POSTS

TIERRA O MUERTE

The seasons were punctuated by extremes. Long, bitter winters with endless snowfall and hot, summer days giving way to monsoon and torrential downpour. Though they called it a valley it was really a slope, an upland mesa, formed by erosion over millions of years, since the earliest days of the planet’s existence, carving out mountains and cliffs made of metamorphic rock, rugged and craggy, casting deep shadows when sunlight descended below the horizon. 

And the sun shone a lot. The land was first green though eventually they named it yellow. But it was also often golden, when the aspen trembled and changed colors beside the spruce and evergreen. Truthfully, the land was mostly brown. A color no one likes to talk about. Rich with mineral, viscose and muddy. The animals certainly didn’t care: grazing even-toed ungulates that were splendidly horned, packs of canines, and birds aplenty.

Many people were born there but more just showed up, or were brought – by their husbands, or as captives, or forced by the will of their god. They claimed, and intended to cultivate the soil but over time only choked it with tillage and crops, stealing water and making dams, with beasts of burden trampling the land. Eventually boundaries were drawn, barriers arbitrary and destructive, gifted by monarchs on other continents. Those who were born there defended it but the boundaries changed hands, different owners maybe but still the same old thing. 

The people blended and blended and forgot how they started. Names and cultures persisted but many more were eradicated. Isolation was pervasive. And most of those who remained never thought that inaction was a form of collusion. A courthouse was built, emulating a society purporting to rid itself of excess, without ornamentation, with the insistence that empire was the birthplace of living. A new identity mounted under the banner of freedom, flagpoles proudly displaying their inclusion into a culture that does not want them. 

Nowadays it’s a ruin – just decrepit, old houses forgotten. A ballroom with no ceiling. A barn that’s collapsing. The people used to proclaim, Land, or death. But I think it might be and.

 

Dowsing

July fizzles. It languishes and snaps, then ends, again and again. So you pursue moisture. Rippling off of your skin, packed into venues, incessantly sweating. You are overdressed and ashamed to be wet. But you’ll never be younger and just love to dance.

Dive into the ocean, its warm buoyant waters. Trust your body to float; become the girl from Ipanema. It curls around and within, lowering defenses, letting a man suck on each of your toes. But spit is mostly water too, so be careful. Sickness follows you.

It surrounds you. Nearly eight-hundred thousand gallons at once. But it’s still not enough. So you hunker down and stay in one place where the tap water is celebrated, traveling through pipes where there’s nothing to waste. 

But you’re restless, you know. You head north to the tides, sinusoidal and flat, to a place like New Brunswick that gives while it takes. Learn what it means to prevent your escape. 

Choose to go without and retreat back to drought. Take it wherever it can be found. Watering holes, brackish and green. Sneaking into hotel swimming pools. The Sunset Marquis. You try not to be seen. House-sitting. Your high school friend’s wedding, cigars and cheeseburgers in a jacuzzi.

Some islands unnerve you, saline reminders of absence, while glacial lakes fold and envelope, water too cold to provide for your body. 

But eventually you learn how to make do with what’s what. Shorter showers. Less is okay – it’s still a lot. Daily hydration, don’t forget. You are a fish with horns. Sweat is just sweat.

Some merciful rivers continue to flow, cascading off granite – reminders each summer that you are a visitor still. And when July returns, you come to a hole, jack-hammered through a foundation, and are told all about an artesian well. Sources of water that can be nearly infinite. And you stop to think, Can you believe it? Abundance.

 

Greg Luna (he/him) is a queer Chicano writer and filmmaker. His work has been supported by the Kenyon Review, Tin House, i-D Magazine, Interview Magazine, and NewFest: The New York LGBTQ+ Film Festival. He is a graduate of the Kanbar Institute of Film & Television at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and lives in Los Angeles. He is currently at work on his first novel: an intergenerational family saga set in the American Southwest. He can be found on Twitter at @gregluna.

