Russ Thorburn – Editor
Alex Vartan Gubbins – Editor
– – –
Issue 4
Robert Fanning
Fisher, Man
Man’s adrift at dawn in his blue canoe.
His line bobs near the pier.
On shore, a stray barks
at its long shadow on the sand.
Man lolls in half-sleep. Wave-laps
lull him. Toward him, a corpse
glides, splayed in a black suit.
At the bulk of this small dark
berg thunking his hull, Man wakes.
Out over the side of his boat, Man eyes
the pecked translucent blue of the dead man’s face,
his stiff hand trailing a ripnet
of bright green weeds.
From his mouth, minnows spill
like prayers. Man shudders at the eyes—
bulbous and wide to the sky—but he glows too.
This is his life-fish.
Wobbling, Man reels, bending
to slip bare arms around the corpse,
lifts him into the boat.
A veil of mist. Man
hoists the dripping corpse
onto his shoulders. Then drags his catch
like some drowned groom
onto the beach.
Two Drifters
Corpse and Man float on their backs
in bed, drifting on sleep's reedy river.
One breathes. A blessing of air,
a breeze enters, caressing the flesh
of dead and living alike. Man dreams—
Corpse sinks in fragments: his torso and limbs
broken stones, ruins strewn
on red sheets. A riverbed. Dreaming, Man
sings: I'm crossing you in style someday.
Corpse floats toward the surface light of
Man's mouth. Wherever you're going,
I'm going your way. For a moment,
they harmonize. Come sunrise,
eyeless, fishpecked: Corpse reassembles and dies.
There's such a lot of world to see. And so to realize
the day: Man wipes his eyes.
So Many Empty Shoes
Waking with a start, Man stumbles down
his dark hall to piss, his house littered
with all manner of empty shoes.
Whose shoes, whose shoes. Man mutters
to himself, falling into a layered heap
of loafers, boots, pumps, sneakers,
flip-flops. He clambers back across
the mountain of shoes to where Corpse lies
in his bed, Corpse now Man's father
and Man a boy again—frightened by thunder.
May I crawl inside with you? Man asks,
nudging his father, now Corpse again.
Corpse doesn't stir. Man turns, gazing
at the floor, where in each lightning flash
he sees no shoes, though his feet are sore.
Robert Fanning (he/him/his) is the author of four-full length poetry collections: Severance (Salmon Poetry 2019), Our Sudden Museum, (Salmon Poetry 2017), American Prophet (Marick Press 2009), and The Seed Thieves (Marick Press 2006) as well as two chapbooks, Sheet Music (Three Bee Press 2018) and Old Bright Wheel (The Ledge Press 2002). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Atlanta Review, The Cortland Review, Rattle, Waxwing, failbetter and many other journals. He lives in Mt. Pleasant, MI.
Denise Sedman
The Blue Marble
My sister stole a blue marble
from a Chinese Checker’s game,
glued it on the lid of a Popsicle-stick box,
Made one-word-sheets of
paper, tore them to pieces,
stuffed better-day dreams inside.
No one cares. Not one bit at all.
Go mumble to yourself,
look outside through bars,
watch Soap Operas all day,
make a gimp for your sister, but
don’t open a locked door.
When my sister said:
“I’m going to kill myself.”
Our father said:
“I don’t give a fuck. Kill yourself.
Get the fuck out of here.”
How the knife got back in the drawer
before she shimmied next to me in bed,
I don’t know,
but I died a hundred deaths. Your Husband Said … It didn’t happen
when there was a tsunami
in the Indian Ocean
Waves went above 40 feet
as this uncontrollable disaster
became your wake of devastation
Then you peed your pants
became rigid, disconnected
readied for an institution
He prays you’ll recover forever,
but it’ll happen again,
he’ll give you more chances
The Human Condition
RIP Anthony Bourdain
June 25, 1956 to June 8, 2018
It’s all about blood, organs, cruelty and decay;
danger, risking the dark, going to bed
with sweats, chills and vomits.
He wanted it all:
the cuts and burns on his hands and wrists,
ghoulish kitchen humor, the free food,
rigid nerve-shattering chaos;
the sheer weirdness of kitchen life;
a last stop for misfits,
the dreamers, crackpots, refugees,
and sociopaths; roasting bones,
searing fish, and simmering liquids;
the noise and clatter, the hiss and spray,
flames, smoke and steam, he said
it’s a life that grinds you down,
you’d think chefs would kill one another with regularity;
jam a boning knife into another cook’s rib cage,
or brain him with a meat mallet, but not dry age.
Denise Sedman is an award-winning poet from the Detroit area. Recent work has been featured in San Pedro River Review, New Verse News, and Gravel Literary. She’s included in the 2017 feminist anthology Nasty Women Poets by Lost Horse Press.
Ken Meisel
The Angel of Doo Wop
snaked up to me in a dive bar
somewhere down south,
and it placed my finger over the knob
that punched I Only Have Eyes for You –
by the Flamingos – so that I could hear
the echo of harmonic voices
lifting up and humming in the stars
over a swamp behind us,
and a lonesome woman, a blond,
gazed over into my eyes –
she was probably sensing
something real, some signal
from the heart
she felt, or remembered,
as millions of people go by
but, gazing into me, they all
disappeared from view
because, her eyes said to me,
I only have eyes for you.
