Category: AP38

[Missing]

In 1942, under Operation Sook Ching, men were corralled and interrogated, notably in Chinatown,and taken away by the truckload to remote areas, such as Changi, Bedok, and Punggol, where their lives were ended by a firing squad.

I think this is the way
                                    of missing you
Much in the way of
                             missing you
How hungry the stomach
                                          milked to its root
The evening stilled
             into what it has forgotten

How are you before you were
                            & you were you were
                                                       before the                        and
     The words that had eluded us         for so long
                                                                                so long
Became
              the lonely island
                            I’d forged from a memory

The face on the mantle speaks with
                                              Such sad eyes
              Such sad I’s
                            Like I was once a rickshaw driver but.
    Some lots were stones.

Some suns never set

          The long shadows cast
                                   into the cell when they came
                     Incense curling a fist
                                                through the window
                         And I still remember
                                                      the gun that came around,
          The moths caught in my throat,
     And you left through the back
                   Not in front of them please

Those damn buts.

Squared off by the bullet
               into a sky that feels like an eternity No
                             one could have

I think you thought that
             Some time on that long drive
                                                        Into eternity

   If only there was something we could destroy
                               That night in Babel
                If only it hurts much as the giving

And morning glory,
                             you welcome the day after
             The carnival of flies.
                     Only the left behind knows
                                                     what was left behind.

Pa, such is the missing.
                            Such is the missing in the part of me missing
                                                 and missing you.

A Canon of Constraints

Consecration     Take these hands and use it
                               for another purpose, this
Country               has another name we have
                               mispronounced into a
Curse                    We carry scars
                               that we keep picking into
Cicatrices            Where we are circling a moot point
                               like a hawk with a clover in its
Claws                   I know they are called talons but after the
                               war, is our existence not a misnomer? We call
Crooks                 The ones who burnt the mama shops
                               to the ground, not the
Colonial               Rule that ran
                               that night on the
Concrete             Bridge,
                               they made
Crucibles             From our jars of clay
                               in the middle of a
Century               When they are moving
                               but we are still in
Calamity              The many times we have stemmed the
                               blood with mugwort leaves, sleeping in
Candle-light       The firecrackers
                               sound without
Celebration         Someone tells you
                               thank God you’ve survived
Carnations          Line the streets,
                               beneath the wind’s
Caress                  Gentle, like
Caros                    the way my grandma says my father is
                              only sleeping, the same way you’d say
Cerulean             Like forgiveness,
                              only lighter
Carnage              Even in the courts, they will deny these
                              monsters they’ve made.

Sher Ting is a Singaporean-Chinese writer. She is a 2021 Writeability Fellow with Writers Victoria and a Tin House 2024 Winter Workshop participant. She has work published/forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Salt Hill, OSU The Journal, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, Bodies of Separation, is published with Cathexis Northwest Press and second chapbook, The Long-Lasting Grief of Foxes, is published with Mouthfeel Press. She tweets at @sherttt and writes at sherting.com

 

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Sometimes I Feel Like Keanu Reeves

 

Artist’s Statement

Since its inception, Submittable has been an integral step in helping creative work reach a wider audience. The word “step” carries with it an inherent sense of liminality; a sort of momentary breath on the journey towards greater goals. With this notion in mind, I wanted to shift the narrative by designing a game which pushed the submission process to the forefront and have it be the work instead of simply proceeding it. Approaching things through a game lens was my conscious effort to turn a tedious and sometimes irksome activity into something slightly less so. In other words, putting the “smile” in (S)ub(m)(i)ttab(le).

Fluctuation in # of declines hurling towards your creative aspirations mimics the emotional damage we all go through. Some days you only get a couple, while others you wonder why you even embarked on this journey in the first place. There is one constant; unpredictability! Declines flying in from all angles without warning mirrors the way rejections can often arrive when you least expect them. I know I’ve gotten a couple Paris Review nos while engaging in mundane tasks like doing dishes or taking out the trash. Standing there before the garbage can I wonder, “Is THIS where my work belongs?” Sometimes. Other times, like an unemployed person, I realize all it needs is a little work. 

