Category: Poetry

Worship: The Gospel Of Pussy

Prologue: Listen.

The Pussy wants you to enter this deep dark tunnel,
Through which you pass           To the Other side
In there                                          You are held completely.

Then She wants                           Your Fire             
Deep, Primordial                         Blazing up houses,                
Swallowing everything              The end                                  
of all things.                                  Complete Destruction            
of what is holding you                Back
and then Love.

Coming from your chest           Powerful                                  Mountain stream                    
River

Such a                                             strong Current                      It takes everything
Your Heart                                     pouring out                            Love                                       
Tearing down                                Walls                                        Flooding
All over.

Breathe in                                      And Out.                                
Close your eyes.                             
Open your mouth.                        

Pussy is a Temple                         with Honey door.             
You lick the door frame,             You bite you eat, Honey
It is made of honeycomb            And halva         
it is made of                                   Baklava
It is a big temple                          Of sweets and nuts
You can just go and                     Eat
And when you close                    Your eyes,
Warm Honey     Is dripping       On your eyelids.
You open                                        Warm honey
Fills your                                        Mouth.                            
That is Pussy                                She will feed you 

Epilogue:
Worship                                         in her. 
Worship                                         her.

 

In Liquid

Liquid is so important to me these days.
The slow flowing of water
The sounds that trickle through my toes.
I observe my body in the bathtub
and desire it intensely.

My softness. I can enjoy looking
and not need to be looked at.

I’m a sea creature,
watching Fran Lebowitz in my bath at midnight.

I feel ecstatic to be part of the same group of people.
The poetic world of the lesbian,
almost mythical creature to me.
I appreciate it all,
but I am especially delighted by the sensation in my mind of a woman so comfortable
in a suit.
Her shirt has shiny cufflinks on it
and they are quite big.

These women with swagger –
In some sort of imaginary mouth,
a transcendent sensual mind space
I enjoy chewing on the gestures, fabrics, and shapes of swagger.

The queer femininity is a fine smoke of a cigarillo
deeply and pleasantly inhaled, or the moment of coming with the dildo inside me,
on top of my lover with a tight touch.
Something ethereal
but still having
a wonderfully palpable texture.
Touch, taste, smell, emotion, feeling? They all combine into one.

The color of this bathwater is a soothing soft golden green,
transparent dress for my nakedness.
I turn around in it. My phone screen is fogging up.

The blue windows and yellow-orange lights,
my big city at night.
Surrounded by millions of people, but the street is empty.
Alone, but not lonely.
Held by the sensations,
filled with my experience,
a rhythm of breath.

The water soaks off layers of my past,
a new skin is emerging.
Can I slide and turn around this white tub with my wet slippery skin?
Soft joy and the hardness of the tub so good against it.
The neverending warmth of the water
enveloping me,
am I inside my own belly?
Pregnant with myself, a grown woman?
Or perhaps still waiting to be born?

My shape delights me and I can’t stop thinking about it.
Bathing in my desire.

When I touch my skin,
pale in the soft light of the LEDs from above the sink,
I am a mermaid in the city
and I only exist
for my very own eyes.

How will I sleep, when I am so hot?

 

Noemi is a queer, interdisciplinary artist from Slovenia, currently based in Berlin. She explores themes of embodiment, sapphic eroticism, LGBTQAI+ identities, and power dynamics. Her work has been showcased at the MSUM (Museum of Contemporary Art, Slovenia), the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, and many others. Noemi’s poetry and performance were published in Nothing Personal?! Essays on Affect, Gender, and Queerness (b_books, 2023) and her debut poetry collection is forthcoming with Black Box in Slovenia. Find more at noemivebericlevovnik.org, subscribe to her Substack at noemika.substack.com/, and explore the ruins of her online shop at noemika.com. You can also follow her current adventures (for now) on Instagram @noemkica.

