Jake Bailey is a schiZotypal experientialist with published or forthcoming work in The American Journal of Poetry, Constellations, Cream City Review, EcoTheo Review, Hunger Mountain, The Laurel Review, Mid-American Review, Palette Poetry, Passages North, Storm Cellar, TAB: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics, and elsewhere. Jake received his MFA from Antioch University, Los Angeles and lives in Illinois with his fiancée and their three dogs. Find him on Twitter (@SaintJakeowitz) and at saintjakeowitz.wordpress.com.
like a body-starved priest holding a brittle eucharist,
hot sugary liquid scalding doctrines molded
into colors you can’t see without eyes.
say you’ve had enough of containment,
how it dulls the feel of any mouth on your inner lip.
you are what we all try to avoid.
**Sparked by a Two Sylvias Prompt during NaPoMo 2018.
If your sons had been twins
they’d share your muffled humming-mother
language, both bodies soothed in winter.
But born in different months and years,
arms undone from the other’s, tragedy begins.
The night’s rocks lost to the river, younger
brother flails about the other’s tongue,
his guns. Older brother lies, tries to bury clouds,
digs a hole so dark, his good memory lost
in the ground. Two sons daunted, they play
with fog’s grief. Your mother-roused air
strips your lullaby: hinged throat, parched
marrow. As men they wonder what unmatched
skin-taut thread darned their introductions, ask
if brotherhood divides, will it surge toward pile-up,
every moving piece sorted before outcome?
White Herons
*White Herons – previously published in a now defunct journal.
__________
Theresa Senato Edwards has published two full-length poetry books, one, with painter Lori Schreiner, which won The Tacenda Literary Award for Best Book, and two chapbooks. Her first chapbook, The Music of Hands, was published in a revised second print edition by Seven CirclePress. Poems from her newest manuscript, “Fragments of Wing Bones,” can be found in Stirring, Gargoyle, The Nervous Breakdown, Thrush, Diode, Mom Egg Review, Rogue Agent, Dialogist, SWWIM,Whale Road Review, Verse Daily, The Shore Poetry, PANK, and other fine journals. Edwards was nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, received creative writing residencies from Drop Forge & Tool and Craigardan, is a poetry editor for The American Poetry Journal and poetry mentor for the 2020 COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective. Her website: https://theresasenatoedwards.wixsite.com/tsenatoedwards. Her favorite word: avant-garde.
“In the molested rocks the shell of virgins, The frank closed pearl, the sea-girls’ lineaments” —Dylan Thomas “I make this in a warring absence”
fresh snowed ground skin smooth
first footfall doesn’t blemish it
it will snow again
bedsheets taught across
the plume of blood won’t stain
as they can be cleaned
racing to wave’s froth
sand sprays with the children’s steps
yet all reach the same sea
a similar race
to adulthood with whiskey
slickened teenage lips
do we remember
that first kiss awkward and dry
or only their name
we were told that kiss
was to be magic on earth
a disappointment
do we remember
our second or had kissing
become mundane then
land and cities named
for those who discovered them
at least in their eyes
bodies too are named
this way of discovery:
Gräfenberg and Skene’s
when the old lie sold
when named the Latin for “scabbard”
empty without sword
when we are first filled
is that when we think we split
open to emerge
chitinous that is
this fiction of shell that we’re
supposed to step from
are multiple shells
allowed to those prized open
by pearl diver’s knife
does our skin harden
a coalesced carapace
from being alone
there isn’t a shell
it’s a parable told so we
feel we’ve lost something
A party to
There’s a less celebrated time, soon after golden week, just after
the cherry blossoms release their raw blooms, when the petals
crinkle and drop, or perhaps are pushed by the leaves behind
them, creating a May snow. I’m walking behind a trio teasing one
of their member, laughing up to the traffic lights, to the island
between Broadway and Main, with the aforementioned trees,
and as we cross onto this brick-pathed haven from the traffic,
the ribbed one reaches up to brush his knuckles against the arcing
blossom branch, knocking loose petals to fall around me like confetti
as if I had done something to deserve this small celebration, and he
said, lemme tell ya, lemme tell ya, but a japer squeals a laugh like a balloon
being let out, its mouth squeezed, lemme tell ya, lemme tell ya repeats,
and my knee-response is to be on his side, because I know how being
so chop-busted can leave me eye-sore, chest-hurt, so far from,
but her laughter reminds me when I’ve knee-slapped and told jokes
over other voices, throwing more pennies than their dimes, only to
hide, yet to be that third member, unspeaking, looking at the petal
mash, ground in the lines between the bricks as we all step off
the island toward the chirruping cross sign, they turn, and
the diminishing noise of their procession left me
hearing my own breath
__________
Seán Griffin (Her/Him) received an MFA in Creative Writing from Manhattanville College. Seán’s writing has appeared in The Southampton Review, Selcouth Station Press, Impossible Archetype, Dust Poetry Magazine, Non.Plus Lit, Sonic Boom, TERSE. Journal, Electric Town Lit, and elsewhere, with poetry in Marías at Sampaguitas, Cypress, The Mud Season Review, Ghost City Review, and Mineral Lit Magazine forthcoming. Seán teaches writing at Concordia College of New York, is an editor for Inkwell Literary Journal, and lives in New York with three dogs.
