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"for (insert name)" by Roya Marsh

1/22/2021

1 Comment

 
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A Bronx, New York native, Roya Marsh is a nationally recognized poet, performer, educator and activist. She is the Poet in Residence at Urban Word NYC and works feverishly toward LGBTQIA justice and dismantling white supremacy. Roya’s work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, Flypaper Magazine, Frontier Poetry, the Village Voice, Nylon Magazine, Huffington Post, The Root, Button Poetry, Def Jam’s All Def Digital, Lexus Verses and Flow, NBC, BET and The BreakBeat Poets Vol 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket 2018).
In Spring 2020, MCD x FSG Originals published Roya Marsh's dayliGht, a debut collection of experimental poetry exploring themese of sexuality, Blackness, and the prematurity of Black femme death--all through an intersectional feminist lens with a focus on the resilience of the Black woman.

                                                                          for (insert name)


never knowing how to label a dream
until you want to tell your children apart
 
you'll forget how
to tell your children apart
 
not wanting your baby
to die on a cross like (insert name)
or in a cross walk like (insert name)
 
not wanting him to be like (insert name) lying in middle of the street
 
not another (insert name) crying he can't breathe
 
or (insert name) shot at the doorstep
 
'cause black fist against door
equates fist against body
'cause guns ring out
more than doorbells
 
or (insert name)'s brains
splattered
in that alley         'cause a cell phone could be a lot of things in the dark
but an unregistered 9mm semiautomatic fired over the shoulder
can only be one thing
         an eraser
 
a broken taillight in broad daylight
        a reaper
 
eye contact, a counterfeit bill
        a death wish
 
you ain't gon let your son go out like
how they let (insert name) run
just far enough to think
himself safe
before they shot
 
you won't let the last time you see him
                  whole
be like when
they threw (insert name) in the back of that van
 
hands cuffed behind his back like (insert name) but he still managed
to shoot himself like (insert name)
 
his spine in pieces like (insert name)
 
you want him home
like putting curfew on (insert name)'s soul - too black to be out at night
 
you ain't gonna be asking the news
why they say (insert name) when they really mean (insert name)
got Obama and Kamala callin' us (insert name) like they don't sit around
callin' him (insert name)
 
'cause isn't that the right word?
‘cause you know ALL lives matter
except (insert name)
 
how lucky am i,
to have (insert name)
in my bloodline
holy                  the way (insert name) keeps pushing my pen from heaven
 
i flap my gums
show the world the fist in my throat
in honor of (insert name)
 
but my mother begs me home from the protest
says she can't go through what she went through with (insert name)
 
says this hype over (insert name)
will die just like
(insert name)
 
and i tell her
i'd rather die for (insert name)
a million times
than die like (insert name)
                                                                                                                     once
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"LONG DISTANCE" by Stephanie Kaylor

1/22/2021

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Stephanie Kaylor is a PhD student in Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They are Reviews Editor of Glass: A Journal of Poetry. Her recent work can be found in publications including Hobart, Protean, and Softblow.​

LONG DISTANCE


I photograph the ocean to show you there was a moment in which I remembered our smallness, in which I placed the shell to my ear and heard not the roar of past lives but the miles between us. I was never faithless enough to believe there is no smell of salt. Once it meant closeness, the peeling of earth-worn limbs folded into themselves, an indiscernible core. I cut apples into spears when you feared a bite would break your teeth. how effortlessly we crumble. I photograph the ocean to show you I remember life before the weight of bone, before the need for knives.
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"A Sketch about Genocide" by Tongo Eisen-Martin

1/8/2021

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​Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, "Someone's Dead Already" was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book "Heaven Is All Goodbyes" was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award.

A Sketch about Genocide


A San Francisco police chief says, “Yes, you poets make points. But they are all silly,”

Police chief sowing a mouth onto a mouth
Police chief looking straight through the poet

Flesh market both sides of the levy
Change of plans both sides of the nonviolence

                                                     On no earth
                                                     Just an earth character

His subordinate says, “Awkward basketball moves look good on you, sir... Yes, we are
everywhere, sir... yes, unfortunately for now, white people only have Black History ... we will
slide the wallpaper right into their cereal bowls, sir ... Surveil the shuffle.”