 

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At least one person died, seven were wounded and 14 others abducted in an attack on a passenger bus in South Sudan on Tuesday night (The East African, Garang Malak, 25, Sept. 2024)

at the bus station, i stand at the queue’s tail, a nagging premonition
heavy on my heart’s lap. every now & then, eloquent images, greased
with raw blood, beaming on the screen of my yeasty mind. this premonition,
finger-traced, flowers not only from the distressing fact, along highways,
these days, death waylays wayfarers with gritted teeth & anxious appetite.
this premonition, finger-traced, flowers from the heart-tearing reality
that not once, not twice, not even thrice but times beyond the count of my fingers,
this road has rinsed her mouth with blood of faces i was familiar with.
last night, i had bad-dreamed. but what do i now remember of the dream?
that the road shapeshifted into a giant Kalashnikov & retched bullets
into my lungs? that a purple-eyed ghost had charged toward me &
suck my bones dry of blood with its glassed lips? that i was trampled upon
until my mushed body spilled on the road’s face? i came face to face
with the man holding the manifest. between breaths & heartbeats,
a hushed hunch, that this might be my last journey, lurks as i absent-mindedly
render to the manifest-man my particulars. the manifest-man hands me back
a receipt with my names & nimule, my destination, misspelt nimuli, scrawled atop.
i make way for the next in queue, a middle-aged man eaten out of shape
that the shapes of his bones clearly marked out in his loosely hanging skin.
half an hour later, after taking our seats, the bus gasps, lurches forward
toward a road seducing it to its warm arms. & i, like everyone else aboard,
align with the star of death. a man to my left, with a weary sigh, mutters
something about how bus-fares today could buy at least two buses two years ago.
everyone mutters something in agreement but a pale-faced woman―with eyes still
& stagnant like a dead tilapia’s―upfront, bee-busily tucking herself into the pockets
of her own prayers for reasons best known to her. thereafter, a stout silence swilled
every sound but tyres’ screech & groan engine’s. a fragment off what i once read,
that silence is to death what flash is to thunder―a harbinger, surfaced on the waters
of my silence. i try to speak to dispel that dreadful spell. but my breath-burnt voice―
sucked of its life―unhooks from its groove, its indigo ashes salting my mouth
with the raw taste of self-pity. & in an eye-blink, i find myself, gripped, between
the teeth of last night’s bad dream.  the road shape-shift into a giant Kalashnikov & retch
bullets into my lungs. a purple-eyed ghost charges toward me & suck my bones dry
of blood with its glassed lips. & fleeing feet trample upon me until my mushed body spills
on the road’s face. i try to pray to atem, my mother’s god, to appease Kalashnikov’s rage
& morph bullets into smooth breezes upon kissing my skin. but it was too late. the rage
had long, long recast my body into a red-river caressing the road’s asphalt-pimpled face.

 

MK Kuol is a poet who is South Sudanese, now residing in Juba. His publishing credits include two chapbooks of poetry, Twice the Size of Sun (Poemify Publishers, 2024) and Song Her Thighs Sing (INKspired NG, 2024). His literary awards include the African Authors Honoree Award, Pengician Poetry Chapbook Prize (runner up), Arting Arena chapbook competition (longlist), among others. His work has appeared in Beach Chair Press, Spillwords.com, Ikike Arts, Arting Arena, Pulp Lit, and Port Harcourt Literary Review.

 

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개꿈

아빠 Appa

Like      a flapping dream
              you are the wind
              I could not polish

Your black hair, cawing
to cigarette smoke—
              the breath
              of paper bodies

In the cloud’s                wet mouth
you are a bony
celebration!                  Before you sleep

you tell me      the word for snow
is “eyes”

 

 

Glossary:

개꿈 (pronounced “gaekkum”) is Korean for “dog dream.” In Korean culture, a “dog dream” is a dream without special meaning or content.

아빠 (pronounced “appa”) is Korean for “dad.”

 

Angela Sim (she/her) is a Korean American writer with work forthcoming or published in Frontier Poetry, ANMLY, Hobart, Scapegoat Review and more. She attends George Mason University and is in her senior year of pursuing a BA degree in English.

