POSTS

9, 煦 (Susie Zhu)

(dream/wired to) a common ground [ + – ]

Weaves and grids. But you hear yourself reading it: waves. The lights foreshorten. The grass unseen yet more saw being reinvented behind. The bed grassy for. Eyes / an initial invention aren’t they? The earth has no comment but would like to offer a piece of opened sky as coordinates in which you are promised a closed path like a happy child. Induced, like in time you always find a me at the end so why bother the I. And happiness Flows. You begin to question if you really have crawled into some soft plastic structure and laid your mind onto that invisible pillow. Or is it just the same old ground. All you need is to get down. Ask your shadow. Before she becomes another body’s breathing. Moistened into a deeper shade and of conductivity. But you hear yourself reading it / already————She could be a cat in anyone’s passenger seat. An ever smaller spoon. Only for one / dear grain of rice. Finally the confession finally the open sesame though each one of us somewhat complicit in keeping it on the high shelf. She reads you a poem from yesterday. You listen but all you hear is the sky tenderly torn into bite size pieces it almost feels truer that way / that this could have been what it is, bright prepositions / as they percolate / through the weave / to enter / you. And you think about a tomorrow. There was a tomorrow yesterday that is no longer. That is not the one. The one came to you is green. A vibrantly silent #00B140. Maybe a weathered #00B140 / is still intensity by nature but she is the most loving kind you know. The universal living room type. Green / forgive as green for give. Your uncrushed hair knows, your shallow kissed scalp knows, your back and vertebrae and buttocks and heels / know————She remembers / everything and would gently peel each of their names off with her well-chilled slivery twisters, if not a day crescent. A real artist of archival practice. What is temporal discharged into the spatial, and the spatial into a phenomena. Like a perfect good night or the unherbing of herbs in infusion. No two points exists in the meadow without one shared instance and all levels collapse / nomadic. No dice needs to be rolled over this / undulation. No dandelion’s mane do not find its way back to a ground. You think of circuitry. Zero potential reference for a flight or a fall here—————Pick your word to plant in this bed grassy for / Rehearsals. Among the many others. Soothed and Sprout. Ever emanating lineworks. Tissued winds / sink with more faces in quietude. The page appears. The page disappears.

9, or Susie Zhu is a practitioner of fragility and a multi-media artist-poet who works with language, sound, rematerialized technology, time, obscurity and ephemeral matters in many forms, including but not limited to installation, performance and poetry in its utmost counter-disambiguation. She received dual Bachelor degrees at Brown University (BA Literary Arts Hons.) and RISD (BFA Printmaking Hons.), dual MFA degrees in Creative Writing and Art+Technology at CalArts as a Truman Capote Literary Fellow and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English & Literary Arts at the University of Denver. She runs butter*rabbit *press and is the author of 9 books of poetry/artist’s books.

Minh Nguyễn

thương | love wounds

I tell you I do not wish to translate my grief,
and you press your fingers at the worry
that forms between my brows. What do you know
of the silence between translations?

THƯƠNG – to love. to pity. to grieve.
THƯƠNG – to wound. to injure. to hurt.

Lesson 1:
Every utterance is deficient in that it says less than it wishes.

Thương      mới        nói
[     ] only  say

(I) only say (it because I) love (you).
(I) only say (it because I) pity (you).
(I) only say (it because I) grieve (you).
(I) only say (it because I) hurt (you).

where you and I and conjunctive reason are pronominal
     ghosts, haunting parentheticals
          their existence mere echoes in syntactic paradigm.

Có bị                     thương    không?”
 Q NEG.PASS [     ]  Q

Have you been hurt?
Lesson 2: Every utterance is exuberant in that it says more than it plans.

Thương      ơi
[     ] PRT

Oh lover
piteous grieving lover,
does it hurt when I call for you?
To love you is to hurt you.
To hurt me is to love me.

Lesson 3:
The silence between translations is the absence of memory.

NHỚ – to miss. to long for. to be homesick for.
NHỚ – to remember. to recall. to keep in mind.

 “Khi       cô đơn,     em     nhớ    đến   ai?
 when lonely 3sg [  ] to who

When you are lonely, who do you miss?
When you are lonely, who do you remember?

 

bóng | lit shadows

Dictionary entry for bóng

1. bóng – as in bóng nắng, bóng trăng, bóng sao; sun, moon, and starlight
                                as in sáng bóng; shining, brilliant – gone.

2. bóng – as in bóng đêm; night shadows
                                as in bóng tối; darkness
                                as in soi bóng trong gương; shadows reflected in a mirror

3. bóng – as in bong bóng; balloon
                                as in thả bóng trên trời; a balloon released into the sky
                                                 dodging power lines and errant branches
                                                 floating, weightless – gone.

