let me be
as I bleed the still images
scraping the walls of memory
to purge what is left me
The Body in the Water
NIKITA GILL
Folded along the crevices where the river meets sand
lies the body of our love, now its edges covered in moss.
It stays there, where the water still sings hymns to the land,
little realizing that you cannot turn holy a decaying corpse.
And I still visit and fold my hands in prayer,
even though seeing what is left of our love
leaves me feeling so alone and scared
undone at the watery seams, cursing every star above.
Some days I return with eyes so red my mother worries
she warns me that the river can never heal what fell apart
but I always return to the alcove of where we are buried.
I am still offering the water my swollen, moon-soaked heart.
I am chasing the metaphors of your goodbyes
as I watch the bones of us turn to disconnected fossil
hoping against hope to understand as I watch us die,
how you murdered so coldly what once made our lives colossal.
Erratics
NIKITA GILL
Today I learned
that there are rocks
called erratics that
are eroded and then
transferred by glaciers,
stolen from where
they once lived
to strange places
that are not their homes.
And there, they are
simply left, abandoned.
And all I can think is
how often that happened
to the human hearts
when disconnected
by the wrong hands
and how some loves
are just like these glaciers,
eroding and displacing
and then abandoning
the things that dared
to trust them.
Sisters: A Blessing
AMANDA LOVELACE
my sleepy sailor, my ever-slippery seaman—
follow our soothing symphony to the end of the floating dock.
whip your nearly-empty bottle of sugar island rum
into the unsettled sea as you stumble nearer,
transfixed by our sister-song, which you swear sounds just like
the long & lavish night’s sleep you’ve mourned for months
& the bedside voice of the stomach-swollen sweetheart
you left back home to hunt sea monsters like us.
we’re dreadfully sorry, but you won’t find blood-beasts
in our water-slick breasts & fuck-me faces—
you’ll crawl right to the edge of the pier & beg for a show,
raising your hand when we ask for a willing volunteer,
your blood-saliva mixing with the sea as you look to the stars
& cry “what a wonderful way to go!”
but, splashy seafarer, don’t you know it won’t come to that?
our teeth & nails will carry you but an inch from death’s ship
so you can use your last blood-breath to let the other sea-boys know that
we would much rather have our song than land legs.
A Book and Its Girl
AMANDA LOVELACE
weary-eyed girl, nightmare girl, can’t-go-back-to-sleep girl,
slink barefoot through the dark to your bookcase
& slowly unwedge me from
your dust-coated, chipped-paint shelves.
quickly now!—
waste no time undressing me,
even if you only intend to spend
a few whirlwind minutes inside of me.
carry me over
the threshold of your bedroom—
fall backwards onto your bed
with all of me in your hands—
take your fingertips
& lightly stroke the length of my spine—
imagine the shivers i will cause
as you trace the gold-leaf letters there—
i’ll practically beg you, plead with you
to crack me wide open.
from now on, consider me an overripe pomegranate
grown specifically with your teeth in mind.
(i’ve been waiting for this ever since the day you
put me away & forgot about me.)
devour me the only way you know how:
suckle at my words then spit out the attar.
i promise to exhaust you to the point where
you won’t know where you are when you wake again,
& after this is over, you’ll find you won’t be able to
imagine falling asleep without my help,
& you’ll come crawling on hands & knees
to beg me for a sequel.
Our Mapless Season
CANISIA LUBRIN
I too am redacted, unsuitable reptilian,
shell of speech I have forgotten,
unless ravines can drown
each sound they cup from my throat.
Exposed against this anemone August
is a way of unlearning
leeching questions, what mischief starves in whys.
Why – because too much is the way
of knowing the chrysalis before
it crumples in the sun.
Mud-formed mirror of this sea-formed
rotunda reminds too much
of this face and will, like my mother’s
elusive redraft, blood-knot
in the spilling
generations’ menses –
what must have started some sweet day
we can only feign to rescue
from the old Carib cleanse
by test tube and accelerants,
in empire’s wildfire ditched in our bays.
These are the many ways of love,
learned in the book’s
dye of our distrusts,
fighting these combustive,
Antillean understandings of why.
