Author:

After Snowdrops

Do you know what I was, how I lived?
—Louise Glück

                                                        I did                                         not
                                                        know                                       what
                                                                                           I was
                                                        I refused                            
                                                        to see
                                                                                           how I lived
                                                        I wanted
                                                        to                                             not
                                                        know what                          despair
                                                        was                                                          but now
                                                        I see                                                         it has been
                                                                         all
                                                                         over                                        my skin
                                                                                                                          light
                                                                         rot
                                                                         spots
                                                                         portend
                                                         time                                                                      bruise
                                                                                                                                         I expected
                                                                                                                          to survive
                                                         at least                                  until winter
                                                                                                          meaning
                                                                                           snow                                                       
                                                         drops
                                                                                           signals                natural end
                                                                                                                          my
                                                                         life                                          suppressed
                                                                                                                          now
                                                                         I do
                                                                                                                                           not
                                                                         expect to
                                                                                                                                           survive I must
                                                                         wake
                                                                         to this fact                                             dry
                                                                                                                                            earth

                                                                                        forgetting
                                                                                        my body
                                                                                        as                                                a boy
                                                                                                                                            I was
                                                                                        afraid                                        yes
                                                                                                                                            I was
                                                                                        among the                              unfamiliar
                                                                                        stalks
                                                                                        and grasses                            strange
                                                                                                                              meadow
                                                                                                                              I could
                                                                                                          not                           see I was
                                                                                                           a part
                                                                                                                                             of
                                                                                                                                             the expanse
                                                                                                           I said
                                                                                                           I refuse
                                                                                                           was                                          mute
                                                                                                                                                             my own
                                                                                                           hand covering
                                                                                                                                          melody
                                                                                         heard it                                 in
                                                                                                                                          the distance
                                                                                         my head
                                                                                                                         echoing
                                                                                         concrete
                                                                                         chutes                  now
                                                                                                                         as not
                                                                                                                         a boy                    I am
                                                                                                                         among                 you
                                                                                                         a                                             battered
                                                                                                         garden
                                                                                                                                         refusing
                                                                                                                                         to release
                                                                                         but forced
                                                                                         into stasis                                          the
                                                                                                                           harsh                  light
                                                                                                                                                         changes
                                                                                                                                                         it
                                                                                         like                                        it changes me
                                                                                                                                         makes
                                                                                                          my hair
                                                                                                          grow                    wild
                                                                                                          stubborn
                                                                                                          as it finds                            new
                                                                                                          beauty
                                                                                                                           yes                         risk
                                                                                                                           yes                         joy
                                                                                                                           even                      in
                                                                                                                                         this
                                                                                                           evening
                                                                                                                                         wind
                                                                                                           raw
                                                                                                                                         final
                                                                                                           finally
                                                                                                                                         new

 

After Matins

Unreachable
—Louise Glück

                                                      we keep                                                           ourselves
                                                                                                                                  unreachable
                                                                                                                   exiled from
                                                                      the heaven
                                                                      on offer
                                                                      in its                                                  place
                                                                      replica                                              of expansiveness
                                                                                     less full
                                                                                                                     of beauty
                                                       without
                                     alternative
                                                                                     flesh
                                                                                     authors
                                                                                     its own
                                                                                                                     worship

                                                        nature
                                                                       returns
                                                                                                                     what it
                                                                                                                     takes
                                                                                     only                       after
                                                                                                                     having
                                                                                     transformed
                                                                                                                     it

Artist’s Statement

These poems are taken from my manuscript After the Wild Iris, a full-length response to Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris. I love Glück’s book, but as I’ve returned to it over the years, it’s begun to feel increasingly unconnected to the world I know. For one, it’s unreservedly straight and cis. For another, it operates under the assumption that the natural world will infinitely renew itself in the yearly cycle of seasons, a prospect that feels increasingly foreign as our environment spins towards catastrophe. I began to write, searching for a form that could hold my experience of multiplicity and reflect the often fragmented experience of living in the shadow of looming climate disaster. I wanted a form that could be read in multiple ways, that could hold a variety of meanings and realities within a single poem. 