4. bóng – as in bể bóng; to pop a balloon
                                                 to be outed
                                as in nghĩa bóng; figurative, or
                                                 shadow meaning
                                                 N.B. antonym: nghĩa đen;
                                                                      as in literal, or
                                                                      black meaning –
                                                                      meaning imbued with the semantic certainty of darkness
                                as in nói bóng; speaking figuratively, or
                                                 speaking shadows
                                as in cái thằng đó bóng mà; that one’s queer –
                                                                                                                  that one’s a fag.

5. bóng – as in I am 14
                                and sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor
                                the blue glow of late night TV, volume turned way way down
                                it’s RuPaul’s Drag Race and The L Word
                                                 (it’s just good TV)
                                my silhouette burning, bursting, wanting release
                                how queer it is,
                                                 to see your shadow on a moonless, starless night,
                                                                  celestial body
                                                shining, brilliant –
                                                                   gone.

 

Minh Nguyễn is a queer Vietnamese American poet and linguist based in Seattle. They hold a Ph.D. in Linguistics, and their research background informs their poetry, which explores queerness, diaspora, translation, and memory. Their scholarly writing on language and identity has appeared in academic journals, alongside creative work in Vǎnguard and Moss. Learn more about their work at minhnguyenphd.com.

Manuel A. Melendez

Etymologies

vampire is the one with death pale skin manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure is the shit-eater freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampiremanure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig manure freak queer dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot faggy, the slurred sibilance of In Your Face homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot, the silent juncture between a blow & a kiss fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot, the silent juncture between a blow & a kiss fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake fruitcake homophone vampire manure freak queer pig dysmorphia faggot fruitcake vampire manure freak queer
homophone            the unmattering of syntax    of becoming           all of me  stripped & strapped               of difference

 

Manuel A. Melendez is a Pushcart-nominated hybrid writer born and partially raised in Camagüey, Cuba between the Teatro Guiñol de Camagüey, where his father acted and puppeteered, and the Biblioteca Provincial de Camagüey, where his mother let him run loose with books. He has been published in Foglifter, Midway Journal, Superstition Review, Apricity Magazine, Gulf Stream Magazine, and elsewhere. He attended the 2025 DISQUIET International Literary Program. In this life, he will settle for being penniless but ravishing on his deathbed. He can be found on Instagram at @marvelzednelem and on his website, manalemel.squarespace.com.

Blue Đào Nguyễn

Cạo gió translates to shaving the wind

Cạo gió translates to
shaving the wind, a ritual practice
done when sick, when tender,
when thương. remember
scraping the unholy wind
from me, a Vietnamese
tradition, medicine tastes
like
memory in the
body.
                                              (a prayer                     /                       chant)

                                              how young was i
                                              when i had been my
                                              mother’s daughter?

                                              do i still get to be?

the wind on my back
as i watch the bruise
form, unsightly being,
my body,
is it my body?
the traditional Vietnamese
medicine working
my muscle,
form, unsightly,

   daughter,

will i die your daughter?
do i still get to be?

ungodly god, unfold me,
unmake me, form, body

   forming
   —a daughter.

 

Blue Đào Nguyễn (IG: @blue.ngu) is a Vietnamese-Teochew (潮州話) non-binary lesbian poet, artist, and organizer. Inspired by cartography and Vietnamese architectural symbolism, they explore grief, prayer, and livelihood through poetry, traditional Viet woodworking, clay, & fiber art. Their debut collection Hey Siri, What Time is it in Vietnam? is out now with GameOverBooks. They have received support and/or fellowship from Lambda Literary, Fine Arts Work Center, AIR.HUE, & more. Nominated for Best of the Net and Best New Poets, you can find them at bluenguyen.com.

c melín lara

TSIKURI

“ La madre tierra te ve con su nierika [pintura tejida], instrumento para ver, que sirve como espejo y escudo…
una ofrenda elaborada…. Las rayas simbolizan las palabras de la madre que, según [la] artista, ‘te habla, pero no le
entiendes’. ”

Centro de Investigación Wixárika citando artista Xitaima Lucía Lemus de la Cruz,
( sobre su obra, Nuestra Madre Tierra Fértil / Tatéi kwié tinetɨ awetɨ), 1981

TSIKURI

that all the world be a spindling arm, where weapons spin so fast they become stars—
stars, where weapons spin so fast; they are no longer tactile but imaginary. suspended in mid-air
mid-air spin like stars, imaginary weapons sit in the eye of god*.

es decir,
es decir,

a weapon sits in the eye of god. draw in & tuck / tuck & draw in the wand so that we may see
see, un día puede que no seamos de esta tierra you says. i know what you mean, we walk not with gods;
instead through black topographies where the light of stars & weapons serve as only our guide

thru the dark

someone says, dancing man dancing aztec for coins singing aztec for coins you says,
son tiempos de incertidumbre déjalo cantar. you says, en estos tiempos de incertidumbre

déjalo.