 

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Glamour

 

 

Grammar

 

 

 

Grimoire

 

Leon Barros (he/they) is a Brooklyn-based Filipinx poet whose work is featured and is forthcoming in Annulet, diaCRITICS, beestung, and more.

 

 

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The Dude

My dad says a famous gunslinger is our ancestor

I still don’t know if it’s true

I once read the last part of a letter he wrote
before his murder

I wouldn’t be able to write you
anything half as eloquent,
paint a world in which this string
of words and em dash are enough
are all

I wish that when you looked up the old west
this was all you found
love sealed in ink sealed in wax
gun parts melted, sweethearts’ promises abound
whites never feeling the urge to build a ship,
one sturdy, able, thick pulse of a thing to withstand the non-Atlantic

Land never having left the hands of those who come from it

Who do I go to with this one?
I grow up with some Annie Oakley crap
and lies about the praries while perched near the Ala Wai
when 4,389 miles away 
half of my heart is missing me
my ancestors have been holding it and waiting
but don’t know where I’ve been stashed away

Can’t call me home with pūtōrino or pūrerehua
when I wouldn’t be able to recognize the sound

Does anyone else know that kind of feeling?
You know the one
where the blood is knotted so close together
it starts fighting itself,
a petition to move across the body, another limb
a different artery,
away from the parts that it finds savage
strayed from God
foresaken

What a strange life it is—
the offspring of Anglia digging generations deep
into Texas soil,
a meeting house just minutes away
from where Horouta beached in Te Tairāwhiti

Beneficiaries off the butchers for the New World
a people who saw home fires snuffed out in succession
both lines burn hard in me
a mixing
a legacy in two parts
an attempt to reconcile
so as to unearth some sort of beauty

 

Ngaio Simmons (she/her) is a Māori/pākehā spoken word artist and educator born and raised on the island of Oʻahu on Kānaka Maoli land in the unceded nation of Hawaiʻi. Now permanently residing in her ancestral homeland, Aotearoa, she is still writing about diaspora, identify conflict, and what it means to be Indigenous and queer in a world that repeatedly rejects both. She has been published in Contemporary Verse, Flux Hawaiʻi, Literary Hub, Ora Nui, Hawaiʻi Review, and Bamboo Ridge, among others. Her poem “Whānau” was recently featured in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series for AAPI month.

 

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estrogen, progesterone, spironolactone, estrogen, progesterone,

I need a new tattoo. A bird in the shape of an angel on my back, a form that rolls and folds against my own – that moves both with and for me

What has preserved me these last few years is the feeling of being stitched, point by point, into a new body, one made up by the body of my body and the hands of another. To feel a foreign art carefully attached to my own

And if I am in this moment, it is not those wings that brought me here. My first respite from the world was not my mothers womb, but a trap: a snare that gnawed and gnawed until I was no longer whole. I have scars across my shoulders from the things I have escaped, and I am ready to see them burned

I want to be abandoned by god in reverse

//

I need a new tattoo. A bird in the sh
ape of an angel on my back, a form that rolls and folds the feeli
point by point, into a new body, one mad

the hands of another To fe
el a foreign ached to my own
brought me h My first respite
from thnot my mothers womb, bp:
a snare that gnawed no longer wh scars across mythe things I have escape

d, and I am ready to see them burnedtndoned by god in reverse

//

                                                                            |
,. I      a   m            a             body                      
.,.foreign          to my own          mother  :  ||
    a     scar  across         god                        I /
                                                                             |

 

sterling-elizabeth arcadia (she/they) is a trans poet and lover of birds. her work has been published in poetry.onl, HAD, New Delta Review, and elsewhere. she is a first year MFA in creative writing at Rutgers–Camden. this poem is part of a series of burning haibuns (a form invented by torrin a. greathouse), the first of which can be read here: https://www.poetry.onl/read/ster-el.

 

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DATA ENTRY 001//TRAUMA_MAPS

Asceticism: 

       1) Autodidactic  

orange rinds and hoops after school 
wandering hands in that void of a closet 
got big teeth like a beast, sinking— 

fires in my chest; I am eating the last 
of you. Little pounding nymph. Boxing gloves 
against the caverns—these damned walls are thick. 

