Author:

Father and Son

My lost
daughter, I

would be
if you

let me.
Chest

hurts, sweat
smells sweeter.

New-old ache 
deep 

in my thighs.
Scrotum

shrinking 
into ovaries.

Do what
I say.

Drink strong
coffee, kiss 

your wife
on her hair, or

let me be
your lost father.

Let me be
your only daughter.

 

Commas (II)

“If” is to witness a person climbing a tree, always alert to the light touch of leaves running under her fingers.

Or the jealousy of hair. Shaking the last note out of the green guitar, expanding the muscles of the throat under a mirror of your ten-story window.

(She went through many voices to get here, but there is not here.)

Squished angles of the green guitar, splashing chords over the crowd. Pummeling down the attic stairs to the safety deposit box, sunshine a slowness of your eyes.

Now’s a table makes its lightbulbs flicker fangs of pale bacon, metal spices whistle it quilt it shrouds the seasons for a moment. 

Hover over a dictionary, the trees now more distinct. The first thing I noticed. The hair in the skin growing slower, the bones under the muscles no different.

 

Robin Arble is a poet and writer from Western Massachusetts. Her poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Oakland Arts Review, ALOCASIA, Door Is A Jar, Pøst-, One Art, Overheard Magazine, and Your Impossible Voice, among others. They are a poetry reader for Beaver Magazine and the Massachusetts Review. She studies literature and creative writing at Hampshire College.

creation

i am the rage that filled the furies with the knives they needed to slice apart their rare steaks. making oaths with bloodied tongues. i am the blow dealt by the ocean storm that drowned the shrimp boats. the anchor in your belly. the steel in your bones. i am the song that slammed your guitar on stage, met with rioting fans. i am god’s right hand smiting the sodomists. i am the devil’s disembodied lonely lovely yearning wings. the bullet in your rifle. the wooden handle of your hatchet. i am your sleep demon. the mirage in the darkness. the flash of terror upon waking. i will not offer you redemption. my rage made you worthy of love. i will get what i want, stepping over stuck limbs and snapping the bones of the men who deceived me. i am the fear and shock of saturn’s salted children. i am the discarded muse that bore the world.

 

Two Years of Two Weeks to Stop the Spread

We lived in the movies we binge-watched,
eating adrenaline like m&ms, 
hoarding vibrators, inhalers and ice cream. 

We danced with people around the globe
through the blue lights of phones, 
feet pumping on the hardwood. 

I took a pounding in my Polish dress, 
surged all over you, smooth and unyielding
in the choke of your moans. 

We lay under the window listening to the song
of a night bird while the empty BART train
whooshed by, cool air gliding over our naked skin. 

I kicked the dentist and the veil thinned,
wandering through baby books and dreams
until we finally drifted out of this unreality.

 

Josephine Raye Kelly is a queer femme living between the coast and the redwoods on the Pacific Coast. As a writer and multimedia artist, they create from the intersection of inspiration and compulsion. Josephine holds a BA in Literature from UC Santa Cruz and an MSW from Cal State East Bay. Their work has been published in Chinquapin Literary Magazine and The Richmond Anthology of Poetry. You can connect with them on Instagram @jrk.dreamscape.

2010

15 minutes. That’s how long I have to get inside. The snaking line of would-be revelers isn’t moving, and I tap my cowboy-booted toes out of impatience, which the cocaine I’ve been snorting all night doesn’t help. A shivering mass, we stand in the cigarette-and-vodka-tinged air outside the warehouse party where my partner, Switch, scored a last-minute bartending gig. We stare down the door person as though we can will them to let us in before midnight with the ferocity of our collective gaze.

Of all the places Switch could’ve been asked to bartend, the warehouse sits around the corner from the apartment I moved into yesterday. I stumbled upon it when a fellow student at a pay-what-you-can yoga class recognized me from an audition, chatted me up and offered me her room while she spends the month in Mexico. Her parents have already paid rent. It’s a step up from the friend’s studio apartment I was couch surfing at because I’m too broke for anything else. Let’s call this friend Rainbow, since he earned his name at a Rainbow Gathering. Rainbow’s futon is also his bed, which I shared while trying not to think about his unwashed, crunchy sheets, rendered as such by many Manhunt-facilitated encounters. Also, he snores. He welcomed my crashing with him indefinitely, for free, plus was the one who introduced me to Switch, and I love him…but still.

