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.

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.

_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.

​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.​

Verisimilitude
​after Rankine

Raphael prefers to go by Ralph, as he feels it suits him better and he’s heard every Ninja Turtle joke ever uttered. He is a native of Detroit, Michigan currently residing in Kentucky with his Boo-thang and their four-year-old boy. He is a chef by day and an essayist, poet, screenwriter in his dreams. He, like Issa Rae, is rooting for everybody Black. His work has been featured (or is forthcoming) on his mama’s fridge, his close friends’ inboxes, Hobart, 3 Elements Review, HASH Journal, Frontier Poetry, and All Guts No Glory. Follow him on twitter: @RALPHEEBOI

I wish Jordan Peele could have released Get Out 400 years ago


                                                                      to serve as a warning to all the
                                                             humans who would          become
                                                 niggers, to let them know they have
                                        reason to fear the arriving ships, to
                            let them know our bodies are honey-
                   laced diamonds ripe for pillaging,
           to prove the drinking gourd
     won’t lead us               home,
to show them our blood still
waters the        cottonseeds,
      to help them choose Olokun’s
           mouth over this land of loss, as their
                    savior won’t know us, their fields will
                              choke us, our tongues will be blanched
                                          in bleach, their law will disembowel
                                                     us, their dreams will wring us broken,
                                                             our cities will wail as tinder, and
                                                                           we’ll never be done     drowning
                                                                                        in their western civilization






Grandpa’s Detroit #1


A shack deep in a thick wood of elm becomes a sanctuary
when duh moon high. Mistuh Bandleaduh counts off
somethin’ swingin’ in A-minuh & duh prettiest gals
you ever seen, conk-laid cats in arm, high-step
onto duh dance floor in ten-dollah suits and handmade
gowns danglin’ ovuh sticky tiles. Duh brass gallops
along wit ‘em, one trumpeter is sweatin’ but leanin’
on his horn, makin’ it bark somethin’ wild.
He make it swang round duh room like a loose firehose.
He give duh music all duh winds in his body.
Doctuh Bass-man pluck his walk in 3/4 while Piano Jim
teach duh keys how to keep duh people feets on fire. Duh sweet
name of Jesus ain’t too much called out in’nis church, but duh’kasional
Lawd a’mercy!! sho’nuff will get heaved up to duh smoky rafters
when duh horns’ wangin’ & Mistuh Bandleaduh’s
raspy holla’ touch on someone just right, make em’ sing
back. Dis a holy experience, got all duh same moans & spite
as dem hymns duh fields taught our folk, but we swapped
the blood in ‘em wit beans & hot watuh co’nbread,
added some jazz & built us up a house to hide it all in.
                                          You wudda loved it, boy.

bouquet

when we thought the world was ending, flowers began blooming
                                                                         -w.j lofton

if not a revolution, a broken window--
an angiosperm in my hand, a bouquet of flowers

in front of me, the shards glisten half yellow-
half opaque & arresting like

              freeze tag, i am preserved & anxious
all at once                      the body always knows

how to signal pain, vivid colors
don’t call me hero, i am no hero, i am

a white blood cell standing in front of this store,
smoking & amber, watching the spring bloom





in defense of survival

i don’t know but it’s better
than not having
nothing to fight for

                                     again, my homies die &
they label those of us on deck
“survivors,” in the longest stretch of the word
           as in, we entered this world dying
& count our blessings each time god takes
                                                    our friends instead

pardon my audacity,

                                        not even small prey
desire to survive