Which brings us to the third and most important point. While I can only speak for myself, there is an almost automatic impulse to click the “Submit Again” button upon dying. Hopefully this rings true for others as well. By resubmitting in my game, folks might be subconsciously encouraged to do the same in real life. Rejections are inevitable, but so are acceptances. Do you think Kobe would’ve become the GOAT that he was without spending hours in the gym draining buckets for fun? What I’m saying is remember the three p’s: practice, persistence, and patience. Just don’t forget their counterparts: panic, perspiration, and profanity. Duality. So the next time you feel like throwing your mobile device across the room after spotting the word “regret” in a PR email, chill tf out and remind yourself, “It takes courage to try, but even more to try again. Keep going; you’ll get there.”

 

Nam Hoang Tran is a multidisciplinary artist based in Orlando, FL. His work appears or is forthcoming in Posit, The Brooklyn Review, mercury firs, New Delta Review, Tagvverk, Always Crashing, and Diode, among others. W/ Henry Goldkamp, he co-edits TILT – a journal of intermedia poetics. Find him online @ namhtran.com. 

SOFT AS SNOW (BUT WARM INSIDE)

there’s no nutrition in a muffin              patron saint of mixed messages
comes out of me chapter & verse                          a troll-themed town
less room for error                      what color helmet u want ???
he was never the same                              after talking to chatGPT
which had somehow convinced him      that armani was secretly british
his suspicions seemingly confirmed      he went down the rabbit hole
an earthly hare                a brazen thief blowing thru intersections
body fit to the point of parody                the male whore spat i am the (212) number
working himself into a froth                                 beestung lips refusing to burst
sulky & pouty                 inspiring mockery        “ not quite there ” as social lubricant
it must be vacca on the street                old cow               skunks ape
there isn’t any reason                  my love comes in different sizes
lead singer of a forgotten band               tells me to use my imagination
gargoyle in a gown         i am out of place
can only come up w. passion                    rainbow beachball i turn over & over in my head
how u are a nice boy—nice boy—nice boy             or i was hearing my own suffering
              cuz boys are mostly hair
i think abt how i must be a better poet than u                  since u are dead
& i’ll only keep getting better                wouldn’t u agree
i find u compelling                       the right shade of raspberry
like the one who said everything is impermanent           including his incredible body
tho i’m pretty sure he still loves me                     the way u put ur hand on a stove
out of love or some misguided desire                                 i’m trying to convince myself
i don’t have a chosen family      but at some point i stop
               —i choose me

 

MICHAEL CHANG (they/them) is the author of SYNTHETIC JUNGLE (Northwestern University Press, 2023) & THE HEARTBREAK ALBUM (Coach House Books, 2025). They edit poetry at Fence.

 

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Someday I Want to Have the Courage of Old People Who Ask Strangers Countless Questions

Their mouths form into an O / and I know they are about to birth /
a universe of questions / I stand in line waiting for my turn / and it
feels like I have been in line / all my life / all my hours spent /
listening to other people find their way / out of the dark / and into
their astonishment / here where they are holding / Turkish bread
fresh from the oven / where they learned about the taste / without
tasting / where they understood for the first time / that dates are
both time and fruit / I am saying my knees / are not as forgiving /
but I stand where I am / because I am meant to witness / how
wonder makes its way into the world / and I suppose it’s not the
questions / but the unabashed gesture / of asking what something
is called / of calling forth a name for a thing / of no longer being
afraid / to look the fool / listen I can’t go back / to being eight and
peeling / the skin off my lips / unaware blood comes / after blood
/ I can’t unknow / what I know / and pretend I won’t get hurt
again / but I can count the change slowly / while asking and what
about this one / and this one / and can you tell me / again, my dear
/ how to get home from here / yes / I am saying / when all that is
left is this body / I can still lean into wonder / I can forgive myself

 

T. De Los Reyes is a Filipino poet and author of the chapbooks, And Yet Held (Bull City Press) and Woeman (Hawai’i Review). Her poems have previously appeared or are forthcoming in RHINO, Narrative, Hunger Mountain, Birdcoat Quarterly, Pleiades, among others. She is the designer of Nowruz Journal and a poetry reader for Split Lip Magazine. She lives and writes in Manila, Philippines. Find more at tdelosreyes.com.