I don’t yet understand how frenetic going out for NYC New Years is—I’ve been here for this occasion in the past, but always spent the night smugly sequestered, since I’m hardly basic enough for Times Square-style celebration. I haven’t planned accordingly and here I am, in line when I should be inside to kiss Switch at midnight. At some point I give up on the idea of making it, and am still waiting on the concrete steps in a crush of strangers when the clock strikes 12 and the air explodes in cacophony. My chest burns with frustration, plus the cocaine, but ah, well, whaddyagunnado?

2010 will be a year of discovering limits. Having just moved from Maine to New York, I’m an unsupervised kid in a candy store. This means euphoria but also stomachaches. 

Euphoria is coming into my own as a nonbinary person, exploring what that means. Switch is also nonbinary, and that helps. I wear eyeliner and fedoras and tunnels in my ears with large earrings through those, plus layers of necklaces and ties. I often bind and sometimes pack. As a drag king, I perform as a male, while as a go-go dancer and model I’m booked as a female or androgyne. I get she’d at one gig, he’d at another and they’d at another, and smile about how, work-wise, my gender strikes a balance.

Stomachaches are the following lessons, learned the hard way:

1. Go-go dancing in the city until 4 am, taking the train back to Brooklyn to attempt a few hours’ rest, then taking the train back to the city to stand still and naked as an art model the next morning doesn’t work. My legs feel gelatinous, the floor beneath me seems to undulate.  

2. Snorting a mixture of blow and Xanax while art modeling also doesn’t work. I unwittingly induce a panic attack of sorts, and it’s one of the few times I have to feign illness and excuse myself from class.

3. Chugging green tea and rushing to my appointment for a paid ADD medication trial is a bad idea. I get kicked off due to my abnormal EKG and am out $50 a month.

4. Love is not enough to save a relationship—but I’ll still stay in this one for five more years. 

5. No, I haven’t become intolerant to heat from my time in Maine—2010 is the hottest summer on record. Nauseatingly hot.

6. Panic can feel like nausea.

7. I can do gigs galore in all my genres, but there’s no one but me to say “you’re working too hard, chill out,” and I don’t know how to say that yet. The average New Yorker I meet doesn’t say to me, “Ooof, a 13-hour day? That’s bananas.” They say something like “yep, it’s all about the hustle” or “13-hour day, huh? Lucky, mine was 14.”

But back to the warehouse party, the first few minutes of 2010: the door person finally lets us in. Switch doesn’t act angry when I arrive around 12:10 and we have our belated kiss over the bar, but in hindsight I’ll think they’re disappointed, my tardiness a failing they’ll stack up with many others. A few minutes later, they accidentally drop a massive, full bottle of Grey Goose, which shatters on the floor. After the shock wears off, they laugh, as does everyone else. I think it’s cute when they screw up, not a failing—it adds dimension and makes for good stories. 

Then Rainbow shows up to this party, of all the millions of parties happening tonight. Switch and I confer and confirm—neither of us told him about it. Rainbow’s rolling on E and greets us like we’re the most delightful sight of his life. In a cigarette rasp, he yells “My favorite theys!” across the space and bounds over for a bear hug. It’s yet another fated stroke, yet another sign I’m right where I need to be.

 

notes from the past 24 hours in my androgynous apartment

Here is the place where androgynes hide
cloistered, clad in cloaks, hoodies, blankets,
buried in research, knee-deep in words
of other places and times.

Through lock chain and deadbolt,
good luck getting in.
Electric wind waves outside contact—
cozy, flimsy placebo. 

Through audiobook, Patti Smith reads Just Kids,
recalls a new haircut she gave herself.
When somebody asks, “are you androgynous?” 
she thinks the word means ugly and beautiful at the same time.

Through iPhone recording, a psychic recounts
a past life as priest…no, priestess…
wait, priest? Gender that changes with the light.
This priestexx stands in an ancient field,
reading from forest texts, blessing the people—
all ye be fruitful and multiply!

The people were fruitful, multiplied,
but some have grown hateful
and while they are few, 
they are the loudest poison.

Gender reveal party pyrotechnics,
in all their binaric insistence,
scorch the earth, leaving hundreds 
homeless. Lifeless.

And thus, the temptation to hide,
on the part of the androgynes.
A beautiful ugly practice.
It can’t last forever…right?