Each poem can be read top to bottom and left to right, but is also broken up into separate pathways, allowing fragments to cohere into new ideas, images, and narratives. The reader must navigate through these, triangulating various threads of meaning. To me, this is where the poem lives, not in any single strand of text, but in the action of holding various fragments together into a momentary and unstable whole. 

Iris McCloughan is a nonbinary trans* writer and artist in New York. They were the winner of the 2018 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from American Poetry Review, and are the author of three chapbooks, including Triptych (2021, Greying Ghost) and Bones To Peaches, selected for the 2021 Robin Becker Series by Seven Kitchens Press. Their writing has appeared or is forthcoming in juked, jubilat, American Poetry Review, and ANMLY, among others.

This Has Never Been My America
_{(a Burning Haibun)}

This has never been my america, but me stating this again does nothing to add to this conversation for my blood, its worth. I could talk about every video clip of bodies rolling on pavement, skin smeared sidewalks, the hopscotch of our bones. But what would it do, other than incite a riot in my stomach? I cannot claim to be a freedom fighter, a revolutionary; but I cling to their cause. I do believe in abolition yet have never been a fan of sticking my own hands in their mud. Does this make me a bad Black, the type soft white palms do not have to warn their children about? All of my (white) partners’ parents loved me, even some far after our parting. Which really just means none of them feared my skin, the Jupiter in my throat; a gas only poisoning me. They say every time, it’s so sad what happened to that boy, just do you all have to keep looting? And all I could offer was a concerning grin, ministerial toothed and tame, awaiting a meal. And I don’t really know what I am really waiting for other than what I never could recall being mine to begin with. A free, borderless land? No guns? Housing and Healthcare for all? A space for all my niggas to be niggas? I’m sure on top of a mountain somewhere there are collections of us made god and may I be so bold to say, that there their black is allowed to crack in peace⸺in pieces into the hands of their own loved ones who gust into a darkening red sky and they all rest as stars; by this I mean they all get to rest: the living, the dead, their names never swirled on a baton of tongues, I might just be optimistic about what it could look like if we didn’t know anything but the dark, didn’t know why we reach for the light.

This has never been my america, but me stating this again does nothing to add to this conversation for my blood, its worth. I could talk about every video clip of bodies rolling on pavement, skin smeared sidewalks, the hopscotch of our bones. But what would it do, other than incite a riot in my stomach?Icannot claim to be a freedom fighter, a revolutionary; but I cling to their cause. I do believe in abolition yet have never been a fan of sticking my own hands in their mud. Does this make me a bad Black, the type soft white palms do not have to warn their children about? All of my (white) partners’ parents loved me, even some far after our parting. Which really just means none of them feared my skin, the Jupiter in my throat; a gas only poisoning me. They say every time, it’s so sad what happened to that boy, just do you all have to keep looting? And all I could offer was a concerning grin, ministerial toothed and tame, awaiting a meal. And I don’t really know what I am really waiting for other than what I never could recall being mine to begin with. A free, borderless land? No guns? Housing and Healthcare for all? A space for all my niggas to be niggas? I’m sure on top of a mountain somewhere there are collections of us made god and may I be so bold to say, that there their black is allowed to crack in peace⸺in pieces into the hands of their own loved ones who gust into a darkening red sky and they all rest as stars; by this I mean they all get to rest: the living, the dead, their names never swirled on a baton of tongues, I might just be optimistic about what it could look like if we didn’t know anything but the dark, didn’t know how to reach for the light.

This has never been my america, but me stating this again does nothing to add to this conversation about my blood, its worth. I could talk about every video clip of bodies rolling on pavement, skin smeared sidewalks, the hopscotch of our bones. But what would it do, other than incite a riot in my stomach?Icannot claim to be a freedom fighter, a revolutionary; but I cling to their cause. I do believe in abolition yet have never been a fan of sticking my own hands in their mud. Does this make me a bad Black, the type soft white palms do not have to warned their children about? All of my (white) partners’ parents loved me, even some far after our parting. Which really just means none of them feared my skin, the Jupiter in my throat; a gas only poisoning me. They say every time, it’s so sad what happened to that boy, just do you all have to keep looting? And all I could offer was a concerning grin, ministerial toothed and tame, awaiting a meal. And I don’t really know what I am really waiting for other than what I never could recall being mine to begin with. A free, borderless land? No guns? Housing and Healthcare for all? A space for all my niggas to be niggas? I’m sure on top of a mountain somewhere there is a collection of us made god and may I be so bold to say, there their black is allowed to crack in peace⸺in pieces into the hands of their own loved ones who gust into a darkening red sky and they all rest as stars; by this I mean they all get to rest: the living, the dead, their names never swirled on a baton of tongues, I might just be optimistic about what it could look like if we didn’t know anything but the dark, didn’t know why we reach for the light.