 

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Koans to Love By

sweet as my lover’s concern and the solution
sweet as winning the argument and my lover’s pain

sweet as moth light in the mountains on a screen door
sweet as leaving gifts in the waiting homes of my friends

sweet as my lover’s shame and a long ride alone by the water at night
sweet as my lover’s regret at what we grew and harvested ourselves

sweet as she got it right this time, finally, my mother, I wish
sweet as a 3/4 ton diesel truck with a tape deck and a mountain highway

funny as the hell we make ourselves and the dog’s impatience with my reasons
funny as calamities visiting in group tours and an exit interview with nothing to lose

we danced like old folks on a long walk by the charles river
while the hours passed like books lent to friends
while the hours passed like casualties

A hungering word

I arrive first enemy of empty teeth
first and worst even before the hunter’s claw, lingering longer
long thin whine, ache in bellows and brain,
feeling that destroys other feelings
ambition killer, focus murderer, murderer outright,
thief of mineral in bone, thief of sugar for thoughts,
disaster of the body to scavenge itself

I am weapon always of the king
end always of the empire
threat of breadwinning withheld
what your family can’t or won’t feed you
the pit, the pendulum, the carrot, the stick
born triple sibling to desire and fear,
root deeper than anything you can learn or unlearn or choose

I have become        cudgel of tyrants,
cosmic excuse of robber barons washing their crimes in charity
an accounting error
the failure to distribute abundance
a carefully curated and choreographed theatre of death, a danse so macabre
          to keep us all in line, to keep us all on the factory line, to keep us all on the running wheel
dangerous margin sliced so fine, founding stasis of world order,
the match to light revolutions.

Rasha Abdulhadi is calling on you—yes you, even as you read this—to renew your commitment to refusing and resisting genocide everywhere you find it. May your commitment to Palestinian liberation deepen your commitment to your own. May your exhaustion deepen your resolve and make you immovable. May we all be drawn irresistibly closer to refusals that are as spectacular as the violence waged against our peoples. Portrait by JJ Dumont, 2020.

 

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My Trans Body as a Spanish Giboso

Excerpts from YouTube, X (Twitter), and Facebook comments

Your egg hatches.

There are soft hands.

Soft eyes meet yours.

World of song and chirp.

Warm dry nest. Safe.

The soft man smiles.

“Hello,” he says.

“Pretty bird,” he says. Voice soft.

The cage is clean and there are birds.

Wear sunshine.

Sing lemondrop bright.

“Pretty bird,” he says. “Pretty bird.”

Stretch and flutter.

Cage plastered in ribbons and rosettes that agree: pretty bird.

Sit on the soft man’s warm finger.

He strokes your bare chest, your curled feathers.

Be grotesque and twisted.

Be half snake half gargoyle.

Be loved.

Rook Rainsdowne is a poet currently attending Eastern Washington University’s MFA program. They have been published in Protean, Ligeia, and Fifth Wheel, among others. They are a co-founding editor of COOP: chickens of our poetry. You can find more of their work on rookrainsdowne.com.

 

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Umami

Silver, gleaming – the dead river fish in my father’s hands. He holds it up like a
trophy for the photograph. He adjusts its head on the bothi, gently scraping the
scales off its back. Oil sizzles in the kitchen, mortar and pestle brimming with the
paste of mustard seeds. I inherited the staleness of desire from him. In America, I
cut open the pack of refrigerated tilapia, season it with ginger garlic paste. This is
muscle memory – to touch what is raw and open. I marinate it in yogurt, sprinkle
paprika all over its moist body. The wetness of fish alive in the tip of my fingers.
The first time I picked out a fish bone, it pricked my forefinger. The blood mixed
with the rice and my father joked how it enhanced the taste of the fish curry. We
keep fish bones in a glass jar. My father’s dying wish is to eat Sitol fish – a rare
delicacy in our Rohu-Bhokua household. To separate the bones one by one, like
strands of hair parted for a French braid. What doesn’t have a name doesn’t exist.
My father slices its throat. The fish flaps its tail.                        

