POSTS

Brendan Riley translating Juan Gómez Bárcena

Good Intentions

Every morning Mom wakes me up with her shouting and through her tears asks me where Dad is. Our little farce commences in that very moment––while I dress or bathe her I tell her any old thing that comes to mind. That Dad will be right back in a few minutes or maybe that he already died, many years ago.

Mom has that strange look on her face when I answer her, that way of saying yes and no at the same time. But in the end she always nods––even on the days when I’m only her nurse––and with her eyes half-closed she asks me where my bathrobe is. She always says yes because there’s no reason for her to stubbornly cling to saying no, no flimsy memory that denies that we’re at war or that her other daughter––your little girl, Mom, don’t you remember––was finally devoured by cancer.

She has long white hair, a thin pale mane that takes me a long time to untangle. And I use those empty minutes to tell her some story about the past, weaving a truth that might be any truth, because any one is just as good as another––whatever ours was, I forgot it a long time ago. She listens in silence, staring at me, her eyes round with astonishment. She asks no questions. No question is possible when nothing is certain. She doesn’t even open her mouth to complain when the comb gets snagged in her hair, because I just repeat to her that pretty little girls don’t cry when they get their hair pulled.

Sometimes I remember Mom’s dreams, the ones she had before she got sick, before she forgot all those things she would have liked to have been. And I repeat them to her in every detail. I tell her that she was a scholarship student, that she didn’t get married so young, that Dad never said all those things. I tell her that the world outside is doing much better than she thinks. But the fact is that Mom doesn’t think at all and she simply stares at the closed venetian blinds, shrugs her shoulders, and smiles. She doesn’t think of anything because it’s enough for her to know that I graduated first in my class or that I’m about to close a business deal somewhere so far away that I need a plane ticket to get there. And then there are also those lucky days when we win a million dollars in the lottery and we’ve got so much money that we could buy any old thing we like, except today is Sunday and all the shops are closed.

Mom smiles on any of those days when everything is perfect. But there are also days that begin differently. Days when I wake up with a strange taste in my mouth or I get another one of those tremendous migraine headaches. And suddenly things just don’t seem quite so easy to me. Something prevents me from inventing another story about the past that sounds just the way Mom would have liked it to be. Something that seems a lot like rancor or envy. Envy for that comfortable existence that consists in waking up fresh each day, always ready to hear anew what a success your life has been. The same beauty again and again ad infinitum. After all, my real life, that life I sometimes remember, was never easy or wonderful. It’s then when I feel that unbearable migraine that I can’t do anything about. Mom shouts from her room, crying for Dad, asking where he is all over again, and I surprise myself by telling her that she threw him out of the house years ago. Or that he died, or that he’s in the room next to hers and doesn’t want to see her. Or that I’m his mistress and it’s me whom he really loves.           

Of course I love Mom; and I sympathize with her condition. But it’s not easy to take care of her day after day with the same spirit as if nothing were going on, as if time didn’t exist and we were back inside her photographs of a forgotten childhood. What I mean is that every time my migraine surges back I know it’s going to be a hard day for us, that I’m going to say some terrible thing that I’ll regret later on, or simply that our past will be unbearable all over again. Maybe I was never really born. Maybe my mother’s whole family died in some bloody war whose name I invent. Maybe Mom never met Dad: you think you remember that you did, but it’s not true, Mom; it’s only another one of your dreams. And she stays silent in that way she does when she believes absolutely everything. Also, when I tell her but of course you love mashed potatoes, Mom, and while she makes an effort to choke them down, I feel how she trembles and struggles with herself, with her revulsion, with her traitorous tastebuds. Or I point to her sick leg and I tell her nothing’s wrong with your leg, and I make her walk up and down the hallway while she grits her teeth and tries not to show any sign of the agonizing pain. The next day she wakes up with her leg all purple from the effort. Her exhaustion is the perfect excuse to tell her that everything really is pointless, that the accident that killed Dad many years ago also left her crippled. Mom looks at me again in that strange way, because she tries to remember but her memory is nothing but the same blind wall without any windows.

Sometimes the game consists of precisely the opposite: in not doing, in not saying absolutely anything. First thing in the morning I hide from her and pay no attention when she shouts and cries. Even when she drags herself out of bed and ends up with bloody gashes on her wrists. With great effort, she totters all around the house but nobody’s there and she doesn’t recognize a thing. Her most recent memories are thirty or forty years old, so I smile when I think about how each new piece furniture forces her to confront a painful, incomprehensible oddity, like a strange artifact from a science fiction movie. Her favorite place is the bathroom. The fixtures are old, probably at least as old as those memories of hers, and the bare pipes are even made of lead. There she hugs the toilet bowl or the sink and, pressing her forehead against the marble, screams until she loses her voice. Sometimes she cries out for Dad; sometimes she remembers my name or her own mother’s name. I deliberately leave a calendar next to the mirror. A calendar that might be current or perhaps, as necessary, one from the past, or even a fake one showing some unbelievable date from the distant future. Mom reads 2374 and repeats it to herself again and again while she clutches the sink weeping, because she understands that she surely must be dead already. At some point she falls asleep, fainting from hunger or thirst: her anguish must surely be immense. Later she wakes up in some part of the house and then I appear, her savior. I help her sit up and I say to her, Mom, you fell asleep, and after you told me that you’d help me peel the potatoes this time.