 

Goldie Peacock writes stories, essays, and poems. Their work appears in HuffPost, Sundog Lit, (mac)ro(mic), Roi Fainéant Press, MoonPark Review, Bullshit Lit, and more, with more to come. A panelist for the Newfound Prose Prize, they live in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn), as well as on Instagram and Twitter @goldiepeacock. Author photo by Uyphuong.

Sainthood

 

Nadine Rodriguez is a trans, queer Cuban-American writer and photographer born and raised in Miami, Florida. They are an MFA candidate for Fiction at Northern Michigan University, an Associate Fiction Editor for Passages North, a prose editor for Mag 20/20, and a co-editor for Sinister Wisdom: Trans/Feminisms. They have work published or forthcoming in Powders Press, Superstition Review, Alebrijes Review, Queerlings, 34 Orchard, and The New Gothic Review.

Two Poems from the Deadbook

burial no. 1

sister, this land is fine 
                                                                                                        dust the Creators brushed off 
                                                                             their tables and saws. 

                                                   my shovel resents this burial. 
                                                   it tells me this dirt tastes green, 
                                                   sickly, unnatural. 

you are no longer here. 
                            i am glad, 
                            but i need to grieve. 

                                                                             your right arm carried your dances; 
                                                                             it mocked the Space meant to contain 
                                                                             the giving god. 

                                          your two eyes, now judgment-blank, 
                                          would be easy to eat. i would wash them 
                                          down the gullet, wine-slick. 

                            your face, with the forehead 
                                          i kissed when we were young 
                                          and you adored me: i love you, 
                                          but one of us had to die. 

i grab the spent shovel, 
the bag with the rest of you. 

               red doves fly full-speed 
               into your grave to join you. 
               their necks break in time with my every step.

(SISTER sits at the confetti-specked white bar, and lets the housemade
Dog’s Tongue soak into her skin. She thinks of the woman from her visions
on the Famine Road.) 

 

burial no. 2

sister, sister 
                                       (lifts up her thumb) 

                                                                                   these grains of sand 
                                                                                   out-exist you. 

                                                                                                 get thee to a fishery, sister 
                                       (pulls an ear from the bucket) 
                                                                                                 get thee to a pit 

                                                                       Ántonia you are the disproof 
                                                                       of god, how i suffered you 

                                                                                                                               strip me of my jackal skin 
                                                                                                                               shame me nude and brittle 

                                       (takes a bite from her fist before hurling it to the lake) 

               i hope you are being eaten by eels 
               in an arsenic moat 

                                       (BROTHER drops the bucket and staggers, out of breath. The whites of 
                                       his eyes have shifted to a burnt orange. He wipes rusty drops from the 
                                       edges of his eyes. He walks away slowly. A falcon falls into the shallows 
                                       and turns to porcelain teeth. SISTER’s favorite flowers begin to grow from
                                       the bucket.)

 

Ántonia Timothy is from Baltimore, MD. Her first collection, Self-Titled by Alien, has been published by Milk Carton Press. Individual poems have appeared in: Poet Lore, The Fiddlehead, Washington Square Review, and Los Angeles Review, among others. She received her MFA from Bowling Green State University.

TO BE A CLOUD W/ YOU

We move slow over grassy hills 
sleep deep in the untethered  
weather February Pisces season unhinge  
silly brass, together n reckless  
tiramisu @ 1pm EST T4T (turtle4turtle) 
you play plush rough w/ dreamy eyes 
retreat in yr city our home 
shaved necks under palms 
soft early winter moon rain 
tapping windowpane pulse I put 
yr hand on my humming while 
the finches dance branches 
thru logic wind n possibility all 
of time wrapped around our perfect 
mouths

 

I’M LEARNING HOW TO ASK YOU TO

 

Alexis Aceves Garcia centers care in their work as a writer, co-curator of already felt: poems in revolt & bounty, and managing editor of Deem Journal. They are currently the steward of a heart-shaped hummingbird feeder in their Abuela’s backyard and an MFA in Writing student at UCSD. You can find their poems in beestung, The Hennepin Review, The Best of the Net Anthology 2022, Apogee Journal, Peach Mag, and The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNext, with poems forthcoming in rivulet. Follow them on Instagram and Twitter @loveloaf_.