 

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NUESTRA SEÑORA DE CONCEPT ALBUM

a scene for Janelle Monáe

EXT. ROUND, GOLD SWIMMING POOL

MONÁEBOT lounges at edge of pool, their legs off-screen, then suddenly jerks upwards as if pulled by puppet strings and dives sideways into pool. CAMERA pulls back, revealing three more identical MONÁEBOTS diving sideways in unison. As CAMERA continues to pull back, the MONÁEBOTS are revealed to be four fingers on a hand, and the pool is a holy water font in a church. EXT has become INT. The fingers are on MONÁEBOT PRIME, dressed in a tuxedo made of patent leather with prominent stitching that is computer cables.

      MONÁEBOT PRIME
Watch all the ways I can transform
Plane, train, my own getaway car
Log all the ways I have been born
Woman, android, even a star
Gawk at the spectacle and the storm
Light in my eyes from light-years afar
Talk about how I’m the brand-new norm
Cast a spell from a techno grimoire

MONÁEBOT PRIME removes their head with a slight twist and hands it off-screen, returning with a new head. It has the same face, but with an afro made of electrical wires. They reach into a pocket and remove an afro pick. CAMERA zooms in on it in an arcing shot, revealing the tips of the pick to be interfaces for a motherboard. As the scene arcs and zooms back out, MONÁEBOT PRIME sticks the pick in their wirefro. Their eyes glaze over, then show data downloading. Their eyes whir, spin, then click back into place. They begin to sing, wiggling their fingers à la jazz hands, which sing along.

      MONÁEBOT PRIME
You ever wish on a rainbow?

      FINGERBOTS
Rainbow…

      MONÁEBOT PRIME
You ever wonder where it goes?

      FINGERBOTS
It goes…

      MONÁEBOT PRIME
Yeah, light is a spectrum, we all know

      FINGERBOTS
All know…

      MONÁEBOT PRIME
And so are we, so won’t you glow

      MONÁEBOT PRIME and FINGERBOTS
Glow, glow, glow, glow, glow, glow, glow

CAMERA refocuses on the font/pool, now occupied by swimmers of a variety of genders and all with some robotic body part. The water lights up in shifting patterns as though RGB lighting were beneath it. The swimmers begin to trade their robot parts with no regard for where they originally were fitted, arms for legs, ears for nipples, jaws for crotches. MONÁEBOT PRIME reaches into the pool with their FINGERBOTS and swirls the water until everyone is laughing in a whirlpool.

      MONÁEBOT PRIME
We remained ourselves yet became one like a country. We sang harmonious notes. We were each a voice. We were 3D. We were images on screens on every TV. We were paradox engines driving towards a cliff, then riding off and levitating. We found the pieces within us that were missing. We replaced them with we. We pierced ourselves to become holy.

MONÁEBOT PRIME drops their hands below the screen and brings them back up holding PRINCE in their palms. PRINCE grinds his hips, drawing his hands from them up to his collar and popping it, continuing the motion to pull down his chest panel, revealing him to be a mecha piloted by JAMES BROWN. JAMES BROWN steps out onto the platform just created and gets down with the boogie, then lifts his hands towards his hair as if to brush it back but instead pulls up on his temples, lifting off the top of his head and revealing himself to be a mecha piloted by the smallest MONÁEBOT. The smallest MONÁEBOT holds eye contact with the camera.

END.

 

JeFF Stumpo is author of five chapbooks of poetry (most through Seven Kitchens Press) and a spoken word album, winner of the Subnivean Award for Poetry (judged by Major Jackson) and runner-up for the Joy Harjo Prize, and his poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as DMQ Review, The Journal, RHINO, Rattle, Puerto del Sol, and Allium. He is a survivor of psychosis and PTSD, husband to a PhD chemist, and father to an amazing trans child. He has a (poor) website at JeFFStumpo.com.

