Category: Issue #20

Group Hug!

(I.)
One of those nights two of us walking back home so drunk
from a party, a slurred chorus rolling off our twisted tongues
as we rediscovered God. The laughter a wind roiling
as you pointed how strange how funny it was. How
did I not know it was the filter I was lighting up?
The dried tobacco must have flaked in my mouth at least.
How did I not know? Something is wrong with this cig I was
saying. Why is it not lighting? I showed you. We were so drunk
and the sky was an alien child’s strange wide many-eyed
colossus face. God’s we thought. It was night and the face was
watching us so of course we could see it. Those many eyes
that watch us that never stop watching even as the farther
watchgods switch places. Even as the cursed lovers that rarely
ever touch (day and night) beyond a liminal exchange
at the end of the shifts of their liege gods (moon and sun) flood
one the other full force equal in revenge because of all
they have endured keeping to themselves all that longing day long!

(Interlude)
We look up the twinkling face and it stretched the heavens.
We raise our hands to heaven Child we say your face is heaven.

(II.)
Squinted twinkling bright we saw those tiny eyes of childhood.
How ever would we not recognise it? We were so young
again so happy again so drunk the alcohol a new
love in our eyes a wonder a new joy in our mouths.
We wanted to say it just how it was. We wanted to say
we see you true god we hail you lonely child throwing tantrums.
Would you like a hug? It was the mood and it was the weather.
The night’s hand a cold palm warm in the core as it cupped us.
Curious. So wonder lost could return? it asked. I thought
you would never get it back. Embraced us the god. Pleased so so
pleased it was. Bewondered by the quick flush of our fleeting lives—

(Outro)
Us calloused new adults God was hugging us
and we were so drunk and it was all love.

 

Egbiameje Omole is a poet, performance artist, and editor, working from Ibadan, Nigeria. Egbiameje serves as a poetry acquiring editor at FIYAH. They’ve had their poems published in ANMLY, Body Fluids, Delicate Friend, New Culture, Eye to the Telescope, and elsewhere. They choose laughter.

introduction to t.r. san’s self &/or body &/or craft &/or hypocrisy

i am beautifully neutered 
green brat vertebrate 
i have hydrophobic bones 
refusing low-tide sex pheromones
& algae bridehood, rock palace
i feel like moonrot, usually
i also feel like hot feathers
when i falsely still this body
my politics include
not mythologizing my[]self
so i keep mythologizing
my anatomy instead
i have been substellar object
at magical realist night club
i have been biggest nightingale
& red dwarf, smallest star, pants off
in love with earth
i feel ashamed for abusing my lungs
so much in my poems
i really am sorry
you just happened to be
both voice & water
& anger diluted, forced to symbol
i can’t help it
i hold obfuscation poetics 
between my teeth, wench weapon
in the very same breath 
i overuse mouth as a verb
swallowing nod to lungs
i am officiating an ongoing divorce
the ceremonious split between
my[]self & body, protruding
blank space in reflexive
meant to be whole
my language is no bridge
& i feel like no bridge
i perform
similes in sonic polysemy
to try to cement my real
winged flesh, multi-facet

& then i fail, am failing
it’s always hard not to make 
of myself many sutured analogies

 

t.r. san is a transsexual lesbian lover, shrinking space, public construction site, & many other things.

To My Sister

Noona, sister, wake up, it’s so early this morning, look how I got too caught up in my own shit to get to sleep. I had that dream again, where all your friends were there and we made our way home. Now we awake, and now we are home, Buffalo Grove, Illinois, 2011, timestamp the letters and internet IM’s sailing across the flat midwest. Our house overlooks a major local highway, and all I see are white walls and green and coyotes, snow and the orthogonal road. I wish I could run away, but I know you’ll always love me, you tell me don’t, please, stay here. I sleep upstairs, and downstairs, you seem, to me, as unhappy as ever that I have decided to remain, shouting at our father, and our mother shuts the new white cabinets and hits my hands and tells me to stop my own complaints.

