Author:

Alterations: An Interview

You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I don’t have a navel. Don’t get me wrong; I used to have one. I wasn’t molded from clay or grown in a vat. But I never liked that hole in my belly. It reminded me of a woman who never loved me, and who I never loved. It smelled bad when I dipped a fingertip in, then brought it to my nose and sniffed. It collected all kinds of weird crud in its moist, bacteria-laden depths.

So after I’d made my fortune, when I discovered the body modification artist who pioneered the procedure, I knew what I had to do.

Several thousand dollars and a waiver signed, and then I was up on her operating table, numb from neck to knees. She took skin from my thigh and grafted it over the old umbilical pit. It healed smooth and perfect, a barely noticeable white scar tracing a rectangle around the flat place where my navel wasn’t.

Next, the tattoos: a rose garden. A serpent devouring its own tail amidst the thorns. A border of tiny eggs, just beginning to crack open. I was rewriting my origin myth in half a dozen different images, all sealed forever inside my transplanted skin. The tattoos multiplied until I had flowers blooming into open human hands crowding my ribcage. I stopped shy of my collarbones. You can’t see them at all if I’m wearing a normal t-shirt. Beneath this drab cotton-poly blend, riches and wonders lurk.

The last step was to get the stone embedded. Here, I’ll pull up my shirt a little and show you. Yes, it’s real—that’s a genuine fire opal. You don’t want to know how much I had to pay for this beauty. Yes, it’s attached there permanently. I have to clean it with a special solution so it won’t get infected, but let me tell you: it’s well worth it. See how it shines and burns in the light!

Yes, it is in exactly the same spot my navel used to be. So what? This blemish is one I chose for myself. Selfish? Maybe. A waste of money? Not on your life. I regret not one scalpel incision nor drop of blood shed, my dear.

---

Briar Ripley Page has been a janitor, a hotel maid, a meat-slicer, a goat farm assistant, a waiter, an art school dropout, an unemployed drunk, and a freelance writer/artist (not necessarily in that order). They’re about to graduate college with a B.A. in English, after which they hope to move from central Pennsylvania to London.

Schematic.

               it is nothing new. ‘slut’ one closed circuit
short of rupture, rapture, derivative of
               immolation explicit. i am functionally a keyhole

               for everyone else’s desire.
all of my teachers said i was a good girl but now
               i am a dyke, which presupposes

               the meaninglessness of language, me
the engine that stops & starts. so i commit
               to nothing but laziness: sloth a blade i sharpen.

               i reciprocate any gentle touch with teeth
less white than some can stand. yes, i have hurt myself
               & others before. self-harm is kin to surveillance,

               the pleasure of kissing
               with eyes. yes, i will
               kiss you, yes, i identify.
               i evade most forms of

                              apperception.

               & like any kind of door, fold under the hands
of a woman. the pities of sex are what bifurcate
               secrecy from silence, a kind of lexical play for kestrels

               at the window. i like to watch them trumpet
in riotous formations. remember what was said
               about circuits? make of it another childhood game.

               electricity also yields a song,

               & this is plain enough work, to corral the particles
‘til they leak fire, ‘til it becomes easy—o’d. open unto them
               your tongue. see then the shape of a future

               oozing, eager to fuck.

---

Lyrik Courtney is a June Fellow of the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets (2019) and the Adroit Summer Mentorship (2017). They are a recipient of the Janef Newman Preston Prize and the Betty W. Stoffel Award, and have been published in journals such as Liminality, Ninth Letter, The Puritan, and Strange Horizons. You can find them on Twitter at @lyrk_crtny.

High Desert Sonnet

                      In my hometown, there are only children.
                      They live beneath tumbleweeds & chase
                      coyotes, looking down their gun barrel throats
                      & screaming with countered violence.

                       & screaming with countered violence,
                       a boy I loved fights another, hands becoming
                       thunderheads, sound of God & his angels bowling,
the cut above his eyebrow blooming with rubies.

 The cut above his eyebrow blooming with rubies
 reminds him of his grandfather, knocked
                        out by a kangaroo who boxed in a circus.
                        He admires the foolishness of his bloodline.