I am a beggar and all of this day is too easy
I want to see all of the phases of a wall
Every age it goes through
                                       Its humanity
                                       Its environmental racism

We call this the ordeal blues
Now crawl to the piano seat and make a blanket for your cell
Paint scenes of a child dancing up to the court appearance
And leaving a man,
                          but not for home

Atlantic ocean charts mixed in with parole papers
Mainstream funding (the ruling class’s only pacifism)

Ruling class printing judges (fiat kangaroos)
Making judges hand over fist
Rapture cop packs and opposition whites all above a thorny stem
Caste plans picked out like vans for the murder show
anglo-saints addicting you to a power structure

you want me to raise a little slave, don’t you?
bash his little brain in
and send him to your civil rights

No pain
Just a white pain

Delicate bullets in a box next to a stack of monolith scriptures
                             (makes these bullets look relevant, don’t it?)


                                                                                                                                                                     I remember you
                                                                                                 Everywhere you lay your hat is the capital of the south
                                                                                                                        The posture you introduced to that fence
                                                                                                                   The fence you introduced to political theory

                                                                                                                                               If you shred my dreams, son
                                                                                                                                                I will tack you to gun smoke

                                                                                                                                       The suburbs are finally offended 
                                             
                                                                                                                                                this will be a meditation too
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"BLOODTEETH" by Despy Boutris

11/27/2020

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Despy Boutris's writing has been published in Copper Nickel, American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Colorado Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Currently, she serves as Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast, Guest Editor for Palette Poetry and Frontier, and Editor-in-Chief of The West Review.

BLOODTEETH
​

I went blackberry-picking, looked down
at my index finger, & watched a wound bloom

with blood. To compare this plasma
to a flowering thing: amaryllis, orchid,

chrysanthemum. To memorize creases,
freckles, the sight of the thorn finding its way

into flesh. All day, the breeze burns
my ears, eyes blurring at the sight of sunlight

filtering through oak branches, that golden
color unbearable, the haze hard to believe

as fable. My mother organizes her top-drawer
& finds a box of my teeth. My mother

tells me love never lasts, a river dissolving
into a ravine with parched rocks. Nothing

left to drink. I call my father to say I dreamt
I swam the span of the Pacific, fled

from everything I know. He reminds me
my name is mythic—body built for saltwater,

memory spanning centuries, trident still stuck
in my spine. & what do we really have

to count on but the sea, water, the light
of the sun turning on the city? Hands

made stiff from the cold, distant smoke rising,
the scent of anise in the air.
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2 Poems by Khalisa Rae

11/20/2020

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Khalisa Rae is a poet and journalist in Durham, NC, and author of Real Girls Have Real Problems chapbook. Her poetry can be seen in Crab Fat, Damaged Goods, Hellebore, Terse, Sundog Lit, PANK Tishman Review, Occulum, the Obsidian, among others. She is the winner of the Bright Wings Poetry contest, the Furious Flower Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the White Stag Publishing Contest, among others. Currently, she serves as Managing Equity Editor at Carve Magazine and Writing Center Director at Shaw University. Her debut collections, Ghost in a Black Girls Throat are forthcoming from Red Hen Press in April 2021 and White Stag Publishing Summer '21 ​

Belly-Full of Gospel


Each morning my grandma rises to find her Bible
still breathing, belting her favorite aria. A lion,
a well, a sacrifice. Crack-of-dawn, coffee-stained,
scrolls making music at 6am. Each page turn a chord
she knows better than hot water cornbread and collard
greens. Wailing Blessed Assurance, What a Friend to crackling
bacon– all a belly-full of gospel summoning spirit to be there
in the midst. Her back buckle and hand wave awakening
a holy ghost- Bash-sha- Shadrach, Meshach- tongue-speaking
spells cast out the demons haunting this old house. “While
I’m on this tedious journey”— a sovereign song soothing her
aching, calligraphed hands. Walk with Me, she asks,
inviting Him in the room. What a meditation, a ritual
to welcome Holy into a place held together by broken bread.
A sacred invitation to dine with her and the browning
hash. Nothing but the Blood and sunrise slicing sound--
stirring a tent revival lasting ‘til nightfall across
her wobbling kitchen table.