Other days I lower all the blinds and switch off the electricity. I enter her room in the dark, clapping my hands all the while. Time for school, I tell her, time for school, get dressed now or you’ll be late. I try to make my voice sound different, but it doesn’t really matter, because as I’ve already said, Mom accepts everything I tell her. Who are you, she asks me, and I reply very casually that I’m Mom, why aren’t you getting up. She takes a few moments to answer, because my mom is no idiot and she must remember vaguely that her mother died when she was a very little girl. But I don’t give her time to think. I caress her white hair, her wrinkles, and her flaccid breasts, and I say to her, Darling, you’re going to be late for school, get up now I’ve already prepared your breakfast for you. She doesn’t know what to say. She vaguely murmurs something about my father, about her daughter, but I leave her no room for doubt, and I tell her here you go again with that absurd nightmare about your husband and your daughter. Finally she accepts the fact that I’m Mom and she’s seven years old. Then she kisses me. She calls me sweet names that make me laugh. She also tells me that she has a math test at school that day. I give her a kiss and then I sit up, switch on the lights, and raise the blinds. I hold a mirror up to her face.

But I love Mom. What I mean is that I want the best for her. Especially those days when my head isn’t killing me. I know that I love her because sometimes I’ve listened to her cry––maybe I told her that she has cancer or that her little girl drowned in the bathtub; the little girl in her head who must surely be me––and when I’ve heard her crying I feel like something inside me is breaking. It only happens very, very rarely, but when it does I can’t stop hugging her and I need to be sincere. I need to tell the truth for once, because I’ve repainted the past so many times that it’s now like we never had any or, on the contrary, that we had every past you could imagine. So I look her in the eyes and I tell her everything. I tell her about my migraines, about her illness, the reason why I lower the blinds and why I don’t answer the phone or the doorbell when they ring. I tell her that some days I invent a perfect past for her and on other ones I feel like I’ve got to make her memory a living hell. I also explain that I surely must seem cruel, but in the end it’s not all my fault: that in a certain way it’s the past that chooses me, that calls to me each morning. I tell her that in these years I’ve learned that the truth doesn’t exist, that the truth has to be reinvented every day––and that sometimes the truth surges up from one simple headache, or from a hopeless whirling nausea in my stomach.

Mom doesn’t say anything. She only listens in silence and smiles or half-closes her eyes. She looks at me in a completely different way than usual. For the first time she doesn’t believe me. It’s strange to realize how sometimes the truth is harder to accept than a lie. At first she doesn’t believe me, and she lolls her head because everything is absurd, but suddenly something changes in her expression. It’s a look of horror or surprise. Perhaps it’s because at last she remembers, that she suddenly sees something in my face that that startles her, something she had never seen before. For a moment she looks me in the eyes, and in her gaze I see certain memories that I promised to never name again. In an instant her expression is more terrible, more unhinged than on the days when, with tears in her eyes, she hears me explain how the Cold War finally erupted and we’re the only survivors left on Earth. And then it happens. For a moment her strength returns to her body. She pulls away from my arms, she flails at me until she manages to claw at my face or my breast; she scratches me, spits at me, and screams horrible things at me that she might never have imagined before getting sick, none of which I take seriously because I pity her condition. She bites me with her toothless mouth or she simply goes running down the hallway; she runs despite her bad leg, in spite of her big heavy shoes and the trembling in her knees; she runs to the door that’s bolted shut or clutches wildly for the telephone. The poor thing doesn’t remember that it’s been disconnected all these years.

Mom pounds on the door over and over again. She screams things that no neighbor will ever be able to hear. She slowly starts to understand that the phone is disconnected and the door is locked tight. Sooner or later she’ll forget everything that I’ve told her. She keeps banging on the door but her energy is spent, along with her hope, and when she’s finally overcome by the pain in her leg she lets herself slide down to the floor. There she cries long enough to forget what she’s doing there on the carpet. And when I see that that moment has arrived I slowly count to twenty and then I go to her side, I caress her head and sweetly ask her why are you crying, Mom, and with her voice raspy from screaming and crying she answers I don’t remember, and keeps on crying. Then I wrap her in my arms, I hug her tightly and I forgive her for all those things I don’t remember and that perhaps I invent. It’s as if I suddenly feel an infinite compassion for her bad leg and I can’t help starting to cry myself. We cry together. We cry in silence for days gone by: for all our yesterdays, and for tomorrow as well. And for a moment I fold my hands together and I wish with all my might that tomorrow will be a different kind of day. A day without migraines or bad tastes in my mouth. A day when there is one single truth that we can confront face to face. And that truth can be any lie properly told. After all, knowing that something was true never really did us much good anyway.

Translator’s Note

Juan Gómez Bárcena’s “Good Intentions” is a powerful, melancholy, darkly comical story of family entrapment in the face of aging and senility, and a daughter’s weakness against the temptation to enact revenge for past wrongs both remembered and perceived as she struggles, alternately, between being her crazy mother’s caretaker and tormentor. And while the narrator wryly confesses the mental cruelty she routinely visits upon her mother, the story is much more than its masque of black humor; akin to the bleak meditations of Beckett and Pinter, “Good Intentions” is about humans’ unenviable, Sisyphean labor to maintain clarity and make peace with the reality of corporeal decay and its attendant physical suffering while confronting the shibboleth of truth. It is an excursion into the quagmire of subjectivity famously explored by Thomas Hobbes in Chapter II of Leviathan, “Of Imagination”: “imagination and memory are but one thing, which for divers considerations hath divers names.”  For some readers, the story may also resound as a very dark echo of Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory.” But where Capote’s famously poignant tale features two people––a young boy and his older, female cousin––essentially alone together, bound by mutual affection, and protecting each other’s souls from the spite of unloving relatives, Gómez’s nightmarish narrative memorably imagines the weird, disturbing solitude of mutual entrapment and the perpetual battle it engenders, something akin to what William Faulkner in his tragic tale “Barn Burning” laments as “the old fierce pull of blood,” the humbling, horrifying, sometimes fatal, truth that we are born into an inexorable, lifelong confrontation with our gene pool, forever groping between who we think we are and how our family defines us.