When I’m 19 years old, one day we’re in your apartment with the shades half-drawn, and you tell me that I shouldn’t call you noona anymore, it’s awkward, because we’re usually amongst her friends, they call her Ella, we’re not children anymore, we have our own names. You’re frowning, and I look out towards the train station, and it’s almost raining on those suitcases and umbrellas and jackets. When I’m on a walk later, a tiny bay unfurls beside me, Mission Bay, and last year, I passed San Francisco commuting to dates and sex at Berkeley from across the bay at Stanford time after time, but that hasn’t really been happening lately, well, so I avert my stride on a quick one and go back to your building and forget about it. It’s almost your 25th birthday, and your shoe rack tells me that your five additional years of age are hard won, but you triumph continually, school career and money, and when you ask me which photograph print should be hung up in your bedroom, I swipe through options and pick a rather tall and narrow picture, the haziest one with silhouettes and shadows and big splotches of colored lights, red and yellow, so you can just barely make out a protest slash riot, because I never want you to forget that life has only triumphed for a handspan’s width of time, maybe as thick as my thumb, and you never want me to forget the same thing. But the truth is, I’m busy carrying on in the complete un-empathy of blissful release, even more selfish than what these songs would have you believe: because it’s a pandemic, but I’m still endangering our family by sneaking out to have sex with queer strangers without masks in the cold hours of the night or morning while living in your apartment that summer. When I feel ill one day, I tell you the omitted truth, and you and your boyfriend are scared, angry, tearful, worried for our safety. We sleep and wait, hoping to test negative for the virus.

I keep breaking dad’s watches. Our parents still live in the same house we grew up in. He puts them each in my hand, a central quarterly fiscal event, and says that this one works fine, he’s worn it for a year, take care of it. I have squandered the second hand ticks and all the books I’ve bought that I know I’ll never read, I’ve probably read as many books as I’ve broken timepieces and told our father that the watches seem fragile, as he notes that I’m the only one breaking them. A year ago and you’re telling me that poetry doesn’t resonate with you, and I rush to think there must be some poem I must write, hearing those words, just those.

---

When I enter the afterlife, I’m a sophomore, it’s 2019, and I have never remembered the date. Mallory is the friend, a quasi-sibling, she grabs me outside her lab building after I call her and walk over and tell her that I fell from the ceiling as my belt broke in half. It’s dark, and I am transparent and the slim fabric next to the jacket zipper cauterizes some leftover chest pain as the forearm bones wrap around and beg me not to leave. She cries, but I can’t, and I think about how there’s someone out there asking where all the ducks in Central Park go in the winter.

While assembling friends, Mallory calls you. Your eyes look at me through swollen lids. Your boyfriend drove you all the way from SF to Stanford, it’s far to Palo Alto, and I wish that you didn’t have to go to all that trouble to witness my arrival into the afterlife. My freshman-year best friend Nate drives me to hospital. I enter with only one other person, so you come, and I decide to sleep in the emergency room for a while.

You and your boyfriend come to see me every day in the San Jose behavioral hospital. I almost would rather you didn’t, but visiting time is the only non-monotony, and I think standing here, in this concrete-laden courtyard, surrounded by all the reinforced glass windows and a psychiatrist explaining the new drug to your pursed lips, feels better but I suspect that this is wasting your time, that all our time can’t be given back, even if I want to make it up later, the time and place matters, like train track lights and sleep.

---

Once, I am almost ejected from Stanford campus because I represent a potential threat to myself, the residence dean tells me so from across a desk, I want to file down the wooden corners of his office and vandalize the walls in orange or warm blue. Noona makes her way to campus again, and we convene and throw our voices at each other about studying and schoolwork. I tell her I haven’t done shit this year, fuck, I haven’t done shit for the past few years, and if I don’t get shit done now, it doesn’t feel so different to me. Once, I stopped calling my sister that childhood Korean term for older sister, and ever since, it’s been easy to want to keep fighting, to preserve our childhood quibbles. I don’t like how things change, and I can’t figure out why I throw myself at breakneck speed at every potentiality, when I find myself missing every past, too, yearning for other lives, because I always compare the tragedies of midwest souls, each pair always somehow bound together. We are 5 and 10 years old, and Ella and I throw game controllers at each other in the car parked by the dry powdered ground, somewhere traveling far, never knowing where we were going, never needing to know anything at all.

