On the Bolo Knife

A blade-long ruler.

A hammer by way of its handle.

Wet steel splitting a coconut in two.

What Lapu Lapu held in one hand

while waving Magellan’s head

in the other.

Since Anchoring to San Francisco Docks, 1945

Before lifted
onto a gurney,
folded into plastic,
& zipped in a bag,
my grandpa says
his goodbyes
in Tagalog
8,000 miles
from where his brother
is a banana leaf
or sampaguita
or whatever
he became
of earth after
the imperial army
invaded.

________

Troy Osaki is a Filipino Japanese poet, community organizer, and attorney from Seattle, WA. A three-time grand slam poetry champion, he has earned fellowships from Kundiman and the Jack Straw Cultural Center. His work has appeared in the Bellingham Review, Blood Orange Review, Hobart, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. He writes in hopes to build a safe and just place to live in by uniting the people and reimagining the world through poetry.

When they come to pluck me, I appear
neither girl nor boy, clam nor cock.

I have neither hooves nor snout.
But I do have claws; I can grunt and growl

and show my teeth. I do not need wings
to create a windstorm, I do not need talons

to break skin; I can snarl and scrape.
I can unhinge my jaw, to fit a head twice

the size of mine inside. I can be razor-backed
and spike-edged when he tries to skin me,

unscale my silvery back, debone my brazen
hen-hide. I will be foul-mouthed and crooked-necked.

I will be the chicken-head they know me to be,
if it will save my life. When he comes for me,

I will remember the coop, how they gathered the fowl
girl up by the feet with warm hands and cooing.

How her brown hung low when they entered her
into the guillotine and severed her head. How they

plucked her body until she was bare. I will remember
the blood and what happens when they want you as food.

________

[1] Khalisa Rae’s “Livestock” first appeared in Issue 17 (September 2020) of Sundog Lit.

Khalisa Rae is an activist, poet + freelance writer, and educator in Durham, North Carolina, and a graduate of the Queens University MFA program.

Her recent work has been seen in Sundog Lit, Crab Fat, Damaged Goods, Glass Poetry, Brave Voices, Luna, Luna, Hellebore, Honey & Lime, Tishman Review, the Obsidian, New Shoots Anthology, Roses Lit, among others. She was a finalist in the Furious Flower Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, a winner of the Fem Lit Magazine Contest, Voicemail Poetry Contest, and the White Stag Publishing Contest. She is Managing Equity and Inclusion Editor of Carve Magazine and Consulting Poetry Editor for Kissing Dynamite. Her forthcoming collections, Ghost in a Black Girls Throat are forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2021 and Unlearning Eden from White Stag Publishing 2021. She is currently the Writing Center Director at Shaw University and also the newest writer for Black Girl Nerd, B*tch Media and Body.com Magazine.

This is where our wealth haunts the earth—
bulldozers leveling back to dirt, frayed
comforters, pieces of faces ripped

from family photos, mancala marbles
clanging at the bottom of a black bag
with dull spoons & a steel urn

sanctifying mounds of past hope.

Metal corrodes quick in this acidic
environment, leaves behind gold
leachate
turning the land into venom.

Like ichor
it disenchants the wind,
ashes yoked in an alloy vase.

Even when we drove past this graveyard
ice-capped on I-40, I smelled
our bygones begging me to wonder

                             will I become that slurry
if my bones are scrapped this way?
I worried about the lost chicks

a farmer ordered during
the pandemic, the opossums
harvesting on fertile

& half-hatched eggs. & the Juul
carts or boba straws that sneak
off into the ocean.

I used to have hermit crabs
with Poké balls painted
on their shells, prayed

they made their way back
to the sea when they were lost,
found them petrified under the kitchen sink

after seven months. Which is to say
we threw them away too with all the Witness
propaganda, the red leather bible

you gave me that shed its spine.
If no one can create matter
nor destroy it, will waste come back to us

in one form or another over time
as a quilt of satin scraps, cracked
MJ CD’s, unraveled buttons,

can a grandmother return
as my sister, my father, my cat
if given a second chance?

_____

Britny Cordera is a Black writer and Creole poet, descending from African, Indigenous, and French/Spanish ancestors. She was a finalist for the 2020 Narrative 30 Below contest. Cordera’s poetry can be found or is forthcoming in Rhino, Narrative, Xavier Review, and Auburn Avenue. Currently, she is an MFA candidate at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, a teaching artist through St. Louis Poetry Center, and a poetry editor for The New Southern Fugitives.

Earth Conjures a Spell for Centralia

Earth Conjures a Spell for Fracking

______

Amanda Hodes is a writer and sound artist. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and is currently an MFA candidate at Virginia Tech. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, West Branch, [PANK], New Writing Net, and elsewhere. She occasionally tweets at @AmandaHodes.

