquí’s croaked nocturne cracks our anthems from one long funerary procession,
sugarcane fields and coffee crops embedded with a chorus of protests. An archipelago slapped into a collection of chords, bumbling skeleton
of an orchestra symphonized until there is no question— we are American as anyone else who isn’t really, the gap between our every song just another funerary procession.
And for a moment I imagine myself dressed in the cloth of two flags—how they thrash, how they flap, tune my body into a collection of chords over my skeleton and every song I know into one long funerary procession.
All Diasporican All the Time
—after Taína S01E05: “En Español”
All flags draping fire escapes or windows or rearviews all the time. All sky blue flags ’cause fuck Americanization all the time. All bomba plena salsa reggaetón blasting from computer speakers all the time. All Don Q or Palo Viejo but never Bacardí rum nationalism all the time. All plátanos eaten at whatever Caribbean restaurant you can find all the time. All Clemente and Don Pedro portraits in the restaurants all the time. All Clemente jerseys even if we’ve never been to Pittsburgh all the time. All TV blasting home runs and strikeouts from baseball games all the time. All rooting for boricuas en las grandes ligas all the time. All rooting for Puerto Rico against the US in international play all the time. All weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepa all the time. All How could you tell I’m Puerto Rican? all the time. All straight A’s in high school Spanish while stumbling over a Spanglish tongue all the time. All pronouncing it Porto Rico ’cause Americanization fucks us all the time. All substituting spices and produce in the family recipes all the time. All Cheo boleros on the heartbroken days all the time. All gray Seattle skies instead of tropical sun are heartbreak all the time. All Puget Sound chill instead of Caribbean Sea breeze is heartbreak all the time. All summers passed without a trip to Borinquen are heartbreak all the time. All plans to bring Pops back to the homeland one last time falling through all the time.
Malcolm Friend is a poet originally from the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. He received his BA from Vanderbilt University and his MFA from University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of the chapbook mxd kd mixtape (Glass Poetry, 2017) and the full-length collection Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple (Inlandia Books, 2018), winner of the 2017 Hillary Gravendyk Prize, and co-edited the anthology Até Mais: Latinx Futurisms (Deep Vellum, 2024). Together with JR Mahung, he is a member of Black Plantains, an Afrocaribbean poetry collective. He currently lives and teaches in Austin, TX.
in8 iĐ is the author of the forthcoming 2-byte βeta Ei8ht ½-Loops, from which this excerpt was taken. Collectively, under various other identities, they have published other book objects including 1/ 4 i am ĐNA, 4ier X-forms, Textiloma, A Raft Manifest, and Ark Codex ±0. They also make music as Sound ƒuries and blog at 5cense.com.
Finally, it ends. In empty space, bodies collide, heat without the production of form, just release. I feel so greedy you say, as your hand creeps down your thigh, but greed is want constrained by extraction—here, awash in the orange of what could have been, there is nothing left. How desire makes scarce the flesh we find inescapable. Deeper, then, into pulsing membrane and nerves entangling violence into pleasure, our slick guts held in by the dim pressure of distant constellations. A debris cloud stalks the horizon, sweeping decades of spent casings across polished floors; an exhausted animal rests its head on scorched earth, texts loved ones I hope you made it out all right; everything eventually looks the same, you on your knees, begging for the rhythm of catastrophe. There is no beginning again. Better to plant your hands in scabbed soil, our well-watered roots recalling the forest, not the axe. There is only our warmth—soon, indiscernible beneath the sun.
the end unfurling your throes steadied by my hands scars fade from our palms
Justin Aoba is a writer and editor based in NYC. His work appears in the Oakland Review, Black Stone / White Stone, Five South, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He is Deputy Poetry Editor at Identity Theory and a member of Heung Coalition, where he helps organize a weekly writing workshop.
A Hookup Explains His Planned Ouroboros Tattoo as I Contemplate Deleting All Photos of My Ex from My Phone
Look at the engine. Tell me the names you will use for every fire there:
disgust—[Portrait in a large
mall in Manila, smiling in a food court] I
could not bear the vinegar, distilled, white,
could not stomach the lake bubbling at the
vents from their place in history, history
being a body of water unfathomable,
spanning ancient land masses for a crown.
want—[Mounting me, in a mirror] I no longer seek who isn’t seeking me but there’s no accounting for the lonely decades, ribless years I spent yearning and I thought this ghoul might be the stopper large enough for the wide mouth it never occurred to me to close even on the driest of days.
thirst—[On a picnic blanket in Tilden, under the sun our temples brushed lightly against one another] I can’t write about anything but the spit anymore, but the christblood stains lifting from the floors of my tongue by a new brew, and though I imagined my first kiss after the ghoulish man would sicken me, might be milkfish on an unknowing palate, I couldn’t stop asking the man to pour his spit into me.
sweetness—[Our pitbull in lap, on a bench, above the bay] I ask, but what of the rot? what of the saccharine profane? what of the animals dangling bioluminescent appendages to lure? to lull?
geography—[Smoking a joint, on the rocky shore of the Yuba River] I jest about physical limitations, list activities that are not in my blood like ice skating, field hockey, living away from the ocean, and I hope my ancestors have a sense of humor, want me to remove all limits.
traditions—[Pissing cock out in the mirror of a Seattle rental] I cannot account for the saints I ask for by name, the beads I count, every curve of heat I call god under my breath.
curiosity—[Portrait in a basement bedroom, in a wig] I say: what a gentle name, what a soft practice, what patience.
gratitude—[At a basilica, gilded] each of my classmates and I were shown a square of tape on the carpet, the teac her instructing us to use our im agination: it was the baptism al font, the acts of pageantry ne ed our careful practice and around the font, we learn that rehearsal is the Catholic way.
habit—[Screenshots of a profile] if I split the fibers enough times, if I thin the stalks, if we are endless, as promised, then when is the last of you?
//
The anger is syntaxed just above my right hip, logic-bound
into a discrete shape—I extract like the hair I pull from the drain, like
the repeated ingestion of my own tail, like telling his friends I’m single
again, like I was always someone tender enough. I finger bundles of greens
at Berkeley Bowl, imagine what woman I am when eating each: virgin
with the escarole, menace with the ong choy, queen with the chard. Woman is a word,
a woman is a bond I can’t begin, let alone keep. I’m freckled today,
feckless in my hunger for a lox bagel, for a nicer apartment, for someone hard and raring to go.
Photo by Paul Goudarzi-Fry
antmen pimentel mendoza (they, he, she) is the author of the chapbook MY BOYFRIEND APOCALYPSE (Nomadic Press, 2023; reprinted by Black Lawrence Press). antmen writes, works at the Multicultural Community Center at UC Berkeley, and studies at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. antmen’s poetry is published in Underblong, Peach Mag, Split Lip and anthologized in Best New Poets 2023. antmen lives in Oakland and is online as @antmenismagic and at antmenpm.com.
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