Category: Poetry

Marlow Moss was a Babe and So Am I

After Composition in Yellow, Black and White (1949)

 

Dylan McNulty-Holmes is a writer and editor who lives in Berlin. He is the author of the chapbook Survivalism for Hedonists (Querencia Press, 2023), and the longform digital poem Half a Million Mothers, which was shortlisted for the 2022 New Media Writing Prize. His writing has been made into a T-shirt, commissioned by a trade union and read at worker protests in Jakarta, and translated into five languages. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he’s been featured in journals including Split Lip, DIAGRAM, Puerto del Sol, Magma, and The New Welsh Review. Find him at dylanmcnultyholmes.com.

 

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(G)loss

Tear after tear, wound after wound.
My life leaks away like water from a tap.
It’ll end with the drop of the last day.
It’ll come back with the pure power of the rain.
Dolphin. Tap

One day we met and later
we sought one another out on other days. And we’d
found–by the screams louder than everybody else’s.
Then there was a walk and I left my footprints
on the snow, on the cobbles, on the poles, on the streetlights,
and you and your sisters watched. There were
three of you and together we were Chekhov and his play.
Then we parted our ways to meet again,
but this time with consciousness. And to count time–
tear after tear, wound after wound,

minute after minute. We were getting closer.
We met to banish undead from the streets
and then walked the same streets down.
We stayed all alone. With no prying eyes
got married and multiple obstacles
seemed to us just a “cost-of-production.”
And we sat down in our tiny room
that was a bedroom and a kitchen to us.
But once you now notice how so long
my life leaks away like water from a tap

and for us it gets too cramped. We read to each other
in hopes to lose ourselves; you talked about politics
and I did on Marx and we tried to find
the common ground. We got our kids;
I started to cover you from the cold with my coat
less and less. Then you remembered your diploma from the US
and decided to come back there, settle in Palo Alto.
I don’t cause a trouble and stay alone with the kids.
You know that even if this dream doesn’t come true
it’ll end with the drop of the last day,

not sooner or later. From California we communicate
over the Internet and to you the howls
of snow and wind are something unheard of–it all reminds
a quiet air alert. Finally, you come back
disappointed and together we belatedly
raise our kids hoping to outrace the time.
We teach our kids the words but not their meanings so that
afterwards they would not judge us for our past transgressions but for future ones. And once
they’re grown we file for divorce and bet on our life, on the fact that
it’ll come back with the pure power of the rain.

Sometime in 2021
Berlin

 

Anton Lushankin is a (visual) poet, writer, playwright, and translator, born in Kyiv and, since the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War, resides in his hometown. His work appeared in multiple publications including TAB Journal, orangepeel, Cream City Review, Lenticular Lit, and Teiresian. He has too many ideas to really be able to manage them properly, but currently he’s finishing M.Sc. in Architecture, while working on a closet musical DIG!!! LAZARUS DIG!!! (based on the eponymous album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), a memoir-in-essays about the Russo-Ukrainian War, and a multitude of short stories. He’s on Instagram.

 

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Crescent’s Quest

     And Atlantis has risen in Maiduguri           

Gullets blowing out prayers to grow gills    
     Paddling limbs have become wet wings       too weak for ascension

Shore is beneath the flood     
     And the people have to drown to get to land

Faith, diluted, snorkeled in soggy tongues
     Hyponatremia bodies and submarined homes

Breathless trees; soaked vegetables
     Flushed zoo; marinated apes in the cold arms of water

In the center of the city, a mosque holds its crescent above the flood
     Begging God for liberation

From this damning cleanse
     Lord, if this be another Genesis

From whose tongue will the prophecy drift?
     The city is gorged and heavy with its tears

The people are filtering into the fringes
     in fishboats. Awaiting the sun

To burn out the flood and warm their homes   
     And they’ll flock back with thirsty feet        and hungry lungs     

 to tell the tale—
     How they have become Almijiris in their own city

This poem, a miserable riddle.      Tell me,
     How a city of water can be deserted?   Tell me, how a flood can be burned?