And I leaned across the wooden
bar, gazed back into her
earth angel eyes, as if
telling her she would be
the only one I adore.
Then the Five Satins, In the Still
Of the Night, played –
a man in a corduroy coat
had shuffled over and pressed it to play,
and the echoes
of the glassware tinkling in the bar
pulsed like stars, like eyes
watching over us: over
our sad beauty, our
inescapable matter,
our nights in May when we
claim our love for one
another and, in the still
of the night, a man outdoors –
we could see him through
the glazed bar window –
stood rocking on the step
of an empty building
playing his exquisite saxophone
to that part of Being he,
himself, could never play –
except by and through
the sublime strobe lights
of God
flooding his horn
with all the incandescent light
that the stars and fate
are made of,
and the sad doo wop angel
leaned over to me,
drink in hand, and said,
you know Kant was correct
when he mumbled
beauty is the only finality here,
and the song on the juke box
was Come Softly to Me by the Fleetwoods,
and the girl’s voices,
silken across the mic,
thrilled me
until I was a mirror
somersaulting me back
to my own desire –
to the love songs
of winsome school girls
with scarlet ribbons –
and the angel pointed me
toward the infinite veils
of beauty that, in this bar,
because they are
from the other mansion
on the hill – that house
we can’t see but only feel
with the heart’s
espionage of poetry –
are absolutely
without equivocation,
without reflection,
without hesitation
born from that light
most glad of all,
and, because of that –
because they caress
and baptize us
with magic –
they’re everlasting.
The Caretaking Angels Encounter Me
This was on a foggy winter morning,
on the back streets of Venice Beach
where the meth addicts hid in messy
cars and did their business while the city
of Los Angeles ticketed their junked
cars for illegal parking. I was standing alone
under a strange tree, studying a lovely
yellow flower’s pointed tips while
the innocent children chased one another
across a play ground in a spirited game
of hide-and-seek or rag tag – it was difficult
to figure it out. Along Abbot Kinney Blvd
I watched a man watching a woman as
she passed quickly by him in her yoga pants –
she was chirping steadily on her cell phone
to someone – and some part of him
began his initiatory descent into hell
while the muscle men on the wild beach
lifted weights together, tugged and pushed
the barbells high up, into the paradisal
pacific sky so dense with cataclysmic clouds
marauding over the ocean’s lathering
concourse of waves, crashing to shore.
And men, dressed shabbily in drag,
abolished themselves to a kind of
farcical ornamentation because they
were dressed in littered fabric and large
black refuse bags, and when I gazed back
at them, before leaving the beach, I
thought they resembled a conjuration
of dumpsters. Some assemblage of plasma.
Along Sunset Avenue, I watched a boy
inhale the meth by himself like a feral
pariah dog. His gray fingers, cupping
the glass pipe with a sphere on its end
where, in the after burn, a smog escaped
just after he pulled his slanted mouth
away from it, burning him – seemingly –
in the rancid heat. And when I saw him
light it again, the crystal meth liquefied
and he moved his small yellow lighter
back and forth in front of it as he
inhaled the vapors until his eyes lids
dropped shut like a sickly salamander.
Keats, you know, wrote so dizzy,
mixing the senses especially in that poem
Ode On Melancholy where he asserts
“but when the melancholy fit shall fall
from heaven like a weeping cloud that
fosters the droop-headed flowers all,”
I think he might have been seeing this
boy addict crouching down in the shadows
along Sunset Avenue, near the fast
Pacific Highway, while delivery trucks
thundered past him in dust clouds. I think
I was unstoppable in my own lostness,
clothed in my own vapor when I found
myself adrift in the canals, mesmerized by
the brown saltine waters until it hit me
I was trapped, too, by the distinct boutique
of the abyss. And the boy’s smoking of
meth – like some initiatory departing
of himself into lost vaporization –
turned me obscure and transparent,
like I was just blue condensation, mist, fog.
Nothing left of me but drowsy salt-light.
And, kneeling beside a white flower in a pot,
I felt the structure of the world
bending me down, so fraught with all these
irreconcilable ideas and impregnable deities
without actual names and, while a woman
watered her plants and the silent canals
flowed memoryless – without interpretation –
I became remote, like the meth addict boy,
lost in translation, without prayer. On the
beach, far off, rain collected over the pier
and a police car rode silently up to it.
Another woman, a nightingale, talked
sporadic into her cell phone as I walked
up to the pier to drown myself in haze.
And the Caretaking Angels – those beings
sent to gather all of us poorly born
to flesh again – crouched in ranks along
the shore, readying one by one to cradle
me into their extended gentle arms:
I could see them in the wave’s bloom
and sprawl. And the rain fell silent,
like the hungry splintered spirits of us all.