You hear one degree. You hear Fahrenheit.
You hear warm weather in your hometown
And leave before the local news switches: they
Say half a degree, say Celsius, say warming
Global climate, so beeswax melts

Out your ear as it ships
Past the Sirens atop bones with plastic
Six pack yokes around them still choking
Those in rigor mortis. You hear them
As one hurricane siren—not constant, plural

Puddles feet deep of human waste smacking
Against Achilles—and chase them. As it turns out,
At half a degree warmer, all of you go
From underwater Otoh Gunga, Sub Diego, and Atlantis
To Upper and Lower Keys, Atlantic and Ocean City:

You go closer from myth to thawed
Greenland; deep-frozen heat in the sky
With smog and lung with tumor tips car
Exhaust pipes, blocking your airways
Yet trafficking cough drop

Needs; the soil’s dry spots a caught black sea bass,
Flat as a skate: you could skate on drought
To the North Pole and fall
Into the Arctic Ocean, devoid of any ice.
Algae moves out, breaks up with coral,

Who then bleaches their skin and dies,
The hottest day on record breaking
Its own record every two years until
Heat strokes are common colds
Nobody’s immune to, everywhere—

_______

Prince Bush reads poetry for TriQuarterly and lives in Nashville, TN. He was a Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets fellow, and he graduated from Fisk University as an Erastus Milo Cravath Presidential Scholar.

Another Bed in Hell’s Ocean

You first find Hell’s ocean on the seabed,
two feet planted on its bubbling and grainy surfaces.
Perhaps if one could glimpse the waters
from the horizon, no one would jump in,
thirst quenched.

All bodies on the bed drift upward,
a grace to those who are too tired
to fight its currents, those
who can’t swim until they learn
the dark waters are chiefly acid, and the lift
too slow for a burn so wet and constant.

Most often the bubbles collect a crown
around my mouth, a ring of barnacles that bite.
The sores they leave are bloody but under a violence
too turbulent to get infected, but then
there are times the bubbles work a way up
and through the entire skin of my face,
a gentle abrasive burning
from chin to forehead.

The skin takes and ejects into the ocean.
When it’s pulled away from me
I see myself in a way no mirror
could let me before the waters destroy the image.

Though I roam Hell in search of my brother,
I can only find myself. So many times my face has
let loose in this ocean. I used to think
the parts I left behind would leave me
the thinnest of what I was. I see now
that what’s left after hurts and darkness
are most potent, thickest, the shapes of which
I work hardest to determine if they make me
sick or the proudest I’ve ever been, but is it
for this question I’ve had my brother traded?
If I loved him, I never said it, and if I never found him
I wouldn’t need to be afraid.

At Some Point, Light Lets Through

After a while floating
through Hell’s dark waters,
enough light lets through
for you to see other bodies
floating inevitability upward
and disintegrating. So long
as you keep a distance, the acidic
waters make beauty of us.
Millions of fizzing bubbles
lift from our bodies’ slow burning
and glimmer. We turn with
the currents, sometimes making
angelic movements,
our clothes orbit wraith-like ruin
around us, and the ocean
makes wild spreads of our long locks
of hair. The viewing itself
is magical. The acid
clouds and fades the image
in our eyes, then between
burning them to complete darkness,
returns the image, briefly,
with the sharpest resolution.
This realm of Hell is one in which
it’s most true what happens
to one happens to everybody.
At some point on the way up,
something changes.
The water clogs with bodies.
I remember I once floated
closer and closer to another one,
a lady I guessed was my age.
At one point between our tossing,
close floating, our eyes met,
and though the image was cloudy
we reached to each other
until our hands met,
and though we were both burning,
and this close the beauty
I described had long left, we smiled
and held on past when our hands
became bones and raw flesh again,
until the drift broke
us apart. I remember after
we separated, I had so many questions
for her, who she was,
the person looking for her,
the person she was searching for.
Of all the bodies I could’ve
washed into, the two of us
decided to make a pair
with smiles we fought hard
to retain and remember,
that holding on to her hand,
that moment. I’ll never
see her again.

________

Dustin Pearson is the author of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud (BOA Editions, 2022), Millennial Roost (C&R Press, 2018), and A Family Is a House (C&R Press, 2019). He is a McKnight Doctoral Fellow in Creative Writing at Florida State University. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and The Anderson Center at Tower View, Pearson has served as the editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review and a Director of the Clemson Literary Festival. He won the Academy of American Poets Katharine C. Turner Prize and John Mackay Graduate Award and holds an MFA from Arizona State University. The recipient of a 2021 Pushcart Prize, his work also appears in The Nation, Poetry Northwest, Blackbird, Vinyl Poetry, The Boiler, Honey Literary, Bennington Review, TriQuarterly, The Literary Review, Poetry Daily, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere.