                        He admires the foolishness of his bloodline,
                        with his smile, teeth hanging loose & pretty.

                      With his smile, teeth hanging loose & pretty,                                     
                  the boys of my hometown abandon their dates                                      
                      at gas stations to skip out on paying, leaving                                      
                                  a body as collateral, as down-payment.                                     

                                  A body as collateral, as down-payment,                                     
                              what do you call the person who trembles                                     
                              as warning before striking? A rattlesnake;                                    
                                               a wired jaw begging to be opened.   

                                                A wired jaw begging to be opened   
                      is the collective noun for a group of teenagers,  
                 who brim at desert bonfires with cloying fingers,                                  
who knows what else could happen between these weeds?                                  

Who knows what else could happen between these weeds?                                 
                                  In my hometown, there are only children.                                 

Neck•Lace

The word necklace combines neck with lace, meaning
“cord,” from the Old French laz, “string, cord, or snare.”
The Latin root, laqueum, means “noose or snare.”

Take your stranger hands,
               wrap them around my neck,
                              like the pretty strands you stole
               for your mother, her face
a blue bloom on the carpet
                                              of the living room
                              just before
              the ambulance arrived.

                         After the funeral, cornflowers fielded
                                        behind you, wet leaves nudging your calves,
                         reminders of damp napkins
                on mournful cheeks. Children trailed the procession,
picking petals & raining them around
                              as clouds, their hands destroyers,
                 singing hymns they did not recognize.

                 Here you are now,
in a bedroom,
                 trying to remember where your fingers clasp:
                                  the clasps on the broken necklace:
                  the broken neck:
the neck breaking to be clasped:
                                  by your fingers, trying to remember
                  you’re in a bedroom, here now,
                                  your face too sweet & unknowing,
                  of all the ways to obey the body.

 

The Body Is a Storm Is a Warning

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

---

syan jay is an agender, Dzil Łigai Si’an N’dee (White Mountain Apache) poet who resides in Massachusett/Nipmuc/Wampanoag land. They are the winner of the 2018 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize and are Frontier Poetry’s 2019 Frontier New Voices Fellow. Their work is published/upcoming with The Shallow Ends, WILDNESS, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and Black Warrior Review. Their debut poetry collection, “Bury Me in Thunder” is forthcoming with Sundress Publications in January 2020. You can find more of their work at https://syanjay.com/, or on Twitter @mxsyanjay.

I Eat In Bed With The Lights Off, Just Like When We Have Sex

<

                        Turn up at low tide

                                                        against your will.


You are too young to know what 

                will is.



We’re nobody nowhere
                                                                                              right now

                                        on a ship neither sinking or floating

                                                        in a desert, under a desert

                                                                                                      there are eyes watching us.

                                        Our eyes are closed. 

                                                                                                       >



                                        (

I want a new moon baby, I’m a new
moon baby.

                                                I’m a moon inside a planet that is 
dying 

                                                               and there are no babies
                                                                                                      left in this planet anymore.
 
                                                                                                                                      )



I took down your photo from my desk 
like it was never there



replaced by space. Empty space is better
than men who don’t try. 





[

                               I ignore 
what my husband did to me

when he took all of the photos of us down
for another version

                                                                                                      of me

the version that is better and younger

and better at sex 
than me. 



{

                                                               A man once told
me he wanted to leave his wife for me

                                                                               &


               live in Europe on a boat somewhere.

That was happiness for him.

But he couldn’t.

I mostly

                                              still love him.

                                }




<<

                                I tell you the truth. 

                                I want to see
what no one else sees. 


I want to see what you see. 

I don’t care if you die before me. 

I want to see something 

and tell you what it feels like.

                                                                                                I want to tell you.



Don’t be afraid to let your body die.   


                                My body died on a moon 
                                                                 volcanic radiation like your body
                                                an unlikely destination for 
                                                                                                                                 life.

Like my womb. Like your body.