 

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[POOR HISTORIAN] In the military, when they would tie you to the fence

I mean when they would tie me to the fence

I mean when they would tie us to the fence

I mean that they would tie us to fences

and there were so many fences
because it was a military base
where they were practicing the art of borders
and walls and hells and, well, we were
left in the sun with our hands duct taped
and our mouths duct taped, but then the duct tape
was ripped off so they could pour old food left in the sun
into our mouths because it was called hazing
and it wasn’t called torture, because they called it hazing
and this way for them it wasn’t torture, but just hazing,
and the sun was an hour and the heat was a month
and the repetition was a half-decade and they owned us
because we signed paperwork saying we wanted to serve
our country, which meant that we wanted to be disrespected,
and touched
and we didn’t want to be touched
and, later, at the V.A., when I’d tell the PTSD counselor
about this, she would stamp my paperwork with the words
POOR HISTORIAN, because the denial of the precious moment
is to darken the history of our childhoods and the sun
had no shelter then and they did this for fun, no, for power
and our bodies were burnt sunburn and the mosquitoes ate
into the tomes of our bodies and I cannot sleep at night,
ever, and I cannot sleep all day, ever, and I shake like I’ve been
translated into a thousand different ghosts and

when they would tie you to the fence

I mean when they would tie me to the fence

I mean when they would tie us to the fence

I mean that they would tie us to the fences

and there were so many fences and one time they rubbed
feces into one of the recruit’s faces and there was only one of us
they killed, just one, his name Lee, and in the war there was nine more,
but this wasn’t during the war, and it was, and it wasn’t, and it was war
where you can do anything, because we were children
and the sun was the oldest man in the cosmos
and I remember when they untied me and I went back to the barracks
I looked in the mirror and I tried
to rip my teeth off, because they want to turn your life into a dumpster,
and there is no one ever in the history of my history with the V.A
where they have ever apologized, only emptying the boxes
in the closets of the disappearances of the dead, how I looked up
the list of those killed in the war and they don’t list the suicides,

as if they’re still alive, as if they’re still tied to fence,
because they are and they are and they are and we are
and I am and I am screaming for you to please cut me down . . .

 

Ron Riekki has been awarded a 2014 Michigan Notable Book, 2015 The Best Small Fictions, 2016 Shenandoah Fiction Prize, 2016 IPPY Award, 2019 Red Rock Film Fest Award, 2019 Best of the Net finalist, 2019 Très Court International Film Festival Audience Award and Grand Prix, 2020 Dracula Film Festival Vladutz Trophy, 2020 Rhysling Anthology inclusion, and 2022 Pushcart Prize. Right now, Riekki’s listening to “A Wish Come True” by Gavin Brivik from the Wild Indian original motion picture soundtrack. Reading and sound design by Vera Riekki Koss aka atmos.vera.

 

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Sleep-Wake Cycle

In sleep, I hold catastrophe at bay;
awake, the fat arm of an aunt 
and an uncle’s mustard breath
press against my softest parts—
This wreck: persistent, recurring
brain on loop, glitch in the algorithm,
defiance of now, catalog of future, 
error of past, dominion over everything

 

Fancy

By the time the auctioning of my hands and the commodification of this flesh 
between my legs begins, we are far beyond origin stories; whatever cane and fire’s
good wake could cut to erase wanting, could conjure into a joyful noise for rabble-rousers,

has done nothing save plunge me into the depths of cracked lips and bloodshot eyes,
wrap me in pinafores and white lace. High price to pay for proximity to white—
his calloused palms, gum, bone against my skin, rum-drunk words spilling from his lips: 

you my fancy ▇▇▇▇ now.    Possession has always been their blind spot, 
unable to fathom the origin story of their concupiscence. He, like his brothers
before him and after, noble apes inking their incestuous nympholepsy

generation after generation—peculiar entanglements forged between fields, sheets, ledgers. 
Beneath his heft, between each breath, I hear my grandmama’s hum come ‘cross the river,
come ‘cross the river and say let there be no grace for those who call you out your name. 

for Regina
circa 1802

 