The still-revolt of our bones’ sacred tow –
unmixable light
measured in the hummingbird’s mapless hum,
scattering this day, only just up,
deep into the ground.
Why, even with twelve litany of litanies
or reasons to stop
would they choose you
and sell you
and stamp you
and keep you – brief
and name you
and slit you down to kin
and name you
and call you
and breed you, bar you
and breed you, room you
and jail you, jail you and cage you, cage you and cage you
Ghettobird
CANISIA LUBRIN
if infinity was a ghetto bird
forewarning might have been the lamb barbed
in flood alongside propane tanks / looped
big bangs descending non-existent
winds tearing brick from mortar while she slept
you decide what more could she sculpt
out of nothing, or another kind of unthing:
her lovely anti-storybook anatomy / the forceflood of man
between her childhood effigies
the revelation too plain for any station of the cross
come home, then, wave your white flags.
What
is war if not everything I risk in speaking here,
too young to call it by name,
like the blind imagines the shape of infinity’s embrace pushed up
against the black of her place at the edge, this abrupt collision
is some secret
screamed inside a penumbra
already she is peeled back, revealed in opened parenthesis
her dreams are already overflo
wing with mud
where empire still marks its slogan in her gone-father’s palms
where she may once have been the never-ending
she won’t bother dreaming tonight: petrified grass already scars the path
between up and sleep, both tips pilgrimed with fools
and she is among them
but if she’s big enough to brave the coming gush, sweeping
brown through
white hibiscus like a paintbrush envisions an opening up, heaven pelting
down again
should she fall into the mud
does she sink
has she sank
Cohabitation in the American South
TRISTA MATEER
It is June and I am knocking down my heart
like a wasp’s nest on the front porch,
taking stock of everything that spills out of it,
no longer running from the old hurts,
but looking for a way to catalogue them
before the big move.
This box is for storage
and this box is to be chucked into the reservoir
and this box is for things that are warm and soft and growing.
This box is for pots and pans,
this box is for all the poems I wrote about peaches
before I started hating peaches.
This box is for you.
It’s still months off,
but I imagine autumn rolling in and all of the unpacking.
How we will take the box-cutter together
and slice through the packing tape,
upend ourselves in the kitchen of our new apartment.
How we will kiss over the clutter.
How the wasp’s nest of my heart will turn more cocoon,
more sturdy,
more protective than predatory.
Until then, I am out on the porch with a broom handle.
It is June and the days bead up
like condensation on a glass.
The Knife
TRISTA MATEER
I am holding your hand in the hospital / I am half-asleep on the couch in another state and you are in the hospital / I am in the front seat of a pickup truck / and you are hopping a fence to pick me wildflowers / I am smearing berries on my face, pretending they are war paint / and you are on the roof, framed by the sun / you are the roof / you are the sun / you are in the hospital / I am one thousand, five hundred miles away from the hospital / I am in Texas to prove a point to someone / only I can’t remember what the point is anymore / pride is funny like that / my mother tells me once a month that you quit smoking the day I was born / because she wants me to believe you are a good man / and I do / even if there is a shortage in my life of men who are good / even if there is a shortage in your life of women whom you were good to / you are in the hospital and this is the first time I can’t afford a ticket home / don’t know what to do with the luggage of my grief when I can’t shove it onto a plane / you are teaching me how to scale and gut a fish / and I am holding the knife / I am not holding your hand in the hospital / but I am still holding the knife
Stained Glass Mirror
CYRUS PARKER
you want so desperately
to please everybody,
so you chip off a piece
of all those you meet
and stick them together,
into a mosaic
of everything
you think
they could ever want you to be—
but when you break yourself down
into such tiny little pieces,
there’s never quite enough
of any one thing
to keep them
satisfied.
Start→Power→Shut Down
CYRUS PARKER
the older i get
the harder it is to relate
to those around me.
i walk the crowded streets,
cram myself into the jam-packed subway car,
i sit in a room full of like-minded individuals,
and my skin begins to crawl,
my mind plots out escape routes,
and i retreat into myself when it all becomes too much.
my relationships are like a phone
that only knows how to play the off-the-hook sound,
a wifi connection without a modem.
my laptop reads “network error”
and there are at least a dozen ways
to troubleshoot the problem.
i read “network error”
but there are zero ways
to troubleshoot me.
