 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.
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 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.  Sanna Wani lives between Mississauga and Srinagar. She loves daisies. Verisimilitude after Rankine  Dorsal after Mitski   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.  Daniel B. Summerhill is an Assistant Professor of Poetry and Social Action at California State University Monterey Bay. He lives in Marina with his wife, Quianna and daughter, Genesis. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Obsidian, Rust + Moth, Califragile, Button, Cogs, The Hellebore, The Lilly Review and others. He holds an MFA from Solstice of Pine Manor College. 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  Ava Gripp is a writer from Cleveland, Ohio. She focuses on poetry and travel writing. Your Grandfather Had Secrets
Without you in the mountains another Midwest mostly East, body of water “Keep it cheap for me, Chief. Will ya?” Any bartender smiles mirroring your tight Irish grin another region missing you again I lost you in the winter considering the canyons considering your slapstick I'm riding with you to be alone A Sportster or ‘Dina riding with the Angels they look like you with their leather on The tailpipe said, “Fuck You” and your windpipe sang Moody Blue I went down to the river to feel for a moment I dipped and slashed and drowned to hear you sing your songs once more and you said, don’t go to hell for me, too Plastic septum accessory oxygen earrings catching Closing eyes dreaming of a sixth gear you say Revving, laughing, yelling booooooooom With you in the hospital driving away Only you lived for one more week You had addictions and we all do I count the trees passing in obsession One, two, blinking to see in the California pines But there is no rest there is no miracle Fish in the water that I cast my net to maybe catch you but The Bells have Tolled or told me that you are gone So go on ahead before me Singing another memory Telling another story Please One more story |