You’re straight like an octagon. A million tiny dots  
on that globe                                I can’t shoot. You’d laugh,  

you ever hit it from the back?
 

       2) Database Animal 

                                                                                                          I am [ ] 
I’ve been chewing at the moon—barking. 
Fucking on Wednesdays. Resting on Fridays. 
On one at the Turkey Hill—drinking 
gasoline                          some guerilla shit. 

Eat till full, molars crush rinds.  
Seraphs too, wings and horns, 

all bodies are [mine] 

Y2K deathmachines; factory farm  
sonata.                          You better meet me in the middle. 

            Listen                        moment                static hits. I’ll meet you there.                 Bring the  goods.
                                                            You’re a god today.  
            Bring everything.  
                                                I’ve/got/the/cash/in/my/screen 
                                                bring the goods to the drop spot.  

                                                                                                                                                                   // error

            4)                               trauma maps

                                                                     a)    ontologies

                                          Trauma

            Acceleration 

$$$$
                                          Data

                                                                                                             $$$$

                                                                                    Autonomy

                                                       Uprooting
                                                                                                            Blood

                          Quarks

               Parts

Simples
                           Theism

                                                                      b)  [memorytype]
                                                                                   the gig
            fucked
                         up
                                        club
                                                                                 oldheadwithhands               onmyback

                                                                   seehisfaceintheevenings,
                                                                   tracingoutlinesonmyback

5) Repeat

                                            does the void speak in tongues or the queen’s English?

             a)  Autodidactic

orange rinds and hoops after school
wandering hands in that void of a closet
got big teeth like a beast, sinking—

fires in my chest; I am eating the last
of you. Little pounding nymph. Boxing gloves
against the caverns—these damned walls are thick.

Been drinking gasoline in the mornings
fucking on Wednesdays, resting on Fridays—
watching market trajectories like blood-sport.

                I am [  ]

Eat till full. Molars crush rinds.
Seraphs too, wings and horns,

all bodies are [mine]

Y2K deathmachines; factory farm
sonata. The hot silence pre-Disaster Engine.
Machinelearning into hyper-capital—

technoanimalia, I am
a legion on the face of advancement,
the vanguard to a dying day.

Phenomena:
              1)   Café
Let’s fuck during the Zapruder film.
We can drive a ‘74 Cadillac off desert roads
till your trauma catches up to you.
If we unravel, I call dibs on the brain.
The font of the organs spread like
                                                         d r e a m s

              2)   Home
Singsong advertisers, sing me to sleep.
Tear me into quarks, spread me thin;

eat me whole as I whistle that church bell
melody, the death tone.

Guide me down the roads where
I found love on blacktops and

you—are one, and all bodies subsist
in their solipsistic glow—O’ melodrama!

Got four walls and I’m screaming—
head into plaster, chewingonthumbs.

             3)   The City
overlapping
traumamaps
noise.noise.noise.
                           fuzzy                                   warm 
                                                                                                [blankets]

                                                                                                                                                        screaming.

             4)   Everywhere
                    repeat.
             5)   Nihilism
                    fuck that.
                           a) Ontology
                                                                                     Roots
                                                                                                                      Sex
                                                                      Love                      Body

                                                                                     Rest                                      Labor

                                                                                                                                                                 //error

[start up: init //002]

What’s the harm in lips?

I read an article on the calisthenics of communism and the inherent freedom from capital that comes with lifting oneself via branch or bar. Parallel bars rooted in concrete utopias—where the body defies gravity, where each second is a fight. It’s all in the control. The tearing

of muscles, when shoulders become planets—when the body, reacts to the abuse. A feeling of flight in the muscle-up, a communal celebration in the park across the elementary school where shells sleep on pavement like an ocean landscape in the evenings.

X-ActoTM knives, boxcutters, and anything with some grit—it’s all in the control. The tearing of epidermis. Those fascists want blood. Predatory opportunists, they slept in backpacks and drawers, cunning friends when his hands grasped my face.

