POSTS

hansel & gretel

i.

funny to see you here, gretel,
though neither of us is laughing
again we walk through the bluebell woods,
holding hands and yours are
sticky with candy — licorice tangles,
saltwater taffy sticking in your teeth,
the spit too bright in your throat —

because what you crave
causes you to ache, also

ii.

once we slept on an air mattress,
cradling us like a tremulous cloud
i wished to become a boy
overnight, for you to wake
and find me bearded,
chin soft as river moss

iii.

some days i want to chop my breasts off
and feed them to the wolves
i want that scar tissue: cherry petals

iv.

in my dream it is last winter
and your mother is red-faced in the kitchen again,
her hair coming down in cobwebs
and all around us that same old lemon-chicken smell
she asks if kissing other girls
we two are the same, now,

if you are confused like me,
if there are parts of your body you want to chop off
and feed to the wolves
she asks, why do you hate yourself — the oven
starts to smoke — why do you hate me

v.

and then you went back to whispering into a locked box
and then we started visiting the witch’s house

vi.

we have to mark a different path each time,
skirt quickly past thickets
of fangs and yellow eyes,
but then there’s the open door,
spiced light streaming out

the witch feeds us bone-marrow broth,
tells us stories about these woods
she wants us to be strong
no one has told us these stories before  
no one even told us the woods were real

vii.  

at midnight her coven drops by,
dressed the way you and i dress in our dreams,
draped in jewels and fox-fur,
their cackles loud and unfraid —

though they have the right to be —
wine-drunk, they dance around the blue fire
for us, but mostly for each other
they are not confused at all
they know exactly what they are

Milo Gallagher lives in Asheville, North Carolina. His poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review and online at The Fem, The Grief Diaries, Crab Fat Magazine, and elsewhere.

The Kindly Ones

Dear Ms. Phillips,

We at – are interested in taking care of
your real estate needs [we can take this
from you] and it has come to our attention
that, as administrator of the estate of –

[who? will you know him even now?],
you may now be in ownership [you, kin
of your father, in whose image – ?
you inherit – ?] of the property at –

[will you still call this home?].
We would be happy to work with you. 
Whether you are interested in renting
[what does he owe?] or selling

[now we come to receive you,
we, your cousins, your home]
the property, we guarantee [as we are we,
as we are here with/in you] we will protect

[vow tucked under his tongue—what now
will he say for himself – ?] of your fiscal
interests—no matter the state
of the property [flooding, rotting, falling,

the house of Atreus, of Cadmus, again]
we have a team of talented professionals
to aid you in this time [how long
has it been since you’ve lost,

since the house, since the man,
do you remember – now, what now?
since then? now, after – ].
We will assign a qualified real

estate agent [should he wander, should he rest,
we will find him, again, even now, after – ]
to handle the property [ – after fury,
what do you do with the remains, after – ]

in any way you see fit [we have seen him,
we have seen the body – let us feast]
and serve as a consultant [sister-cousin,
ask us how we know]. From sales

[what you’ve chosen to mourn]
to mortgage financing [what’s fitting to note],
property management [as you create him,
with fury, so you we – ] to homeowner’s

insurance [villainous he, furious we],
we are here every step [sister, we have been here,
have seen him, have spoken the name
of the dead, have gathered, perched

on the rooftop of this house, nails tap tapped
on windowpanes – let us in let us in – the man
on the couch breathing, not breathing, he was here]
of your real estate journey.

We have thousands of agents [we are]
in several offices [here] across the U.S.
[we are here], all ready [we are here]
to serve [with/in] you [we can take this]

and your property [we can take this from you].
[Sister, we have come to you for the feast,
for the shelter, your guests, we are, kindly
sister, furious sister, we will call you home].

Thanks again, and we hope you choose – for your real estate needs.

Theme in Red

Instead of an apartment,
we decide to live in a pomegranate.
We search for the proper size and ripeness,
the right richness of color,
the perfect shade of velvet, an essential
red. We are the masters of real estate,
discovering such a steal buried in a pile
of wrong picks at the farmer’s market, just $3
for a mouthful of home.

Moving is difficult, as it always is
in this city. But we fit inside the palm
of the mover’s hand, and we split the rind
into a doorway wide enough for years
of heres and theres, the unabridged
history of the soles of our feet.

Each seedless pocket of fruit is a room,
and they are infinite, a room for recalling
the things we’ve forgotten, a room
for the unpracticed waltz and improvised tango,
and a room for considering impossible things,
where we live most of the time, dreaming
of mansions cut of dragon fruit
and summer homes furnished
from blood orange and red pear.