My Horoscope in a Style of Harry Houdini
The horoscope read, “you wound up
in this situation because somebody
else wanted it.” So let me tell you how
to escape it: you lay the white cloth out
on a table by your bedside. Then you
mix the white powder you have dutifully
purchased from the dealer, in 20-40mg
of water, and, then, filter it through a
small balled up piece of cotton. Then,
take the needle and flick all the air in it
to the top and push it out. Then, with
the red headband in hand, tie it over
the top of your left arm so that a blue
vein bulges out enough to pierce it,
and insert the tip of the needle at just 20
degrees, and, then, inject the solution
into your vein there. In a moment you
will feel a wind to which no angel has
seen or felt. And then you will fall out.
Something in your mind will lose rule.
And then your evaporation, your escape
from all this, will be complete. Yes.
I have told you this to stir your notice –
says Houdini, unwrapping himself
from ropes. This is while I am alone
in a room in Detroit, the old heaters
rattling the building with steam.
And this is at a time when I am without
name or number; I am anonymous.
And to be anonymous is the way that
advantage seizes someone; rules them.
I watch Houdini walk straight up a wall.
The woman downstairs, intoxicated,
starts singing the song La Vie En Rose.
I believe, in her sorrow, she sings it to me.
Houdini sets a cup of tea for us. Says –
and I have captured you, in this drug
imagery, because to escape yourself
is to unravel time. And those who try it,
try it too often with drugs or gambling,
which is a foolish bid for bad blood.
And so you must push yourself in –
to this beer barrel of your body’s jar –
and then tie off where your arms rule
all your certainty, and then you must
insist that someone – your lover is best –
push and lock the top of the barrel over
you, and then secure it tight with nails.
You must be fixed inside a circumstance.
It’s only through fixity we discover a spirit
in us – which must be accessed to escape.
And then – inside the barrel’s prison –
you must see yourself in a vision where
the entrapped light in there is just a
lonely hobo encircling you. And then,
when terror strikes you like a match and
you’re lit aflame – a tree igniting itself as it
stops disputing all that aggresses against it –
you will inhabit the silence it takes to
achieve your horoscope’s benevolent
refrain; this escaping, of another’s wish
for you. And after you have fell to quiet,
which cannot come through injection
but rather, must come from a lawlessness
only a self-devotion provides to you,
let your hands rise up to the lid’s rim
and push it open, for it was always
just a cloud you thought was wooden,
such is the falsehood of all illusion –
just like this selfhood you’re alive in.
Only after will you know a true limit.
And when I blinked my eyes open to
find Houdini in there – in this room
where I believe he died in – all I saw
was a wall clock that read five o’clock,
a Monday. And the river was slate gray.
There was no sign of Mr. Houdini. Just
the sea gulls, wailing their usual song.
Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist, a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of eight books of poetry. His most recent books are: Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press: 2020) and Mortal Lullabies (FutureCycle Press: 2018). His new book, Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance, will be published in 2022 by Kelsay Books. He has recent work in Concho River Review, I-70 Review, San Pedro River Review, The Wayfarer and Rabid Oak.
Issue 3 – Latinx
Angela Trudell Vasquez
Arboretum
Frames Mexican bones
bodies who built railroads
with broken backs, raw hands.
An 1880 census conceals us
carving holes in steel cars,
for light, night air, hanging
hammocks for sleeping wives
to rock under galaxies.
One woman rides the continent
follows her man from Zacatecas.
Thighs astride her clacking motorbike.
Belly swings on a swing sways on the rails until…
Where they lived in box cars until kids were grown.
Where postpartum was unknown
and unbalanced women got sent back.
Where my grandma, her cousins
hid on the school hill to eat quesadillas.
Neighbors claim the old man rode with Pancho Villa
when men in suits leap off skyscrapers in New York.
Where my mom and tia pretend not to speak English
teasing shopkeepers on the square.
Where my dad ran cross country to escape
those fences, farmland until he broke –
a mahogany streak on burnt clay tracks.
Where my uncle strove through bullets in Vietnam
dragging his buddy to the helicopter.
And grandmothers trade apples for pears
fingertips and ashy wrists
dig out change at the market,
dole out tortillas during meals.
One hand on the open flame,
one hand flutters holds the blue house dress.
Where peony roots divide on their own
sparking an arboretum of sweet pink light.
Whose perfume carries itself uptown
to the courthouse in drafts with garlic and chile.
Where my sister came the day my grandfather was buried.
Water gushing graveside.
And summers meant volting between family houses.
Rhubarb sticks dipped in bone white sugar.
Rope swing thigh burns. Treasure hunts in the gully.
Where I visit now water their parched Easter Lilies
as they lie beneath the grass.
Thank them:
for surviving Midwest winters, wars and lynchings,
for firewood split, mole recipes on parchment,
for raising people who love so much it hurts to swallow,
for lessons on how small caramel women united overcome great sorrow,
for sharing their one red lipstick and rose hand lotion when I was a girl flowering.
Born at a Funeral
Caught, under the bed
baby dolls propped on pillows
stuffed animals against dark pink velour.
Her black curls bop, she reads
Cinderella to her “dollies”
in a voice husky from lack of use.