It’s all in the control—of breakbeats and vibrating fluorescents. Make the people dance. Kiss the boy with long sleeves and hands tucked in pockets. What’s the harm in lips? Repeat these words. Talk about time like liquid and not like a carved out stone.

In Calisthenics, one aims for hypertrophy, growth from the conjunction of time and tearing.
It’s all in the control of repetitions, of breath. The control of repeated pain in hopes of accessing

something new. More control, more strength, the shaping of the self into something else—
it’s all in the control of etymology to create long words like calisthenics. The conjoining of
beauty and strength, the image of Plato wrestling boys before his hands spun sophistry down their chitons—the definition of justice is justice and the world is a series of shapes like puppets

in a cave where control is key to the shadows they make. You are not like Plato and your hands still move. Like shadows in a cave—I’ve been seeing you in the evenings. The silhouettes of time shapeshifting on my walls. My hands move differently now. No longer grasping sharp

edges, or any boy with some control fantasy. My hands curl into fists clutching rings and
branches and bars. It’s all in the control of moments, holding my breath, engaging my core as the blisters form and your face starts peering in like the violence in daylight or an email, something

so normal. Out of my control. I found a picture of us, two pleather jackets and my half-smile, a face like a car wreck. You still make people dance. The boy in that photo would leave and dig into drawers and backpacks, the normal things. He would reek of the cheapest bodega liquor.

He wouldn’t really read Plato, he’d carry some dialog sometimes. He’d dig into himself without the growth, just fascist edges and a marked up outer layer. He wouldn’t expect to spend days in the sun, grasping at branches— totally in control. Trauma mapping, not deconstructing—

init[repeating error][error] [error] [error] [error] [error] [error] [error] [error] [error] [error]

DATA ENTRY 002//BODY

In 1998, Serial Experiments Lain debuted. The series featured a series of adolescent suicides. Children abandoned their bodies to become one with “The Wired,” an early symbol for the world wide web. The first time I thought strongly about suicide was in 1999— I was four years old.

I read a chain letter on AOL and believed that if I took my life first, I would be saved from the haunting an adolescent suicide victim would bestow on me (per the email). My breathing accelerated, my mind was racing, I spent an evening in the ER with my first panic attack.

Recurring thoughts into catatonia—my time in the self-harm haze was controlled. Household objects repurposed—I became one with space. Evenings spent in thrash den paradises, learning to socialize in isolation. I met flame with

hazy eyes, greasy hair and love which only flowed outward. Everything passes.
Mitigated voids, held hands through the worst of it. Vomitfire nights—talked of songs, hummed melodies under motel moonlight, cigarette butts in the parking lot ballroom.

Mixed Lexapro with clear liquor and concave brain—smashed my head into walls until the lights went out. I wanted so badly to swim. Nerves at white corners, all my connections are fractured. Tying knots, trying to tighten my connection—every second is a reminder—is a stall tactic.

Every time I pass a diner, I think of a friend who used to bus tables. She took her leave at
twenty-eight after a man systematically maimed her. We met in Pittsburgh; smoking cigarettes outside of a Super-8 when I was young and taking the long road to decay. While having coffee or

when a morning breeze is too calm, I think of hanging bodies. Like the swaying of leaves, or Suzuki Izumi alone in her apartment. Dissociating in motion or mid-conversation; I have yet to find words grounding enough to keep me here. I wonder what she thought of before the leap?

Before me, my father served time in solitary confinement. The minutes kept adding up like
centuries. When I was five, he told me he tried to starve himself to death. I pictured his big hands smashing against concrete; his face gaunt, and my body disappearing.

My body is a survived future. My hands are automated machines, they clutch at my neck or
pinch at thumbs, I paw for a pulse to remember something about autonomy while someone,
somewhere else is abandoning themselves entirely.