                                                                          >> 




{{ Don’t be afraid of 
your deaths. }}

Holyplanets, stars & you, dear Algol, dear Asteria

But here is the birth of a new story.
Let me tell it to you: 
Once there was a body made

by the rings of Saturn, a star separated
into two stars, genderless, shapeless
architecture, a thing, the thing,

a house, holy, holier than two
because one is the only

number that can be holy

but now two, the architect said, here

let them find each other
even if it takes a millennia—
all of time, sideways and backwards

;;;;;

And eventually the star, the two 
disembodied stars, find each other

as humans
with matching thunderstorms inside, beachmoon 
smoke and salt instead of bones

binding them together in death, afterdeath 
and beforedeath

and the sun is out like a swan’s broken neck
and a car alarm is going off
and they are walking down a street somewhere
and sometimes they are smiling

and they aren’t perfect but they are perfect 
and this moment in time is perfect
and it is the thing that will matter

in all of time even when their bodies
rot even when their bodies are full of rage
as if rage is the only thing

to fill them up, like only left pieces of rib.

;;;;;

And in another space of time, their bodies are being made 
and split apart over and over and over again

and Saturn’s rings spin and dance purplesilver, a thing in space, 
nothing more beautiful

and one of the stars says, I do not separate 
you from me:

first feast, a ceiling fan circling for eternity

 &

God and their angels, swans with broken necks

               learn how to dance every dance.

;;;;;

There is a thunderstorm when the two stars
kiss, a poem whose infrastructure is a body—

your body, one star says, before I knew it was yours,
our bodies in Scorpio’s moons.

If bodies are lines, eternal beasts lit like stars,
then my body is yours,

so say a prayer

because I’ve always loved you—
I’ve had no choice

once the first prayer was born,
spoken as a monument that stopped our bodies
in time, along with all the other bodies

and stars before us
lost in a cemetery, their energies and ours
locked in a timeless

architect’s dream. 

Under my architecture, you rise like a demon 
once lost but now found, simmering
twilight leaking—

and what is the difference between demons 
and angels?

None I tell you.
It was just a story some humans 
told, wrote down like a breeze,

like poison wafting till turned.

---

Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. Joanna is the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), The Gods Are Dead (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015)  Marys of the Sea (The Operating System, 2017), Xenos (Agape Editions, 2016), Sexting Ghosts (Unknown Press, 2018), No(body) (Madhouse Press, 2019), and #Survivor (The Operating System, 2020). They are the editor of A Shadow Map: Writing By Survivors of Sexual Assault (CCM, 2017), and received a MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Joanna is also the founder of Yes, Poetry, as well as the senior managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine.

earworm

The speaker of this poem is in a tizzy in a huffy & a 1/2, she’s feeling 
down on her luck. how disparate, how desperate. I love her, I would 
do anything for her survival. I am her, I would do anything for her
survival. It isn’t trick, or form: the reiteration is for resonance, 
affirmation; repetition is for learning, comprehension. you’ll sing 
the hook for years, you’ll come to love the uncontainable earworm.

still life, life still

weep, sow     harvest rain soaks the ceiling, weighted in ways 
unbeknownst to me — this grief can’t possibly be mine alone. still life, 
life still, collapsing of scenes. it all comes crashing, 730am & the dormant 
mold spores make known their estate, eat all the wood has to offer. 
I digress, resist autobiography. I once lived w/ no resentments, figs 
from out front, chilled summer soups. even the bleeding was romantic, 
in that mundane way: slicing an edgeless finger timeless bluevein, water 
& windowpanes, rolling off etc. it stung more than it hurt. a grudgeless
life looked good on you, he tells me, looking at old pictures.

potluck, music we loved as teenagers, 2019

 

---

S*an D. Henry-Smith is an artist and writer working primarily in poetry, photography and performance, engaging Black experimentalisms and collaborative practices. You can find their words, images, and book projects at seanhenrysmith.com.