She lies on her stomach. Ankles twist.
I spoke for her before she spoke
for me when bus stop bullies lobbed spit ball bullets.
Easy target: trumpet case, school books,
extra credit books, glasses, braces, silent.
Little girl born at a funeral
when dirt clods hit the casket.
Her entry on a flood of salt tears, a family’s
wails of grief. Fall ginger leaves scatter our names.
When she began to open her mouth
she wrote stories for her baby dolls.
They rode horses, served tea, played
mass using pickle slices for the host.
Her mother called her father
and began to weep over the wires
looping commas of sound
downtown to our house,
“She can talk. She can sing!”
Sea Burial
Backpacks, a week of groceries, no hospital
for 200 miles, no wheels, I survived –
on the island where once in a clearing
we came upon an animal meeting,
hooves and feathers flee, mass exodus.
There lies part of me, my man –
wedged beneath blinding white rocks.
Body whispers, blood and rot.
Until sediment slides down
the fifteen-foot cliff back to the sea.
Campfire ashes circle the base.
Where pelicans preen and eagles train
to feed, is our born too early zygote.
My two became one.
Female island ghosts told me
sit in the water let life wash out and back
cool stone slabs your throne. We know.
A sea burial. A hollow tree.
Limestone markers.
Dana Maya
Nochebuena (December 24th) for Gloria, mi mamá
I’ve felt you shaky for days.
It’s the December gathering of lives in your body. You are making Chiles en nogada:
soaking almonds & peeling the golden skeins from their bodies, white like tiny doves.
You place pomegranate seeds, huddles in their garnet amniotic sacs.
You want there to be bounty. You are trying not to breathe.
Come, I take your hand & say.
I’ve brought a book, a calendar of secular prayers, almanac for abstinent believers,
We who don’t say god, but hold hard to our holy.
I read the entry for Dec 24: Slowly, on the soft bed, I apply gentle, steady pressure.
If we place the words just so, there is divination.
Your eyes go slack & wet.
I leech your tears to balance humors. I am sorry my only medicine is this crude & ancient, dirty & dangerous. I’ve only ever known this cure: homeopathy, Like with Like, Hair of the Dog.
You tell me that every year on Dec. 24, when you were small, Abuelita would tell you
The Three Kings cannot come this year
All she had to feed you was black coffee & bread. Now, almost 7 decades gone, you are still hungry,
hot-bellied & tight-chested for food unoffered, uneaten, ungone.
I see you: the child, my mother
& I see her too: a mother alone, turned to her three children
(Tell me, mi mama, is there anywhere to rest, to breathe
in this small story, is there anyone to be?)
Only here: this bed, almanac, my eyes holding yours. Did you say Los Tres Reyes never showed?
See us now travelling great distances of memory, here we come.
We bear gifts backwards, in our hands.
Not only to you and Tía and Tío, but to Antonia, her face to their small faces,
breaking the news again, of the failure of the 3 kings,
of god himself.
Calling Instructions: How to Live in Sirens
for Tony Robinson & the queer & trans leaders of the Young Gifted & Black Coalition &
#FergusontoMadison, 2015
& for Black Lives. Again, now, still. 2020
Once they call the cops, go ahead & call it murder, cause he’s forced the door &
Inside, shot a black boy once & then five times: torso, shoulder, head
His life pulled up his body, across his unarmed arms & over his crown like an undressing
The long garment of his blood pulled down the stairs & dropped onto the cement stoop
Once they call the cops, go ahead & call it familiar, call this murder home cause we call this
Willy Street the way a boy is named Anthony & called Tony, Terrell
Willy Street, near the Co-op, the Social Justice Center, the street banners that say A Place for All People
Once they call the cops, the dispatch will call him a suspect & the Chief of Police will
call him the subject to the press, the press will call him a black man, though all the neighbors say kid, say teen, say Tony, say Terrell though his friends call him funny & his grandma says gentle
Once they call the cops, the signs will say #TonyRobinson & the chants call What’s his
name? What’s his name? You’ll recall Nina calling young, gifted, and black, your soul intact
& Baraka singing urgent, calling you, calling all Black people calling you, come in.
Once the cops are called, in the carceral state, it’s a world gone siren: the sirens call submit. Lay down.
The Chief & the press & the preachers, the Open Letters call for peace & objectivity & to wait for the facts. You know this song: same damn verses with new Black lives. Same pieties, same lines. You know you’ll be a siren too. Called & calling: saying the same damn shit, one more fucking time.
Once the world’s gone siren, think of Odysseus in that old story. How he survived the calls without crashing on the rocks—Lash your body to the mast. Be the mast. Let your ears flood with cries. Listen & want & want to be released into some final sound. Beg for it. Want it like a new lover & do not submit. Be the rowers. Stop up your ears with wax. Keep rowing. Get to the end of this poem but
don’t stop. Cause this poem is nobody’s son, not a life, not a boy I ever knew. This poem is not that kid.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN Feminist Formations 27:2. https://www.feministformations.org/journal/poesia
My brother tells me he will be a father
A baby:
my brother, a father.