*god (the one whose gossamer thread sews guardians into) :

/THE BOY/

 

c. melín lara (a.k.a Car Lara) is a multidisciplinary artist and experimental writer of Mexican and Honduran heritage, born and living in Queens, NYC. A recipient of the 2024–25 Emerge–Surface–Be Fellowship, their work explores transculturality and mythic-domestic entanglements through translation play, formal experiments with typographical symbols and asemic transliterations. It has appeared in Noir Sauna, the Poetry Project Newsletter and Fine Print Press. @car1ara on IG & car1ara.carrd.co.

Ayling Zulema Dominguez

Postcolonial Classroom Exercise, or When the Craft Talk is Insufficient

Turn your chair to face the person with the most power in the room.

In this exercise, power is to be understood as the echo of colonial legacy clanking around beneath complicitly comfortable skin; as stake in maintaining the status quo for personal benefit.

Face the person who does not sharpen contradictions, but instead, vindicates them, effectively deadening revolution.

Ask them how much the dread in their chest weighs, should they have any. Consider their chosen method of measurement.

Do not answer when they ask you, “Dread of what?” This is your first indication: you are facing the right direction.

Ask them their favorite part of the land acknowledgment. What they imagined during it. Where their mind went. Did it travel over lands from a bird’s eye view, borderless? Did their shoulders relax after it was read?

Note: Whether their shoulders are tense and raised only now, as you ask these questions. Can you form a constellation out of the places around the room their eyes have darted?

Press on. Not as form of absolving privilege, you all being there in that room far-removed. But as collective necessity.

As practice in getting free.

That, or as way of unsettling the elite.

Ask where the creation myth of this nation resides, both within and around them.

Have them introduce themself with the last time they defended the institution. It need not be so explicit, you might remind them. You might not, because their power already rests on mountains of unseen labor.

You might still, because lives are lost the longer they delay their social consciousness.

Have the notetaker—I trust you assigned a notetaker, every uprising, no matter the scale of it, needs its archivist—collect answers from the rest: suppressions of every kind, both the violence and that which was silenced; it’s more difficult to overwrite a history that tells all sides of it.

Though not entirely immune to revisionism, to being grinded to dust and scattered across inaccessible archive labyrinths.

So, have the record be read at the institution’s funeral. Have it serve as epigraph to every curriculum until then.

Have the person in question get in touch with the person they report to, have them ask their own set of questions.

Repeat this exercise until the pillars are shattered.

 

IGUALA

where each 43rd letter has been replaced with the name of a forcibly disappeared student from the 2014 Iguala mass kidnapping.