Translating a story like this one entails dwelling a while, willingly, inside its house of horrors. To a certain degree, familiar territory. I grew up in a very large, spooky old pre-Civil War era house. Ghosts? Unquestionably. But ever more powerful is the effect that large, old, open, lonely inner spaces have on the mind and memory because they provide an almost infinitely interchangeable set of interconnected spaces through which to move and imagine, searching and being followed at the same time. Add, to many echoing, dusty, high-ceilinged rooms, various attics and a labyrinthine basement once used as a stop on the Underground Railroad and, well, when you encounter a story like “Good Intentions” it feels like stepping through the front door after baseball practice, familiar environs, that is; but actually inhabiting that unhappy place for a while is not not always easy because this is someone else’s intimate creation and, as translator, I have to explore it rather closely and allow myself, authorize myself to write down words, phrases, emotions, scenes that are seriously disturbing; it’s a process of discovery and revelation, and of coming to terms with all that; writing something, and having to write it clearly, deliberately, precisely, and then revisiting it, something that I would probably never have thought of or written myself, can be an odd feeling; revealing all that, committing to having a relationship with that text and then putting my translator’s byline on it. All a bit surreal.                      

In terms of actually translating, after the initial reading, it’s a process of gradual and increasing familiarity, building up the translation sort of like the way forensic model makers add layers and bits and pieces to a skull in order to create a bust, and trying to recreate the face of a person whom they will never really see, working through several drafts, checking for errors, reading aloud, listening to the voice come to life, trying to feel that it’s convincing until the time comes to surrender it, and then wait to hear back after other eyes and ears have taken a crack at discovering its character.

This is the only story by Juan Gómez Bárcena that I’ve translated, and I can’t speak to his immediate influences. Nor can I pinpoint codified or canonical precedents but it certainly reminds me of, and unnerves me like quite a few other stories I’ve read from the world of Spanish-language literature. I think of the spiraling claustrophobia of Borges’ detective story “Death and Compass” with its pathological relationship between Eric Lönnrot and Red Scharlach, and Antonio Ungar’s novel Tres ataudes blancs (Three White Coffins). I think of the cruelty that saturates and defines the relationship between a father and son in Ana María Shúa’s knife-edged novel Death as a Side-effect.  Finally, I think of the coldness of Albert Camus’ Mersault (obviously from French literature, not Spanish) and the ludicrous, terrifying closed-house scenarios found in some stories by Julio Cortázar, such as “Bestiary,” where children try to survive in a house where a tiger sometimes roams free, and the fascinating but disturbing and inescapable möbius strip of “Continuity of Parks.”


Brendan Riley holds degrees in English from Santa Clara University and Rutgers University. An ATA Certified Translator of Spanish to English, he has also earned certificates in Translation Studies from U.C. Berkeley, and Applied Literary Translation from the University of Illinois. Riley’s translations include Álvaro Enrigue’s acclaimed Hypothermia, and Juan Filloy’s 1937 modernist epic novel Caterva, as well as the travelogue Sunrise in Southeast Asia by Carmen Grau, and The Bible: Living Dialogue, a religious and spiritual roundtable by Pope Francis, Marceloa Figueroa, and Abraham Skorka. Recent translations include Carlos Fuentes’ The Great Latin American Novel, an expansive, nonfiction survey of the genre, and Antagony–Book I: Recounting by Spanish novelist Luis Goytisolo, both published by Dalkey Archive Press.

Spanish author Juan Gómez Bárcena (b. Santander, 1984) holds degrees in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, Philosophy, and History. His 2014 novel El cielo de Lima (Translated as The Sky Over Lima, by Andrea Rosenburg) won the Ojo Crítico de Narrativa prize from Spain’s Radio Nacional. His 2012 book of short stories Los que duermen was named one of the best literary debuts of 2012 by El Mundo’s El Cultural magazine, and also received the Premio la Tormenta al Mejor Autor Revelación award. He also edited the anthology Bajo treinta, a collection of short stories by young Spanish writers.

Sophie Hoyle

PERMASTRESS addresses Anxiety disorder, the technomediation of the body and the role of collective anxiety in geopolitical discourses.

PERMASTRESS(1)(2016)

Permastress (2016) Clips 1-8 from Sophie Hoyle on Vimeo.

​PERMASTRESS(2)(2016)

Permastress (2016) Installation Documentation from Sophie Hoyle on Vimeo.

INNER STRESS (2016)

Inner Security from Sophie Hoyle on Vimeo.

Artist’s Statement

I’m an artist and writer whose work and research explores an intersectional approach to post- colonial, queer, feminist and disability issues. I work in moving-image, installation and video-essay to look at the relation of the personal to (and as) political, individual and collective anxieties, and how alliances can be formed where different kinds of inequality and marginalisation intersect. I explore biographical experiences of being queer and part of the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) diaspora, to relate the interpersonal to wider structural violence. From direct experience of psychiatric conditions and trauma, or PTSD (Post-Traumatic-Stress- Disorder), I began to look at the politics of collective trauma in communities and societies in the MENA region through post-colonial critique, anti-psychiatry and transcultural psychiatry, and the history and use of medical technologies rooted in biopolitical control.