And I a mother
Four years now, two babies
for a dozen years, he’d said
I will not be a father then
I will be a father.
before him, it was me:
I will not be a mother.
I will be a mother.
We were children amid shouts
the closet door dented for a decade,
its off-white metal
a crumpled sheet of paper—
a message gone wrong.
Our parents’ love split
down the middle of our
two small bodies
We fought too—
swore mutual hatred
spells to ward off
larger storms and disasters
Acted the play within the play
puppets tearing at each other’s
hair, not knowing our own plot
Each time we go to love, my brother
we finger the fissure, the cleave running
through our blood. We never say
how it was sweet:
Four of us wrapped together
on the70’s round bed with its
black & white zebra bedspread
Our father, crazy: walking on his hands
down concrete stairs & sidewalks,
stopping for hitchhikers
Before crazy was diagnosis,
we played in the fields of his untamed
mind
Our mami, la Gloria dancing for us
in the hotel room in Yucatan
an underwear joy dance
Until the gardener outside knocked:
a kind intervention
Señora, se puede ver todo…
(she could be seen outside)
She covered her mouth, but the joy in
her big white teeth, showed
I want to tell you yes, my brother
we loved it, loved
us. Yes, we did.
Oscar Mireles History lesson My grandmother Elisa was picketing outside the cattle car trains that were quietly lined up to deport Mexican nationals from Minneapolis Minnesota in the 1920’s Yes, it was her and three other women, my Aunt Juanita and two friends Carmen and Josie Flores they were afraid to hold up their picket signs that protested the mass deportations yet were more afraid worse things would happen if they didn’t do anything A local policeman warned them it would be best if they left otherwise he would be forced to take action but they stood there waving their picket signs like a flag as the last train fell into the sunset Lost and Found Language It started in 1949, when my oldest brother came home from school in Racine, Wisconsin after flunking kindergarten because he 'spoke no English' and declared to my parents that 'the rest of the kids have to learn to speak English if we planned on staying here in the United States.' so my parents lined up the rest of the seven younger children had us straighten up tilt our heads back reached in our mouth with their bare hands and took turns slicing our tongues in half making a simple, but unspoken contract that from then on the parents would speak Spanish and the children would respond back only in English how do you lose a native language? does it get misplaced in the recesses of your brain? or does it never quite stick to the sides of your mind? for me it would always start with the question from a brown faced stranger 'hables espanol? ' which means 'do you speak Spanish? ' which meant if they had to ask me if I spoke Spanish this was not going to be a good start… at having a conversation... my face would start to get flushed with redness and before I had a chance to stammer the words 'I don't'… I could see it in their eyes looking at my embarrassed face searching for an answer that was nowhere to be found as I walked away I knew what they were thinking 'Who is this guy? ' How can he not speak his mother's tongue? ' 'Where did he grow up anyways? ' 'Doesn't he have any pride in knowing who he is? ' or 'Where he came from? ' I tried to reply, but as the words in Spanish floated down from my brain they caught in between my throat, the rocks of shame. I spoke in half-tongue. my future wife taught me how to speak Spanish mainly by being Colombian and not speaking English I had already known the language of hands and love which got me confident enough to reach deep inside myself to rediscover the beautiful sounds and Latin rhythms and although I still feel my heart jump a beat when someone asks 'hables espanol? ' now the Spanish resonates within me and echos back 'si, y usted tambien? ' and today as I talk with the Spanish speaking students at our school they can not only feel my words they can feel my warm heart splash ancient Spanish sounds off my native tongue that has finally grown whole again Elvis Presley was a Chicano In the latest edition of the National Inquirer it was revealed that Elvis Presley, Yes…the legendary Elvis was a Chicano Fans were outraged critics cite his heritage as an important influence I was stunned Can you believe it? Well…I didn’t really at first but then I remembered… his jet back hair you know with the little curl in front sort of reminded me of my cousin “Chuy” Elvis always wore either those tight black pants like the ones in West Side Story or a baggy pinstriped Zoot Suit Pachuco Style with a pair of blue suede shoes to match Then I figured no, it couldn’t be So I traced his story back to his hometown a little pueblo outside Tupelo, Mississippi a son of migrant sharecroppers looking for a way out of rural poverty Let’s see… Elvis joined the army Maybe he enlisted with his “homies” They never made a movie about it But they fought hard anyways I read somewhere that Chicanos have won more Silver Stars and Purple Hearts than any other ethnic group Maybe Elvis was a Chicano I wasn’t convinced yet! Elvis was a Swooner, a dancer, a ladies man and always won the girl that hated him in the beginning of the movie he had to be a latin lover or something even Valentino and Sinatra has a little Italian in them Elvis played guitar like my Uncle Carlos, always hitting the same four notes over and over again But now, I think I have figured it out It was probably that Colonel Parker’s idea to change his cultural identity, since it was just after the second big war and the Zoot Suit Riots it wasn’t the right time for a Chicano Superstar to be pelvising around the Ed Sullivan Show, late on a Sunday night I think it was just a hoax, to convince more people to buy that newspaper If Elvis Presley really was a Chicano He wouldn’t have settled to die alone, in an empty mansion With no family around, No “familia” around Who cared enough…. to cry