If My Aunt Was on Twitter
@lovelydurbangirl
YENA SHARMA PURMASIR
when i left home for the first time, it made the paper. now if i were to go back, it’d read as a failure:
OLD HAG AFRAID TO DIE ALONE,
MOVES INTO SISTER’S HOUSE
every stupid, good thing i’ve ever done is because i missed my mom. i missed my mom, so i moved thousands of miles away. i missed my dad, so i stayed.
if my sister wasn’t my sister, i’d either punch her in the face or buy her a drink.
you get to be a certain age & people try to force your forgiveness. it’s like, ‘how can you still be angry?’ i don’t know, how can you still be an asshole?
my first boyfriend was my only boyfriend, because i didn’t want to make the same mistake twice.
from what i can remember, love was the best worst thing that ever happened to me.
i used to change my little brothers’ diapers & now they’re both gone.
i think about their kids. i think about them as kids.
contrary to popular opinion, unmarried women have rich, meaningful lives. love is not our only war.
one day people stopped referring to me as a girl. my hair turned white, my joints ached. i became a person.
let the kids have their technological renaissance. when i was their age, i sailed across the indian ocean. no one stopped me.
Waiting on a Skype Call
YENA SHARMA PURMASIR
A long time ago, someone sent me a message about seeing me naked
on a Skype screen. I laughed at the audacity, I even told my mother.
Back then, sex was not quite a weapon, but an empty promise.
I blamed my faulty internet connection for everything.
In another time zone, he was supposedly naked.
I was pixels away from figuring it out.
Then, I got some lacy underwear.
In the middle of a diner, someone asked me why I wore thongs
and I shifted in my seat. This is before things were complicated.
This is before I loved him. And anyway, it was just underwear.
Balled up in his hands, it was almost nothing.
When I started thinking about sleeping with someone else,
he wanted to know, which is strange, right?
People aren’t supposed to talk about that, right?
Anyway, I loved someone and we watched porn together
like it was a bad movie, laughing and then cringing.
Anything we tried was less out of expertise
and more out of experiment.
If this, then what? If what, then why? If my waist,
then his hand.
If I leave,
then we stop.
Someone who touched me is silent, is gone. Someone
who touched me is never going to touch me again. I am kissing
new doorknobs and telling my mother about my own audacity.
Sex is still not a weapon, but it hurts.
No one wants to talk to me about foreplay anymore.
I blame my faulty luck for everything.
In another time zone, he is supposedly naked.
I am miles and years away from figuring it out.
23-Year Epiphany
LIAM RYAN
no, it doesn’t always end well
and sleeping is nice when you’re
tired and these days it’s nice even
when you’re not so get sleeping
no, they don’t all love you
they’d like you to lose a few inches
in fact
either off the top or off the back
or any place—just as long
as they can see it to know that
it’s worse
no, you can’t say what you mean
only the lucky get to and even then
the words don’t ever come out right
they just come and the world turns
over like always
and your heart will remain broken
Neruda won’t read the same
and the sky doesn’t heal the weight
like it used to
you will grow up and feel only older
no, you can’t ever go back
no, you can’t ever
go back
Blue
LIAM RYAN
a man in blue
watches a wild woman
dancing freely in the rain.
she is wet yet happy, shining
brightly from head to toe so
he asks her how to dance.
she says
“with your heart! with all your heart!”
so watching this wild woman,
shining and dancing inexplicably
in the rain,
the man in blue
takes off the blue
and gets down to business
Food Stamps
R.H. SWANEY
I heard a news story about a woman who sold her food stamps to buy cigarettes and cocaine.
Everyone wondered how somebody could be so selfish with the taxpayer’s dollar.
But I want to understand, I want to see how she could become so broken.
The news doesn’t talk about her fatherless childhood, or her drugged out mom, or the barbaric boys who beat her because she tried to say no to the way they wanted to use her body.
I wish I could replace the cigarette between her fingers with my own hands, and let mercy’s heart beat in her chest until love pumps through her veins, replacing the cocaine.
I want the world to see that there is so much more to every single one of us underneath the pain.
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