Ode to Uncommon Things
                                    for Pablo


If this world has taught me anything,
it has taught me we are obsessed

with naming, with calling a Ren a
Ren, with deciding the weeping willow

was heavy with grief, with echoing
the words Nightjar and picturing

nocturnal hawk. Maybe it's the god-like
power of it all, the villain of conjuring

titles, calling a thing broken and watching
it fall, then calling it chosen–phoenix,

and watching it rise. Who are we
to be cataloged and filed?

All of us just common things
waiting to be named uncommon,

waiting to go from bird to Nightingale,
from pigeon to white-wing, crest-backed

Long-tailed widow.
The sonnet we hoped
would be written for our raised backs

and color stripes— unwritten.
Instead, we watched while handkerchief

and pitch pipe got 83. Mementos
to things less miracle than we. Time

spent crafting sestinas to penny loafer,
and pocket watch.

But we are not listed--
we, the uncommon, silvery tokens.
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"Days of Hourless Mothers" by JinJin Xu

11/13/2020

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JinJin Xu is a filmmaker and writer from Shanghai. She has received honors from The Poetry Society of America, Southern Humanities Review, and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation. She is currently an MFA candidate and Lillian Vernon Fellow at NYU, and her chapbook There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife was selected by Aria Aber for the Own Voices Chapbook Prize and is forthcoming November 20.

Days of Hourless Mothers


       i.

Herbal, thick,
my mother’s insomnia wets my nose,
You are leaving me
again –


My mother’s insomnia wets my nose,
exhales her abandon
again –
into the muffled orifice,

Exhales her abandon
into night, guilt unclenches
the muffled orifice,
old tissue, balled-up grief

Of night, guilt unclenches,
herbal, thick,
balled-up tissue, old grief.
I am leaving.



       ii.

Each hour an organ, a zodiac beast,
twelve hours separate my mother and me,
our days halved, up hanging down,
shadows splitting this American sun.

Hour of the tiger: my mother
calls on the tip of night,
her sun spitting my American shadow,
sorry, sorry for disturbing your sleep.

Midnight tips me into
my mother’s lonesome noon,
always, I apologize in my sleep.
Only one is allowed pity,

Pity my mother’s lone moon.
Double the organ, double the beast,
only one child is allowed to
flip the zodiac onto its knees.


       iii.

Hour of the lung and its cyclings of qi,
vital, untranslatable beasts
wailing songs of abandon
into night, I wake to

Your call, vital, untranslatable,
my abandon strains your voice,
Why are you awake?
Organs need sleep to heal.


I abandon you to the bright of day.
Listen, your daughter is sleeping,
her organs unclenching
your night’s far shore.
​
Soon, your tomorrow will ring
her into yesterday’s outstretched lungs,
and when she wakes, forgetting
to call, let her -
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"Flour, Milk & Salt" by Ashley M. Jones

10/30/2020

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Ashley M. Jones holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, and she is the author of Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press 2017),  dark / / thing (Pleiades Press 2019), and REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press 2021). Her poetry has earned several awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. She was a finalist for the Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in 2020. Her poems and essays appear in or are forthcoming at CNN, The Oxford American, Origins Journal, The Quarry by Split This Rock, Obsidian, and many others. She teaches at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, she co-directs PEN Birmingham, and she is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival.   ​

FLOUR, MILK & SALT
     after Celestia Morgan

flour
          a universe is born between her brown hands—flour, a cloud of Southern
          possibility when she makes it hover and sigh. how this could become our
          sustenance is magic, is Jesus making bread to outlast bread. what God but
          a mother’s hands? what a prayer in the biscuit dough clinging to itself,
          readied for the fire?