Issue 2 – Guest Editor Abayomi Animashaun
D.M. Aderibigne Father's Prayer Because the morning was a bastard, The woman I loved stuffed. Our future in a trash bag, And locked the door. Because I had no scar to show for my wound, I fell on my knees, begging The past to return. The Past returned. “The doctor says he won’t survive,” she said, Putting my hands on her stomach. Few days later, From one of the corridors of heaven, I watched her rock a child—excitement running Across the child’s face. For a moment I forgot He wasn’t hers: ours. The mother Came, took him away—I was reminded That there is no bond Stronger than that which joy and sorrow share. Dear God, when next you pass Through me, pass as a complete story. Night Again, there’s a thunderclap In your womb. On the outskirt of your nightmare Lies a man you’re meant to love. With him, roses are rough, Bullets are beautiful. And as the bandage wrapped Like a bandana around your head Shows: this man’s soft words Have teeth. You rise From the bed, Sit on the wooden Edge of discomfort—it is ripping Your stomach like a hurricane Through a city. You crawl To his wardrobe, Pull out secrets From a drawer; A battalion of strange pills Lays on your palm. You dump the pills in mouth, Drive them down with a glass of water. He Called Me Brother, Afterwards Cambridge, MA Walking in the middle of the street— The night, clothed in silence. Soon, winds made of human voices Begin to trail me. On the sidewalk of my fear, He stands like an iron gate. In his left hand lays A moon, carved out of stainless steel. In his right, death’s oldest son. You Jamaal, you Jamaal, right? He proclaims. His breath, Already pressing Against mine. I was silent. I mean, what do I know of color Since I’m from a land where even the sun is dark. Answer me now, he barks. I wasn’t, and my school ID is a diligent witness. No need to worry, brother, Jamaal just stole a car, And you look so much like him, he says, Before patting me.
Alan Chazaro My Mexican Abuela Taught Me How to Land on the Moon I’m not sure if there’s ever a perfect. If this light/dark cycle will ever reset. If there was an artificial moon, I’d want to drink its vibrancy in the same way we drink our final moments before they’re gone. These days my circadian rhythm has been rotating against me. Don’t take this negatively; negatives are needed for exposures. I’ve been reading about aliens a lot, how their languages are purely hypo- thetical since none have ever been encountered. When I first kissed my abuela’s language, I felt like I was floating on a third moon. Some people believe we’ve never even landed on the first moon. Some people think the world isn’t really globed. I don’t believe in flatness and I rarely consider gravity unless I’m falling. I don’t believe in certain languages, certain oppressors. Have you ever been so bored with your reality that you created a future that didn’t make sense? Recently, a city in China proposed to build a replica of the moon and hang it like a photograph framed in the night sky. They said it would hold the city’s light in times of darkness to conserve energy. What if conserving energy was actually a bad thing? What if we never learned to cleanse our mouths of whatever needed saying? What if we always hid from our darkest hours? I guess I’m not sure if there’s ever a perfect moment. If aliens can actually form sentences from nothing, or if we simply imagine what we want—impossible forms of comfort. When my abuelita passed, I didn’t cry. She gave me an impossible comfort from two feet away. She gave me many moons in my palms. When I need her, I return to their many surfaces. They keep me grounded with impossibilities. In 2020, the 45th President of the United States Declares, When the looting starts, the shooting starts, Meaning: We Can No Longer Breathe In America Meaning: we are not the same. Meaning: the lights have literally been turned off in the White House. Meaning: there is no room for figurative interpretation. Meaning: where is our leadership? Meaning: why do we keep burying our own bodies in our own dirt? Meaning: there is not enough space for more of this. Meaning: yesterday I was marching with families and children and teachers and teenagers and wives and husbands and my grandmother-in-law from New Mexico said, This country is just lost in a big chaos. Meaning: we are not well, we are not okay. Meaning: a neck bone can collapse from a forcefully applied knee. Meaning: some things can never be replaced. Meaning: there is division, and there is negligence; where are you? Meaning: we’re talking about a man who was murdered on video. A man who was murdered on video. A man who was murdered on video. A man who was fucking murdered on video. Meaning: some Americans don’t care until their windows are broken, then they are bothered. Meaning: our future cannot look like this. Meaning: I refuse. Meaning: we will all be saved or we will all burn together. Meaning: I swear to every god I will work for a different world, because Pocho boys can build spaceships, too. Meaning: we can no longer breathe in America. Alternate Universe Ending #2 In this version I am riding an all-black single-gear bike along Lakeshore Ave near my apartment, and a cadenza of dusk is singing a nearby family of trees into a deep chorus of green that can only be described as baptismal, as if our bodies might be simply and impossibly loosened into a wild dance of light- shadows, and in this moment I am taken by a bloom of faces around me, and I cannot tell if I am pedaling forward or being pulled on a string, and if there is a string how it must stretch from far beyond wherever this sidewalk ends, towards some parallel galaxy I have no business entering because I am no cosmonaut, and I am unsuited for this, and I am just a boy who watched too much Star Wars growing up and how, if I go too far past what I know, it might unravel me.