Every morning we eat
ourselves out of our rooms.
We fill all our pockets with seeds.
We are never hungry for anything.
The juice seeps into all of our clothing,
the linens, the furniture, this stubborn red
we picked, so we are stained
with the evidence of our living.
We are a mess at dinner parties.
We apologize for nothing.
We crimson with laughter.
We lick the joy off our lips.
We wake every day singing
from the fevered red rooms of our hearts.

Maya Phillips was born and raised in New York. Maya received her BFA in writing, literature, and publishing from Emerson College and her MFA in poetry at Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. She currently works as the associate content producer at the Academy of American Poets and as a freelance arts journalist. She lives in Brooklyn.

The Way White People Speak

Ying Kit had seen a handful of Asian people on TV, like Connie Chung and Lucy Liu, their black hair like his sister’s, like a waterfall at night. Only, when Connie Chung spoke, she sounded like no Chinese person he knew. He pictured her voicebox as a radio she would program every morning. How hard it must’ve been at the beginning, shaping her lips to the words, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, a moving hand inside her throat.

Lisa Low was born and raised in Maryland. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Passages North, Quarterly West, Vinyl, Day One, and elsewhere. She lives in Bloomington, IN, where she recently earned her MFA in poetry at Indiana University. 

GANGRENOUS LOVE

gangrenous love fills everything. a mind made blank
by careless hands turns purple in the sun. the fear

of closeness ripens. she had threatened to split her lips
open while the ocean made sounds in the distance.

every crashing wave gave water to the air as an
offering. the boys were off rolling blunts and laughing

too loud to hear all the violence. time stretches
and folds in on itself. time is a body full of damage

that is constantly trying to forget, though it always
remembers on the long drive home. the freeway is

such a beautiful trigger. machines like cold fruit
falling from city to city until one day they find

the soil. the same soil she moved her fingers through
when she thought of the love she gave away. the love

she held onto. all wrong, all backwards, all pus-
covered memory. she slips into something more

comfortable, another reality. somewhere things are okay.
somewhere she is hacking off old limbs and dreaming

                                                      of velvety silence.

I Don’t Want To Be Understood

i don’t want to be understood
i want to live in the air
with all my sisters
floating free around me
like dandelion seeds
no blood
no language
no speaking
no border between body
and subjectivity
just feeling
pure feeling
leaking out from her skin
while she twirls her hair in her fingers
and blows kisses to the sun
she will fall in love
with the way the star will expand
and eat us
she will not fear death
because she does it every day
when she leaves her house
to walk in front of men
who beg for the tangible
who want to know her
more than she knows herself
and she laughs
remembering how
coming to understand her body
was like reconceptualizing water
how moving through their spaces
was all about displacement
how she became one with me
when she realized
we’d been touching beneath the soil
all along

Loss Ritual

This one involves stretching
the skin until it begins to break.

There is light that escapes, and
light that enters. We call this

an even trade, but I am still
without family. Poured myself

a glass of womanhood and drank
until the bones became enough

to live in. Said you can have this
old thing. I don’t need it anymore.

Lick the salt from its surface. I
don’t need it anymore. I can cry

whenever I want, all it takes is
remembering. You wanted to

be holy and righteous because
this is one path to one kind

of heaven. I wanted to be holy
and righteous because life is short

and sad and we all deserve to be
loved. Even you, alone with your

god. Even me, alone with myself.
Neither as complete as we hoped

the loss would make us.

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet living in California. Her work has been featured in The Offing, The Feminist Wire, PEN America, and elsewhere. Her first book of poems i’m alive / it hurts / i love it was released through boost house in 2014, and her second collection THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS was published by Civil Coping Mechanisms in 2016.

Planning Your Suburban Affair

You’ll need a map, though there’s no substitute
for local knowledge. Consider the parks, scout
their parking lots: note any trees that screen.
Walk the quieter paths, hear mulch crackle,
cock an ear for barking dogs. Check shrubs
for cover, picnic shelters – you never know
when it might rain. Weigh the likelihood
of snakes against the certainty of joggers. 
Buy condoms at a place where they don’t keep
your prescriptions on file, where you won’t meet
the checkout clerk at back-to-school night. 
Quick, think what you’ll say when someone rifles
your purse for stamps: “Let me, Hon, you never
find anything in there!” Take up yoga,
poetry, something to get you out at night. 
Now you’re off, eyes conning the dark. You seek
the hole between lampposts: bone in the throat
of the universe that buys you time. Watch how
cars flow, see their headlights sweep the shadows.
Check your pulse, register its spasm;
take off your wedding ring. Pack a flashlight,
fine, but you can’t ever turn it on.