Sophie Hoyle is an artist and writer currently based in London, UK. Recent exhibitions, screenings and published texts include: Sheer—Naked—Aggression, Chalton Gallery, London; Archipelago, Issue 4; The Southern Summer School, BAK, Utrecht; Power: The Politics of Disability, London (all 2017); The 3D Additivist Cookbook; Clearview Presents; Mimesis for Cosmos Carl; Off to Mahagonny, London; This Time With FEELing [space] London, and Anxious to Secure, Transmediale HKW Berlin (all 2016). sophiehoyle.com

Sarit Ben Aryeh Frishman

Femme/home

1.
“If I’d’ve seen you someplace,  I’d’ve thought you were a straight girl” was the day I went home and shaved half my head
Undercut
“Femme Visibility Cut”
7 months later for my birthday,  I got the word,  “Femme” tattooed in black above my cleavage. 

2.
When I met you at Bluestockings,  we had the same haircut
Proud gray roots
#FemmesOver40
But yours was dyed pink at the ends, and on your chest, 
Where mine said “Femme” was the word “home”

3.
I’m sitting at a table in the Met Life building in Midtown Manhattan,  waiting for the charger port on my phone to be fixed.  My overwhelmed autistic ears are stuffed with rolled up halves of a paper napkin, an insufficient measure to block out the large wall mounted TV tuned to CNN, and the men around me taking up too much space with their voices.  
I’ve been re-reading “Love Cake”, and I’m writing this longhand on a piece of stenographer’s paper with a pen I borrowed from the front desk on top of its cover.  
In the picture inside, you have a full head of hair,  and I wonder if someone once made you feel invisible.  I want to tell you,  that even without the undercut,  the tattoos or the “switchblade hip switch”
If I had seen you in the wild
I would have seen you right away
Queer, Brown, Hard Femme
Because we are not invisible
We take up more space than these chattering men, CNN and Midtown put together
Just by being the 
Unbreakable Bitches we are
But until I picked up your books, 
Found your words when I lacked my own
I might never have discovered this Femme/home.  


Sarit Ben Aryeh Frishman is an SDQTPOC, mentally ill, autistic, Femme sex worker who lives in New York. She is 48.

Ysabel Y. Gonzalez

Apocalyptic Luck

Some of us will be relieved when the world ends,
no more bones to shine.

When we see a comet dashing towards earth,
we’ll cheer, think finally— 

not because there’s an afterlife waiting
for us

but because we’re exhausted scratching at our scarred
etchings

day after day, tiny pluckings at the skin 
until we’re raw,

red at the helm of our flesh a hacked-on reminder
that there’s 

luck in an ending invoked, when we tell an apocalypse: 
come, do 

your fiery blaze
baddest,

ease our yoke with a shower of cosmic 
roses.

That’s what people like me call
triumph.

Invocation

Some people
leap or slice
to start over

I know too well
this urge
but also know
I’ll just be sent back
unglued

Despite 
constant tinkering
synapses don’t mend
so in short-lasting light
I conjure up 
a litany for Lucid

         praise Your steady
         guide my hands
         guide my feet
         guide my tongue

And this is how 
witchcraft began

stealing back 
a sober mind
through fiery prayer
but not to their god


Newark, NJ-based Ysabel Y. Gonzalez received her BA from Rutgers University, and an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. Ysabel has received invitations to attend VONA, Tin House, Ashbery Home School, and BOAAT Press workshops. She’s a CantoMundo Fellow, and has been published in the Paterson Literary Review, Tinderbox Journal, Anomaly, Vinyl, It was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip-Hop, Wide Shore, Waxwing Literary Journal, and others.  You can read more about her work, at ysabelgonzalez.com

Julian Randall

This Land Is Where We Buried Everything That Came Before You: African American History and Concepts of Ownership in Early Elementary Education

Abstract:

Within the history of Afro-American existence much scholastic importance has been attributed to the weight of February. This is certainly understandable as Blackness in the pedagogical tradition is nothing if not a silhouette in a pelagic winter. However, understated in all of this is the significance of the “Token” as a kind of tragic hero in the tradition of sole survivors such as Odysseus. More specifically, how a boy might see his undoing and howl across the unflinching snow and never identify the echo. This Sonics of Blackness is a criminally under represented element of how one conveys to a room full of second graders the savage lick of a whip as a means of explaining an entire history. The question of this poem then is how the educator of the classroom approaches the subject of slavery when only one Black child sits in the room worrying at a shoelace, as if preparing. This poem takes as its primary subject a boy no older than 7 embraced by his white best friend as the white best friend states “I am glad slavery is over, I would have hated to own you.” Followed by the boy sitting on his hands until they are blood bulbous and no longer entirely his own. How he looks beyond the window onto the playground and beneath the snow imagines an entire country; beneath that country, another.

Frank Ocean Sighting #268: Frank Ocean Is Rumored to Speak of Rivers Which is Likely a Lie (Disc 1)

Junior year come around
& in my dorm room
animal level desire makes me
more me in some ways
My savage tongue drizzles
onto an empty bed
Empty         except me
      nothing new
to splinter the obese quiet
Lonely & holding court with stains
Drake vibrates through the next wall

Lust got loose in the hallway
sex echoes between melodies
I thumb at flakes of paint
I ain’t got nobody    no music
No woman    no man
this makes me the anomaly
again     My man handsome
as anything that don’t quite exist
My man just the hum glazing my fist
Beneath my nails    olive coats of landscape