 

Agboola Tariq A., Swan II, is a poet & he studies Law at the University of Ibadan. His writing explores self / identity and space. His works are featured or forthcoming at Lucent Dreaming, ANMLY, Aké Review, SoFloPoJo, Variety Pack, Fiery Scribe Review, Olumo Review, Overtly Lit, & elsewhere. He won the Blessing Kolajo Poetry Prize ‘24, 1st runner-up Fireflies Prize ‘24, and a SprinNG 2024 Fellow. He is on X @Agboola_Tariq_A.

 

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home equity loan.

break the glass,
tell me not to worry about the pieces.
when i kneel to pick them up with bare hands
pick me up and bind them.
put me in the car and tell me world news,
tell me about my great grandmother:
“she was a teacher when women were nothing
more than the bones to build a home on top of.”
i’ve been awake for thirty-one hours
and still can’t sleep.
every time i try, i trip over pain
that i know i put away already;
pack the difficult things into boxes,
seal with caution tape
and pile on top of the boxes
where i packed the good things, and the things
that were just alright.
they’re sitting in the corner of your apartment,
taking up space.
you could put a nice coffee table there.

 

Isobel Burke is a Canadian poet born and raised on Vancouver Island. She was shortlisted for the 2024 Bridport Prize for Poetry and her poetry collection, inheritance, won the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival poetry contest in 2023. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including PRISM International, Pinhole Poetry, and Anti-Heroin Chic.

 

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If music is the sound between

I.                             If music is the sound between
                                                                           the notes,
                                              then the knot is the closeness between the strands.

             The knot is not of the string.
When the ends can be found and the center can be freed
you might find that it is not there at all. The knot does not exist.

What magic trick is this?

The simple knot is a string’s final perfect form.
Physicists have studied at length
               how all knots, if separate from one another, remain
                                                          separate
               unless placed in proximity into the same drawer.        
                             Then they form one knot again.

Leave any of us alone in the dark
& we, too, will twist into knots.

II.
It was my father who taught me music is the sound between the notes. What, then— of the staccato of water while wading with fishing rods into the stream? Of early mornings filled with birdsong?
                                                                         Of the minds of women who laugh between sorrows?

What of the hush that lies between family secrets housed in boxes, stacked away
that our loved ones will one day sort for us    
only to find them
                                                                        full of knots?

It was on my own that I learned that a knot is the kinship between the strands. Find the ends & begin the unraveling. Begin to free the heart of it & find the knot no longer exists,
                                                                                                                                      find your hands
                                                                                                                                      suddenly empty.

III.
Yes. I think it must have been my father who taught me the sound between notes was something called music. About the vast spaces between a scolding & a screaming match. About the fear trembling like a cymbal
                                              between shirts hanging in a closet hiding a hiding child.
                                              Of the fear that ripples between hands covering the ears.       

IV.
I really think it might have been my father who taught me how time is the invisible structure that holds our happenings. How events can be rearranged or swapped out like pairs of shoes. How you can exchange lies for truth & fill gaps with them like insulation, the way birds stuff paper into nests to keep out the draft. Piece for piece, forming the same life again & again
                                                                                                    & find all roads leading to the same grave,
                                                                                                    find that the obituary always reads the same.

I may have learned on my own, but probably with some help, that a knot is the constraint between the strands. Find the edges & push, don’t pull— that causes tightening. The goal is to loosen; to unravel gently to free the heart of it from its own tight-fisted grasp; to find it no longer there.

The knot does not exist.

                                              Find it is only air.

                                              One day, after you disappeared, I walked around plucking the sky.

                                                                         Beautiful silence,
                                                                         everywhere I searched.

V.
My father taught me that if you smash the notes like dishes heaved at the wall, it’s one way to make a point mid argument.

That there isn’t any music between the shatterings—
                                              only pieces of something that a nostalgic likes to call a childhood.

                                                                         In the same way that we form deep bonds
                                                                         with ordinary things, in our minds made special
                                                                         by virtue of being ours

                                                                         & nothing more romantic than that.