Katherine E. Young is the author of Day of the Border Guards, 2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize finalist, and two chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, Subtropics, and many others. Young is also the translator of Two Poems by Inna Kabysh; her translations of Russian and Russophone authors have won prizes in international competitions and been published widely in the US and abroad; several have been made into short films. Young is a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts translation fellow and currently serves as the inaugural Poet Laureate for Arlington, Virginia. katherine-young-poet.com.

rest in peace sound

    the alteration of the sense

                                          sense-alteration

                             selfless

                                          all too well    

                    what you know

    sensible            well-known    anterior

                             & interior motives

                 catch tenses    suck

                             in the two bells

    tuba halt                      breath

                             breathe

                                                  breathing

                 I hope you get the reference

                 I hope you get the message

    all too tell

                             alliteration of the rent

                 allusion to the curtains

                                          tears in the cut

                             written not spoken

    the archive casts its net

                                          I meant weeping

                                          I meant resisting

untitled

yeah abrasion after         all parts mumble apart         no more
       portions                   protons not porous               parallelisms
into your pillow    your locked-up eyes            your unafraid tongue

          who gets the final say on flower-names

its succession secession    a success        until slept in
       going out later                    growing into parts        paroxysm
sharpens sleep-gathering                    therapies for the first time

          I keep pointing and asking who took this photo

wall-writing         brawls with planar space             or onyx
           known                I thought         no wrong note
guilt is gullible     repeating after me             un-change loosening

          I confuse mountain pink and mountain peak

clocks calling the shots         mountain pink          sent back
       accomplishment     efficient          gently downed the screen
who gets the final say           on flower-names                who will

          I identify myself who told you to do me for me

how many placeholders                    within citations    
          who took this photo         grass deletion removal compiling
this shaken comic book cornucopia              of lasting rites

John Rufo’s work has been published, or is forthcoming, on Poets.org, Ploughshares, The Offing,Tagvverk, Entropy, The Journal Petra, NOO, and Dreginald. More information is available at dadtalkshow.tumblr.com.

Gifts Between Ghosts

This is a difficult place
to hold ground.
Removals and refusals
make apparitions of those of
us living in categories reserved
for dead. But today I am real
enough to hold a gift crafted and carried
here by others made ghosts
in their own lands
to drink hot tea together and suspend
our phantom states.

Bone Songs

Being the first Native
in this department is just
another word for only but
I am not really the first one here
these halls used to hold
my ancestors whole
but now favor cells and scrapings
horse nation
canine nation
primate nation
we are all gathered here in boxes and slides 
If I sang the bone songs
they would all sing back to me
I have lined this office with plants
books by southeastern women
Two spirit art
and ndn comics
sometimes I find the
echoes of my people here comforting
at least they tell jokes
with the same intonation
know removal cuts bone deep
the longing for home
and resistance to the
shovels and scalpels
of loneliness
I am here to call this
story
paper
lecture
into being
peel the bark from my flesh to
bite the patterns of my thoughts
weave the honeysuckle vines
so resistant to squared pages
type the beads onto cloth
in the traditional patterns of
paragraphs                   
columns
chapters
mutter prayers to do this
in a good way
a kind way
pray that no one will inspect
the back side where
the disorder of strings
betrays my shaking hands
When they sing the bone songs
I will sing back to them 

Jenny L. Davis (Chickasaw) is originally from Oklahoma. She is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign where she lives with her partner and spends most of her time tending her cats (and cat-sized Chihuahua), plants, and the students in her Anthropology and American Indian Studies classes. Her creative work has been published in As/Us; River, Blood, & Corn; Broadsided; and Rabbit and Rose, and recently appeared in the anthology Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance. @chickashajenny.