quiere decir “donde serena la noche,” so serene the 43 of ABEL GARCÍA HERNÁNDEZou have yet to ever be seen again. I, too, have worried mABELARDO VÁZQUEZ PENITEN family that all that would be left of me is righteouADÁN ABRAJAN DE LA CRUZ rage unfulfilled, though comparison is worth littALEXANDER MORA VENANCIOe when my bones are still within me, not burned to uniANTONIO SANTANA MAESTROentifiable ash. Marking the anniversary of a massaBENJAMÍN ASCENCIO BAUTISTAre, you were made into another massacre. This poem wiBERNARDO FLORES ALCARÁZl never be able to hold corrupt officials accountaCARLOS IVÁN RAMÍREZ VILLAREALle, but if all I can do is interrupt language with relCARLOS LORENZO HERNÁNDEZ MUÑOZntless reminder, I will do so until my tongue is seveCESAR MANUEL GONZÁLEZ HERNÁNDEZed. Students sin pelos en la lengua will always be “raCHRISTIAN ALFONSO RODRÍGUEZ TELUMBREicalized,” deemed revoltosos, barely tolerated by sCHRISTIAN TOMAS COLÓN GARNICAatus quo enforcers, pejoratively labeled Ayotzis, CUTBERTO ORTIZ RAMOSero yo aquí pensando “qué lindo nombre.” Revoltosos se lDORIAM GONZÁLEZ PARRALs llevaron, revoltosos los queremos. Ay, how tragedy EMILIANO ALEN GASPAR DE LA CRUZlways indelibizes, drapes even a number with immutEVERARDO RODRÍGUEZ BELLOble sorrow. You may know by now, but your families will FELIPE ARNULFO ROSAever permit our forgetting. As I write this, it will hGIOVANNI GALINDES GUERREROve been a decade. Each of us missing, holding your forISRAEL CABALLERO SÁNCHEZed disappearances. Peña Nieto’s government establiISRAEL JACINTO LUGARDOhed “historical truth” in the investigation. A goverJESÚS JOVANY RODRÍGUEZ TLATEMPAment is only as good as its most horrid falsified doJHOSIVANI GUERRERO DE LA CRUZumentation. Power abuse, however, inevitably grows JONÁS TRUJILLO GONZÁLESranslucent. What’s harder to see through is the schoJORGE ÁLVAREZ NAVAl murals, which have not buried you, which continue tJORGE ANÍBAL CRUZ MENDOZA declare: Protestar es un derecho. Reprimir es un delJORGE ANTONIO TIZAPA LEGIDEÑOto. In a country with more than one hundred eleven thJORGE LUIS GONZÁLEZ PARRALusand people gone missing, you all have become greaJOSÉ ÁNGEL CAMPOS CANTORer emblem than snake-eating eagle. ¿Qué cosecha un país JOSÉ ÁNGEL NAVARRETE GONZÁLEZue siembra mentiras? “There is no indication that thJOSÉ EDUARDO BARTOLO TLATEMPA students are alive,” says truth commission chairmaJOSÉ LUIS LUNA TORRES, Alejandro Encinas. What, then, are the protesters whJULIO CÉSAR LÓPEZ PATOLZÍN continue to break down doors to the National PalacLEONEL CASTRO ABARCA, to be met with tear gas when calling for justice, to uLUIS ÁNGEL ABARCA CARRILLOify pueblos against state repression. Todos somos LUIS ÁNGEL FRANCISCO ARZOLAyotzinapa. El lugar de las tortugas. Carrying anti-hMAGDALENO RUBÉN LAURO VILLEGASstory on our backs, plodding steadily through mud bMARCIAL PABLO BARANDArn of the long rain on the night of your attack. Sus faMARCO ANTONIO GÓMEZ MOLINAilias los esperan. En esta vida y la próxima. Because rMARTÍN GETSEMANY SÁNCHEZ GARCÍAvolutionary lexicons know to leave room for hope, oMAURICIO ORTEGA VALERIOher translations of the town’s name take it to mean “yMIGUEL ÁNGEL HERNÁNDEZ MARTÍNEZ volvió,” o “ya viene,” from yohualcéhuatl instead of yoalMIGUEL ÁNGEL MENDOZA ZACARÍASa. Hasta encontrarlos, you reside in the mother tongSAÚL BRUNO GARCÍAe.

 

Ayling Zulema Dominguez is a poet, educator, and community artist who dreams and writes toward a borderless world with rematriated lands. Their writing asks us to defy colonialism and nurture collective care in its place; it asks us who we are at our most free, and explores the subversions needed in order to arrive there. What can language do for our resistance efforts? How can we use it to cultivate new worlds and weave our ancestors into the fabric of them? Their storytelling is rooted ancestrally in the lands of Puebla, México (Nahua) and the island of Kiskeya-Ayiti.

Emma Brewer

Trial By Water

 

Emma Brewer is a satire and fiction writer from Vermont. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker.com, McSweeney’s, The Cut, Epiphany Magazine, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in the Addison County-based Zig Zag Lit Mag.

Jesse Mechanic

Prism + Cube

 

Jesse Mechanic is a writer and artist based in New York’s Hudson Valley. His work has been published in Mother Jones, In These Times, Huff Post, Truthout, World Post, and other publications. He is the author of the books, The Last Time We Spoke, and Don’t Be A F*#king Marshmallow.

Sadie Hales

Leave A Mark

 

Sadie Hales has been a waitress, cab driver, pilot, seamstress, house cleaner, barista, farmer. She’s worked in an office, handing out fliers on the street, slinging popcorn at a movie theater, going door to door for the census. She has no training as an artist or writer. She has no business being here. She lives in a tiny town in the northernmost part of CA with her family.

Cortnie Cleary Enns

Scenes From Love Is Blind Season Ten

 

Part-time observer of trash pop culture, Cortnie Cleary Enns forayed into the world of artistic commentary quite by accident but has been enjoying it thus far. Silversmithing and family life happily take up the rest of her time. Her jewelry designs can be found at www.tinyparticlesoflight.com.