That may be all he taught me of music :         

the silence

                                              when he tried to teach me to play guitar / the tambourine / drums / to sing.

When I asked if I could see the sheet music, he replied that he didn’t know how to read music, that he could simply hear it,
                                                                         couldn’t I hear it?

For years, I strained my ear listening for the music between family secrets,
muffled where the notes are merely mumbled whispers stuffed in pockets, stowed away,
packed in boxes, then stacked in shadow towers in basements.

VI.
I learned that breakthroughs are lubricated by flood damage.

                                              I think I learned this from my mother’s tears
                                              catalyzed by a broken sump pump that caused the deluge
                                              that floated things to the surface.

A broken pipe.

A faucet left on, overflowing the bathtub.

A heavy rain that washed the backyard into our home
through a tiny solitary window.

   It could have been anything

                      that made soup of too small clothing
                                                     of shoe boxes of photographs
                                                     of evidence of family life

   constructed of the people we once were.
   of the images we hold onto / outgrow /
   wince at the sight of / would rather not face /
   remember with pride

by virtue of having been them; of them having been us—       nothing more.

Maybe it makes sense when he says, I don’t want you to see me like this.

Maybe we all want to be remembered as someone we tried so hard to be / only managed for mere moments, sandwiched between years of not-our-proudest-moments, that in between the waiting to become, tied itself together to form the knot that we call identity.

VII.
It isn’t wrong to want to remember my mother’s voice & simply let that be enough. To hold on

to that long-ago sound
amid the music-less silence with no attempt to reconstruct your memories
in a present where you clear out your father’s belongings. All that useful space to be reclaimed.

Somewhere in the breaths between the grief
a child untangles the desperate fiction healing over the gaps in memories

    she sits in an empty room reconstructed from a closet,
    composing something.

Remember those songs your mother sang whose words you never paid much attention to, then found later they had formed the synapses of your psyche anyway— how they were the foundational beliefs between the independent thoughts?

Perhaps I don’t give her enough credit—

it’s true, my mother also taught me
things.                                                     

VIII.
It was my mother who taught me how to present my body to the male gaze. The yoga of how to breathe while sucking it in,
                                                                      those softer parts.

                                                                      How to make the bones stick out artfully.

How red can glisten like gold in the bright light of the stage. How bruises can be maquillage. How to remain soft despite pretending you’re not just doing what you’re taught again and again long after the encore.
                                                             How smiles are a performance we call womanly arts.

When she got up on stage the visions of thinness became the hiding between the reflections of the dancing spotlight on her teeth. Eyes closed, mouth agape, crooning into the microphone like kissing a tender lover, were all a form of both hiding & allowing of men’s eyelashes to strike her face, which my father hardly noticed, did not protect her from.  

IX.
It was sometime around then that I learned that delusion is the denial of the existence of the hands that grip the wrists leaving purple marks.

When I asked my mother about this, years later, she said
                                                                                                                      children misremember things.

Then why did I keep listening for the music as the sound between the thuds? Searching for acceptance to be the thing between the broken strings of disappointment left behind to be inherited like the family instrument & waiting

for the forgiveness to be the gift from the many steps trekked between childhood & the future & kept finding that knots continue forming
where they previously weren’t,
                                                          if you left the memories unattended;

that wounds can continue hurting
long after they’ve healed

to find that scar tissue is a form of binding,     like a knot.

To find that your fingers must remain busy untying / unwinding / unsnarling / unperling / resolving / undoing it all with such impeccable devotion to maintain this spaciousness between the gossamer strands of lace of the life you don’t realize you’re weaving.             

You cannot place the untangled knot into the same drawer with the rest

& shut it                                                 & simply walk away.