 

Jason B. Crawford (They/He)was born in Washington DC, raised in Lansing, MI. Their debut chapbook collection Summertime Fine is out through Variant Lit. Their second chapbook Twerkable Moments is due from Paper Nautilus Press in 2021. Their debut Full Length Year of the Unicorn Kidz will be out in 2022 from Sundress Publications.

HAIR 2

Sara’s mouth had hair growing out of the inside. It grew out of her throat and organs and sprouted into a beard or braid (when she braided it) that never let her lips touch. Her breathing was muffled and eating was impossible. She made the decision to cut it when she got very very hungry. After she did she had to continue cutting and shaving her mouth and tongue every day. Deep in her throat it still grew and eating was still so, so difficult. One of Sara’s lovers told her that she gave the best head they had ever encountered. Sara always liked that.

 

Never Angeline North is an author, artist, and bisexual jew living in Olympia, Washington. She is the author of a number of creative works that are available in book form, such as Sea Witch (published in 2020 by Inside the Castle Press), Careful Mountain (2016 by Civil Coping Mechanisms Press), Sara or the Existence of Fire (2014, Horse Less Press), and Wolf Doctors (2014, Artifice Books). Many of her various projects are collected at her website undying.club and the rest are lost to time, and that’s okay.

Phantasm with Bones

We open at sunrise. The stage is set under flashing lights. 
                                                               A theatre
                                                                                                where the convict always dies. 
                                   The intercom
                                                    buzzes, spastic:
                                                                                                                surrender
& you’re lurching within the construct,
                                                                                                flesh bruised 
                                                by the white bars. 

                  Soon, the hourglass will crack.                                                                                 
                                                  Patiently, I teeth this cardboard street. 
On cue, 
                  I explode into one million tremolos. 
                                                                                                                    I burn the walls
                                                                                                  with my fingertips.
                                   I raid the Capitol. 

                                                                                                  The puppets flail on their axes,                    
their strings caught in the machinery. 
                                                                    They jerk, spitting out 
                                    rubber bullets and 
                                                                   paint bullets and 
                                                                                                  real bullets and 
splaying open their wooden mouths.
                                                                             It starts to snow. 
                                                                                                              My eyes burn, because it is ash. 
                  Applause flutters through the darkened room. 
On the stage, 
                                                                the bones are all the same colour. 

                  The crowd calls:               Give us more

Emma Miao is a 16-year-old poet from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She is a commended Foyle Young Poet of the Year 2019, and her work appears in Atlanta Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and The Emerson Review, among others. She is the winner of the F(r)iction Poetry Contest 2020, and a finalist for the Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize 2020. 

Chicken Dinner

In the night, our stepfather has us line up on the patio. Barefoot on the cold concrete, we  are here to see him kill a chicken. This will mature us into adults. It’s good for us to know about  death, he told our mother, and so she does not stop him.

He wrings the chicken’s neck to teach us how we will one day twist the necks of our  enemies, or our children. Then he cleaves the head from the body. He looks at us meaningfully,  although—meaning what? 

I am standing on a rock almost small enough to be inconspicuous. I’m afraid to shift, so I  continue to smother the pebble with my big toe, and it bites me back in self-defense. Now our stepfather has begun roughly plucking the bird, tearing out handfuls of feathers  at random, action uninhibited by strategy. He throws them everywhere. Blood droplets fly with  them and land on the white outdoor furniture. Two drops land by my sister’s foot. A feather  sticks in my brother’s hair. 

We will not eat the chicken. Later we will go inside, and our stepfather will light the  corpse on fire in a child-grave-sized hole he dug in the backyard. We, the children, will go to  bed. We will sleep and wake up and eat something that is not the bird, and so on, and so forth,  and on and on, etc.