There is a targeted ad promising
to press cremation ashes
into a record with all your favorite
songs burned to the remnants
of your loved ones.
I heard Facebook is working on a deceased
section: and I think I am still alive
on a Myspace page or AOL chatroom
where a man wants to fuck my seven-year old
brains out. I am alive everywhere
eternally, and with my feet
on the ground and my throat wilting—
do I need to have a body?
My flesh might fertilize honeysuckle
on a patch of green or glutton
the plastic-full seabream
off the coasts of some island,
only one maxxxed out credit card away.
Do I need to have a body
in order to subsist on a heating globe
or for my loved ones to remember
my face now that my prints
are digital, should I wait for the revolution
in virtual reality when my sprawled out flesh can be re-
animated. How many times does a symbol
have to shatter
before the simulacra
is enough?
Do I need to have a body/

//error_corrupt_file
//exit initiated.

 

Eros Livieratos (he/they) is a currently an MFA candidate in creative writing at The Ohio State University. Eros’ writing tackles topics of identity, capitalism, art, and the Anthropocene—their poems seek to deconstruct theoretical and systemic frameworks. Eros is a harsh-noise artist and can often be found yelling about aesthetics & automation in your local basement. They’re on Instagram and Twitter, as well as his website, eroslivieratos.com.

 

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The Plane Lands at Ben Gurion and Every Passenger Bursts Into Song

tradescantia

from the mundane root. an oyster plant.
a spiderwort. its variegated purple across
nearly every flowering inch of the world.
sweet Moses-in-the-cradle-lily. amethyst
Angel of Doubt. o Lucy, Saint of Sight,
blind me to etymology, the perse plum pit 
in every story about G-d. what wildflower
deserves this wandering? to be buried in
a grave so violet? a name so violent
it once curbed the crucifixion. yes, cursed
to roam until Christ returns. sisyphean
in our ignorance. my aunt gave cuttings
away each winter as a Hanukkah gift
(we all need a little Jew in our lives)
terracotta exodus. tangles of it end-
lessly growing. creeping across oceans.
spreading over continents. the lurking
of a lesser theology. o Lord, leave us
to our legs, our purple leaves. Lord,
where we grow, so do the conditions
for surrender. look us in the root. o Lord, 
Lord, let even the seed of affliction bloom 
into a blessing.

 

Matryoshka

Zach Goldberg is a writer, educator, and arts organizer from Durham, NC. He is the author of XV (Nomadic Press, 2020) and is a 2021 MRAC Next Step Fund grantee. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Washington Square Review, New South, and elsewhere. He lives on occupied Dakota land in Minneapolis, MN. Find him online @gach_zoldberg.

 

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Step Therapy

-in honor of Carrie Ann Lucas and Dr. Bill Peace

The way you play this game is simple: there is a boy 
on a skateboard and the boy has four lives. The goal of 

            the game is to get the boy on the skateboard to the end
            of the racecourse. The racecourse is not an oval 

                           or a circle; it’s a city. Miles translate into a pixels. The
                           pixels may be counted. The counting, of course, is not 

                                         a requirement, but a strategy: 

                                                                                  the math works like this: a clinitron bed,
                                                                                  which could relieve the pressure on bedsores,
                                                                                  costs upwards of 40,000 dollars. Less than one
                                                                                  milliliter of infected blood may lead to sepsis. If
                                                                                     septic I would be hospitalized and placed in a
                                                                                     clinitron bed. Once sepsis is cleared I would be sent
                                                                                     home and to the same bed that caused my wounds.
                                                                                     An obvious pattern would emerge.[1]

The city is blocked off by buildings. The stairs 
supplemented by railings. The ramps are 

            fashioned into figure eights. To take the stairs would crack
            the skull. To ride the railings would break a leg. To risk

                           the ramps would lie to gravity. The skateboard boy
                           has four lives and with each death he can experience

                                        partial revival. The funding for complete revival floats at the end
                                        of the racecourse in a pot of stars. The pot of stars is surrounded by

                                                       a pit of fire and evil wizards. The evil wizards hold
                                                       both the wand of Sudden Death and the Key to Level Up

                                                                                      The concept of step therapy is simple: just
                                                                                      because something is expensive doesn’t mean it’s
                                                                                      the best option. A medication made out of dirt is the
                                                                                      same as a medication made out of chemicals. Both
                                                                                      drugs have capsules. Both drugs are dissolvable.
                                                                                      The idea is not to dwell on differences but to be
                                                                                      grateful for your temporary survival.