 

Place-Poem, Quasi-Sestina

after “Step” by Vampire Weekend

I once wrote a sestina in the peninsula, near San Francisco,
to talk about impermanence and teenage relationships. The city wasn’t Berkeley,
but it, too, was an ancient grave one digs up over again, near Palo Alto,
on a day when it was too rainy to ride that shaky bicycle up Potrero Hill
and the months when a loving hand was only offered from over in Sunnyvale —
that time I knew I was in love with an ex-girlfriend from Fremont

and Oakland seemed like a far-off memory to me. It was the lonely island Alameda
that made me think about Chicago, and then, I was suddenly there, in Hyde Park,
in the Jay Som t-shirt, in the cloud-stuck afterlife. My hometown, Buffalo Grove,
was only an hour away, and even though I hadn’t even met you yet, it was New York City
that I was missing, I was in California but it was E 180th station and the Bronx Zoo
that appeared in dreams, I’d wake up talking about a chain-link fence cast in Poughkeepsie

that told me of your future love, days after the uncaring ex-girlfriend from Oak Brook
shrugged me off her shoulder for the last time. You were the future, somehow Illinois-
bound, even though you’ve never even been there. Your spirit came to me from Rochester,
haunted songs that arrived in our lives in tandem, and your family’s native Puerto Rico
showed up at the bottom of the album cover for Red Burns, and suddenly, Seoul
appeared before me, too, and reminded me I couldn’t be old after all, it was Suwon

that was my mother’s birth-city, and somewhere off in current-day North Korea
was my father’s father’s birthplace. For my family, Chicago
feels modern. How long have I really lived? I imagine taking you to see Wicker Park
and pointing out all the uncaring hipsters I see my past selves in, and at Thalia Hall
someday you could tell me you’d rather not make out while the band from Leesburg, Virginia
played onstage. These days, we’re drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes with Amsterdam

Shag tobacco, and I always wonder, what past lives did the moon dictate for you? Sagittarius
could be a place/palace in your mind, and I could guess the coordinates — Prague,
for my own topology, feels appropriate, and it’s where I think the astronomical clock tower
would make a good place for us to sit nightly and point somewhere in the sky, call it Venus.
And someday, we’d say goodnight and end up in Budapest
in the morning, train-stopped, and we’d be just a little bit older. Heading off to the Danube,

I’d wonder if we have to wait so long to feel time complete its orbit around us. Brooklyn
will have blessed us by then (Red Burns call the place Medina
because it’s holy) and when we stay up late at night on the phone, the Hudson
speaks through us, in harmony, two voices, miles apart in the same city. In Jerusalem
next year, the secrets of the psalms will stay tongue-tied, but at the corner of Kosciuszko
and Broadway, your poem will speak to me, remind me by the grace of San Jose

I’m still alive, loved by the lunar secrets you tell me you’re running out of. In Prague,
I told the Vltava I was looking for a tender heart. I confessed my love to you in Brooklyn,
watched you walk away to Kosciuszko station. You turned around and pointed to the moon.

 

Young Fenimore Lee (they/them) is a Korean-American kid, poet, and music journalist residing in Athens, OH whose work has appeared in DIALOGIST, Entropy, Existere, and filling Station. Indie rock, emo, post-hardcore, and other music genres are important influences in their writing. They received a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from The New School. They are currently pursuing a PhD at Ohio University.

the (dead)name speaks

What my girl will never see is her mother
digging in the night, screaming like a horse 
about to be shot as she unearths my tomb.

Only I am witness to my own desecration: 
her mother holding herself over my grave, 
all my ashes dried jagged in her open mouth.