 

Morgan Bennett is currently based in Austin, Texas, where they spend their time writing and studying film. Their work has appeared in, or will soon appear in, YA Review Network, gloworm press, and Black Ink Fiction. Their work has previously been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Heritage

Dad was born in 1939.
I was born in 1996.
4 of my 7 siblings were born
before you, Ma. Did you visit
Pampanga as a kid?
That’s where your step-
children were raised.

3 wives, 57 years, & 7,000
miles away from your Talisay
home only makes sense
if I say colonialism, Ma.
Time & distance must be
products of your zeitgeist,
a suspension in post—

why did you & Dad
make me in America?
Ma, I can call you nanay
in 3 languages except my own.
I have no birthright.
My unborn body lost its roots
in 1957 after Dad graduated

from his segregated
high school—Falls Church,
Virginia—& the Air Force
assigned him to Clark AB.
Ma, his Oriental desire
was set, & I lost, years before
1991, when you were 24

& he took you to California.
I want to know him, & you,
but I only have numbers.
Tell me, Ma, how you survive
separated from your culture.
You say I’m lucky to live here,
but I think you’re wrong:

Luck is not being born at all.

American Pastoral

On a patch of infected soil,
the last alfalfa plant burns,
tells a story of lives never lived.
Humans haven’t touched this dirt.

Alfalfa burns under a dead sky,
nobody to witness the blaze.
Humans haven’t touched anything
in ages. Blister beetles die by firelight.

Nobody gazes upon blazed
dirt—once green, tales say.
Blister beetles continue to die,
fiery wind propels their memories:

Tales of green fields, they were called
farms. Alfalfa was grown to feed
horses, their bodies propelled by wind.
Like humans, the horses died,

along with the farms, now the alfalfa.
People’s greatest talent was poisoning
themselves, all the horses. What’s left
is fire, a patch of infected soil.

 

Dani Putney is a queer, non-binary, mixed-race Filipinx, & neurodivergent poet originally from Sacramento, California. Their debut full-length poetry collection is Salamat sa Intersectionality (Okay Donkey Press, May 2021). You can find Dani’s poetry in Camas, The Fourth River, LandLocked, & Tule Review, among other publications. Presently a PhD student at Oklahoma State University, they permanently reside in the middle of the Nevada desert.

Shot #7

When I think of women, I think of K’s long Black hair. Though store-
bought, it was laid as if it wasn’t. How her body flowed on dancefloors
like shame wasn’t a factor, as if every factor in the world didn’t exist. 

& then I think of existence. Do I deserve it after the things that I did 
to K? The deception, the dumping, the trauma I’ve given to her? 
How trauma makes a broken record of us. How the boys did 

what they did when I wasn’t old enough to know they do whatever
they want to. How is this my first time bringing pen to paper about it? 
How “rape” feels too explicit of a claim even 20 years later. I don’t speak 

to K anymore, but I do flinch when my lover trusts in me too much. 
I fear that the breaking will hit her & turn into a wound like the ones 
I go to therapy for. When I think of therapy, I think of all the sessions 

I’ve spent on K. When women in my life spend their labor on me— 
my lover, my therapist, and K— I think of history. My growing 
mustache doesn’t mean I must repeat it.

 

KB is a Black queer genderless miracle. They are the author of the chapbook HOW TO IDENTIFY YOURSELF WITH A WOUND (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize. Follow them online at @earthtokb.

Drunk Rebel

Today, mum would probe my mental health,
& I’ll have no demons to show her.
and I’ll know she is forcing it, the way she believes in this thing.
the way she toughens breakfast with an eye for therapy.

I have nothing against unleavened bread & milkshakes:
mushroom whites that pours into my cheeks,
& the smooth chaos of it.

I just can’t bring myself to making u-turns,
trading grief for a luxury of serviette,
saying nothing of dark littluns shoving at my chest, 
as I break words into pills for a distinct good.

I have relatives staged to the peeled block next to my room,
ears straightening the walls in search of their black sheep.
I feel so worthless in their gaze,
a rag doll to middle fingers.

for those treats I didn’t go, 
I learnt to drive nuts into a plywood,
knock it into four corners to improve the sleep in my eyes.