Jee Leong Koh The Father for W. (Chengdu House, Chelsea, New York, March 6, 2019) What was compassion he learned when he helped his older son fill up his college forms. He wasn’t so neglected his abuela had to report to Children’s Services. He didn’t grow up in a foster home. He hadn’t, every season, to meet strangers, before he graduated out the system, to play basketball, to make them like him, afraid the whole time they would make him choose between a real home and his younger brother, or su hermano would choose home over him. What would Admissions think of his expulsion from school for selling his classmates his meds? What of the second time he had to leave, this time from boarding school, in the same year as Trump’s election? Rapists, criminals, the President labeled all immigrants. Not long ago the same slander applied to men who lived with men and wanted sons. In Singapore, the technocrat’s wet dream, he chose and was, it seemed, chosen, by merit. Coming from no-name school to RJC, he thought the students smug. Instead of joining Humanities, he chose Arts stream to root for local faculty. Instead of the Ivies, he studied fashion at Parsons. Instead of the Chelsea boy, he dated older men, much older men, with stories of surviving conversion therapy, gay bashing, AIDS, heroic stories of protest and care. He met his husband on Craigslist. He googled the value of his home to judge it safe, as he had always done. He didn’t know about the shootings in the neighborhood. So much for Singapore-style planning! How could he imagine in one year he would marry in February, graduate in May, and in June have the boys move in with them? He had always been good at being trained and the adoption training was not hard, good at filling up forms, following rules, at cost-and-benefit analysis, but he had to be taught again and again, by Christmas cacti as well as the boys, their shooting, flourishing, yet homely needs informing his attention, the feeling of fear inalienable from fatherhood. On Graduating from Your Play-writing Program for Zizi Azah The times, they are against you, the Times too, the chummy virus has closed down the lights, for how long not one prophet can be sure, and afterwards, if afterwards has rights, the patient is unhooked from machine lungs, totters, collapses here and there, eyes whites, a modern Zinira whose mother tongues holler unheard. Distant are the satellites. Writing for TV is an option close to blasphemy, betrayal, or bad works, much as one loves the silver cellulose, much as one envies its heroes and its jerks, for live theater is bang on the nose, not the image of faith but faith itself, precise and literal and malodorous, transforming us into a commonwealth. We need plays! We need playwrights! The old term recalling still of mills, wheels, ships, and carts. Although the wilderness glares and grunts, be firm! Glare back until the One who sees our hearts brings to your side the tiger and the tick, turning all counters into counterparts. Grunt if you must, because the work is sick, but Prophet you’re, and Mistress of the Arts. The Conductor for Phillip Cheah, born in Louisiana, 1978. He never saw her without make-up on his pretty mom who had a different hairdo in every photograph she left behind. Stylish as she was, he never left home without his Brylcreem helmet and his suit, well favored by the flower of a tie, Anita Mui from her radio in his ears. A misfit with his peers, he gravitated to teachers, who in every year made him a monitor in Rosyth and RI. The love of music begun at puberty, after some years of banging ivories, when he was taught composers and their times and music gathered faces and debates, closeted Phillip further—Tchaikovsky!— in Yamaha’s CD library near Balestier. The blissful hours lost in listening, listening, listening, and listening. His father, the geophysics engineer, wanted to give his draftee son a choice: go Singaporean/stay American. Music, like his mom, did not give him one. No conducting school to go to here, everyone played the piano or violin, and to conduct was what he was to do. At nineteen, the boy flew to Bloomington, Indiana, to take up his birthright, failure propelling him with fearful fumes, first in the country of Bernstein, and then his city, charging hard from gig to gig, rising to direct the Central City Chorus while he accompanied New York’s elite in tuning up their vocals for the world, where we met, when somebody (was it Karyn?) told him, funny coincidence, there was another Singaporean in the school. As the intent for tempo clarified from Beethoven onwards, the instrument changing from heartbeat to the metronome, so we discovered the disparate ways by which we know the same Alvin Tan, teacher to you and paragon to me. What we talk about when we talk about mothers is meter, the stress on the beat, the knuckles, violent roses, that you raise in concert with your slim baton, and that she caned to make you learn to tell the time.
Issue 1 – Detroit
Peter Markus Too Many Days, or Where the River Turns to Lake It has been three days since he's seen the river. Three too many days if you ask him. To be inland means in from the river. There is a river running inside of him. For the past few years he had his father to go see before walking down to the river. Now he has his mother he goes to see in her grief. Let's go down to the river is what he tells her, and he takes her by the arm to safely walk her down. She watches him fish. She is momentarily happy, it seems, when he catches something. It's not what he's fishing for but it's a fish regardless. He throws what he isn't after back. His mother asks about the hook. Doesn't it hurt. He makes up what he thinks is possibly true. That the fish do not feel pain. That they don't have nerves in their lips which is where the barbed hook takes hold. He doesn't know for sure if this is true. He knows that if a lie is repeated often enough it begins to carry its own truth. Today the geese are grouping up on the river, preparing for some migratory trip. They make their loud honking sounds though his mother does not turn her head to hear them. She is elsewhere inside her own thoughts, he knows. She is somewhere, he hopes, with his father, on a boat, perhaps, like when they were both still young, without kids, with the wind filling their sails, pushing them out of the river, into the bigger lake.