Gossip tells us there’s two discs
Rumor tells us it’s posthumous
Sense should’ve told me not to sleep
with this white girl    knowing history
like I do     yet here    me frightened
me jutting my hips in the dull light
Gossip tells us one of the discs
is River     Booze shuffled off her lips
It never met my mouth     I quivered inside her
loneliness    she told me    You need to quit being
such uh bitch & fuck me    I obeyed     then exited


For weeks it goes like that
this memory I shudder to call
abuse     Yet it was
the story is gauze
I already bled through it
She called me a coward
for each of my refusals
I ask myself    why I stayed
The sex was bad    I was scared
of her solitude    her fragile quiet
her desire for me to be hers outside
Some vases shatter   get filled with gold
Some vases shatter   just become fragments
that hold my eyes    as I drop the lid over them
Leave their little trauma in the hallway

My whole body an Achilles Heel
momma’s ever tender failing
destined for a puncture’s fame
The album was a hoax
I was just as depressed as before
& now mother to half a secret
Still I was ablaze with want
for sex     yes      but mostly
I just wanted it to end
My friends & their partners
are in the main room playing Monopoly
discussing gains & losses & losses
I’m invited as an afterthought
Still ablaze I put on my coat
It is 3am     and the downpour is torrential
I shouldn’t be going anywhere
I’m not sure I’m going anywhere
so much as testing if anyone would stop me
while I stroll past them        They didn’t
& when I stepped outside to quench
the gene which gives me my father’s sadness
it rained until every puddle was rabid

(Self) Inflicted

I enter this story by the same door each time. Sweet tragedy, honeyed tongue of the night bucks down my throat again and again. It is as common a myth as I can bear: Everyone Remembers Their First Time. Suppose I do, for argument’s sake. Suppose a memory knows violence inherently as a wolf knows that it deserves. Suppose we can call the result, result. That it is something more than my need to be sacrificed to myself. I did this to myself, the shots quivered, then didn’t.

My face made smaller and smaller in the dimming melody. Taint me in the glass, eclipse a flood a quarter inch at a time. I am saying here, that if I pretend I can remember much of anything, I like to think I could see my face in the shot glass. Self as parenthetical, self as wound framed by the less tarnished. I did this to myself, surrounded by my friends who are all prettier than me. Now, too drunk. Now, gone. Now, faded; life span of a bruise.

I wanted that, a reckless beauty; dauntless and inundating the room. I inflict myself on myself. Still. Hasty yes and yes and yes. I thought, even when surrounded, that I was alone. What is there really to learn from Troy, besides isolation begets permeability?

Sacrifice begets visibility; I am never more dazzling than when I’m sucking my own knife clean. I sprinted towards the light, nobody knew I was absent. Past that, desire begets a gash in the memory. I remember teeth, and how the blood didn’t leave my neck. Pooled instead. Bruised constellation. Botched hanging. Loud islands of regret. Too drunk. I make terrible prey. Mutter yes as if it can mean anything.

Oh teeth, my one clean memory, little disorganized search lamps, I count you as my audience; the way stars are beautiful until they are revealed as planes; the way what is touched erodes into an unremarkable darkness; the way the light of what is gone; reaches dim, reaches still.


Julian Randall is a Living Queer Black poet from Chicago. A Pushcart Prize nominee he has received fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT and the Watering Hole and was the 2015 National College Slam (CUPSI) Best Poet. Julian is the curator of Winter Tangerine Review’s Lineage of Mirrors and a poetry editor for Freezeray Magazine. He is also a cofounder of the Afrolatinx poetry collective Piel Cafe. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Nepantla, Rattle Poets Respond, Ninth Letter, Vinyl, Prairie Schooner, and The Adroit Journal, among others. He is a candidate for his MFA in Poetry at Ole Miss.

Marlin M. Jenkins

anxiety attack in a public university bathroom stall

i’m paranoid      everyone wants            to kill
me      well             at least        we have found
common ground           i want                 to kill
me too     do you want to help?      this can be
a collaborative project                     something
we can do together         be united        i guess
i’ve become           especially scared of people
lately                   but hey                 let’s plunge
the knife  together       call it solidarity   call it
ally-ship   call it abraham      on the mountain
doing the will of god                 but neglecting
the final instruction              i learned sacrifice
early       learned hate early           hate myself
often         it’s a viscous circle            maybe if
i flush myself            they’ll never       find me
someone hears my gasping sobs      walks up
to the stall door      knocks    asks        hey man
you alright?
and i almost  say          naw    bruh
but          i’ll open the door        if           you want
a brown body         to use            as target practice
except for the tremors         i promise i’ll stay still

anxiety attack trying to remember the word for fear of irregular groupings of holes

this time the ceiling
opening dark spots
worms again fall
through onto the bed 
mingle with bed bugs
that aren’t really there

but still the itch feels 
like some microscopic
eating away at skin
growing openings
irregular everywhere

you ever want to just
scrape all your skin
off just all of it because
there can’t be holes
in what’s not there 
can’t itch what doesn’t 
exist maybe just get rid 
of it all with a knife 
or a potato peeler or 
my own nails or maybe 
there’s a way to make 
a single incision and boil 
myself so it’s all off at once

the whole thing detached
and whole and all of it
smooth and even and even
and even


Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit, and studied poetry in University of Michigan’s MFA program. His writings have been given homes by The Collagist, Four Way Review, The Journal, and Bennington Review, among others. He is an editor for HEArt Online, and you can find him on Twitter @Marlin_Poet.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Crip Infinity