In a simulated attempt to Level-Up, the skateboard boy calculates
the inertia needed to conquer the ramps. The skateboard boy

            succeeds the figure eight but on the way down gets shocked
            by the wizard’s wand of death. The boy loses one life, revives

                           inside the pit of fire and loses a second life. The skateboard
                           boy bleeds from his neck and stomach. He can see

                                        the pot of stars, but, oh, are the wizards laughing.

                                                                                 The concept of step therapy in practice: Because
                                                                                    Carrie Ann worked for the state, she had to use
                                                                                    state insurance…. In January of 2018 she got a cold
                                                                                    which turned into a trach and lung infection. Her
                                                                                    insurance company UnitedHealthcare, refused to
                                                                                    pay for the one specific inhaled antibiotic that she
                                                                                    really needed. She had to take a less effective drug
                                                                                    and had a bad reaction to that drug.[2]

To revive from the second death is to not to be confused
with the revival of Jesus. The body quivers with

            electricity. Nerves tingle. Burn marks fester
            and bleed. Bacteria crawls into open sores

                           and tissue necrotizes. Stars blur into the retina, 
                           begins visual snow. Lack of blood flow to the brain…

                                                                                    Bouts of sepsis, an increasing number of wounds     
                                                                                    and hospitalizations. Over the period of time my
                                                                                    body will weaken, sepsis will become increasingly
                                                                                    difficult to treat and recover from.[1] In this state,
                                                                                 the wizard shocks the boy again. 

Of course, there are strategies: trick the wizard,
take out the middleman, start a go-fund me, grow 

            a rich uncle, a relationship with the president, unblock
            the buildings, throw the wizard into the fire,

                           fix the ramps, find the bug, rewrite the program.

                                                                                      My name is Carrie Ann Lucas. I am here today on
                                                                                      behalf of Not Dead Yet … If I were to become
                                                                                      depressed… and this bill passes, I could go to my
                                                                                      doctor and ask for a lethal prescription. Because I
                                                                                      have a disability, and because physicians are
                                                                                      terrible at evaluating quality of life of people with
                                                                                      disabilities, I would likely be given that lethal
                                                                                      prescription.[3]

                           The doctor comes into your room in the hospital at night
                           and shares the math with you: 

                           this medication, bed, treatment, pill, stars, Level-Up 
                           will costs 2,000 dollars. Not to mention the cost
                           of wound care is astronomical.

                           It’s your choice how you would like to proceed,
                           he says gently. He tells you he can make you very comfortable. 

[1] Peace, Bill “Worse Wound Care Woes” Bad Cripple. 24, April, 2019,
        http://badcripple.blogspot.com/2019/04/worse-wound-care-woes.html

[2]Lucas, Carrie Ann. Carrie Ann Lucas Death. Facebook. 24 Feb. 2019
        https://www.facebook.com/CarrieAnnLucasPersonal/posts/10217145330961609
        Accessed 26, Oct. 2019

[3] Lucas, Carrie Ann. “Carrie Ann Lucas Testimony in Opposition of Colorado SB 16-025.”
        Not Dead Yet, 3 Feb. 2016, notdeadyet.org/carrie-ann-lucas-testimony-in-opposition-of-
        sb-16-025. Accessed 27 Oct. 2019.

 

Rachel Litchman (Rachel DL) is a queer, disabled artist, writer, and member of the Dane County Youth Action Board. Her work centers themes of survivorship, trauma, chronic illness, disability rights and justice. She has been published in Colorado Review, Rooted in Rights, Redivider, and Black Warrior Review, among other places. She is at work on a graphic novel about being hospitalized during the COVID-19 pandemic. You can find her on twitter @wordcalculator or on her website racheldl.com.