 

Shlagha Borah (she/her) is from Assam, India. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Salamander, Nashville Review, Florida Review, EcoTheo Review, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is an Editorial Assistant at The Offing. She has received support for her work from Brooklyn Poets, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and The Hambidge Center. She is the co-founder of Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India. Instagram: @shlaghab. Twitter: @shlaghaborah.

 

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Fortress Fails: A Cow’s Retort¹

1.           The fortified field—ancient-lined with stone pulled up from volcanic history—walls
              our arrival into sun-warmed grasses. Our life is a mouth in wait. Incisor lops.

10.         The cow knows the score. The cow watches and moves, always held, vanity of
              the brand as a map of scar tissue, singed hair (there is no return), vanity of fence
              as a system a lexicon imagined logic of enclosure. The cow knows there is no
              way to shut the gate here.

20.        We receive what the earth yields to us and we give it as love our waste.

21.         The cow terraforms a field with e[i-e-i-o]missions. Toxicity is a matter of numbers
              when a field is used as a site of discharge, as a bin to feed.

22.        The scrub of our teeth over blades welcomes what remnants of waste and 
              whose. Hooves stomp, do not dig like nails uncovering the direction of water or
              what it carries sick to our regulated chewing and swallow of land.

23.         The cow welcomes contaminant into its stomachs. It passes unknown at the 
               technical and scientific levels.

24.         These walls were never made to shield us.

---

¹ Homophonic translation of excerpts from the 47th Portugal-U.S. Standing Bilateral Commission report

Air Base as Assonance²

1.         The first heft of a base is a messy realization of death as elemental to your 
            everyday enterprise of living. You estimate the size of your share of dead bodies.

9.         This pile is an impossible integer so you instead include just the illness and listen 
            for coughing fits.

10.       The hope of faux statements shows you are guarding the most rose-colored 
            home and so don’t know you are a posed flamethrower cut off from the blow of 
            the burn unit, its sorrowful moans not soaking the hold of your dome, no toll of 
            church bell or slow tableau of dark robes overflowing their woe in the road.

12.       Fuss deterred, you lust for stuff fit to the cuff of a uniform—what want you are.

---

² Homophonic translation of excerpts from the 49th Portugal-U.S. Standing Bilateral Commission report

Air Base as a Path Toward³

1.        Toward the sea from the flight check, from the sea toward the flight line—the 
           forward advance of the base as a crossroads.

20.     The base receives and expels, misses and longs for arrival yet is only ever on 
           the way to fill.

21.      The base took note of its shrinkage, its omission of family, and traced the 
           suturing of its rupture, empty folds tied back with a belt.

22.      The base is afraid of its future—sand covers so much it irritates its field of vision, 
            sand-scarred cornea, fine laceration (the Air Force calls them cuts). If forward, if 
            a word allows for a field to continue to feel like a home base and not just a 
            between site, a preservative.

23.      The base knows and does not know what floats like a covering of skin on the 
            water. The monitoring well is certain. The movement of release is certain. The 
            swell of the wave of cancer is certain. The emptying of fuel into pipes of fuel into 
            tanks into us into us is certain.

  29.     The base is on the way, uncertain the way to undo but to end.

³ Homophonic translation of excerpts from the 48th Portugal-U.S. Standing Bilateral Commission report

Ryan Clark is a documentary poet who writes his poems using a unique method of homophonic translation. He is the author of Arizona SB 1070: An Act (Downstate Legacies) and How I Pitched the First Curve (Lit Fest Press), and his poetry has appeared in such journals as DIAGRAM, Interim, SRPR, and The Offing. He now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with his partner and two cats. You can find more about him and his work at ryanclarkthepoet.com.

 

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Reading in the Dregs of Forced Displacement

I. She reads the past in coffee dregs

“We descended from the mountainous clouds.
On bent backs we hauled barrels of olive oil,
handfuls of sacred soil and burlap bags
of lost and displaced farming memories.

We wandered in a withered procession,
between pale surnames of rephrased cities,
hauling our own bulbs like orphaned lilies
on the humps of ancient curvy letters,
laden with red exclamation marks
and diacritics of anxiety.

We were bullied, shackled, stacked on lorries,
transferred, expelled to a bitter exile.

Bitter! Add some sugar to my coffee.

Stayed the predestined nights. Not one more night. 
Named “refugees, bugs, beggars, petty thieves.”