If my cane is a limb,
Then so is my pen
–         Maranda Elizabeth

1.        my friend asked her facebook feed what apocalypse would be too much for us. What we would
           really want to not live beyond.  Folks mentioned cannibalism, the end of the whales, I stubborn
           said nothing.
 I already died three times and came back,
I don’t fear death, I know her.
I trust this world’s mean gorgeous unrelenting surprise 
Like the best top,
 she’s taken me to the edge of death 
and brought me back 
over and over, transformed.
but if this world was sterile scrubbed held down of crip  genius
I would not want to survive that
I would not want to live in a world where my people had been eliminated
for our own good 

2.       my goal is to make the revolution irresistable, so listen close:

in the infinite crip crazy future, I am not eliminated
and neither are you. We stand sit lie limp freak out
infinite.  
There are kinds of crazy that we ain’t even thought of yet.
We are the walking dead         the dead femmes walking

There’s nowhere you can hide from seeing all these birth defects,
I mean people.                  I mean us. 
We really are everywhere 
puffing, drooling stimming
The quality of our pain has changed
because no shame is the most effective anti-inflammatory

When an autistic kid is born people jump up and down
and scream quietly, in our heads.  We are so excited to find out
what we can do.

The best stim toys and futures are made by our kind
who focused and focused and focused 
til we made something the most beautiful
and every one gasped with admiration
but never surprise

Nothing horrible happens
You are not taken away
I am not left to die
We take care of each other forever

Our crip femme brown  love is something studied  in school
How we loved towards each other, again and again
     –     how a million ideations couldn’t end this
We are an epic love story
We are one of many

All of us are worthy of study and  grants, in fact
I don’t mean the abled studying us,
but us studying ourselves.
We study ourselves
we check each other out in the mirror
We are the beauty standard.
We didn’t end.
Our wild minds make the future 


I not in need of a cure

I my own amazing future

and yes, I ask:

what will we know about the queer crip body?
what do we know about the divine?
Persistent like virus
and as holy

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (she/they) is a queer disabled nonbinary femme writer and cultural worker of Burger / Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish / Roma ascent. The author of Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, Bodymap  and Consensual Genocide, she is also, with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani,  co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. Her work has been widely published, most recently in The Deaf Poets Society, Glitter and Grit, and Octavia’s Brood. Currently a lead artist with the disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid, she teaches, performs and lectures across North America. Primarily, she is a weirdo who writes about survivorhood, disability justice, transformative justice, queer femme of color lives and Sri Lankan diaspora sitting in her room.

Ruby Hansen Murray

Fishtrap

       When I’m awarded a fellowship to study with Debra Earling, a writer hero of mine at a conference in the Wallowa Mountains, I accept even though I’ll have to read before the assembled conference. That’s how much I admire Debra and her work. The reading is five to seven minutes on Friday evening before the keynote speaker. If all goes well, I can do seven minutes. Sometimes, even after I’ve prepared and I think I’m okay, I shake and I can’t get my breath.
       On a Monday afternoon in early July, I arrive at the Methodist camp south of Wallowa Lake and settle into White, a forestry-service-style cabin under lodge pole pine. It’s named for a minister who lived at the camp, who called it “God’s Country” whenever he spoke of it. Of course. The Eagle Cap Mountains roll out from the lake formed by a glacial moraine. The Snake River Hell’s Canyon Wilderness runs on the east side. It’s stunning country that was Nimi’ipuu ancestral land. Nimi’ipuu or Nez Perce presence hangs over the country. The nearby town of Joseph was renamed for the respected chief, who was still alive when the town changed its name from Silver Lake or Lake City to Joseph in 1880, but although they admired him, he was never allowed to live in his homeland again.
       The conference is called “Fishtrap: Writing the West,” a mash up of Nez Perce fishing technology and a historic focus on bringing eastern publishers out to the West and introducing them to western writers like William Kittredge and Wallace Stegner. One of the co-founders was a white historian of the Nez Perce and over the years, the administrators tell us, they maintained relationships with the Nez Perce. Sometimes, like this year, they invite Native authors. The conference has a loyal faculty who come to fly fish and breathe in the beauty of the lake while teaching. There’s a progressive group of artists who live around Joseph; many of the workshop participants are white middle-aged teachers. It’s a conference with smallish workshops and a friendly vibe.
       Tuesday late afternoon, several women, including the three Native women in attendance, gather at Terminal Gravity, a brewery in Enterprise, where we’ll meet one woman’s husband. We sit around a table on the balcony, and three white men from the conference, who have the clean look of professionals, walk across the parking lot like they’re wading across a stream to reach us. One, who looks like Ernest Hemingway, clumps up the stairs and asks to buy us a drink.
       I remember him from previous conferences. At the end of the week during a panel he will ask how Indians are going to survive under Trump, as pitiful as things are. He earns a response from a Native that challenges him to describe the community that will support white elders when the administration guts nursing home funds. So, while the women reassemble with the fishermen at a larger table, I return to camp to prepare for the reading.
       In the past, I’ve tried to memorize my work as performance artists recommend. It hasn’t worked. I tried to recite a short piece at a big art gathering in Seattle. I remember how my husband sighed, frustrated that I left out an essential line. Anxiety blocks me; apparently I can’t pretend to be calm and think freely at the same time. I ask the other fellowship recipients, if they want to practice. Yes, but they can’t say when.
       As a writer, it’s not enough to publish beautiful, powerful words. You need to perform your work competently and speak fluently. The days of hermit, reclusive writers, refusing interviews, hiding out to write are generally over. I mean, writers have a responsibility to create a normal life in the midst of the hyper-competitive creative-writing industry. But writers who want to sell their books end up touring, working hard to get venues to read, to speak and teach.
       The faculty here, young and old, are promoting new work. I write books for the girl I was. I want girls on and off the Osage reservation to find books that reflect their experience, their families and worldview on the shelves at libraries in Osage County. I want a top tier agent for a chance at national reviews and wide distribution and compensation for some of the time that has gone into this work. It’s possible to write a book that interests agents, but when they meet you, they’re assessing your ability to communicate, your skill, age, and style. Your marketability. I’m not young and attractive, not spunky or hip.
       Thursday I work on the text, paring it down. Knowing the work intimately isn’t enough. Sometimes I’m too stiff, have the words mostly memorized and they’re flat. I want to preview the work with friends, who will be in the audience wishing me well.
       It’s hard for me to walk to the front of a room to read. I tell myself I don’t have the right clothes; I’m not what the audience expects. My voice is too soft. My mixed ethnicity is unclear, and I’m overweight, which some read as ignorant. I don’t accept all of the self-hate, misogyny, racism and ageism that the world distributes. I feel good about who I am, an Osage woman in her sixties, but the toxins are layered in. When I face my fear and read, as I have again and again, nothing is better than the deepening quiet in a room that tells me a scene is working.
       Friday, the fellowship recipients have lunch with the program administrator, and then we go to the White cabin and practice. It’s such a good feeling to listen to strong work, to feel the intent and to support each other. That night our readings are strong. The mock orange on the far side of the Fishtrap stage waves sweetness in the air. My voice doesn’t crack; I tell the story rather than reading it. Afterwards, Emily, Nellie and I stand together, taking pictures beside the podium in front of the Fishtrap quilt. We want to get a drink, but nothing is open.
       We sit in the lodge around a large table. Nellie has gone to be with poets in Naomi Shihab Nye’s class. They’re having a party tonight and will have another class tomorrow. Naomi is generous; her work and her countenance are like sunshine at the conference.
       A local poet and teacher comes to sit with us, saying how he appreciated me mentioning the Nez Perce elders who were here when I was some years ago. I’m glad you spoke, he says, there are two Nimi’ipuu families in the county, and the local ranchers are nervous about the 320 acres the Nez Perce bought for a Homeland Project near Wallowa.
       The man who looks like Hemingway appears. “Well, look where you are,” he says to the poet and pulls a chair up to the table.
       “We’ve had all female fellows for a long time,” he says. We were told they selected the top three applicants after a winnowing process. “When you can’t tell if the author is a man or a woman–that’s pretty good,” he says.
       “What?” I say, looking from him to the women, the stink rising. We know that agents request to see work more often when a man queries than when the same work is submitted by a female. Hemingway is saying we don’t sound female. I don’t engage with him, because I don’t want to hear anything he has to say.
       The morning after the reading, the Wallowa River is still roaring, heavy with snow melt, banging over rocks at a thousand cubic feet per second. The USGS says stream flow is dropping day by day.
       I drive north toward home through Joseph, where a new bronze statue of the chief, donated by a member of the Walton family, surveys the tourists and art galleries. The Nimi’ipuu have also recently dedicated a statue of Joseph, created by a Nez Perce sculptor near their casino in Lewiston, Idaho. I learn that this year, 2017, was the second consecutive year that all three fellowships were awarded to women. I cross my fingers for next year.