 

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Self-Portrait as Tinder

You part your hair zigzag again, so I can’t ghost you. 

I swipe across your scalp & perch on its dandruff—

it snows mid-August & I feel so super special 

without my seasonal depression. 
Had such small wavelength, no true imagination. 
& so, I theorise about the green thumb 

of my mother; the lilac pyramids in her front yard 

& the headlights of her car, atomising 

the dark. I was only myself, trying music—

who is only me 
in motorised skin—& thought:
a pianist is only a prison 

guard holding a key & thought, now this music 

had made a good woman 

of herself & still, you break my heart. 

& so, I waited for it to rain
my lover’s beard—he’d cut the hedge 
& flushed the stubble.

Shaved the chin

into the wheelbarrow.

Roller skated to the street sign 

with his razor—looked so boyish:
wish I’d known him. Found a neon 
seed, a smoke of worms.

Found the stencil 

of a six pack shape a lovesong

like a turtle—found it in his hair 

like curlers,
& you got so jealous.

& so, the lanterns baptise 
their light. I heard a god invent hibiscus 
in Alaska, & it all happened in my body.

Pinched two things that exist 

like they did not, & so now they’re woke

like me: a praying 

mantis on a popsicle—aren’t you absurd? 
Something outran my childhood like a cyst 
on a kitten & it was just a prototype.

They tell me to fix it, or else—

& so, was my own death only fiction?

For everything behavioural 

there’s a thesaurus, there’s archeology. 
I couldn’t hear god 
think that day, couldn’t replace it,

& so, the ferris wheel in my Babylonic

head, so the language. & so, you are 

& aren’t you a dynamo, spinning on air.
& aren’t you just artificial grass in snow.

 

Canoe

Hey, I’m back. Came here closed        atlas, peppered             light—
            swung beneath a disco ball,                                              didn’t feel it.
                          Watched the robbery:                 everyone hunched 
                                                                     their hips           under the laserlight, 
            smeared across their skin                     like green 
lipstick on St. Patrick’s.                                                                   Didn’t feel it
                                            wear off. Came here 
because the street was pouched in light                        and I had no clutch
to go with my shoes, yet.           Came here asking people       in whose image
you were made—                       silly me, 
                                                         forgot you didn’t have to be made twice 
to be remembered.                     Came here        and then the music
                             was clueless. 
                                                         Came here because the street lamps were low 
pyramids—                    so ancient,        but I still wonder            who’s the dust,
who’s the museum and 
                                            where                is           the dance floor? 
            Pre-electric light only had one                emotion: a single longing to dissolve
            in darkness— 
                                                         came here because there was a silencer 
                             screwed onto my lanterns. 
Thought you might know something about the body                  that isn’t bodiless,
                             that isn’t 
                                            somehow 
                                                         a migration. 
            Know I’m only soft                      at a distance,       only brutal to myself up close.
I’ve got a blindfold     between my shoulders—              I only measure uneven
                             5’6 but hear you’ve got a ladder, 
hear you’re a forest and I’m returning                in my head-lit canoe.

 

Nadine Hitchiner (she/her) is a German poet and author of the chapbook Bruises, Birthmarks & Other Calamities (Cathexis Northwest Press, 2021). She was a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has been published in Midway Journal, GASHER, Red Ogre Review, and others. She lives in her hometown with her husband and their dog. Find her on Twitter: @nadinekwriter.

 

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Summer Morn

I (you?) descend the cave through it’s stalactite incisors: pungent trollgoblins, thundering shadows and midnight grumbles – Bloodrot of fresh kill – ugh, the reeking mossgrot and quiet shh shh your bloodnoise they will grok and their bellows will topple my preyerful musque so stand rockstill Allow healing rivers to replenish daylight to (y)our splintered granite slopefalls… 

[the trumpeteering towncrier abreast a weathervane]: a rose, a rose, my strawberry Summer… has arose?