We returned when the moon refused to shine,
that moonless night, on our knees, arched backs
bending forward like heavy ears of wheat,
two months after that summer’s lost harvest.

We went back in the dark, dodging bullets,
travelled between written lines and took sharp
turns at proper nouns of cities and towns,
arrived at streets we could recite by heart,
we could not enter, nor could we depart.

The lore of our ancestors.  My sorrow!
Some lines erased, bent over other lines
others rephrased with foreign characters
cast like concrete angular cubicles.

In time, we backtracked to one proper line
and got stuck on its deserted margin
like fortuitous ink stains, present there,
we were, but deemed absent in the feigned
demography of foreign characters.”

II. On the mountain of sorrow, the fortune-teller went silent. But her misfortune emerged after a while in the dregs of another coffee cup

“Fifteen barrels of olive oil
five or six burlap bags of wheat
three jars of bee-honey so sweet
and I had just baked flat bread
not one hour before we fled
all left behind…  oh my sorrow

three cows,  two horses, the chicken
a hundred and twenty acres
and many other farming nouns
all left behind … oh, my sorrow
became outcasts in our own land.

Without nouns, the verbs of farming
become stop words at coffee time.
Enough futile stop words for now.”

III. And she coiled up in her seventy-five-year-old inner cubicle, refusing to read any past in any type of dregs

That, what she would never read,
forever rings in my inner ear.

IV. The dregs of forced exile
I’ll always remember her solemn voice
in the ancient tales about ghouls and jinns
about villagers hypnotised by wolves
and hyenas, and taken for pale prey.

Indeed, she believed all the fairy tales
but she utterly refused to believe
the fabled fiction tales of presence-absence.

My grandma denied all forms of Exile
their adjectives of ecstasy; the cold
foreign cubicles, their secure pleasures
of triumph; emasculated the pages
of absence, their margins and the bloody
surreality of presence-absence.

She died wearing with pride all synonyms
of sorrow and a blue tattoo of a cross
on her bare forehead. And we inherited
the empty space she had to leave behind.

Here, where the lilies grow in plastic pots
but die of old age, I write my chapter
of forced exile, with angular letters
building concrete cubicles.  My sorrow
for the lost words. The lost diacritics.
the lost curves. My sorrow. Oh my sorrow.

 

Khalil Sima’an is a Palestinian poet living in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His poetry appeared in Fikra Magazine, The Palestine Chronicle, and will appear in a forthcoming collection of poems. Prior to immigrating to Amsterdam in 1989, he published poems in Arabic language magazines Al-Jadeed and Al-Ittihad. Khalil works as professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam.

 

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Serial

It’s true New York must always follow Shanghai. A wide river
exchanging hands with the drowned valley. All cities are the same
during the right season, enough cold to bury difference, be it
anger or language. That first year in America I learned to cut
my nails so short they bled, lived comfortably off instant coffee
and laxatives. Sitting on the twin mattress with a fruit knife,
I was so beautiful I couldn’t even be recognized. My mother,
cheeks the dark hollow of nickels, tires out of performance, says
we were not made to stay in this country. Our skin and temper
too brittle, our humors lilt in the wind’s extremities. Growing
mousy in Manhattan, she thinks each brownstone is haunted
by its architect. Of course, she would know. She was a doctor
until she smelt the bodies; a romantic until she had a daughter.
Everywhere I go, there are arrows in my eye that flint and flicker.
Their angled path toward anger is one I walk again and again
on every continent. Each bearing the same lessons: all food
tastes the same coming up my throat and onto the curb. I am
so liberated I should start wearing dresses. I tape down my tits
and show the bare skin on my arms. It’s a challenge.
I want you to look at me. How much I’ve wanted
to change. How much I fall helplessly over
the next closest thing to home. Even with
all the dead weight and words I’ve lost, I’ve found
I still look like my father. I can never lose his nose.

 

Mimi Yang is currently based in Providence, but they are always dreaming their way home to Shanghai. A Best of the Net Nominee, their work has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers and the UK Poetry Society, and appears or is forthcoming in The Margins, BOOTH, Penn Review, among others. More of their work can be found at mimissyou.com.

 

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