The Hole

after Michael Martone

AUTHOR BIO: Cat Ingrid Leeches is fucking hot for a writer. I mean for anyone really. Her stomach is flat, you could do big crimes on it. Her nipples are two different sizes. I mean one is like a nickel, and one is the size of a dinner plate. Babies follow her everywhere. 

She has never had sex. 

Art is a violation. 

Sex is a violation. 

Anytime she thinks about it she falls into a hole. Holes are a volition. 

Cat Ingrid’s mother spent her life hospitalized with vertigo. Leeches saw her just the one time, right after their bodies were irreparably separated (a hurried c-section, maternal arteries tangled around the baby’s neck). The mother’s hospitable bed was levitating and spinning in circles. The nurses mostly blamed the mother. Some said it was the electricity, that it had a suspicious nature (these nurses argued that electricity was changing the smell of the world, and not for the better: those with sensitive snouts were bound to go extinct). But her mother also had a suspicious nature in their eyes. It was written in the shape of her slightly beautiful, slightly arched eyebrows. So the soulful devourers of the Effluvia Theory were not going to go to bat for her or put their jobs on the line or anything (they still had plenty of misprinted pamphlets to hand out). Cat Ingrid Leeches peered into the room from a window (the kind you see in cruise ships). She was just a newborn― someone had to hold her head up for her, but she doesn’t remember who they were. Her mother waved at the unnecessary creature, hand turning into a strange bird. In no other way was she notable. Even under piles of blankets, Cat Ingrid could see that her mother’s belly wasn’t flat and rejected her. As an adult she still rejects her. She rejects her dead body. She doesn’t know where it is, that’s how much she rejects her. 

Cat Ingrid’s holes are all literal. Her mother’s holes just became that way, whether it was mental laziness or sheer force of will, she will never know. Although, she strongly doubts the latter. 

Mary Wollstonecraft once wrote that digressions and circadian rhythms are tools of the weak. She tore this piece of paper up and ate it, then eventually shit it out, where it lingered in British sewage constructions for generations, imprinting its wisdom on other pieces of fecal matter, which through negligence and intentions, made its way into our collective human guts. Leeches has taken these words to heart. They’re the ship that sails through her night. 

(Imagine who she could be if Mary Wollstonecraft was her mother. Chaucer and Valerie Solanas would be quaking in their boots).

Cat Ingrid’s great grandmother raised her and always looked grimly on when the topic of desire came up. 

Leeches told her guardian not to worry, that one day she would have sex. She lifted up her shirt to show her great grandmother how good she was at starving herself, see? She painted whorls of gold and silver around her belly button, as if to say, Hello world, it is only a matter of time. Lick me and it will make the lint boil in your laundry machines. Yours and mine. 

Her great grandmother’s pupils shouted with their tinny mouths HILDEGARDE THAT’S NOT WHAT ANY OF THIS FUCKING MEANS. 

A man arrived on a motorcycle and he had long grey hair (dyed, Cat Ingrid was pretty sure) and a plastic leather jacket, and she wanted to desire the desire, so she hopped on and squeezed him between her thighs, but she saw only more holes as she rode away from her childhood home. She emitted them from her mouths, and they were endless, and her throat was dry or maybe wet, and her nipples, which then weren’t the size of coins or dinner plates, but soft as eyelids, bloomed into a grotesque extravagance that slurped at his spine. 

The road was littered with holes. She made up her mind that if he accused her, she was going to claim that the holes were always there. Nothing had changed except in his mind, which was obviously deteriorating. But riding the bike had become unsafe. 

And of course, this caused one of the stranger disasters in Harris County history. The babies jumped from sky scrapers into the holes. She was ejected from the bike. The bike became a hole. She was paid a sizable fund from the city of Houston to de-tongue her breasts, which stopped babies from leaping out of windows into holes. For the most part. They were and are still attracted to the sight or smell of her nipples. It couldn’t be helped. Can’t be. No one ever found where they went, the babies, because the holes remained holes. They were never filled over in case the children wanted to come out again. Their parents said on the news that they knew their children were still alive. They each had remarkable financial luck for the next five years. Some of them even published Cat Ingrid’s short stories, which seems really generous. Really kind. Or maybe she’s just that good.