MEDITATIONS ON A FIST

I. Grandfather

A clenched foot is to a body object that strikes with fists around a wooden rod or slippery metal that pushed heavy hooves through a field’s shallow rainwater I grew around acres of mud and the seeds we planted under its weight dug

a fist equivalent to a machete         as rifle         as Beretta       as pistol
above a skull               it opens into a plume

from the world it hides all five fingers can fit into a womb or a mouth
a man seated tied with hemp rope a strung-up rooster eyes widened to the ivory

names & coordinates he confesses once I remove my fist the rain stops
                                                                                     heat rises to ten

II. Grandmother

I cannot recall how early I knew or how it was shown to me as a girl in the parlor of my mother’s living room the piano the mahogany floor smelling of a wet earth fingers elongate to each personality

legs crossed in a schoolyard my hands folded like gowns over my lap
                                                                                                     open open open

old woman slices okras tawny roots a fish laid out glassy and gutted I clutch meat
and foliage cutting with precision and speed                          I cannot keep up my own
fingers       I cannot help cutting into them                                           yes the fist
                            I can speak more       on slicing 

III. Granddaughter

It transforms into a comet when used right curls to meet the invisible rendering
them quiet they cannot fit into this mouth I always try but teeth get in the way

because I’ve been called small men have said my cavity is not equipped to protect
me from such things I’ve learned this first from my mother that night I dreamt of pummeling
                    a man to paint                                I brushed the ground
                                          with his own stain                                      with my fist          

                                                                          how to break his nose

I do but without breaking my fist first

then there’s a gift above all gifts                      this nautilus of skin
I can make love with it talk into my endless self         with or without grief          
   through this portable cave

SHE’S BECOME TOO DISENCHANTED TO INDULGE IN ROMANTICS

*

her body a tiny lake dwells on the tabletop before plunging into the cool bowl her hands of sticky rice full she eats nothing else only craves (the taste of clouds) like dewy pearls mashes them to impermanence (before swallowing) the kitchen continues to smell of jarred rain stinking of silver ghosts

*

she powders her face to almost snow porcelana that’s what her mother calls it (the right kind of sheen) there’s no time to stay (herself) she has a prized date it is night in a vacant parking lot (the open trunk of a car) what she steals she smokes slow the taste of silence that comes as she presses a glass bottle (to the swell) of her lips tanduay dark with the gold seal oh that medicine of sugar cane

*

with some friends at a bar their tailbones in triangulation with a hard angle of light (in usual red) she sits underneath a print of Paula Rego’s painting snow white playing with her father’s trophies (in cruel) satin lush thighs and in between (the severed) animal head (antlers arched upward like yeses) smiling she does not forget to signal him the bartender with a nod (before the bill) another one for prosperity

*

at a window seat of a moving bus (or a train) the presence of a television (that cannot be seen) flashes suggesting pleasure of pale flesh naturally she turns (away) looks out the window an (indecipherable) map beams across her forehead as the vehicle accelerates her face (from clay to ash) becomes a sterling mise en abîme the map pans & pans

*

inside an expensive restaurant knives and soupspoons dipping in fatty omegas over a telephone call she discusses how men (also women) along with adoration will go (like this broth and oil) and sacrifice (a reunion of adventures) of a body’s departure (not made of or from crust or callous) and that you are a voice on the phone’s receiving end says that’s how you ended up in that hole i mean the woods i mean into a bright monster made of birds

Born in Iloilo City, Philippines, Angela Peñaredondo is a Pilipinx poet and artist. Peñaredondo is the author of the book, All Things Lose Thousands of Times (Inlandia Institute) which won the Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize and the chapbook, Maroon (Jamii Publications). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AAWW’s The Margins, Four Way Review, Cream City Review, Southern Humanities Review, Dusie and elsewhere. She resides in southern California. apenaredondo.com .

THE CONDITIONAL

            after Ada Limón

if my lineage is forced into a white van in the middle
of their lives—if every family photo album i own is seized
by customs—if my abuelo doesn’t have a face when i speak
of him in this foreign language—if we call a thing
what it is not until it is—if history becomes a redacted text
book given to children—if the future is a shelf
of bricks—if i look on the nation & my voice becomes
a block of salt—if i have sunken so far
that not even harp strings can reach me & you are patient
as i climb back out—if i tell you this may be me
at my best & you do not leave—if we vanish into light
clinging to one another & still think ourselves lucky—
i will climb onto the moon, look back on the ravaged
world, reach my hand out to you, & say come with me. please.

TRIPTYCH FOR EARTH ON THE EVE OF THE FLOOD

i.

the children are born to a world that is as hot
as it has ever been & having never seen
it any other way, believe it has always been
so. they cannot imagine a sky without gaping
punctures. they stand to inherit our empire
of smoke. its busted oil pipes spoiling
water, ransacking the bodies it passes through.
they familiarize themselves with an animal
through its bones. an animal whose fur
we as children had placed our small hands on.
we cannot show them the world
that exists in our memories, so we show
them photographs. in their palms: glaciers,
forests, & mountains vanish from film.

ii.