 

February Spikener (she/they) is a Black femme poet from Detroit currently residing in Chicago and is an MFA candidate at Randolph College. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Muzzle Magazine, Poet Lore, So to Speak: feminist journal of language and art, among others. Ever inspired by their loved ones, their poems reflect how they navigate through the world and what it means to love and be loved. She believes that love is and has always been the answer and that the mastery of love is a form of survival.

On Sara Moulton

What is it about watching white women teach me to cook? On nights while Anna works I watch them. Alison Roman makes a chicken caesar wrap. Carla Lalli Music makes a chicken caesar wrap. Molly Baz makes a chicken caesar sandwich. I’m probably never going to make any of these elaborate hand-held foods, but I watch standing at the counter doing mundane chores, wiping things, drying things, and I watch standing at the dining room table folding load after load after load of laundry. Two enormous stacks of dishtowels, a number of piles for each person in the house: one for pants, one for shirts, one for underwear. The eight-seater table has become a landscape of stacks. Anna likes to work nights. She started when she was pregnant with our first, and it’s how we learned to co-exist, all that space. When she is on nights I sleep propped up by all four of our pillows. As a kid, I watched women cook, too. I liked Rachael Ray, her earnestness, the way the ingredients were things my mother would have had in the house. 30 Minute Meals, which aired the year I was in the eighth grade, featured a frenzied series of actions: running to the cupboard for bags of pasta or grains, patting dry meat, opening giant cans. She talked fast, too, in an almost pressured way, but friendly, too. She reminded me of a younger, kinder version of my mother making dinner. I liked that my mother, who grew up in a home with no good cooks and not enough money, could carry on a lively conversation while performing all of the kitchen’s actions. Making dinner every day for so many people had made a cook out of her. She poured vegetable oil and vinegar and a packet of dressing mix into a little bottle and shook it vigorously. She cut onion into bits with a little steak knife. She breaded chicken cutlet after chicken cutlet after chicken cutlet and the whole time, she talked.

As a teenager, I watched Sara Moulton because she was so smart about food, and even though she often made accessible dishes on her shows, especially on Sara’s Secrets, she had worked in restaurants and as a recipe developer and editor for Gourmet, so she could explain why she did the things she did, and what was important to spend time and money on. My mother treated food television as background fodder, something that was on but only half paid attention to. I learned from her that when you do the work of the home, you listen to the work of the home.

The house in which I grew up was impossibly loud: my mother was loud, my five siblings were loud, our dogs were loud. First we were in a very small home, the downstairs of a duplex in which our bodies were always on top of each other, sitting in front of the window A/C in the living room eating firecracker popsicles, and then we were in a much larger, more echoey home, my mother’s yelling reverberating off every wall. She would yell between two and four names, on average, before saying the one she’d originally meant to shout.

I liked that the women on television, the women teaching us to cook, talking to us while we did chores, were not yelling. They never cursed or demanded anything of me. Their gentle suggestions were offered with something I suppose I mistook for love.

I love my mother, and as I’ve gotten older and had my own family I understand her so much more, but I admittedly spent my youth looking for other mothers, for women who would talk calmly to me, who had warm faces.

I spend a good deal of time trying to remember if wanted children when I was a young child. I can’t figure it out. When did that desire come in? There is no remembered time in which my mother wasn’t mothering at least one child other than me. Feeding us took up an enormous amount of her time. My mother did not work outside the home, and so we were the work of her life. She never pressured me to have children. Nobody wants or expects queers to do it. I didn’t know I was a queer child. I didn’t know what that was. All I knew was, whatever my mother had, this life of cooking and cleaning, it didn’t seem like something I was supposed to want, supposed to get.

Sara Moulton’s debut cookbook is the first one I remember seeing on the shelf at Barnes & Noble. On the cover of Sara Moulton Cooks at Home she wears a modest blue scoop-neck shirt and an orange apron.

The apron is emblazoned with the logo for her show: sara’s secrets, it says, humbly, in lowercase blocky print.