.CHISARAOKWU. (she/her) is an Igbo transdisciplinary poet artist. She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and others. A health futurist and retired pediatrician, she’s developing a poetry collection set in the liminal spaces of the African diaspora in the Americas.\

 

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Midnight Marching for Palestine in Lubbock, Texas

October 2023

Lankans say holy beings get down from trees
at midnight and roam looking for souls to save.
Something got into our heads during that early
Halloween party. Maybe the weed synchronized with
mindless drinking and hours of nonsense:
somebody’s ex’s breakup, the new assistant prof,
my curried cashews, digging up the soil
to determine the cause for my peace lily’s demise.
Then flashed the random memory
of a road trip. Motorcycles. Che Guevara.
Bob Marley and reggae and how nobody
gives a fuck about reggae
in West Texas. Jehan was about to ping
an Uber home. Maybe he did.

Why was Sameer making out
with my doorknob? I didn’t even know
we were playing truth or dare.
Still no takers into our wild cheers
of “make-out, make-out,” who mixed
Ceasefire Now! Maybe Amir, maybe
his teenage girlfriend who wasn’t even
supposed to be drinking. In no time,

Kavin was banging the door demanding
a ceasefire! Tanisha lit up a scented Walmart
candle to make it a vigil. Few had the presence
of mind to grab their shoes, but the moon nodded
as we marched through the street. A stray dog joined.
A midnight skater stopped by and asked
if we’re all right. I gave him a hug.

As we hobbled past a fenced yard,
somebody switched on the lights
and rushed out with a rifle
primed in his hands. I froze
and pictured my brain splatter
on the sidewalk like graffiti.
He screamed and screamed.
But the others drowned out his voice
and marched on without noticing.

When the dark cavities of our eyes
finally seemed to lock, he lowered
the gun and nodded in their direction.
“Heck, don’t see why the great state
of Texas can’t form our own country,” he said.

 

Perfect British English – Waiting Room Edition

As part of my IELTS exam, I am here
to converse in perfect British English
with an Oxbridge-certified examiner,
waiting thirty minutes past
my scheduled interview time.
The well-travelled macho dude
who went in before me stumbles
back from the testing arena
pulling his hair. He’s lost
both muscle and color, his steely face
a messed-up toilet bowl.

The girl after me is mumbling something
paganist under a spell of demonic
possession. I eavesdrop hard and finally
make out two versions from intonation:
interrogator and tortured prisoner.
A useful tactic for the CIA to adopt…

The magazine on the coffee table advertises
English courses of all sorts from kindergarten
to the top executive, and I hope they’d expand
the catalogue for the centenarian in his deathbed
as a final blessing. A TV screen plays
countless testimony of the saved. This eclectic
mix of black, brown, and yellow faces
can’t be more blessed to learn from
our perennial white masters. Light shines
on them from above. God’s back in His
civilizing mission, but this time making us
pay out of our pockets.

Yet it bothers me not to see a single
portrait of Her Majesty, the Queen.
Or her governors of Ceylon, so that
I could recall their names we immortalized
in school, fearing the teacher’s cane
would come down like thunder
to darken our brown skin more.
As soon as my unworthy eyes
behold her grace, I vow to bow
my loyal commonwealth head!

A young local to usher me in as if
let alone that twenty feet, I’d lose
my bearings. A white dame as expected
with her name on a golden plaque
greets me: “Good Afternoon!
I’m Mrs. Jacqueline White.”
The clock behind her shows 11.35.
I waver between afternoon and morning.
After all, the English are light years
ahead of us, so I mutter an apology
for not setting my watch to their time.
“Excuse me, Some-Wood, please speak loudly,”
she instructs for my own good.
Both my hands go unto my hair.

                 IELTS (International English Language Testing System) is a so-called standardized test 
                 of English proficiency for “non-native speakers” of English. It is masterminded and           
                 administered by the unholy trinity of British Council, International Development               
                 Program (IDP), and Cambridge Assessment English. The U.S. equivalent of IELTS is         
                 TOEFL.

