 Darius Simpson is a writer, educator, performer, and skilled living room dancer from Akron, Ohio. Much like the means of production, he believes poetry belongs to and with the masses. He aims to inspire those chills that make you frown and slightly twist up ya face in approval. Darius believes in the dissolution of empire and the total liberation of Africans and all oppressed people by any means available. Free The People. Free The Land. Free All Political Prisoners. YOU’RE NOT A POET TIL THE STATE BETRAYS YOU writing a poem is to punching a cop what punching a cop is to voting blue it’s like comparing apples to punching a cop unc, this whiskey is callin me your name again blood in the august sun dares me to jump dirty knife in the sink sings about vengeance untouched ammo screams about loneliness am i a punk for writing the state’s mortality can an empire bent on death ever die do pigs fly to hell or is hell already in them will angel wings make me a better fugitive devil on both shoulders says squeeze we all somebody’s child tryna get home you’re not a poet til the state betrays you NEW SHIT ABOUT OLD SHIT
these is between-job poems these is third shift politics these is no sick-time ramblings crooked teeth between coffee stains desk imprints next to handcuff scars edge of the counter kinda dangerous cobwebs fill the spiral in my notebook weaving a story about secondhand creativity speaker of the poem got a puppet mouth speaker of the poem breaks the fourth wall unfortunately poetry leaves the governor’s jaw in tact i write in third person so pigs don’t know who to choke i write of violence like a child forged in a lit furnace turn away from the carnage and the zombies will find you turn your back on genocide and you volunteer for the next noose death is a matter of how you interpret disaster economies sittin up at 2:00A.M. fightin sleep for a better casket siftin through used books for inspiration in the margins
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"When my son says, I don't love you, I want to tell him about lilacs" by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach2/11/2022  Julia Kolchinksy Dasbach emigrated from Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She is the author of three poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, winner the Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2019), finalist for the Jewish Book Award; Don't Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize; and 40 WEEKS, forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2023. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, Blackbird, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. Julia holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the Murphy Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Hendrix College and recently relocated to Little Rock, Arkansas with her two kids, cat, dog, and husband. When my son says, I don't love you, I want to tell him about lilacs
how sometimes I don't love them their careless smell of childhood & sudden bloom their sweetness lingering to rot & sometimes I don't love his grandmother who always loves lilacs & smells of them when making threats of suicide if I marry the man who will become his father & all the lilacs in her garden will die if I move away or say the words I don’t & sometimes I don't love coffee if it's gone warm or the bed when I am too far from hitting it or the pillow sometimes I fucking hate the pillow when I bite it when making love isn't actually loving & I won't say fuck in front of him no matter how much I want to or tell him that sometimes I don't love his mouth & hands biting & scratching his head of curls drilling into my stomach or slamming into the wall & sometimes I want to tell him all the things I do not love but instead I reassure him after each I don’t love you, Mama, how much I do I do I don't know how to love without him how the lilacs will keep coming year after year how rot is its own sweetness  Sofia Fey is a Lesbian and Non-Binary writer living in LA. Currently, they are the founder of the Luminaries Poetry workshop, and poetry editor at Hooligan Magazine. They love to be with their friends, but mostly, to beat them at Mario Party. They tweet @sofiafeycreates. Outstretched Hand Disguised as a Love Poem
after Matthew Olzmann So this is what I've got, reasons why we might make it through this week: Because your lipstick on my water bottle. Because the way you laugh into my neck like one of those photos but actually in real life. Because you say "ay" when you bump into something, because even your accidentals are sexy. Because your hands are always fidgeting, your fingers dancing. Because your hot breath close to my hot breath. Because look at you, glowing and grounded. Because if anyone can hold it down, it's the queen of pentacles. Because it's the 42% earth in your chart for me. Because you'll tell me when you're scared. Because I'll tell you, I'm scared. Because when our state is on fire you turn to ask me how are my lungs. Because you love me like I want to be loved. Because I want and want and want and want. Because the hardest I've cum in my young life is the night you moaned I love you not once, but twice, you don’t forget when your chest swells like that. Because when we played uno you asked if we could be a team and then I never put another card down because it seems like you had every skip and plus two in the deck. Because I'm always worried people want me to leave and because you never make me feel like you want me to leave. Because I miss you as soon as I leave. Because I send you my emoji hand and you reply with two. Because first I was moving to write for TV, and then I was really moving to be with you, if only once, if only from six feet away. Because I have to know where we will go.  Kaleigh O’Keefe is a gender outlaw and proud union member living in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Their poetry has appeared in “Breaking the Chains: a Socialist Perspective on Women’s Liberation,” Slamfind, and on indie music legend Ceschi’s album Sans Soleil. Kaleigh writes and edits for Liberation News, is a co-founder of Game Over Books, and hosts the First Fridays Youth Open Mic in Jamaica Plain. You can find them at www.kaleighokeefe.com. AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOAN OF ARC
after Ansel Elkins “...and since you are fallen again -- O, sorrow! -- into these errors and crimes as the dog returns to his vomit…. we denounce you as a rotten member, which, so that you shall not infect the other members of Christ, must be cast out of the unity of the Church, cut off from her body, and given over to the secular power: we cast you off, separate and abandon you…” - The Trial of Jeanne D’Arc, translated into English from the original Latin and French Documents by W.P. Barrett. Chapter 33: May 30, the Last Day of This Trial, 1431 Let it be known: it was not merely armor. Ask the flames how much those clothes protected me. I was extinguished early, not even offered dignity to burn fully. The ashes raked away to display my womanhood for all to see. Nor was I a dog that returns to his vomit-- unless every peasant in France also turned canine at the sight of me. They reached out to touch my garments-- that vomit. Only eighteen, they believed me holy. In a hundred years had never seen anything so liberating as me. Look at me. Touch me. Can you feel the power of not being what you are told to be? "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  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? |