Nancy Owen Nelson
“Say Hey, Willy!” Says Spencer Turnbull,
Opening Day, Detroit, Michigan,
April 4, 2019
Willy, I heard you came from Alabama too, like me.
I was not actually born there. Born in Mississippi,
but Alabama’s my home, since I played the ‘Bama team.
Like me, you made it big out of a little place,
scored 7-0 against the Houston Colts one summer
evening, 1963. You were before my time but
I saw you in a dream last night, sitting silent on the bench,
chewing gum, or was it tobacco? Waitin’ for your turn
at the bat. Heard an old man in the stands shout “Say Hey
Willy!” and climb slowly down the bleachers to get
your John Hancock on a game program. That old man
walked slowly, I said, careful that he might not fall.
Willy, you were important to him, the old man
in a fedora, grey with the bill turned up. His face
earnest, he grinned as he yelled “Say Hey, Willy”
yet again, makin’ sure he got your attention.
Makin’ sure he got your signature on the program.
Makin’ sure his 16-year-old daughter would not
be disappointed. That old man was from Alabama
too, like you and me. Had been through wars,
seen too much. Worried about his daughter, who
held her silence close to her, like hugging a secret
to her chest instead of calling out your name for an autograph.
Too bad, he thought, that she’s too scared to seize
the moment. To find her hero. The old man had
seen too much, Willy, about what they did
in Alabama to folks like you because of your color.
He yelled “Say Hey, Willy!” to let you know that,
though his skin was white, he’d seen some awful stuff.
And he was on your side.
So here I am, Willy, in Detroit on this big day,
pitching balls. Had ten strikeouts, ten Royals
walked away from plate, dejected. No one said
“Say Hey” to any of us, but inside, I knew you
would be proud for me, proud I came from
Alabama, proud I love God and good works,
proud I want to go to Uganda with Tigers pitcher
Matthew Boyd, help those kids caught in the slave
trade. I think the old man in the bleachers would be
proud of both of us, the Alabama boys who left
home and made good in the world. Did good for folks
like kids in your “Say Hey Foundation,” kids in Uganda.
I think the old man would grin his sideways
grin, hope his daughter would understand
we’re on the same side.
Cal Freeman A Liquidation of the Portraits of the Saints for Larry Larson Your eyes were the glass of another city’s buildings the last day I saw you. You’d become a drug addict, you said, a realization that came while taking an extra pill that afternoon and watching the flurries drift down the street like avid businessmen. The tremor in your hand quieting with the first payload, you were a gaunt face in a cold pool of coffee. They’d carved out half your left lung to get the cancer and prescribed Oxycontin while radiating your lungs and vocal cords, but it had been months since you needed pills for pain. This was to be kept strictly between you and me, but it’s true, and impossible, anyway, to libel even the newly-dead. I picked up your Gibson J-45 and strummed the chords to a new song. Fret three was a cicatrix of grime where your middle finger pressed to make a G, 30 years of that in smoky stage lights. You kept a Gatorade bottle full of vodka next to your volume pedal, nobody wise that it wasn’t water. That guitar thirsted in arid Michigan’s late-winter (the furnace coughing on at intervals), its finish spidered like a mess of varices. The health of things no more than the hum of mahogany and spruce, lungs, gallbladder, bone bridge, brain, heart, and spleen (a splenetic cadence to your voice) despite what we believe. The hook was, “Just another disappearing thing,” erstwhile Detroit, bars with silt-smeared windows where you cut your teeth picking sad songs on a Guild 12-string while your friend Eddie McGlinchey sang ballads about those Irish heroes of ‘16 whose portraits you’d later paint. That last gig we played together in January you sang better with half a lung than I ever will. You said you were proud of me and asked if you could pat me on the chin, that Bob Gibson had patted you on the chin at the Raven Club in 1963 after realizing you’d mastered his finger-picking technique (pinch, thumb, pointer, thumb, middle, thumb, that measured thump on alternating bass strings). Bob Gibson who’d destroyed his talent with heroin and amphetamines, who even after kicking never got right again. They say the frontal lobe irredeemably changes. Too much is irredeemable. Can I pat you on the chin? You who knew everything about the faces of flawed saints and bitter heroes. You’d just painted Father Solanus Casey for perhaps the seventh time. You said his expression carried knowledge from another place. This version featured a halated Blessed Mother in the foreground with a backlit Calvary nearly vanishing the way a phosphene behind a closed eyelid can turn consciousness sacramental. It didn’t matter to you that it was good. Nothing mattered much those final weeks. They auctioned off your instruments and artwork at the wake. The afternoon light bleared through the open door bald as a single-payload pill each time a mourner came to buy a piece.