I know a place where I can spread myself out and be enough to fill a room
It goes without saying
My British English troubles my American English
I pause before I say words like be-u- tea-ful
Confused by how I learned to say it in Botswana,
In British English, and how I hear it here,
In America, there is less consideration for u in a sentence
How c o l o u r becomes c o l o r
Word flattened like somebody’s version of this poor earth
And We the people
Is often them not u, the people
When I don’t think in American English,
I think about u in almost every word, and it pains me
To know that u can’t be in some places
That u should be with me
Here in America, depending on who u are
Or who u aren’t, the system is built to leave u out
If u go missing, the system isn’t designed to miss u
I am always reminded that this is not my language u can’t be saved by any English
English was never meant to save u
Look at history, what English brought, u didn’t survive, so many of u didn’t survive.
______________
Akosua Zimba Afiriyie-Hwedie is a Zambian-Ghanaian poet who grew up in Botswana. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan. She is the author of Born in a Second Language (forthcoming 2021), winner of Button Poetry’s 2019 Chapbook Contest. She placed 3rd in Palette Poetry’s Emerging Poet Prize & is a finalist of The Brunel African Poetry Prize & Furious Flower’s Poetry Prize, among others. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kweli, Obsidian, Wildness & elsewhere. Visit her at AkosuaZah.com.
I’m a Terry McMillian character live & in charge of my own damn(ed) life.
I loathe men then clamor after their body parts regional accents
blue collar swag.
No, I am not the bitch to play with.
Himalayan sea salt baths is how I remain dignified & in tact.
The state of the union is apocalyptic dystopia with the ku klux klan leading the
stupid way.
Real niggas who love pussy do not deserve pussy.
I cry every weekend.
El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz is no longer with us. thank no one.
Caravaggio paintings contain tiny roman boys all naked & sinless.
Afro Sheen Shining & Afro Blue Mooning.
The Notorious K.I.M. on repeat is how I endured him fucking her
& making sons.
Let me tell it, I am one of Jesus’ confidants. Mary Magdalene invited me.
My Grandma’s earrings as amulets.
Lavender & eucalyptus on my bed sheets.
Tall glass of english rum for a kick.
Mozelle Batiste Delacroix is the prototype.
Lost ones dismiss me when I say I’m a feminist.
A healthy head of kink keeps the demons at bay.
Spookin’ ain’t never been easy.
People keep asking me to birth children I don’t want or need, my nig.
I am god. the soul of myself.
A man with perfect cuticles. what else is possible.
Pilate Dead walks into a bar.
Hidden under their husbands, women won nobel prizes.
2019 be like: nothing is real, hoe.
Gravitational anomalies exist in the redwoods forests.
I’m a magnet for miserable married niggas.
It is entirely plausible to love dick but not men.
I have the face of a circus.
I attend champagne parties & make all the Aunties’ pussies twitch.
Lucy Parsons tried to tell y’all.
I said I do in a furniture-less living room & regretted it fast.
What planet can I return to in which desire for me as I am is guaranteed.
A prophet is not accepted in her hometown.
Every African in amsterdam speaks to me in dutch. on sight.
The bible refuses to name hosanna’s sisters. why trust it to protect my body.
I’m more safe in a Brixton fish market than in my home state.
I’m still here. a tea cup full of rum & devastation.
I lick my lips first. the tip just after.
15 Yr Old Redbone Me for Ahneva, Alexus, Ciara, Cristabel, Shania, Tayah
__________
Ashunda Norris is country down to her bones. Born and raised in the heart of rural, red clay Georgia, she carries the spirits of her foremamas into the room each time, every time. Her honors include fellowships from Cave Canem, the New York State Summer Writer’s Institute and a residency at The Lemon Tree House. A Black feminist, filmmaker, poet and teacher, Ashunda loves hot water cornbread, obscure cinema, star gazing, the ocean and Sirius. She lives in the city of angels.