 

Svetlana Litvinchuk graduated from University of New Mexico. She is the author of a chapbook, Only a Season (Bottlecap Features, 2024) and a forthcoming full-length poetry collection (spring 2026). Nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net, her poetry appears in swamp pink, About Place, Flyway, Apple Valley Review, Sky Island Journal, Arkana, and elsewhere. She is the Associate Editor and Reviews Editor with ONLY POEMS and is serving as an Editor for Rockvale Review in 2025. Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, she now tends her garden in Missouri. Find her on Instagram @s.litvinchuk or at www.svetlanalitvinchuk.com.

 

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Hey Siri, Define: An·i·me Gen·e·sis Req·ui·em

You retcon the canon of your father’s
     Adultery with Schrodinger’s cat eyes :
Blue blinks once for truth, Red unceasingly
     Flickers :          「Lying …」          in your next Shonen Jump
Life you wouldn’t have this hassle : deadass
     Tago-ng-tago before your hero’s
J. Campbell Over-Powered arc drops : You、
     Hallowed First of Tres Marias、 curse yourself
Alone the Strongest : your ultraviolet
     Loneliness rends space so none may ever
Touch your infinity : rōnin reverse
     Blade slashing no belly save yours : 「Lying …」         
Your love language :          Ganbarre Ganbarre!
     Katsusa!          Bukkorosu!          Believe it!         
Ora! Ora! Ora! Ora! ^∞

You brat、 know love only from insides of
     A blood-black palayok ; kamagong sticks
Like fans abaniko-striking temples
     Of all shadow opps ; Queens Yellow Paged shields
Absorbing One Inch Punches & absence :
     Your fanfic has more fighting spirit than
A body like yours can contain :          死ね! ^{[ Die! ]} 、
     Is what you wish to say to your villains :
Your Father-Emperor of Iron Sand
     Warring states to bury your insolence、
Your ice-veined Mother whose frost ingit pinch-
     Pricked your upper arm meat & cancerous
Beauty found no rival in your face :           Die ^{[ Sige, mamatay ka na ]}

     A thousand suicides : their command you
                         Refuse。

                                               

Note: Debt of gratitude to adult authority figures in Jujutsu Kaisen, My Hero Academia, Naruto, Rurouni Kenshin, and Saga.

Balikbayan Noir Prelude

They Drive By the Claws of Night in the Naked City : Jaguar packs under Karnal
Moonlight : You Only Live Once — they croon to The Balikbayan : Stray Dogs drag Bodies
Bodies Bodies underfoot : asong pinoy tales wagging from the wrong end : make for
Pretty Little Liars — It’s good times, yeah— Joyridin in Cars with burgis Boys babe :
On one of those Brutal Scorpio Nights The Third Man leads The Balikbayan with
Mga Batang X through a Dark Passage : Bomba Queens Burlesk Kings Midnight Dancers
Tukso Sa Mundo Kundiman ng Lahi sing Maging Akin Ka Lamang : kind
                     of Is It A Sin To Worship You? like real love

                                               
Note: Capitalized language borrowed from Philippine film titles and film noir.  

The Homme Fatale in The Balikbayan Noir Multiverse

It was already too late when she turned around. Sheets funeral shrouding
     their hormonal bodies. So-called slumber on the banig mat on the floor.
Filipinos back home will sleep anywhere, five in one bed, horizontal at
     kuya feet, who cares.

Too late when she woke to the weight of his more muscular arm over
      her waist, when she breathed shallow, when she only heard his breathing
on her neck and no other snores in the bed above, when realization sunk
      in her belly button and bare kneecaps and armhairs and tonsils, when
the chasm opened, all too late even with eyes closed they ampersand-
      curved into each other, all too quiet until other people’s comfort recedes
far far far from the only reality that existed in that daybreak hour.

     She was the one to move first. She knew she would. Every answer to
What Would Ate Do? governed The Balikbayan’s decisions in this trip.
     She wasn’t bad. The Balikbayan wanted to know herself better, taking
detours into such unknowns as what would follow after she turned
     around to face him. Eyes (still) closed.