Dawnlight trickles from dry waterfall sky.
Gentle lover with cracked lips, 
will you allow my tears as balm?
accept this lonely morning psalm?

“He loves me, I rust and rot.
I hunt him, he lusts me not?” 

Petals droop tearfully
in sleepy sinking hammock-swings… 

V: I heard-
O: -what?-
V: I heard that – I heard- I heard-
O:-what!-
V: Won’t you shhh? There were thunderbolts.

As my gaze rumbled
& undressed the trembling stembrush—
stumbling storm-strirred eyes. 

(Uh-oh)

Rising from loam her blooming iris painted the clouds in whirlpool watercolours –
(my pirouetting sunrise, how you were mist) – directly spy-swirling their (over-there!) inner-eye.

“Will you help rescue my beloved?” 

… Okay?

And so we breeze the promenade, 
haunt the hillsides,
overcast sheep in suffusions of mist.

When the Seer, Ms. Hawthorne VII, 
Daughter of the Gnostics Temple,
summon(ed?) them/us to family dinner,
the invite is (was) by windswept crow.

Now entering the applecottage pie quaint English hamlet
– deer on the mantel, blackberry eyes 
opaque and oracle –

Ms. Hawthorne II, tragically perished, wrapped me with cackling voodoo beads and thus were her deathwords: 
“Oh what is it to be loved?
A snare, a snare, look at my rabbit paws.
They bring luck.”

Hypnotic hearth, hypnotic heart, 
in the warm-rug warm-rum library of Mr. Haardt… 
her eternal heartthrob.

His eyes are accusations. “Have you ever fired a rifle?” 

I’m swinging my neck across the horizon, 
so we pulse through the vein, fluid hunters,
brandy hemoglobins preserved in amber… 

boozed (wobbling) scope 

     drowssy crosshairs slurrrring skyward:

[clangclanging churchbells] Dinner dinner for all you carnivorous sinners! Dinner up(on) the clouds in the giant white wintercrowned poplar with popular vegan guests and tables carved in artisan-flavored cherrywood.

And on the menu, my dear whoms and whomstresses (inc. bodies and nobodies):
some strawberry
Sum Myrrh

(where did she go?)

Chiming tinkling cutlery, guests quiet like sorrow:

V: … But papa, truly you are fowl.
O: Yes, I am a monster, little chicken.
V: I am no longer little, papa.
O: Ah, but we are specks to the sun –

The hunter that flings incandescent spears, 
flaming battlechariots of barbarous heat – 

At this her face speckled,
freckled pomegranate seeds;

(slicing kitchen knife & wooden cutting board)
“I’ll be out soon with slices of lemon.”

Lunar-yellow crescents, 
heavenfruit fumes waft from bubbling stars
stirred in the night cauldron.

Occult astrology on the barnyard roof,
shuffling tarot decks hosted in the wine cellar:
rotting calendars & desiccated dates.
I stretch for the pulp,
you stoop for the pip.

“Please, don’t sulk, we’ll be back in a bit.
He must learn to shoot.”

But I & we & you turned the cards over
in that basement crypt, intoxicant grapevines:
The Silent Archer and The Juggernaut,
The High Priestess and The Tangled Lovers.
(crystal-dark cave)
A most stormful forecast, indeed.

“Okay, be careful, my beloved.”

During the Sagittarius eon of Brontosaurus Rex,
silent-toed they crept with axe and club,
meat for cavern.
“Look, look!”

There’s two of them, fullchested and loinclothed,
circling the other like twin flames,
lightningforged blades
crisping to spark.
They duel for ripe daybreak.
To pluck the wallflower
from between unruly heap.

Sobbing rain mourns the clouds. Rotating garlands of our children circling skipping chanting around the campfire: I am you and you are me, in perspectives of eternity…

 

Hiyoowi Hamainza is an emerging poet who resides in Cape Town, currently working on his debut novel. He works as an English Editor, studying Psychology and Philosophy part-time.

 

 

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