Jaden Gongaware is an MFA student from Pittsburgh, PA studying poetry at Florida International University. She earned her undergraduate degrees from Carlow University, where she joined the Madwomen in the Attic workshop group and worked as an open-mic emcee for the Red Dog Reading Series. Last semester, she served as Poetry Editor for Gulf Stream Magazine, and she currently teaches Writing & Rhetoric to undergraduates at FIU. Her poems are forthcoming in Pittsburgh Poetry Review. 

There’s a man who cares
for the last snail of its kind,

Achatinella apexfulva, knows precisely
how much moisture, shade and light

it needs to thrive while it spends
its dwindling time in a glass cabinet.

Don’t think about what you can start,
think about what you can end was the advice

I heard on a time management podcast
while slicing bananas

for my daughter’s breakfast.
The banana comes from Guatemala

where its kind is plagued
by the Fusarium fungus to a possible

almost certain if-it-continues
at-this-rate extinction.

I’ve never been to Guatemala,
seen a rotting banana plant, or touched

a snail’s glossy shell of the kind
that resembles the palette

of a chocolate box— dark brown, chestnut,
white, the occasional splash of mint.

I watch my daughter collect stones
in her plastic bucket, clinking them beside her

as she runs smiling from one corner
of our yard to another — impossible to say

if this July is the warmest month
since the last warmest month,

until it is. My dread, a garden
crawling with invasive insects.

Later, she smashes bananas at the table
between her dirt-crusted fingernails,

laughs at the stickiness while I try to finish
the article I started days ago

about Achatinella apexfulva,
whose largest threat is

(you might’ve guessed) another snail,
Euglandina rosea, aptly named

for its rosy-hued carapace, who will follow
the slimy trail of its gastropod cousin

then yank it from its shell with its serrated tongue
and swallow it like Cronus, shell and all.

When a species is the last of its kind,
it’s called an endling, a word

that reminds me of changeling,
such a fairy-swapped child

I’ve called my own. I’ve made
this place for her: warm, soft,

a place that someday I’ll not
be allowed to enter,

that may not even survive me.

_____

Sara Burnett is the author of the chapbook Mother Tongue (Dancing Girl Press 2018). Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Poet Lore, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere. She holds a MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland and a MA in English Literature from the University of Vermont. She lives in Maryland with her family.

Every Summer, A Murder

of monarchs flocks the roads of Oregon. Thousands
thud on the windshield or stuck to the grate
of my low blue truck hell-bent on getting

home. But murder is for crows
while monarchs are, in fact, a kaleidoscope—
true in multitudes, or when splayed across

the car’s surface: the body swirled
into new configurations. Discal cells
separate. Plates of chitin unhinge

like fingernails. Pollen sprays, an untethered
forewing ghost-flies in the lift of wind. This road,
a wound: concrete that cuts flight

in curves and small catastrophes. How easy
they would have once flown, with only the old kind
of predator (parasite, wasp, bird, cold) and a home

in the distance. Before the pines were laid
out, the asphalt laid down, limbs carted off
to be settled for someone else’s sleep.

Now, on the tarmac’s skin, the monarchs
rest; they make themselves obstacle. I brake, but still
they scoop up in the tornado turn of tires, snare

in the wipers, fanning wing and thorax across
the glass: unraveled and re-spun. Every summer,
a murder, and who is to blame here: surely

the clear cut, the pavement-layers, the spitting speed
of other travelers. The civil engineer—his compass,
his level. Meanwhile, my foot on the pedal,

bodies
pile
up.

The abdomen spurts yellow on impact, another
colorful collide, like butter, it blinds
us but nobody slows.

This is a False Monarch

This poem
should be
thin, like
the abdomen.
The abdomen
which bursts
into cloud
of pollen. Impact
makes a body
dust. Once,
I saw
a heron
flume its way
upstream, wings
reaching opposite
banks, not blue
but slate.
Making air
a solid thing
beneath it.
In another
poem, a heron
is blown open.
There are girl-tears
for its wounds
but not for eighty
dead seagulls. In this
poem, also wings.
Unfastened
from so many
abdomens.
Collected on
my windshield
among
the body-dust.
They were monarchs
and then they were
not. Mimicry, of
the Batesian
sort. A cursory
imitation, meant
to protect
the less pretty
and less dangerous.
The California
Tortoiseshell
is no stained
glass. When asked
what was to be done
about the hundred
tattered corpses
(each undone matrix
of fat and chitin
hitching a ride
down the mountain
on our windows)
I was told
the Tortoiseshell
is not
endangered.
A body is worth
saving if rare
and original
in its splendor.
One heron, eighty
seagulls. Numbers
to be culled.
Where to place
all the dead
we cannot hold,
or refuse to.
The false
monarch, unsaved
by her tricks: see here
her unqueenly body
and all
its severed
parts.