CLOUD IN THE SHAPE OF A HUMAN

A local moazzin calls the faithful towards goodness as I step into the bathroom to masturbate. It’s (possibly) the holiest night of the holiest month, & I feel vulgar. Often, I am disgusted by how much I think of god. How his blue-eyes will drown my sorrow. How his many-hands will cup my liquid body. His animal-wit will testify it was alright to not give up my small transgressions. I dislike thinking all this, especially among the moans & the oh yes!s & the fuck it, bastards & the croaking voices & the creaking beds & the wet grunts & the thumping of one softness into another—a blue wave pounding a rock. Oh! How I want to forget everything then, close my eyes & not have your face greet me with delight or even your soft flesh transforming into something tenderer—just a vast blueness of the sky, & I floating as if a cloud—an innocent child underneath calling her mama, look, mama, this one looks like me 

 

TANGERINES

From god, we came. Whenever I come, 
I think of god. Not in that godforsaken way,

more in that look what you made me do way.
It’s true. I’m Taylor Swift for god. I create

music for which god never gives me credit. 

To god we shall return. What is a turtle 
without its shell? Free. More dexterous. 

God created me a left-handed in a muslim 
cunt-ry. It takes two to tango. Last winter,

we ate tangerines under the soothing gold.

The citrus made my tongue rub the roof
of my mouth. Or your mouth. Some times,

I can’t even tell the difference. We spat
its seeds upon the sharp green blades, 

made promises one can only make young.  

Meanwhile, god hovered like a dragonfly, 
swore upon the figs and the olives as if 

they are staples. Meanwhile, I mourned 
god’s dead & ate the cheapest, damned fruit.

 

Javeria Hasnain is a Pakistani poet and a Fulbright scholar pursuing her MFA Poetry at The New School. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Margins, The Aleph Review, Gutter magazine, Scrawl Place, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Google Translate Parses Passages From Chapter One of My North Korean Refugee Grandfather’s Autobiography

My heart still breaks at the thought of my sister who I am so thankful for.
becomes

I’m already dead, so I’m left with only regrets. Heaven with thanks
I wish you peace and happiness in Esau.

My mother was always very sympathetic, but one day, a close friend of mine went to the hospital.
He was infected with smallpox, a type 1 infectious disease at the time, and did not have time to try his hand.
He passed away two weeks later. It was so sudden and unexpected that I cried
didn’t even come out. Even now, when I think about that time, I feel empty and empty.

The suffering was hard enough to describe, and it is still good in my eyes
The horror of Seoul, which was completely ashes even after the war ended.
It was.

At that time, in my dreams, I had nightmares of being tied to a rope and being dragged around every day.
dreamed together At that time, if you looked any smarter, you would be mocked as a rogue.
Many unfortunate people were sacrificed besides me.

When I arrived in Yeonan-eup, there was no place to accommodate it, so there was a water tank that stores water.
It was to put us all in. When we go in, there are people other than us.
It was too narrow and the air was so cloudy that I couldn’t breathe. like that

Holding me from both sides and asking me to go together, I can’t help but be dragged away
there was no They dragged me to a village called Ibangge, far from our house.
He went and told him to tell me where the reactionaries were.
was to be locked up.

After walking through the night, I arrived at the shore in front of Gyodong Island and waited until dawn.
I remember that it was December 20, 1951.

A small wooden boat came in rowing, and the four of us rode a boat.
We arrived safely at the tidal flat where the gu was visible. I’m so glad I met the savior
I cried.

I was released and I still can’t forget the severe torture I had been subjected to for two days.
I don’t have it, but I remember being hit so many times that I passed out several times.

Everything written here is an honest true story of my life.
again to my descendants
May there be no life of suffering like mine.
I would like to leave this record with earnest prayers.

 

Die Meistersinger

Long ago, my grandfather escapes from North Korea because he realizes the danger of staying in the village where he lives on the brink of war. Quietly, in the middle of the night, he drags a boat to the water with two other young men from his town, and they alone, family-less, set away. He arrives in what becomes South Korea and works in labor camps, the typical way to survive during the post-war reconstruction. After some time, he becomes an important freight-forwarding business owner, and I have magazines on my bookshelf with his wry, dry smile on the covers.

My father, his eldest son, a child, wants to play music rather than anything else. Before long, my grandfather finds out, and tears up all of his music books. My sister anthologizes this event in our reconstructed family history with a simple imagined declaration: It is not a man’s job to play music.