 

samodH Porawagamage is the author of becoming sam (Burnside Review Press) and All the Salty Sand in Our Mouths (forthcoming from Airlie Press). His writing focusses on the Sri Lankan Civil War, poverty & underdevelopment, colonial & imperial atrocities, and disproportionate impacts of climate change on rural & marginalized communities. These poems are from his manuscript brown mongrel, which is about a brownie’s tragicomic misadventures around the world while also being a celebration of brownness.

 

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Flowers Are Not The Only Fragile Thing

 

a 6-year-old palestinian-american was stabbed 26 times for being  muslim, police say.
 his mom couldn’t go to his funeral because she was stabbed, too.
—CNN News.

iii
we don’t question death for the pain inflicted by man;
for the hollow dug in our hearts by man; because, sometimes,
death fruits peace & mostly, all that man has given birth to is chaos.
give your eyes wings—see a man shoveling through debris
to collect the remnants of his four children after Israel’s  bombing.
see Heba Zagout. see 17 family members of Fady Joudah—a huge home
lacerated by every line succeeding bomb blasts’ history.

ii
the word Wadea means peaceful.                   means a small boy wearing a golden smile
enough to break a dark-ash rock.                   means a boy knotting english words onto
his father’s tongue. flowers are
not the only fragile thing.                                 say, a six-year-old boy, like butterflies, is tender
enough to be squeezed with palms.               say, he is an angel with (f)light who couldn’t
fight the man catapulting him
to heaven with a knife.                                       say, he is a human—he is a muslim—he is peaceful.
                                                                                  say, he became a stranger to his name when the edge
of the knife kisses his intestines.

i
what do we do if the entrance to our home is the origin of our sorrow?
what will Hanaan Shahin do when each suture of her knife-cut is the water
seeping her to the floor her child laid on, lifeless?
scar is the parental gene of pain, the first filial generation before death.
& no matter how much you gather, saliva can’t fill an ocean bereft of water.

 

ghazal with your name

for Shukroh

{شكرا= name}
{شكراً= thank you}

On the day of your death, I wept but barely enough.
Perhaps I was too young for grief, my sorrow too
fleeting to be named sorrow.
—Samuel A. Adeyemi

one day, we returned from school & شكرا
was already spat out saliva. yes, you, شكرا.

in our hands, soft like green leaves, you were a fresh tomato,
& for that, we languaged our gratitude to God, tenderly with شكراً.

your time was so pored like the space between two fingers.
did you enjoy those moments or were we too much of a pest, شكرا?

today, i saw you evaporating & i reduced the hotness of the sun.
afterward, i shared lollipops with the kids around & they said, شكراً.

despite knowing it’s a thank you, i ransacked your face round the area.
but like shadows in the absence of light, you were a vapor, شكرا.

just as wallahi & innalillahi in the mouth of hausa men, every
thanksgiving i receive these days dissolves into memory; yours, شكرا.

 

Abdulbasit Oluwanishola, SWAN V, has works up/forthcoming in A Long House, Poetry Journal, Poetry Column, Ake Review, Tahoma Literary Review, SUSPECT Journal, Ninshãr Arts, BAM Quarterly, Rowayat, Haven Spec, The Marbled Sigh, Invisible City, and elsewhere. He tweets @abdulbasitoluwa. You can also find him on Bluesky @oluwanishola.bsky.social.

 

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Deport Me from the U.S. Colony Back to My Country so That I May Live, Fight, and Die with My People

Thaer Husien is a Palestinian educator living as an unwelcome guest on First Peoples’ land. He helped found The Posterity Alliance, is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, a Fulbright scholar, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from American University. Writing can be found in Rusted Radishes, Black Warrior Review, Litro Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, The Written Resistance, Montreal Serai, Sonora Review, Collateral, Emrys Journal, and Poetry Wales. His recently published novel, Beside the Sickle Moon, is a near-future tale based on Israel’s occupation of Palestine (Daraja Press, 2024).

