POSTS

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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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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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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chandrakant

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.

 

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Naming the Dead

the bullet hole in my sister’s head opens like morning/ like light waterfalling into my eyes/ the last time i bled/ my brothers mistook it for water/ & drank till their bellies groaned in satiety/ months later/ we are squatted by the riverside drinking from the blood of our sisters/ the sea reeking of death/ a morbid stench strangulating our noses/ the rosebush breathes/ so i know blood has life/ mid-october/  i cup my sister’s body in my mouth/ because here safety resides in the mouth bridged with walls/ the dead reincarnating in our elegies/ their names like a song/ clanking on our lips/ the dead resonates in the spirit realm/ phasing us/ shaking up the kitchenware in our closets/ they answer when we call them/ wind/ rushing at us/ formless & here/ wind/ sister/ father/ brother/ the muezzin in me singing the names of the dead//

noun: wind
1. the ability to breathe easily /
2. the region of the solar plexus / where a blow may paralyze the diaphragm & cause temporary loss of breath or other injury /
3. living remnants of the dead /

usage:
     i/ [    ] thing/ because the wind will not leave me//

 

A Year of Blood

           after Adedayo Agarau

it’s raining sharp knives & machetes/ the city irrigated by blood/ & bodies harvested as sacrifices in a sacrilege/ the evening moon casts an halo of lesions over the sky’s face/ & beneath a beige/ a company of little children hide under torn cartons/ a man smokes the atmosphere with hemp/ his breath saturated with grief/ a young girl raises her hand to the rain/ cups the water for a drink/ & it becomes blood in her mouth/ tonight in the music of the weather/ we waltz along like monarch butterflies/ our soft wings dispersed into dust/ the stereo crooning a litany of eerie ballads/ we are romantics in a matrimony of living cadavers/ & above our heads are constellations of fireflies/ their flamy wings dampened/ somewhere in a hamlet/ a bevy of quails circle a farmstead/ & in a cottage nearby/ a father barbecues his daughter/ christens her death an art of grace/ humbling his act of devotion/ i beseech/ how do we decide what is allowed to live/ & isn’t/ somewhere in a temple in the city/ a young mother seeks to prey her dead son’s body into the mouth of a figurine/ say there is enough hope to bury us/ & at nights we make incense to the sky/ burying our dead in the sea of the stars/ in the floods of their haemorrhage/ ’til they return as rain/ as testaments of our soft bodies/ in this water cycle of gore/ & gall//

 

Adesiyan Oluwapelumi, TPC XI, is a medical student, poet, essayist, & Assistant Editor of Fiery Scribe Review from Nigeria. Winner of the Cheshire White Ribbon Day Creative Contest (2022), & 1st runner up in the Fidelis Okoro Prize for Poetry (2023). His works are published in Fantasy Magazine, Poet Lore, Tab Journal, Poetry Wales, Variant Literature, & elsewhere. An Adroit Journal Summer Mentee & a SprinNG Writers’ Fellow, his works were selected for inclusion in the Annual Outstanding Young Writers Anthology (Paper Crane, 2023). He tweets @ademindpoems.

 

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