I learnt the symptoms behind this,
what breaks inside of me.
the ruin, & how it makes me brief.

my brother knows to hype my prose poems in their queer state.
that alone is twice a therapy 
to predicting which is my favorite poison, 
when I myself bears a naked brand.

 

Stamina

smash my teeth with stone fruits/ milk the raw sugar 
from my battered mouth/ shred tongue lose like deciduous news/ 
the white forecast/ wintering in cold blood/ 
serpentine jaw at gum baptism/ a kill of incensed wet as throat piece/ 
swirl/ skip gravitational force/ words are hurled welkin aiming for different worlds/ 
rob the sky off it’s weathered punctuations/ recall the mastering of English 
on novena & forced hymns/ 
the spotty chaplet on my numb thumb is full stop enough to end this body/ 
arms stretched as in hyphen/ limbs like indentation 
plies the margin of beads to separation/ rig the bloody result/ 
splice my midriff to a narrow cut/ ballot a sound for neck care/ 
mouth breathe— till I bring susurration/ thump/ brand me a breeze gadget wield up/ 
thingamajig of due brilliance/ nameless in airier form/ 
fog my cheeks for utterance/ watch the fume self breed/ 
thrill my lungs to negative surges/ 
whatever morphs halfway/ bridged & stiffly informed in short circuits/ 
span my airwave to outlive the wreckful sirens and wailing of seaports/ 
my kind of hunchback/ studded with welts.

 

Nnadi Samuel holds a B.A in English & literature from the University of Benin. His works have been previously published in Suburban Review, Seventh Wave Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, Quarterly West, Blood Orange Review, PORT Magazine, The Cordite Poetry Review, Gordon Square Review, Rough Cut Press, Trampset, Rigorous Magazine, Blue Nib journal, Stonecrop Review, The Elephant Magazine, Lunaris Review, Inverse Journal, Canyon Voices, The Collidescope, Journal Nine, Liquid Imagination, Star*Line Science Fiction & Poetry, Subterranean blue poetry, The Quills, Eunoia Review & elsewhere. Winner of the Canadian Open Drawer contest 2020. He won the Splendor of Dawn Poetry Contest April 2020, won the Bkpw Poetry Workshop Contest 2021, got shortlisted in the annual Poet’s Choice award & was the second-prize winner of the EOPP 2019 contest. A longlist of the NSPP 2020 prize, & Pushcart Nominee. He is the author of Reopening of Wounds & Subject Lessons (forthcoming). He reads for U-Right Magazine. He tweets @Samuelsamba10. 

If You Think Bodies Are Static You Have Clearly Never Had Queer Sex

We all have Google, I know: If a tree falls in a forest, it does not make a sound
because sound is made in each of our ears from vibrations. Feeling, similarly, 

requires the nerves to happen. So if half of my body dissociates
every time. If I imagine our legs otherwise. If my eyes stay open

but I feel something other than what I see. What is that?
Facts and reality are two different things. Reality is just a lot of people 

agreeing. Months of injections from now, a group of people might see me 
and the reality of me will be a whole lot different than the fact of it. 

In between & all kinds of whole and unembarrassed tonight, gin-dazed 
and asking to be both the hips and the knees, for submission to submission. 

If two people at night decide there is a dick between them
and no one else is there to see it, are they wrong? 

And can you prove it? If the only people in the room know 
what they feel, if our nerves go rogue against the night,

I am not the kind of guy who likes to ask for directions. 
Soften me. I am a muscle used too often to know how to stretch. 

if I look in their eyes and see it, is my dick a mass hallucination?
A conspiracy theory? Every ghost story involves somebody

who’ll go to their grave believing what they saw, whether or not 
there’s a rational voice they’re ignoring, or maybe listening to, 

but that can’t shake it, this tendency to doubt. I’m not doubting the ways 
my pleasure comes to me. I want to believe. Queering reality is deciding 

the options we get aren’t good enough, and doing something about it. 
I am feeling the kind of too much I am supposed to want but often get too scared

to look in the eye but today I think, I trust them, I trust them, and the world
can shatter without glass getting anywhere near my skin, your skin, our skin. 