 

Diary Entry #1492

So, then. We understand that October 7th was a prison break and that the Palestine Question stems from 1492, not 1948. As it happens, I’ve spent much of my life more than not assimilated into euro-amerikkkan pseudo-reality; a displaced settler materially and largely in mind despite my family’s best efforts to pull me from the confusion. Didn’t quite know soft imperialism back then, so I’ve done Peace Corps and Fulbright and the like thinking it wasn’t the worst way to go. But that deformity didn’t completely take hold and continues to recede, restoring matter thanks to the privilege of family, friends, allies, a lifetime of journeys into Palestine and places of the world, learning, unlearning, X,Y,Z-axis. May it always be so.

Due respect for a journey aside I can’t seem to accept this pervasive idea during a time rivers of blood flood more into Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and the global south wholly – neo-settler-colonial expansion and capitalist extraction haunting every indigenous cousin and diaspora – that I’m supposed to be convinced theory and expression will save us from a bleak future we’re not supposed to look at, in a present we’re supposed to accept for what it is, while not mass organizing under banners or visions because of a great leap assumption that this leads to the same nature of the oppressor.

No. This is annihilation. How many of these settler-organizers in artificial communities called liberation spaces have ever spoken to loved ones in immediate danger of sanctioned slaughter? Can the neocolonial captured hear the sounds of death beyond chanting for indifferent idols? This is annihilation. Then again all I’ve heard from the awakened west is no rulers, horizontal structures; sure, but also “just do you,” while we’re surrounded by this war machine and ecocide slowly encroaching, encompassing, here, now. All while our inspirations come from those like Subcomandante Marcos, Kwame Nkrumah, Leila Khaled, Basel al-Araj, Alaa Mansour, Sakine Canciz, Lumumba, Sankara, the list goes on. But don’t fall for main character syndrome or delusions of grandeur like some Hollywood brainwashed drone thinking that’s your reality. But also-also, maybe grab some friends, read some zines, tag a recruitment center or set fire to a police station. Am I making any sense? Will they ever let me forget we’re demanding the impossible? This is annihilation.

I have basked in the artificial light of this spectacle sun long enough. It is not one of life but the extraction and exploitation of it and we must take responsibility for what that has wrought.

Game recognizes game, ‘we’ have lost ourselves to mutual aid, speculation, and theory for the safe bet of dying in radical vacuums, waiting on particular conditions, throwing our brave few under prisons and tanks. And we children of the diasporas stand for our enemies on podiums as mere relics and representations instead of a living, indigenous community displaced in this confusing place. Exotic objects of study dancing as settlers on unceded lands ourselves. No one really has the answers. Basel did but didn’t. I certainly don’t. Hard to imagine myself as even half of a half of these people who have risen the way I hope to someday do. But.

This is annihilation. Can’t shake the natural whispers that this – whatever “this” is – ain’t it. Belatedly join the First Peoples chant that, “Reconciliation is dead.” To hell with revolution. Free Palestine means death to the U.S. settler-colony. Death to the U.S. settler-colony means First Peoples’ land back and New Afrikan reparations. That’s not a bias, that’s the basis. And I am ashamed at my hand wringing no matter how justified. All any of us have to do is look to our left and right, to these so-called neighbors who think their vague concern makes them good people. Many can’t find their voice. Many more collaborate with Zionist entities cheaply disguised as something more digestible poison-honeyed with our stolen heritage. Hell, we barely ever talk about the Palestinians in the diaspora who write this off as a shoulder shrug inevitability or commercial opportunity. What of the neocolonial captured? Shouldn’t this inspire some self-confidence? Maybe an affirmation of our humanity against their absence of thinking? No. Despite grounding principles in al thawabet, this stalling indicates to me that we are really not all that different. We can be proud of our experiences, battling defeatism and the complex horror of Goliath at every waking day and sleepless night, and in the same breath recognize that the lack of results speak for themselves. Awake I dream of open recruitment. Not as some vague aspiration for a fictitious future, but a total possibility of the conditions in the here and now. This is annihilation. Some may call me a misguided romantic. Or just a fool. Tear me apart with intellect that avoids the same enduring questions, waiting for some mythical inciting moment, swirling around the same distractive, mitigating byproduct loop of organs we’re stuck inside together within this leviathan. Or maybe Occam’s Razor can slice all that shit up. Maybe we can set it aside and really begin. Shed the white mask. Every morning. In every conceivable way. This time, this time, this time, this time, this time, this time, really.