milk
          thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama
          thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama
          thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama
          thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama
          you gave your life so that I might live--

salt
          they say it will kill us, silent as it is. salt as it is. how it makes our blood so
          deadly in our veins. how it, tableside, can be a weapon, even if it makes
          the meal sing. a death song for me and my people. precursor to diabetes,
          ​that great southern meal.
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"How To Cook Your Family" by Sam Herschel Wein

10/23/2020

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​Sam Herschel Wein (he/they) is a Chicago-based poet who specializes in perpetual frolicking. Their second chapbook, GESUNDHEIT!, a collaboration with Chen Chen, was part of the 2019-2020 Glass Poetry Press Series. He co-founded and edits Underblong. Recent work can be found in Moon City Review, Sundog Lit, and Bat City Review, among others. Perchance, read more at samherschelwein.com.

How to Cook Your Family


First
Six mixing bowls. Fourteen blenders. Who needs this
many kitchen aids? An avalanche of appliances from
the taut, turquoise shelves. Every rubber spatula you’ve
ever dreamed of in the pull-out cabinet next to the
stove, packed so tight it’s stuck shut, inaccessible

Then
Mother makes Challah most weeks, though she often
makes extras, for the weeks she wants just to pull
one from the freezer. A special Hungarian mixing
stick, an overnight dough, hidden recipes she changes
just barely over time, they’re impossible to copy

Next
Clean out grandma’s house. She’s in a senior’s apartment
complex now. Not a nursing home, my mother says aloud
for herself. Though Grandma wouldn’t know. Her
Alzheimer’s, ten years old. I’ve inherited many of
the extra kitchen bowls, tools, essentials she kept buying.

Don’t forget to mix
Yeast for the bread to rise. Raisins on holidays. Gefilte
fish from scratch, Brisket recipe from Great Aunt
Esther. My grandmother was the best cook in town,
in the Jewish community. My mother was the best
cook in town, in the Jewish community. Where I grew up.

Sprinkle, ever so gently
sesame seeds. Sprinkle dirt on the grave. Sprinkles
in your eyes, reading a speech goodbye. All good
cooking comes in pinches, my mother once said.
And she lives that way, too. Pinching out her sadness,
the sprinkles hardly visible. Not even coarse.

Leave out to cool
I was like that. I was a balloon of smiles. They’d
shoot out of me with so much force. Pinching back
my hair, back my hurt. I’m learning to unfurl.
​I have a book of recipes, but I don’t need them.
This tart, I baked anew. My own strawberries.
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2 Poems by Marianne Chan

10/16/2020

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​Marianne Chan grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of All Heathens from Sarabande Books (2020). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati.

Ars Poetica


Say what you mean already, the man snarls
with a string of floss hanging from his teeth.

You imagine that if you pull at the string, his whole
mouth would click on, incandescent. You stand

in a friend’s bathroom. The night drinks a glass
of Diet Pepsi. You feel refreshed inside of it.

And yet, the man is here yelling: Say it. Spit it out.
The story. What’s the story?
But sometimes

there is nothing. No story, no character,
not any reason to be at the party, other than

the fact that you like games of Twister, aperol
spritzes, the rolled-up prosciutto on a sugar

maple board. Sometimes there’s only the smell
of bleach, a clean bathroom that never looks

clean, only the slush of memory tumbling
into the gutter, dark and barely solid. Sometimes

there is only the silhouette of an owl outside,
the sheet music of its hoot, the German houses

on the street that remind you of a version
of Germany you once floated within, but now,

can no longer imagine. You want to say the story,
it’s here somewhere. But at the party, you’re under-

water with no goggles, your reading glasses
floating to the surface. What is there more

to say? It’s all bubbles and tile down here,
but no speech, and you’re ready to come up.
VALLEY OF FIRE, NEVADA
          for  J., A., & C.