Ruby Hansen Murray is a writer and photographer, whose work appears in World Literature Today, The Rumpus, As/Us, Apogee, and Yellow Medicine Review. Winner of the 2017 Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction, she’s a Jack Straw and VONA fellow, awarded residencies at Ragdale, Hedgebrook, Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She received an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2017. She’s a citizen of the Osage Nation with West Indian roots on her mother’s side, living in the Columbia River estuary. 

Lauren Yates

The Therapist Speaks on Mania

I put up a Craigslist ad: looking to smoke weed then fuck all day. Dan writes back. He says he is free after 3:30 p.m. and he doesn’t smoke weed. Dan is a straight white man. Dan is the only graphic designer I know who doesn’t smoke weed. Dan knows he does not meet my two criteria and expects to be chosen anyway. Because I am too eager to compromise my needs, I invite Dan to my place. Dan says he will lick my asshole. Dan says he will take his time. As we are fucking, he panics and asks what time it is. I tell him 4:00. He says, “I have to pick up my kid.” Dan goes to stranger’s houses for sex, instead of picking up his child. What the fuck, Dan? I get off of Dan. He leaves the condom on my bedspread that’s now soaked through with his sweat.

I see a tote bag on the Internet. It says, “Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man.” I only apply to jobs I’m qualified for. There are probably jobs I’m qualified for that I don’t apply to because I don’t think I’m good enough or I don’t know about them or I lose them to assholes like Dan.

When I ask, why is _______ so shitty? The answer is usually white supremacy. When I ask, why do I do these things? The answer is usually mania.

My Facebook friend starts a hashtag: #ThingsIDidWhileManic. I read through the comments and see things I’ve done. I want to comment. That I’ve shaved my head. I’ve intentionally slammed the brakes and swerved and sped when my mother pissed me off. I fucked four men in four days (not all protected). I’ve stood in my hallway naked, waiting for my neighbors to see me. I’ve drunk a bottle of clementine vodka and eaten three weed brownies. I’ve dated a man 38 years older than I am and dumped him for his son. I’ve smoked a pack of menthols in one sitting. I’ve hit my ex. I’ve hit a different ex. I’ve written 20-page love letters with hidden read receipts. I can’t bring myself to comment. I am studying to be a therapist. My professors and textbooks tell me not to reveal anything about myself. To be a blank slate. To never admit I’m not okay, either.