[an erasure of Barack Obama’s speech at the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris]

climate 

is immune

this means.

                the sea is faster               

    than our efforts   submerged  

               more floods      seeking 

                               nations 

that future                          is one fragile

           moment  

that hour

is here,           we place our 

interests behind 

our

                  lives

iii.

skiffs pass between towering steel buildings jutting
from the ocean. skyscraper’s windows reflect
the sun. on some roofs, gardens. sea life
finds a new home in a library, a subway cart, a brick
building. in the desert, the opulent palaces
are abandoned to reptiles & even they do not emerge
until after the sun sets. here the paint peels off
every wall & sign. rows of houses lie empty.
in drought, the salt was taken out of an ocean
along with the ocean. somewhere there is an island
made entirely of garbage. if there is an after world
i am certain we will waste that one too. inside the last glacier,
the fossils of fish. when it melts, the fossils will be given
back their muscle, their sparkling scales, their ancient teeth.

Alfredo Aguilar is the son of Mexican immigrants. His work has appeared in Winter Tangerine, The Acentos Review, Vinyl, & elsewhere. He lives in North County San Diego.

12/9

                                                             Stayed
with 2 climatologists and they walked me through
multiple scenarios. All very stark. I won’t
describe for you because I worry what
you’ll do if I do. Jenna said it seems like you,
letter, should just kill yourself and I said
that seemed like a copout, like oh
it’s easier to imagine being dead than to imagine
changing. We were at the antiques mall
lifting old things and putting them down
till we ran out of steam. We can always imagine
driving into a powdery sunset, low flare
like a relic we notice without information.
Every tiny darkening will be a letter.
Every hint of rot will be a letter.
Is a letter now, age spot drawn on by hand.
In my dream someone was saying how much
they love trees marked with a rot that looks
like the mark of fire and I knew it was a dream
because it wasn’t me: I don’t feel guilty
about not wanting to manage the night.

12/10

                                                             Stayed
with 2 climatologists and they walked me through
multiple scenarios. All very stark. I won’t
describe for you. Maybe I’ll just explain it in
a really blank way: how thing used to mean
meeting and how that reminds me that people
in a song called a strike meeting and I didn’t
know what that was and still don’t know why it’s
called a strike, is it like a strike at the root
of a plant you don’t want in your life,
nightshade camped in the gutter ruining
not everything, but the gutter: the thing
I like about that is
it sets you up as a garden with self-interest
and its pleasant cells only some of the things
in it, but not the whole thing—anyway only
one other person came to the meeting
and the nightshade tapped its root deep down
and I felt what it felt, not guilt,
but the name of the night.

12/12

                                                             Stayed
with 2 climatologists and they walked me through
multiple scenarios. All very stark. I won’t
describe for you, because I can’t without calling
myself the kind of names you’re not supposed to
put in the world. It’s like I have to
be vicious and I can’t to you, but to myself—
it’s like that, but it’s not that.
I’m vicious to you all the time in the course
of my lawful occasions, my meetings and partings,
my perfectly loving and generous actions in the short
distance that still can’t be wholesome
to you, a word that to hear
brings an aching for you to stitch yourself up
around my hands, letter by letter and law
by law I didn’t make but only find,
the laws that make you up and might let you
shake me off and move on. If you do, please
don’t feel guilty about not wanting to manage the night.

12/13

                                                             Stayed
with 2 climatologists and they walked me through
multiple scenarios. All very stark. I won’t
describe for you. I don’t want coffee but it’s one
of my chores so I make it and try to remember that later
I’ll be writing to ask you: what would your life be like
if it was a quarter better? How about a
quarter worse? How would you ask that
to someone whose math was not that great? I want
our math to split for you. I want to sag it out of how
we are into a catenary. Coffee
tastes how I’d expect it to: full of injury.
My stack of things to do for the current order
is so high, my list so long. In the current
dragging other orders under first, and further,
I don’t feel guilty about not wanting to
manage the night.

Kate Schapira lives in Providence, RI, where she writes, teaches, co-runs the Publicly Complex reading series, and offers Climate Anxiety Counseling. Her sixth book of poems, FILL: A Collection, a collaboration with Erika Howsare, is out with Trembling Pillow Press. Her prose has appeared in The Toast, the Rumpus, Catapult, and as a chapbook with Essay Press, Time to Be Something Other Than Human.

 

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