               How did she forget the pastel flowered sheet covered
their heads. There had to be a few minutes of waiting, holding
          breaths in to let the other make the first move. Noses first. No
               longer kids to repel and laugh away awkwardness. No excuses
                    left to utter. Lining up mouths. That had to take some seconds.
Slow seconds in every pressing, every entrance, lick becomes
               licks becomes underliptasting becomes cut green mango slick slippery
          becomes shooting guard palms on goosebumped skin dipped at her ribs
               like a valley at her shorts’ elastic becomes his erection against
her thigh

               Breathing becomes too loud.

               When they stop, he breaks the silence.
               Ang sarap mo pala. Grin reaches his ears. 

                                             They leave after breakfast.

                                   Alone in the car he asks if she
wants to go to a motel. No answer. He says it’s not
                                             like i forgot who you are.
               Alone in his room where there are no locks
they risk they writhe as if ennui and youth
     puppeteered their parts. They know and they don’t think.

Some mornings he pulls her SO-EN flower-embroidered pastel panties
     to the side, enters her in whatever way they have time before footsteps
in the hall cause them to untangle, before maid hands turn doorknobs,
     before almusal announced. There is always more time to be alone.

Rattan bed almost broke when she was on top.
     Ceiling to floor wardrobe with deep shelves
serendipitously high enough for him to stand against,
     for him to lift her on, for her to blend into
his folded polos and jerseys, her bottoms off, 
     for her to lean back, for him to lean into her, into
          her, in, to, her, intoherintoher, i, n , t , o, h, e, r,

                                                                                    They never seem to finish.

Some nights they drive to the city, dance in clubs
     where nobody really dances, where nobody knows
who they are to each other. Some nights they hide from
     family in dark corners, grind against a wall as he
taunts her for showing so much skin in public where
     he has to keep her safe. Sometimes in the pools the lagoons
on the road against his motorbike one time in the cave.    

               When she goes home, none of this
               will cross the customs line. All of it
               stays when it’s time for her to go.

The Underage Balikbayan Never Walks Alone in the Probinsyang Twilight

You and your kind never drink alone in the province : Adults pushing San Mig Lites
Into your open hands after mano po’s second breakfasts meriendas : Cans 
Erupt gush overpoured in stereo you and your cousin’s Lasallian bros
Chug out on the balcony in full view overlooking the kalye : Your family’s
Not rich like those bros are not famous pero over there by the gate : a kuya
You’d never known perched in-stool gun in-pants : Presume from here on that you at lahat
Sila present are not American legal drinking—Easy Ka Lang Padre
Your other kuya’s barangay kap’tan : They try to speak English to you not with
You : Only the sosyal one matangos yung may pera-pera enough to split
Live between the Makati Hills and the West Coast spoke the most casually assured
With that pointlessly idiomatic language : Tells you that The Filipino
Dreams most about the 3 A’s :          3. To be an Athlete —           2. To be an Artista —
                   1. To be in Amerika —

—“No wolves have ever managed to reach the islands and breed” — In the Philippines twelve
Million strays the Filipino street dog aspins askals their own breed : Walang wolves
Except for the soap opera Lobos : no rules of the road but always carry
Barya folded behind your lisensya in your wallet on the driver’s visor
Pag may pulis stopover : no aircon in doorless jeeps and Higit Sa Lahat
No Love in the Club pare : Bituing Walang Ningning live on stage lights fleshed Gods
For cash or Private Show you stare they don’t care you wash you Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Macho
                      Dancer Till We Meet Again…

                                               
Notes: Capitalized language borrowed from Philippine film titles.
Quote from Quora answer by Selwyn Clyde M. Alojipan to “Why are wolves rare in the Philippines?”

 

Pamela K. Santos is a Pinayorker writer-artist practicing popculturomancy across disciplines and genre. She dedicates her multilingual work-at-play to bekis, lolas, and dalagas everywhere. Pamela co-founded Portland’s Winter Poetry Festival and has received support from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Oregon Literary Fellowship, and Caldera Arts, among others. Her poetry appears in Cultural Daily, ANMLY, Snail Trail Press, and elsewhere.

 

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wound citation