My ex-girlfriend is a therapist. My ex-girlfriend is a gay white woman. She and I break up because she’s not okay, either. Because she’s like Dan. I told her sex is a mandatory part of a relationship for me. We didn’t have any. At all. Aside from the one time she thought we were scissoring and she was just humping my thigh and I just laid there.

I tell my girlfriend, she isn’t fulfilling my needs. She says, I know. I cannot get angry without somebody calling me crazy. Because of my past. Because of my skin color. I am not allowed to fall apart. To be anything less than what anyone expects. I am not okay. And isn’t that the opposite of mediocrity.

Twelve Thoughts on Depression

I.
My grandmother calls herself a “Depression Baby.”
Born in 1933, she came along at a miserable time.
She says her family got through it
by refusing to show signs of weakness.

II.
She says she worries about my nerves.
She whispers, as if covering up a dirty habit.
I ask her why she cannot call it what it is.

III.
The first time I told my mom I was depressed,
she laughed. “But you have it so good,” she said.
After that, I took “sad” to mean “ungrateful,”
and thought asking for help was a sign of weakness.

IV.
He and I feared becoming zombies.
We can tell “smart” from “obedient.”
We know that doctors prescribe Prozac at the drop of a hat.

V.
My aunt’s pet cockatiel takes Prozac.

VI.
He said, “All great writers are depressed.
Why quit the tortured genius club?”

“Why apply for grad school?
Let depression be your terminal degree.”

VII.
I said, “Medication treats symptoms,
but does not cure them.”

If sickness ever disappeared completely,
the drug lords would go out of business.

They’d have to sell their vacation homes,
and who are we to deny them relaxation
from the stress of honest work.

VIII.
Rock bottom is everything they say it is.
Like heaven or hell, it is not a place,
but a language you cannot understand
until you have nothing.

IX.
It’s been a year since I started medication.
I wonder if he yells “traitor” in his sleep,
if he dreams we’re Bonnie and Clyde,
and I’ve turned us into the police.

X.
My psychiatrist says that one day,
I can come off the pills completely.

I hope sooner than later.
I have always wanted children.

XI.
At the hospital, a baby was born broken.
While pregnant, his mother had stayed on her pills.
It was either this, or the risk of her killing them both.

Sometimes, I wonder who decided
that it’s fine if you are damaged,
as long as you aren’t dead.

XII.
My grandmother calls herself a “Depression Baby.”
Born in 1933, she came along at a miserable time.

I worry my son will, too. That he will be born
broken, and will gorge himself on tainted milk.
That he will inherit a sickness he never asked for.

I hope he never learns the language of rock bottom,
but if he does, it is a language I still know how to speak.

What does it mean to have empathy
for the very affliction you caused?

It means that there is no one else
better equipped to love him than me.


Lauren T. Yates is a poet from Oceanside, CA. In 2012, Lauren earned her B.A. in English with a Creative Writing Emphasis from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Bettering American Poetry 2015, Rust + Moth, Hermeneutic Chaos, and Connotation Press. Lauren’s work focuses on her identities as a queer black femme living with C-PTSD. In her free time, she enjoys watching RuPaul’s Drag Race, dancing to Joy Division, and eating gyros. For more information, visit http://www.laurentyates.com.

JP Howard

Ghazal for Sugar Hill Secrets or Lullaby for Harlem

Mama’s lover was a secret,
wrapped around decades of bittersweet dreams

When sleep visits, I mimic Mama, 
escort secret lovers into my dreams

I think we are all, always dying here,
these bodies buried under dreams

Grandma Pearl lived-in with rich white folks on Sutton Place,
scrubbed their dirty clothes, while folding up her dreams 

Weekends brought Grandma back to Harlem,
her pot liquor so exquisite, it lives on in my dreams

Sugar Hill stories still run through these veins,
summer stoops hold old men’s shattered dreams 

Mama strutted across runways in her heyday, proud to be the first black model 
in Harlem who couldn’t pass for white, not even in folk’s dreams 

When she strolled up St. Nicholas, with her high yella baby in tow,
neighbors cooed, Look at that good hair, ain’t she a dream?

Mama hid behind an exquisite mask, on a ledge of black joy, 
then swallowed bottles of pills; nearly crushed both our dreams 

Alone, at night, I’m just a scared little girl screaming, Please Mama wake up!
while EMT’s who found Mama’s pulse, still haunt my dreams

Sugar Hill, she be smooth like Ella’s jazz notes, 
belting Dream a Little Dream for Me

One Sunday morning, church elders on Lenox Ave whispered 
Ain’t she the Pastor’s child?  as they washed away my dreams

Yes, I am that light-skinned fractured flashback,
Mama’s love child, snapshot of her wildest dream

Still, in silence of night, I hear her whisper,
Juliet, baby, you were Mama’s best dream. 


JP Howard’s debut poetry collection, SAY/MIRROR, was a 2016 Lambda Literary finalist. She is also the author of bury your love poems here (Belladonna*). JP was a 2017 Split this Rock Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism finalist and is featured in the 2017 Lesbian Poet Trading Card Series from Headmistress Press. She was the recipient of a 2016 Lambda Literary Judith A. Markowitz Emerging Writer Award and has received fellowships and grants from Cave Canem, VONA, Lambda, Astraea and Brooklyn Arts Council. JP curates Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon, a NY-based forum offering women writers a monthly venue to collaborate and is an Editor-at-Large at Mom Egg Review online. JP’s poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Academy of American Poets, Apogee Journal, The Feminist Wire, Split this Rock, Muzzle Magazine, and The Best American Poetry Blog. JP holds a BA from Barnard College and an MFA in Creative Writing from The City College of New York. Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths