"In This World of Mysteries, Sometimes, I Want to Be a List of Impossibilities" by Timi Sanni10/22/2021  Timi Sanni is a writer, editor, and Muslim literature advocate. An NF2W poetry and fiction scholar, his work appears or is forthcoming in Palette Poetry, Lucent Dreaming, Down River Road, Drinking Gourd Magazine, The Temz Review, X-R-A-Y Literary, and elsewhere. He is a reader for CRAFT literary and Liminal Transit Review and an editor at Kalopsia Literary. He is the winner of the SprinNG Poetry Contest 2020, the Fitrah Review Short Story Prize 2020 and third-place winner of the 2021 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize. Find him on twitter @timisanni In This World of Mysteries, Sometimes, I Want to Be a List of Impossibilities
to go for a swim in deathly waters / and return neither wet nor bloody / to live and love / and not die these little deaths of heartbreaks / to bring forth new lives / from every shard of my frozen soul / and not first feel the pangs of demise // again / to live / and not die / but what? Other than variations of deaths / what / were we ever bestowed with as grace? I have given myself / to the wind / and to death / that it may take me at the toll of destiny's bell / but again I want not to be defined by life's compendium / of possibilities
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 Anna Attie is a writer and community organizer living in Chicago. She recently graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA in English Literature. Her journalism appears in In These Times, South Side Weekly, Inside Higher Ed, and other publications. Her poetry is forthcoming in The Offing. We Lose Her Over Facetime   Ruth Baumann is the author of Thornwork (Black Lawrence Press, 2020) & Parse (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). She is also the author of five chapbooks. She holds a PhD from Florida State University & an MFA from the University of Memphis. Solace
Three of six in the photograph in front of me are dead, young & overdosed, but this isn’t a poem about death, really, as much as it is about being still here. Being still here & trying to make music from that. C tells me about Thin Places, offers a holy explanation for the way the saltwater marshes calm me, make me either new or very old, shape me small, eternal, & honest. I would like to hold his hand, hand him that sense of connection. I would like words to give in the wake of all this nearby wreckage, deaths like wave crests passing by, sweeping & startlingly irreversible. But I suspect if we get still enough, we all already know what we need to know. I have no fresh ideas. Love is not novel. Inside me is something gentle & honest that I give all I can to tend. Rewiring My World God’s got both eyes shut some days, not from apathy but from wishing her creations could be nicer when they are bruised. I get it. Every meditation tells me to breathe out a few counts longer than I breathe in. Who says imagination can’t break like bones? God, I wish, too.  Rob Colgate is a Filipino-American poet from Evanston, IL. He holds a degree in psychology from Yale University and is currently pursuing his MFA in poetry with the New Writers Project at UT Austin, where he serves as the nonfiction editor for Bat City Review and is working towards a certificate in critical disability studies. His work is featured in Best New Poets 2020; his first chapbook, So Dark the Gap, was published by Tammy in March 2020 and won the 2020 ReadsRainbow Prize for poetry. You can find him at robcolgate.com. Remember These Tulips
After Sylvia Plath Back when things were good between us, Finn, I would fall asleep dreaming of my own future anxiety and how I would be able to text you: Hey, tonight is really bad— can I come over? And you would say yes and I would come over and we would be overwhelmingly together, our bodies made tangible by the activated sprinklers in the field. But tonight I cannot find even a single vein in these petals. Do you want me in your blood or not? You were so happy. I did that. I only have a future because you once told me that I do. You would always promise a silly dance together, a joke that would never end. Now—so many leftover lentils. So I keep myself busy. I count the ways the light lies on your sweatshirt draped over the porch banister. I open and close every book, every draft, every video of every boy who is happier and less anxious than me. I never wanted to distract myself. I only wanted to lay with you with my shame half-open. But your driveway was too open. I swerved around each handful of rice you spilled. You were the one who filled my tank with gas, who smeared my inclination towards you with light. I have never been so absent. I think I am in love but am asymptomatic. Every night I slept next to you I dreamt of you anyway. REM, why couldn’t we save that? He’s gone now. Promises made in the context of time are not promises. They are small hooks that catch on your skin. They are too bright in the first place. I am so hungry and you ate all my purple yams. I need to call home. I miss Rob. You are the greyhound I always bet on and you are the bus that never comes. I will use my propensity for delusion to believe that I do not miss you, that you are coming back, that we are at the museum together and the two of us become an exhibit. Glass case, be small enough so my shoulder touches his.  Tasneem Maher is an Arab writer and poet who encourages theatrics and melodrama of any kind. A Best of the Net nominee, her work has been featured in Vagabond City Lit, Kissing Dynamite, and Jaffat El Aqlam, amongst others. She is also Fiction and Personal Essays Editor at Sumou Mag. She tweets @mythosgal. Pilgrimage I rub a dove’s smooth head and watch it fly out, imagining that it is simply taking the long way to get to you. We had our send-off on opposite sides of the desert. Now, there are at least two bodies of water between us. I toss my voice like a stone across the sea’s shuddering skin and it sinks halfway in. My qiyam is a four-hour phone call while you cried through it. I tell you I know what being alone feels like, that one time, I opened all the windows in the middle of a storm just to smell it and spent all morning mopping up pools of rainwater. If storms make us feel less alone, it is only because they crawl across skies carving out distance like the aloneness carved into us, cured by the ache of distance alone. We would live by rivers we know nothing about and had only seen glow apatite blue in idyllic postcards we picked out in bookstores. We’d chosen this, after all. On your first day, you show me your new river, pixelated and dim
through your camera. The windmills you’d passed on your way into the city, farther out, are much prettier. You think happiness looks a lot like the windmills catching the sunset, breaking the light to shards, a thousand glittering suns. I want to see that happiness without a screen. I want that happiness to be closer to you. For now, you buy the cheapest bottle of wine for the novelty, disparage all the food, and tell me very quietly that you miss Amman. I miss it too, on humid days most of all, though maybe it’s the mountains we miss, how much nearer to the sky we were. When you complain about digging up coats in mid-September, I say you’ve been spoilt by a sunburn summer but to you, it’s divine retribution for ignoring the duaa before the plane took off or that it took off at all. It rains on your first night and when we have nothing to say, we listen to the water.  Aerik Francis is a Queer Black & Latinx poet & teaching artist based in Denver, Colorado, USA. Aerik is a recipient of poetry fellowships from CantoMundo and The Watering Hole. They are event coordinator for Slam Nuba and a poetry reader for Underblong poetry journal. You can find links to their published work through their social media on IG/TW @phaentompoet _Bebop_
“[B]op referred to the way a man in particular walked down the street. It was his signature to the world!” –Afaa Michael Weaver Bouncing with a bounce that announced us three, a trio of Black cuties, faded and insisting to get more twisted, we enlisted the assistance of a Lyft ride to safely get us to music and club lights. Stopped in a stopping zone, we are stopped by a cop: What do you think you are doing bebopping across the street? Dizzy and shocked by the hunting of this hawk, we paused – the driver paused – lost, only to notice the cop was talking to us. Driver-side window down, he scowled at us in the back, passengers waiting for an answer to a foreclosed question. We clearly must have been improvising or riffing or scatting & step-skipping– Why did he think we were bebopping across the street? Clogging up the stopping zone in gridlock the cop could not find a law -ful reason to fee or lock us so he clocked us & blocked us until he walked off. Not even jaywalking, just walking while Black with the singing swagger of our swinging staggers– What else could we think but be, bopping across the street?  Emily Blair is a queer Appalachian poet and writer currently living in North Carolina. The best ham in Louisville’s in a deli in the back of a liquor store, no signs, salty-sweet and heavenly cold on a biscuit, made for picnics in the March sunlight, made for walking, and even these moments must be remembered.