 

Palestine Plus One Trillion

Haven’t had more words to show, tell, explain our annihilation and what must be done about it for months now. But I recycle through because words are most of what I have while I build in this desolate desecrate place. They are all I have because each time I followed, I was led by cousins to Zionist encampments cheaply disguised as something else, something further away from the point of annihilation muttering something fucking ridiculous about community gardens, scholars, and donations in a vacuum erasing urgency and agency. Every time I tried to lead, I would find myself in ready company then excused to be alone after one, two, maybe three-four steps. It’s their dog’s birthday, after all. Every attempt to be Sent…

So here I die slowly until it’s not. Posturing until it ain’t in front of people who wouldn’t move a muscle if it was me under the rubble. Decaying faster than any martyr. Braver in my wander-search for the glorious who dig than any of your genocidal kin standing silent-still or those who storm-chase crimes against humanity seeking if you ever had your own.

This is annihilation, o’shades of the empire.
Numbers, statistics, and math often do more harm than good but just to break the spell locking frames in time, the martyrs orbit half a million in just fifteen+ months.

+
+
+

You cannot drown the adhan with your AI powered drones. You cannot deathcamp imprison from zero to ninety-nine. You cannot poison, burn, rape our living ancestors, heritage, land until it’s rubble like white settler soul. Cannot vaporize us under tungsten bombs. Cannot make our children carry parents in plastic bags. Cannot leave those children starved-dead on the side of the road for starving cats and dogs to feast. You cannot push us all into mass graves. Not just them. You.

Wander, search, build
muttering
between hammer strikes
they cannot escape this
they will not escape this
You will not escape.

 

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Lambrini Socialist

for Shola Von Reinhold

The creed: I collected myself from the wreck
of decadence. Education? Oh, darling,
please. I already learned everything I need
to know, like at how to wear a silver signet
pinkie ring inset with an eBay lab-grown
rhinestone when I was perfectly born. For Earl
Grey cigarettes, I find that a cleaned vegan
camembert box makes the perfect ashtray, hides
the ash with its lid; I hide by covering
myself in peacock-teal silks. In the street, no
-body dares to make eye contact; my trick works
perfectly. Somebody else buys me Waitrose
sparkling rosé, which gushes with delicate
fizz. I insist on this, because foam, lotus,
& pizazz complete my perfect 3-point food
pyramid. I eat baroque, and am a slut
for the fabled yellow label. Theft’s a hobby
not a habit. Fuck me on a leopard skin
that never had to die. I am the Prince(ss)
of Panache, and rightful heir to the fabulous.
My wardrobe is made in charity shops, clothes
that come exclusively from the section marked
“cosmically androgynous”. Make way, sweetness,
because my 2-ton, 6-inch heel boots and tight
flamingo corset are on their way. My toast
is drowning in butter and a thick layer
of champagne marmalade; I drink it up, trans
-fixed by a self-portrait I did on the sky,
the ceiling adorned with a thousand shades of
me. Vain is a word for people who believe
that ’authentic’ means ’expensive’. But, gorgeous,
I’m your golden baby, made of 24
-karat pyrite. ’Extra’ doesn’t cover it,
I’m the real deal: a genuine specimen
fighting off my own extinction. Even if
you blink, you won’t miss me. Babes, I’m here to stay.

 

Baz likes poems and people. He’s been published in Full House, Spellbinder, and elsewhere. They have worked in collaboration with Lyra Poetry Festival, The Story Works, and the Oxford Poetry Library to help bring funky words to the people who need them most. He can usually be found on public transport or trying to avoid dairy products.

 

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