On Cooking Live, Sara Moulton wears chef’s coats. They look trim and professional on her small, blond body: she looks like a seasoned athlete, the kitchen her playing field. Her moves are planned out. She has great bangs. Not many clips from this show remain on the internet, but when I watch them as a thirty-six year old man, I notice things I didn’t remember but am certain I observed, integrated, as a child: the big rolled up sleeves on her blue chef’s coat, her sporty ponytail, the natural, if present at all, makeup on her face.

I didn’t know people could transition until I was seventeen years old. I know it’s weird, because I grew up in New Jersey, and could see the New York City skyline on my way to high school, down Route 17, but it just wasn’t something I’d ever heard of until I was getting ready to go to college. Lesbian was as far as queer went in my parochial high school. So when I looked for models of what kind of adult I could be, I looked for women with haircuts like Moulton, women who, because of their professions, had to wear sensible shoes at all times.

Whether someone was, or is, actually gay, that doesn’t matter. It was about finding models of success whose costumes looked like something I wouldn’t rather die than wear.

In her Cooking Live episode Burgers, Moulton speaks authoritatively but casually about ground lamb, an ingredient many American home cooks twenty years ago might have found unusual. She explains how to ask a butcher for a better grind, but acknowledges that interacting with a butcher isn’t something most of us can do, bound to the supermarket as we are.

She speaks in relatable aphorisms. Take it home, season it, cook it right up, you’re in business.

Sara Moulton is a good teacher. She knows how to explain techniques and ingredients in a way that beginners and more seasoned cooks would understand. If she thinks an ingredient might not be at a supermarket, she tells you where to get it. In a 55 minute episode, she makes three different burgers: a lamb burger served in a pita, a chili cheeseburger, and a tuna burger.

Like my mother, I have learned that the most likely successes in the kitchen, when you’re cooking for your family, are slight variations on things they already like. Thus, something that looks like a beef cheeseburger, that is called a burger, is almost guaranteed to work.

Sitting at a table with three gigantic dressed burgers and a modest glass of wine, Sara Moulton concludes the episode by answering questions from fans.

This is where Moulton, like any great teacher, shines: responding to these inquiries with care and automaticity. She still does this today: on Christopher Kimball’s podcast Milk Street Radio, Moulton joins Kimball in a weekly Q&A segments. Listeners call in with all kinds of questions, but the ones I like best are from people trying to reconstruct family recipes. The callers described what a cake looked and tasted like, and Moulton and Kimball offer advice on resurrecting a dormant, grandmotherly joy.

In one episode, a caller named Jerry from Vermont describes his family’s annual viewing of the 1983 made for TV holiday film The Gift of Love. In one scene, Jerry relates, Angela Lansbury’s character proclaims that she is going to make her famous burnt orange cake. What could that be?

Wow, Moulton says. I’ve never heard of this before, though it sounds absolutely wonderful. Though Christopher Kimball says he believes the burnt orange refers to the color, and he may be actively googling while he relates this fact, Moulton seems delighted by the question and its ascendant possibilities, and on the spot invents a dreamed-up treat: I envision, she says, a wonderful orange cake that you then pour a dark caramel syrup over, and just let it infuse.

Jerry likes that idea, he says.

Nobody transcribes these episodes, so I don’t know how to spell the question-asker’s name. I suppose I’ve chosen Jerry with a J to distance him from Gerry with a G, my father, who rarely prepared food for the family, though, on the rare occasions he did, he was quite skilled in the kitchen.

In a 2022 interview with Benjamin Kemper, Moulton is asked about the gender divide in cooking—those who light things on fire (Emeril Lagasse, Bobby Flay), vs. those who help Mom get dinner on the table, Moulton answers flatly on the dynamics of early cable food television:

They didn’t really want women at Food Network.