In Nieta Heaven, no one goes hungry because there is always some rice on the stove that perpetually refills itself so abuelita doesn’t have to break her relaxing to get up to feed everyone who walks in. She says mija, I love it and this is the truth but sometimes this is also bullshit because Love is a panza stuffed with mole but it is also exhausting and in Nieta Heaven, we don’t have to pretend like it isn’t anymore, that it costs nothing because it does. And that honesty makes it so Nietas maybe don’t have to grow into their abuelita’s scoliosis one day. In Nieta Heaven, the fathers, the always-mijos, get up to cook a meal or two and don’t believe their mothers when they say Estoy bien, Mijo and it teaches the Nietas not to believe them either. In Nieta Heaven, the nietas remember everything their abuelos said, in both languages. When they’re in a bind, they can play back the wisdom in digital and know they got it right. In Nieta Heaven, there is so much time. There is so much time. Everyone snuggles to sleep under cobijas as a favored pastime, and not because DWP has raised its prices and the abuelos can’t afford heat out of their fixed social security. In Nieta Heaven, Nietas don’t have to translate because their abuelos get the respect they deserve in any public place, the first time. There is plenty of abuela’s cold cream for when the nietas miss her but she is also not gone forever because in Nieta Heaven abuelos never have to die, they just get to leave the house without being scared or having to involve anyone. They get to go see their brothers and sisters and cousins because they are all still alive and there are no borders to worry and everyone can still live in Mexico if they want or stay living here but the distance is shorter and it’s not a choice between living and dying anymore and so nietas also have more connection with the pueblos their abuelos came from. The fruit. The wind. The town square. The river. The dirt. Because of this, nietas find themselves having more sensory memory than just getting excited over a pile of avocados from Michoacán at the Vons in Granada Hills. In Nieta Heaven, abuelita doesn’t have to stop taking in birds because she’s in too much pain to keep them up. Arthritis only gives abuelos an excuse to slow down when they want some “me time.” Abuelos know what “me time” is and they aren’t ashamed of it. They don’t have to spend their lives disproving the name “lazy,” even when they are at an age where other grandmas and grandpas get to be “retired.”And their nietas don’t have to nightmare about that word either. In Nieta Heaven, the nietas have time to help out their abuelos while also still being able to do what they need to do to do well in college because there is so much time. And because there is so much to carry for the nieta, some of us who never had to work at a factory in our lives because someone who loved us made sure of it, we still carry the weight of that making. We too, just like abuelito, have been where no one ever expected to see us. And in Nieta Heaven, abuelo gets to see us graduate, and there are so many graduations, even for abuelo, who only got to go to the 4th grade but read the dictionary every night as he fell asleep. There is so much time for abuelo to read and fall asleep. Nieta Heaven is built on every word of that search. There is so much time. There is so much time.
triolet for bad news
one day we will lose everything,
even the heave of such news upon the body.
do we coil into loss or does loss beget coiling?
one day we will lose everything,
even the bad news, impermanent in its carrying.
we convince ourselves otherwise.
one day i will lose everything—
even the news, its heave, my body.
Clarita speaks to Serafin while pacing the house alone
__________
Crystal AC Salas is a Chicanx poet, essayist, educator, and community organizer. Her work has appeared in Chaparral Poetry, The Acentos Review, YAY! LA Magazine, and others. She just completed her MFA at UC Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles where she writes about the city’s landscapes of grief, remembrance, memorialized and un-memorialized spaces. She is [accidentally] working on two manuscripts.
Jordan E. Franklin is a Black poet from Brooklyn, NY. She earned her MFA from Stony Brook Southampton. Her work has appeared in the Southampton Review, Breadcrumbs, easy paradise, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Frontier Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2017 James Hearst Poetry Prize offered by the North American Review, and a finalist of both the 2018 Nightjar Review Poetry Contest and the 2019 Furious Flower Poetry Prize.
If I could call you back from the far shore of the darkness,
I wouldn’t. I would let
the ocean have its say with you—you
who woke, each morning, cradling your shadow
like an instrument in its locked, black case—and had to let
our mad hands open it
to the immensities. History
is a revving engine of scrap steel and fire
and you walked away from it, once; you wrapped it
around a jacaranda on the slick
Pacific Highway, then walked off
from the fury of its burning,
one more beautiful body built to be wreckage forever.
Tonight
in America, it is summer, and we are hungry
for the songs that might carry us
through our madness, the moon in us
dragging us down our fathoms
like the chunks of slag-iron in your steel-toed
boots, dragging you
down the drop-off in the river. Mississippi
is a word that meant, once, wonder, and you waded in
with your mouth open and your hands
bare, the names
of your lovers on your shoulders, inked there
in spit and ash and the moon
of youth, the same moon
that had sung you
through your changes, the bitter moon
that is no one’s, and is always, the ruined moon
that must rise
as what it is.
Hush, now; there are hymns, still,
in these rivers.