          October and the world alternates in vermillion, cantaloupe,
gray and tan. Limestone swirls: cream stirred into orange coffee. We
find ourselves in the petroglyphs. A thousand years ago, people
carved their own image—four figures holding hands—into rock
covered in a patina of iron and manganese. But we are not the
descendants of these original people. These minerals did not leach
from our bodies and evaporate over hundreds of years. We are sullen
transplants in search of red Aztec sandstone, knobby desert knees,
blue agave.
          What does sedimentary mean, really? I think of the four of
us—an accumulation, broken segments cemented to broken
segments. Before you, I was a single person carrying a bike up the
stairs, listening to the radio in a tiled kitchen, but now, we are glued
here in this lumpy land, this amphitheater. We lay our heads on each
other’s rock shoulders. This was all sea at one point. All strung
together by water.
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"PReP" by Jason Crawford

10/9/2020

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Jason B. Crawford (They/He) is a Black, nonbinary, bi-poly-queer writer born in Washington DC, raised in Lansing, MI. In addition to being published in online literary magazines, such as High Shelf Press, Wellington Street Review, Poached Hare, The Amistad, Royal Rose, and Kissing Dynamite, they are the Chief Editor for The Knight’s Library. Jason is a cofounder of the Poetry Collective MMPR, a group of poets who came together for laughs, bad memes, and nerd culture. They are also the recurring host of the poetry section for Ann Arbor Pride. Crawford has their Bachelors of Science in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University. Their debut chapbook collection Summertime Fine is out through Variant Lit.

PReP


He asks me if I am on PReP
or why I am so careless with my own body
He has seen boys like me before
eager to ruin what little we have

I am drunk off my ass
and this man now looks like an open field
or I look like open season
to these other older men

This is, after all,
The Chicago Jackhammer
where the men feast
on the young like me

​But I am drunk and willing
to be a plate for any mouth here
Surely, it is the sadness that brought me
to the table with an apple in my teeth
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<<Previous
    ​Roya Marsh- for (insert name)
    ​Stephanie Kaylor- LONG DISTANCE
    Tongo Eisen Martin-
    A Sketch about Genocide

    ​Despy Boutris- BLOODTEETH
    JinJin Xu- Days of Hourless Mothers
    ​Ashley M. Jones- Flour, Milk & Salt
    Sam Herschel Wein- How To Cook Your Family
    ​Marianne Chan- 2 poems
    Jason Crawford- PReP
    Jee Leong Koh- 2 poems
    Geramee Hensley- Redundancy Limit
    Dustin Pearson- My Brother Outside the House in Hell
    DT McCrea- On occasion of my own death
    Noor Hindi- Unkept
    Lyd Havens- I only misgender myself when Fleetwood Mac comes on
    ​Linda Dove- Mid-Life with Teeth
    Stephen Furlong- I Don't Know About You, but Mostly I Just Want to be Held
    Dorothy Chan- Because You Fall Too Fast Too Hard
    ​Kevin Latimer- MIRAGE
    MJ- Let me be remembered as a mother
    Taylor Byas- Rooftop Monologue
    Matt Mitchell- FINE LINE TRIPTYCH
    ​Todd Dillard- Will
    ​Heidi Seaborn- Under The Bed
    Heather Myers- A Rainbow, Just For A Minute
    Donna Vorreyer- In The Encyclopedia of Human Gestures
    Conor Bracken- THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO TO A MAN
    Ben Purkert- 2 Poems
    Emma Bolden- What Women's Work Is
    ​Chelsea Dingman- Lockdown Drill
    Raych Jackson- Pantoum for Derrion Albert from the Plank
    Elliot Ping- in the eighth grade
    Devin Kelly- POEM FOR MY FRIEND MATT WHO AT THIS MOMENT IS RUNNING 300 MILES ACROSS TENNESSEE​
    Kwame Opoku-Duku-
    ii. dance moves
    D.A. Powell- Sneak
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