Cooking Live ran for over 1,200 episodes. In her next show, Sara’s Secrets, which ran for just three years, Moulton dresses differently. She wears what my stay-at-home mother wore: basic slacks and workmanlike long-sleeve tee shirts, tight on the whole body, covered by a plain aprons. She is presented, then, as a regular person, not a professional, cooking on a homey set in front of some windows. There’s something more feminine about her presentation here, though I am not sure feminine is the right word, and I don’t consider Moulton to be in a certain category among hot white woman television chefs—Claire Robinson of 5 Ingredient Fix, Katie Lee of The Kitchen and Beach Bites with Katie Lee—all, perhaps, Nigella Lawson derivatives in their own ways. The long-sleeve tees, though, lack the gender ambiguity of a loose-fitting chef’s apron. Of all the items of clothing in the world, it was a tight girls’/women’s tee shirt that gave me the most trouble growing up.

In the Kemper interview, Moulton recalls cooking her first meal on a solo television spot. Cooking on one’s own is markedly different from cooking with a host, she tells Kemper.

For my pilot I cooked fish meunière and asparagus—and never once smiled.

Don’t smile until Christmas, the popular teaching adage goes.

Hi, I said on my first day teaching high school. I’m Ms. McIlraith.

Of course I could not help it—I smiled at my students.

We’ll have you out by November, someone said from the back of the room.

 

Krys Malcolm Belc is the author of The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood (Counterpoint 2021) and the flash essay collection In Transit (The Cupboard Pamphlet). He is the memoir editor of Split Lip Magazine and the Edelstein-Keller Writer-in-Residence at the University of Minnesota. Krys lives in St. Paul with his partner and their four young children and is working on a very, very long essay about food.

cultivar

 

---

¹ the same structure, project
   & projected. every fault
   needed a name, a treat[ise],
   in/corporation. we learned
   what makes the body a lie
   & not a body, recognized
   their gaze staring out of us,
   & it was the first time we
   realized we [were] wanted.

² we built a new language
   from dial-tones, we held
   each other to our ears
   & laughed & laughed
   & answered, our voices
   mistaken for silence by
   everybody except us.

³ our bodies were born[e] in[to]
   exile, our mothers’ daughters.

⁴ weathering their ord[i]nances, we
   ached for lexicons free[d] of hurt,
   we carved bombshells into calling-
   bells, prayer-flags, wind-chimes
   that caught the breeze & brought it
   to us as sutras, we listened, we
   built, we failed & failed & failed.

⁵ we knew we were kept things,
   learned how to pick our names
   like locks, held them as secrets
   meant to be shouted, treasured
   salvage, strange & idiosyncratic.

⁶ like every girl, we were sculpted
   hollow as any god. we followed
   hunger, daisy-chained into the sun
   -showers & pressed ourselves into
   each other’s hands, each lingering
   touch leaving fingerprints we took
   as permission we could never give
   ourselves to be changed, to become
   defaced monuments to our fathers.

⁷ the moment we entered their
   fantasies, we knew what they
   wanted, we gathered fabric,
   fashioned ourselves silhouettes
   from their narratives to survive.
   always we were craved, spent,
   discarded. we saw it then, mirror
   -close, their curiosity, soured.

⁸ we made camp in the diegetic
   ruins, listened to the brick’s
   murmurs rasp against our
   fingertips, tore every last syn-
   tactic structure into ribbons.
   we knit them into blankets,
   warded off the clinic’s lingering
   shadow. in the morning we
   were awake, unnamed, still
   allowed to be anything.

⁹ they too had poets, they twisted
   our forms into synecdoche, pulp,
   the first jokes to be cut into teeth;
   our first names were from their
   dialect[ics], our mother tongues.

¹⁰ some of us longed to be human,
    combed through manuals in hopes
    of becoming legible, let them write
    us into case studies & declare it
    medicine, claiming we could only
    ever be stitched things, dolled up
    for men who picked up scalpels
    and called themselves surgeons.

¹¹ we severed the old logic, its unbroken
    lines, continued traditions without our
    mothers. they found the ruined terraces
    of our births and named us barren, not
    knowing we grew homes that weren’t
    farmlands, that we could raise daughters
    without asking them to wear our names.