My father listens to Die Meistersinger, a Wagner opera about guild singers from antiquity, in our house in the Chicago suburbs. After only so long, I learn about the Nazi’s love of Wagner’s music. My father listening to Die Meistersinger, Nazis burning paintings: a sort of Stockholm Syndrome tied to banning art that follows our family from Korea to Chicago, Evanston, the suburbs, chasing forever.

There’s a painting in the SFMOMA by Anselm Kiefer with the words Die Meistersinger scrawled at the top. It’s a blue painting of a field, with the canvas covered in straw. The clumps of straw that sit atop the paint are protrusions sagging out, like herniated sacs. Straw becomes organs, spilling out of itself and gushing red paint into other parts; straw creates autonomy, crafted through bloodless flesh. Circles of red and white lay silent next to phantasmic black splotches. Something floats out of the canvas, but I don’t see it, I just feel some strange shaking in my arm from where it must have touched me.

These clumps are die meistersinger. They burn in secret and sing in the tempo marking langsam und schmachtend, which, my dad explained to me once, translates to slow and languishing. They perform in theaters as, elsewhere, what my father might have cherished is removed, slow and languishing, from memory.

My father is der meistersinger. In one dream I have, I see the painting, my father’s face within the straw. He furrows his brows, as he always does, and twelve limbs of yellow stalk rupture from his body. He screeches, like a Francis Bacon painting, vaults towards me, and the last thing I see before awaking is blood, in the same red color as what hides behind the numbered cardboard of the painting.

 

Young Fenimore Lee (they/them) is a Korean-American kid, poet, and music journalist residing in Brooklyn, NY, whose work has appeared in or is forthcoming in DIALOGIST, Cosmonauts Avenue, Entropy, and The Concrete Desert Review. Indie rock, emo, post-hardcore, and other music genres are important influences in their writing. They received their BA from Stanford University and are currently an MFA candidate at The New School.

Empress Dialectic

the empress cries / imposter syndrome / hallucinogenic games / utter confusion / suppressed  bar codes scanned / consumerist dysphoria feasts me / westward from conventional reality / no  guardian angel / will comfort me / steam erupts / a volatile geyser / people watch /  questionable eye contact / salmon buoy in saltwater / when i see / facial hair / my adams apple  / j.k rowling / cis women storm troopers / wear a pussy hat horde / a public restroom / hear the  frat boy muttering / faggot / waiters emphasize / “sir” / sneered using / my valley girl  vernacular / the filler word “like”/ assumed ignorant / by glass door employers / doctors  gatekeep hormone therapy / family using my dead name / real name rarely believed / violent  invalidation jabs / by ones truly obsessed / with their god-given / gender / acrobats juggling  sharpened daggers / toss at lip glossy / cracked mirrors / enshrouded in / trans people’s blood /  i dream of dying / all the time / living in / a bleak world / actively / stripping / humanity. 

Until the moon comes out 
Shall the hummingbird rise 
Self-worth and love sows 
The revolution’s seeds 
To bourgeoisie demise  

a faggy \ speaks valley girl dialect \ vanilla throats slit \ by a queen \ a joker \ a king \ flaming  hands wear \ angelic stiletto nails \ vivid lip gloss paint \ slides my cupids’ bow \ red coral  earrings \ vitally dangle my ears \ freshly shaven neck \ a holographic sheen \ a lace front  brunette wig \ over my hair \ lavender metallic heels \ i imagine wearing \ a magenta palomo  silk dress \ the mirror watches me \ passionately lip sync \ fka twigs \ blasting out laptop  speakers \ a regal empress reigns \ southern california \ glistening like selenite \ sailor venus  limelight \ there is so \ much beauty \ in \ being \ trans \ only a definition \ bitch i am living \ in euphoria \ embracing ambivalence \ a new horizon \ eastward with no escapist reality \ the  city on the hill \ crumbles to dust \ unabashed vulnerability \ my true power awakens \ praying  to no deity \ my genitalia exists outside \ illusory glass ceilings \ no longer climbing \ the  destination \ is already within me \ what is in between \ my legs \ an intergalactic monarch  butterfly \ deflects u.s. society’s militarism \ melts their utopian sheltered cottage \ and knows  they will \ be for \ ever free 

 

Emerald Rose Anastasia is a 26-year-old poet originally from Bakersfield, California. They currently reside in NYC and are pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the New School. This is their first publication.