ABSCISSION THEORY

            “n. – 1. (botany) The normal shedding of a senescent plant part or organ (e.g. old leaf or ripe fruit) 2. (zoology) The intentional separation of a body part, such as the separation of a tail or autotomy, usually as a protective evading mechanism against predators…”

i understood trees in mid October,
the way the cello prayed & wove itself through leaves,
melody a critique of shadows outlined
in each vein drawing themselves in creases
as breeze would rend their touching edges—

i scraped myself awake
to find sidewalks littered
with a moving day, curtains drawn open,
clouds inching from chapped mouths,
light jackets, loose-leaf trampled flat on concrete.
a month beckoned & smiled for me,
shrugged, walked along,
glanced back every so often.

i have read those theorists
who pour my molten
body into a mold on the cedar shelf
with an amethyst geode & trash morsels
painted into a muffled story—stale crumbs
on a public floor. coils of jargon:                                                                                         

stamped belts, shower rods,
sweatshirts around safety faucets—
my folded shoulders, dry eyes
fixed on black-speckled laminate,
“quiet rooms,” hallways as peer-reviewed
analysis, distant collections of ink
blurred by snow, tinted breath,
watching my mother die before she knew me.
i understood the way soft necks
adhered to wood stalk
& drank light to their death—
red sandstone statements, fibrous phrases
drifting to earth as embers fall after the
short shout of combustion— 

if my mother worried tenderly & does not now,
her hands worry still over what a misaligned fork
& brown napkin suggest.
my hands are bent to break the surface
of a salty gulf; they worry over shadows
cast about the curves in my leaves
& sentences scrawled over dirty tomes thrown
from tongues behind nameplates—
they trace the atonal grain
in the wood of a New Jersey bar, counter carved
with grooves of all the selves that had stopped there,
intricate tattoos drawn on a squirming corpse
rolled down a hot rural hill,
forgotten.

i smell myself as a term on the breath
of the world, & my infant head she let rest in her palm
(it was washed & nothing, but she held it)—
sutures now fused, a skull round & tossed
from thinker to thought to thinker
onto the pulp of what i understood in mid October
all to make neat piles,
give a proper address
to my trembling abscission
on the side of the road.

 

EASTER SUNDAY

i

A red undercloak
peeks from beneath your dress
as you wish for a river
to birth into. A hole
    to sleep in. Her hand
vibrates at the cusp
                of your breast & the juice
wears a gorge
in your neck,
marks you
like the bird’s
                pecking post—
                a thousand strokes   
    in intimate rows—

 ii

             On the edge
             of the copse
you collect rotten
wood, tear a sleeve open
     on exposed bone. Soon
a lung bursts
with invasive berries. You exhale
a fluttering red hem.
              She opens her
hands to catch what comes
from your wrist:
the watercolor study
of a Monarch,
wings held in four fixed positions—
black tape stripped
from the frame. You think
nothing will sate her. You hold
a skirt or two above
your knees & wade.

TRANSITION AS MOURNING AS A HOUSE TO DECOMPOSE IN

Outside this dead wilderness, you keep stones
under the wall of eyes & melt your loss
before it. You lift an image from your favorite
song & recite the shape in your new voice
until you sound like a hay meter wailing
in miles & miles of grass.

You never trust doctors. You know
why—the strange gust of wind
pushing the spines of several mice
against your doorjamb—the look
on your mother’s face
when they strapped her down
by the wrists—the dried yellow
sweet clover you keep in a box on the top shelf
of your closet, like a disused uniform
you imagine yourself buried in. Each time

you touch the stem it loses a leaf
or two. You’d keep them 
if you could, but some dying is good 
to forget—the look on your mother’s 
face when they strapped her
down by the wrists. The yellow notes 
she wrote to remember 
the names of everyday
objects. For a long while you wouldn’t trust

your own tongue. You were swallowing
things you should’ve coughed into a container. 
You were using patterns to describe yourself 
as if you’d been born tattooed
with a fucked-up blueprint. But really
there were vines fighting their way
through the walls to find you, to whisper
new visions of the act of existing
within a structure. This was how you began

to know the complex stillness of decay—
the way death-feeding creatures celebrate
a discarded carcass, press themselves
against each other—a touch born 
of the food of death.

---

Elliot Rose Winter is a trans, nonbinary writer from New Jersey, currently living in Tempe, AZ. They are an MFA candidate in Poetry at Arizona State University, and a recipient of a Global Fellowship from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. They love animals, food, and heavy metal.