 

iris nguyễn (they/she/chị/em) is a transfem poet living in New Brunswick. She found a loose thread on her body and hasn’t stopped pulling since. They can be found at ih-cn.carrd.co or @acensusofstars on Twitter. 

CONGRESSIONAL INCEPTION MEETS TOURNAMENT OF CHAMPIONS

      1.

kiss vampire red lips on the back of the bus               nyx shade copenhagen

elegantly discuss DEMOCRATIC BACKSLIDING & tell the boy you love him right when he looks up the Washington Post. quote “democracy dies in darkness” against the expanse of his skin. kiss his neck. fall in love. wear a suit to

WAKE UP                              at six in the morning & trauma dump for a ballot

[HIGH SCHOOL SPEECH AND DEBATE is an academic activity typically available to students. Similar to athletic sports, speech and debate activities are challenging, competitive in nature, and require regular practice, coaching, dedication, and hard work.]

WAIT. tell me again baby what does it mean to be human & i am kissing you on the back of the bus (kissing like a prayer :: hope for a better time) WE WIN the tournament we win the war we win what it means

WAKE UP                              at seven in the morning & roleplay congressional speakers

pretend they don’t make your life a living hell (you are queer & brown & chronically-in-pain & this doesn’t matter at AIA ARIZONA STATE TOURNAMENT but it does in the real world where your competitors turn against you the minute the round is over & bite down into your insecurities)

WAIT. tell me again baby what does it mean to lose & i am kissing my own tournament lipstick of your cracked lips & praying to gods i don’t believe in to make this work &

WAIT. tell me again about SOKO NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION baby tell me the world’s ending when we’re stuck in highschool i want to annotate books in the margins of what it means to love & WAIT. tell me again about HARVARD NATIONAL DEBATE TOURNAMENT where i kissed you until i couldn’t breathe & i became the monster congressional debater i feared i’d become

WAIT. tell me again baby when you realized this was it & i am kissing you across the knowingness that we are going to be nothing // be swallowheart swallowtail & blood across my body & a COUNTERPLAN for a policy we can’t endorse because it’ll kill us all.

      2.

[welcome to WINTER TROPHY DIVISION ONE where i watch you win congressional debate. monster. my love]

WAIT. remember when i told you what happened the last time this happened. congressional inception. congressional debate meets child predator meets i’m fucking sorry you’re banned from the TOURNAMENT OF CHAMPIONS

WAIT. baby i don’t want to become that monster (lines of coke running down my nose. i debate college policy. i follow the pipeline)

WAIT. baby i’m begging you to stay here. stay mine baby i remember when Vedh Shetty pretended they were queer so that they could take advantage of the circuit i remember when Jay Shapiro was banned from the tournament of champions because he stalked a freshman i remember when my debate captain told me that my gender would never be valid unless i was a good debater

WAIT. come on baby remember that time i saw you in ARIZONA DISTRICT QUALIFIER winning extemporaneous speaking you looked beautiful under that light you looked like the monster we both knew we were

[WELCOME to high school speech & debate, where all kids go to die & drown & where i face sexism comments like THE LENGTH OF YOUR BLAZER DISTRACTS FROM YOUR ARGUMENTATION & i’m sorry but your voice is too shrill for debate. maybe try dying instead.]

WAIT. maybe this is the end of the story. maybe we repeat over & over again. maybe we pretend we’re not the monster this time. maybe we do lines & take shots & pretend we’re good enough. maybe HIGH SCHOOL SPEECH & DEBATE rots us whole & spits us back out

 

arushi (aera) rege is a queer, chronically in pain, Indian-American poet in senior year in high school. They tweet occasionally @academic_core and face the perils of instagram @aeranem_26. Their chapbooks, exit wounds (no point of entry), and BROWN GIRL EPIPHANY, are forthcoming with Kith Books and fifth wheel press. They are the EIC of nightshade lit, Bus Talk, and Draupadi Interviews. You can find their website at arushiaerarege.carrd.co.