When I come around all I want is salt. I beg God smite me like Lot’s wife. I step over sharp and broken things, find the remote, sit, smoke, drink a pot of coffee, lick salt off my palm, choke down the forty cent can of chili, force living, more salt, dream of ham biscuits in the sun, of picnics, of the life I never tried, dream of dying, smoke all the cigarettes, go out in the rain, say hello to the cats, drink Gatorade, drink tea, drink chlorinated tap water, pray for death, wake up, go to work, live, ask everybody the name of the deli, nobody knows, is it a deli or do they just sell ham, what’s the fucking difference make, go to the park, eat a sandwich alone, go home alone, stand just outside the circle of conversation in the dark, smoke all the cigarettes, clean up broken glass, swear off dark liquor, repent, bargain, repent, beg for death, give in, walk to the corner store, buy a bottle, drink it, feel better, lie on my stomach reading the Bible, Lot’s wife doesn’t even have a name, get religion, lose it, go to the bar, lose it again, go to get that ham and the cashier looks at me like I’ve lost my mind, why do I think they sell ham here, exactly?  Adrienne Novy is a Jewish and disabled artist, Bettering American Poetry and Pushcart Prize nominee, and graduate from Hamline University’s Creative Writing program. She is the author of Crowd Surfing With God (Half Mystic Press, 2018) and the mini-chapbooks, We Have Each Other’s Flowers (Zines + Things, 2020) and Pull (Ginger Bug Press, 2020). Her most recent work can be found in Vagabond City Lit and “You Flower/ You Feast: An Anthology of Prose, Poems, & Plays inspired by Harry Styles”. She lives in the Upper Midwest and has a cat named Laurie. portrait of the artist as lights up by harry styles, sequins soaked in the pacific ocean, 2019
since i sleep in the dark alone, i fold into the hum & glow of me. a finger is drawn down my torso & becomes a prickly scrambling. the boys who wouldn’t look twice at me in high school like my instagram photos now. none of them know i smell like lemons when i really try, or feel more like me submerged in bubbling water, like a torpid knife embracing the harvest, my body is inconsistent in its want & gratitude--i’m sorry by the way, the sour of being encased in skin—is much messier than anticipated, i do not desire myself unless someone else is hungry. i would make the mirror prism its growl if i could. falling by harry styles is actually about mental health recovery & I will die on this hill, whether it is made of gold or not. my hands, a scaffold, a benevolent temple, dedicated to some new & warm g-d, i pray for a freezer full of ice packs & a kitchen sink free of dishes, thankful to be drenched in amber that is only the sun in the morning &, even so, what am I now if I’m someone I don’t want around, undeserving of joys such as iridescent nail polish & the breeze from tulle blouses? I call my therapist, sobbing. Someone somewhere is playing piano at the bottom of the ocean.  Daniel Garcia's essays appear or are forthcoming in SLICE, Denver Quarterly, The Offing, Ninth Letter, Guernica, Hayden’s Ferry Review and elsewhere. Poems appear or are forthcoming in The Puritan, Harbor Review, The Arkansas International, Ploughshares, Zone 3 and others. A recipient of a Short Prose Prize from Bat City Review and a Poetry Prize from So to Speak, Daniel has received awards and scholarships from Tin House, the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and currently serves as a reader and editorial assistant for Split Lip Magazine. Daniel’s essays also appear as Notables in The Best American Essays. essay on girlhood
n. | definition: the balmy bouquet of a mouth always burgeoning into summer / a kind of blue often confused for a shape like sinking but more / the ocean in all her tumbling / arms vast enough to ribbon an entire planet & still find room for me whenever i ask if she has any to spare / the way she says always babe / the mouth that becomes a dressing room & / me as the bouquet blooming from it / hands curled around booty shorts / a scrapcloth the color of wine / that which i didn’t think could hold / the soft of my thighs like i would my mother’s when i stepped into them / the light that finds my teeth before my tears / the word pretty perched above my lips while the cashier rings everything up like / a handful of sand pressed into / a pearl i’ve waited all this time to see / a sunset just outside the glass doors & not enough world to fit it all Daydream In the dressing room before the ceremony, my mother’s thumb works across my cheek. Like a secret tucked behind my ear, there’s a rose plaited into my hair. Pink, thornless. She’s the only one I’d want walking me through the trellis, the first set of hands to meet me in the world, last before I find his. I’m becoming a wife I need to be. I came here shoeless & singing & today I’m doing it all over again. If I look past the window, the ocean is chittering & halo- draped in sunset. Before each other, we’re both so young. Her assessment is simple: You look so beautiful. I’m not sure who says it, my mother or the waves, but she’s looking at me like a woman. She’s about to give me away. We’re crying.  Brendan Joyce is an unemployed worker from Cleveland, Ohio, the co-organizer of Grieveland and the author of the collections Love & Solidarity and Character Limit. moving day
this city would be smaller if cars were illegal though we’d have to drag that desk across town then walk back to grab the mattress & then again twice for the couch (it’s two pieces) a new color made from what was once grey sponging up the light late May rain I found so much from a few different decades packing (how can moving be so many things? as nostalgic as it is hard as it is reinvigorating) that blue corduroy snapback from when the nun took us to sit courtside (before Lebron) when Eric Snow was about the best we could get (Zydrunas spit all over your lap) the Whitney ticket from a first date and the hospital bracelet from the last the New York magazine you gave me a few months after I got sober with Philip Seymour Hoffman’s dead face on the front yesterday while cataloging these morbid kindnesses I realized this is my seventeenth time moving last summer (here he goes again) I sat on that porch with you and watched them build that house. The day I moved out they had almost finished. |