And when the wind slips
through the kindling of these cities, when
the moon climbs in his cherry-leather
church shoes, rinsed clean
from his troubled plunge
in the darkness,
sing to us
of the hymns you found
in carnage. Sing to us
in the language of the changed ones, you who slipped
into the river and became
it, its dark barges like the laden freight
of our own hearts, loaded to the gunwales
with their trouble; you who held
the dark harp of your own heart
and listened till they took it
from your own hands, your hands that grasped
your lovers like this country, hungry
for an afterlife
to rise for, your clear eyes
that were no one’s, once, and holy;
that were no one’s, and were
open, once,
and lived—
you
who were ruin, and were music,
and who knew, yes,
that the only way into the radiance
is down
into the terrible chaos
and waded in, waded in
with nothing, and trusted
it would lift you
with its riches,
and wouldn’t we also
come to love it, wouldn’t we also
trust in wonder, if every time but one
it always did.
___________
Joseph Fasano is the author of the novel The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing (Platypus Press, 2020) and four books of poetry: The Crossing (2018), Vincent (2015), Inheritance (2014), and Fugue for Other Hands (2013). His honors include the Cider Press Review Book Award, the Rattle Poetry Prize, and a nomination for the Poets’ Prize, “awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award year.” A Lecturer at Manhattanville College and an Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia University, he serves on the Editorial Board of Alice James Books, and he is the Founder of the Poem for You Series.
My first hamster ate its babies
the first night in our house. From the cage
I peeled blue membrane, blubbery—that
was the year of the drowned
child from church, whose parents insisted
open casket to show last & finally
what they’d made. My mother taught him.
My sister, roundfaced, befriended
his great dane. His name is a secret
this poem hides vined up its shirtsleeves & swallows
as a fistful of keys. In the great deaths I’ve known,
there was no hospital, so like bleached barracks for wild cows
a hospital meant milk, meant birth, meant roaming
freedom’s halls & pulling prayers out the chapel lockbox,
stealing nurses’ redbull from a mini-fridge, any evidence
of our going to meata long-tunneled eventuality. I admit
when I think bovine I think that college boy who referred
to the vagina as sack full of cows’ tongues, & how much
we harvest from gentle creatures, bred & slaved—our cruelty
flings itself at the ozone like an old-fashioned movie
killer with plastic cheeks & a butcher knife. They say
no more seals or koalas soon. They say ravenous storms
& less turtles. It’s trying to stop a raze of locusts
with useless tearful fury, then startling at the hungry click
of your own jaw’s hinge. What I could tell you about my people,
my people who turned to honeysuckle
not out of sweetness, but boredom & desire
to dismantle something live that would not yelp.
That seasoned our unblemished legs with the copper
softball pitch. That I was a child, for no reason
glitter-thrilled that strangers identified me
feminine, as a hen must be when held
skirtless by its scaly legs before slaughter.
My people, ethanol perforating brains like hollows in nests.
My people, what are they but smoke & boom & gone.
My grandmother’s house smells arsoned appliances,
my grandfather’s books crushed mollusks between pages.
Some mice cannibalized in the neighbor’s trailer bathtub
up the overlooking hill. That is a lie, those mice
were mine, my sister’s. Two, like us, in their pyrex microcosm
on a corner desk buried by crayons & doll trash. Friends
in their only world, they ate one another & collapsed
in husks of the tiniest bone. It was our fault, our ark
of failed animals. We forgot about them. We had our own bedrooms.
__________
Erin Slaughter is editor and co-founder of The Hunger, and the author of I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. Originally from north Texas, she is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at Florida State University. You can find her online at erin-slaughter.com.
I. Taste buds grow all over the mouth.
Especially on the tongue, but also the gums, inside sinuses.
Babies have them on the insides of their cheeks.
This means, that when you have had your tongue
excised
you can still taste fresh tortillas
coagulating between lip and gum.
II. When God first came to the island,
we had called it home for centuries,
and when He first told us to convert,
He assumed that we would understand Him
since He was speaking the language of Gospel,
the tongue installed in every human being.
III. In Spanish, the word for tongue and language is lengua.
From the Latin: lingua.
Tongues sliced out at the ligament
separated the word from, literally, language,
which eventually disappeared as well.
IV.There is no Taino word for language.
Not one that has survived.
Not one that I have found.
The words that have survived are these:
Taino[1]
daca[2]
[1] adjective. ‘Good,’ or ‘Good People.’ Taino language sextext break down: “Tai”=”Good” and “No”=”People”
[2] pronoun. ‘I am.’
__________
Tori Cárdenas is a trans poet of genízaro/boriquen descent, and graduated from the University of New Mexico in 2014 with Bachelors in Poetry and History, and again in 2020 with a Masters in Poetry. Cárdenas also served as Poetry Editor and Editor in Chief of Blue Mesa Review, and as Executive Editor for Skull + Wind Press. Their work has appeared in Witchcraft Magazine, Cloudthroat, and VICE and is forthcoming in Open Minds Quarterly.
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