This is a False Monarch

Should this poem be thin like the abdomen? Or spread across this page like their bodies on a windshield: constellations, words and small organs. Little known is these featherlights are made immobile by heat (and surely a parenthesis is another type of wing, the page a road to lift from). A state of torpor, a sister to the sleep of cold season, here called estivating. The unlucky ones (and there are hundreds) are forced to rest on the road, the road which is a passage into the mountain’s forests, for us. I swerve around their tiny openings, like the pages of books, ragged from a winter in hiding. Cars with paddleboards strapped to metal racks consider these bodies another debris and nobody slows, their recreation spattered in yellow (all that flowerblood undelivered).

I, too, have a boat, the lake another body I sink into, sectioned by a labyrinth of reeds: those tall hushes which hold the red-winged blackbird and his songs. I use the resistance of water for my own movement. I go past the point where others turn back. At the tributary, a light current: a finger swirled in a shallow glass. When I bottom out, the scrape of rock shakes something free from its stillness. A great blue heron, cool and alien calm. Its neck, a curved letter. The bird unfurls its appendages from where they lay bunched (impossibly) to the body, tips reaching both banks and then some. Wind emerges from it: each wing beating the air into something solid to push off from. Becomes a sonic pulse through the pines’ long needles, going where I know not to follow.

On the way home, smaller wings tear off. On the grate, under the wipers, across the boat’s bright plastic. It feels unavoidable, but of course, it isn’t. The world twirls out from wherever we decide to position ourselves. On the lake, on the road. Everything an echo that we call accident.

They’re not even monarchs. A lazy imitation at best, Batesian mimicry that only works at a distance. An alternative version. The California Tortoiseshell is no stained glass (less sherbet, less delicate). No noir lines, just splotches of last ink. They wear the slip of something beautiful in order to be avoided: by bird, car, or other predator. (This, the reverse of my world, where to be a flame calls danger forward). Though, this trick doesn’t save them. As they rest on the endothermic back of asphalt, their bodies are churned through wheel wells. Ripped as easily as a receipt. I think to collect them—not them, but their now discarded selves. Stack the wings in a book and press them into relic.

One of my favorite poems is also about wings, pages. Taneum Bambrick’s Biological Control Task. A truck of dead seagulls, at least eighty count. Shoulders folded apart / like wet book covers. The speaker watches as the men pull out the most prized of their gunned-down, although this one not split by their own hand. A heron. Blown open. The book of its body perusable. The speaker cries girl-tears; the men assume the seagulls too ugly to be grieved.

Unlike the monarch, the California Tortoiseshell is not endangered. Quite the opposite: a population that cycles between boom and bust. But after the third summer of continuous growth experts agree that something in this Oregon forest is off. Like the seagulls, soft numbers to be culled. We are always at work weaving the nets of our own absolution. Rarity, hue, or wingspan. A place to catch all the dead we cannot hold, or refuse to: the gnat clapped between palms, the bee trapped under a cup, the girl in a short skirt, the seagulls now thinned out. The false monarch and her tricks. The flame of something stunning, how it protects and it damns all in the same breath, of the same body (or hundreds).

_____

my husband works his fingers
into the knot muscled against my spine      & my dead
stay dead          my hair a knotted cursive language
my ligature      my grief barely literate      my amulets
knotted around my neck & wrists       my language
my language       cursive & silent       glottal & knotted
& scarring the cheeks of my dead      adorning the hair
of my dead        tallow in their braided hair
i read the books in translation      where is the poem
& circle every word i know               acacia      lupin
sandalwood & ash       they ululate      my dead
they squat like brides         over clay pots of smoke
a yolk suspended in each open eye          & some
in truth are not dead       my dead       & i am who
is lost        who is not counted among the living
the poem is not owed me        i was wed in all the colors
of my dead       the reddening     the borrowed gold
i wrote the poem in translation       i wrote the poem
in the loophole     i wrote the poem in cursive
i snarled it      i picked apart the threads & wove a shroud
i was wed in it       i unfastened     i broke my fast with apricots
furred like the ears of my dead      i looked laterally
for ancestors       i descended left & right     i read the book
in arabic      knew each letter & its sound     & did not
recognize the words for tallow     for ululate      my dead
my languages      my ligatures      smoke in my loosened hair

*Originally appears in POETRY

_______

SAFIA ELHILLO is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) and co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019). In addition to appearing widely in journals and anthologies, her work has been translated into several languages and commissioned by Under Armour and the Bavarian State Ballet. She is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.