So yeah, sex with me might haunt you. Why be born right when you 
can manipulate consciousness, shimmer like a fact in an age 

without image, age like a document pressed between two books,
the millimeter of possibility you feel in the back of your chest

when a shape passes the corner of your eye in the middle of the night.
Trying to explain why all my loved ones are trans is hard 

when you just weren’t there. There, in the room of your brain you might not have gone into yet.

 

an explanation I do not owe

I wake up with the sun glittering onto me my shower glitters so hard
you can hear it I pour coffee over giant chunks of glitter
and taste the cool of it I buy the sparkly toothpaste

so if I bleed the sink still shines foamy prom dress mudslide
and then the morning ritual of choosing between discomfort
or discomfort passing and passing and not passing

a mirror for a clean breath I am thinking about the whole
futurity thing when my favorite professor shes me
and it is almost like it does not happen

but I still wonder all class if skipping dinner
will make my jaw more angular or my body more throwable
but I survive it and do this revolutionary thing where I keep talking

talking with this voice these bundles of string lights
caught in my throat see I am told that glitter is a feminine thing

and if it is to you, that is so valid! but honestly 
I am already so clockable I feel like the closest I can get to passing 
for a thing no one has a word for is to look as DIY as my name

I cover myself in glitter because I am effectively already covered in glitter
I wear men’s everything and might as well be in a ball gown my eyes are two giant chunks of reflective confetti I speak and glitter pours out of my mouth I eat and taste shards of glass I bind and feel grating specks of plastic everywhere I walk down the street I must be covered because no one can look away but I must be so bright they can’t actually see me

If I try to be visible I get buried in the numbers of it
it’s that collection of moments that bury us in the end I’m so tired
of looking like an emergency siren there is no surgery
for a sometimes and if there was I would need centuries of sleep
to take back all the deep breaths I’ve lost my body
uses up energy buzzing in self awareness my body congratulated itself
every day it went without a cigarette before I even started smoking it’s like an inheritance

every trans person I know
knows a trans person who has died
and here I stand

in a room with no ghosts
waiting for a knock at the door

 

Myles Taylor (they/he) is a transmasculine poet, organizer, award-winning poetry slam competitor, barista, Emerson College alum, Capricorn-Aquarius cusp, and glitter enthusiast. They run Moonlighting: A Queer Open Mic and host at the Boston Poetry Slam. Their work can be found in The Shallow Ends, Academy of American Poets, Washington Square Review, Underblong, Crab Fat Magazine, Slamfind, and others. Follow them @mylesdoespoems. Photo by Clark Hartman.

They, There

I hold my growing hair and imagine it braided out of sight, the way my fingers would swirl, encasing the ruin like charging a spell, except I can’t braid at all, I’m not deft enough, and 

once I asked my father’s ex wife to braid it for a trip, where I felt like a dignitary getting off the plane, with red red hair, also check out these vinyl boots, the same ones I wore to climb a mountain that week with my father, and 

she did it, I was home, but in the way you only know a place through some kind of generational memory–and what is memory anyway but all of our pain pressed so tight every new soul bounces off, pretending to be fresh, then my mother teased my hair and 

I was fresh, earned slaps across the mouth, but who knows when and how many, times charge inside the deviation in my septum I only notice winding the ring there, and 

the thing that hurts sometimes isn’t the hands, but the words, and my mother’s gasp when last week I told her I hadn’t cut my hair in eight months, her pride, while I pleaded listen, it hurts, it’s a nest, the headaches are so frequent and 

the inside hurts too, not looking like myself, wanting to look like nothing, wanting to bounce past the conversation–not a man’s cut or a women’s cut but a nothing cut, neither, please help me disperse and 

I loathe the symbolism of it all, letting down my hair like some kind of lost princess when we all know I’m wrong for that other than my mother, who still calls me her beautiful daughter 

and the gastrointestinal doctor’s assistant who checks my blood pressure without a machine to back her up, she’s something else, she sees me and 

there is it again, your hair, it’s so long and beautiful, and I spin around myself and 

die right there, another death, before the inevitable, because who can see me, they, underneath

 

Tate N. Oquendo is a writer and visual artist that combines these elements, along with magical practice, to craft multimodal nonfiction, poetry, and fiction, as well as translations of these forms. Their work can be found in numerous literary journals, a hybrid memoir, and six chapbooks, including their most recent works: Space Baby: Episodes I-III and The Antichrist and I.