 stevie redwood is a disabled sino-jewish neuroemergent introvert genderpervert homotrash littledreamer bigmouth freak living & dying on Yelamu Ohlone land / San Francisco, CA. they like shittalk, porchsitting, leaflitter, & riffraff. find them trolling yimbys on twitter @trash_whisperer abolish the dead
living binary :: i’m supposed to be :: grateful to habit :: a body it means :: i think :: i am :: alive :: like everything else :: a live :: continu :: um :: how much :: living in order :: to cheat being :: dead :: how ordered :: until the binary :: body how dead :: before the body :: unliving how bodied :: until becoming :: you think :: how living :: until you :: unbody your body :: how grateful :: you body :: how body become :: how are you :: undead :: you how :: you living :: how disordered :: before unbecoming :: a binary :: how disordered until i un :: bi :: nary the body :: & how are your dead :: & are you alive :: & i am :: here still :: becoming :: disordered :: abolish the body :: a body i am :: still dying :: still living :: become :: be :: come :: abolish the dying :: a body :: come :: be :: & body the dead :: unliving :: the binaries i am :: supposed to :: be alive if i bother :: a body :: i think :: it means i am :: grateful :: i am :: the living :: the dying :: am i :: alive am i :: still :: here i am :: disorder :: still dead :: be here :: what is unbodied :: am i :: what is :: what is what :: is :: what :: is the body :: what is :: what is what :: is :: what :: is the body :: & what is :: the body :: what is :: what is what :: is :: what :: is the body :: & what is :: the body :: becoming
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 Ariel Clark-Semyck (she/her) is a poet from Chicago. She is currently an MFA candidate at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Her poems have been published by Heavy Feather Review, Grimoire Magazine, Witch Craft Magazine, Yes Poetry, Occulum, and elsewhere. productivity log
isolation has been challenging but rewarding. during this time, i have taken the opportunity to assess & restructure my past methods of suffering, all while developing new methods that might prove their usefulness in the months ahead. i leak menstrual blood across the bathroom floor & let it harden. i double over in pain, slide along the walls, ricochet from doorway to doorway, shout oof! oof! oof! alarm the cat. i role-play waterlogged ophelia & take a bubble bath face-down in my finest nightgown. i shake my hand with my other hand. i fast-forward through brokeback mountain to get to the kissing scenes, a giddy tear tumbling down my cheek. i shine a flashlight all over my body & spend hours on web md. i stare at the deer in the backyard, touch my fingers gently to my heart as if to ask who me? i practice drifting out of consciousness with my hand resting on my forehead, palm up, like all the old paintings by the greats. i practice dreaming of you. i practice dreaming of you dreaming of me stranded in the desert with the tumbleweeds going in the background. i practice dreaming of you dreaming of me waving a handkerchief & calling out to you yoohoo! in your dream, we are gliding across the green screen of a spaghetti western on a beautiful dappled stallion, my arms around your waist, my pigtails whipping in the wind, your ten-gallon hat flying off to reveal a full head of hair. i practice waking up in a cold sweat. admittedly, there’s been a learning curve. sometimes my suffering can get sloppy. sometimes i speed ahead of myself & i don’t even mean to. sometimes that sky swaps its purple for pink for blue for gray for blue for gray for blue for pink for purple again & i move so slow i can barely stand it. tasteful nude all yolks run together in this afternoon sun. the sky yawns as fur spikes up from the earth. a daffodil opens like the palm of a hand, yielding its sex to ask apocalypse now or apocalypse not with each petal pulled. white blood cells furrow my fox-brow as i watch the space cadets fake-kiss & drink coffee in their brightly colored lofts. gray matter floods my pelvic floor & grows whiskers. if i bounce my thigh against my thigh just so, someone’s square jaw will appear to argue with my alone-time. i vortex into the pea hiding between the mattresses. i spew royal jelly & get glued to the springs. i told you not to leave me out so long— any longer & you could cut through me like butter.  benedict nguyễn is a dancer, writer, and curator based on unceded Lenape and Wappinger lands (South Bronx, NY). Their writing has appeared in AAWW’s the Margins, Brooklyn Rail, Diacritics, and Pank, among others. In 2019, they created the multidisciplinary performance platform “soft bodies in hard places.” They publish a monthly-ish newsletter “first quarter moon slush” on substack and are sometimes online @xbennyboo. bezel bleed
after Jessica Alba, Awkwafina, The Bold Type, Ariana Grande, Vanessa Hudgens, Daniel Dae Kim, Gwyneth Paltrow, & Jia Tolentino @me_on_main It is up to me to represent myself I see me and I deserve to see me I want to help me solve I want to be an additive to life When I post I’m giving voice to highlight #representation starts both in front and behind the camera Paint over this screen with lit up pixels of your heart Bleed your aorta dry so story exists people feel less alone so people stay #woke Its hard to make a living That’s harsh reality of participating in these systems gain a little more freedom Use freedom to reject things you no longer need But keep writing write what you know #ownvoices An equal world is enabled coming together we can A journey to 100 likes too 1000 dollars begins with a single post a single # this is #art #resistance #ad @me_on_main commented: so my comments are being taken out of context It’s a crazy time this is NOT plagiarism this is a collage not a cop out this is my art this is my labor this is curation this is me thank me it is incredibly dangerous and selfish to take this situation that lightly people are going to die which is terrible but like inevitable stay inside @me_alt When u bleed over my screen with the lit up pixels of ur wet heart paint ur aorta so ur story exists don’t forget ur telling them what hurts u what moves u they already know ur blood type now they know ur behavioral type so take this message and whisper it in my ear sign it on someone’s palms write it down and pass it on find ur friends online if u rly must then log off forever unless new friends need to find u online too then log back on grow the movement between new accounts deleted accts darting beneath the algorithm that’s probably still smart enough to catch u doesn’t care u hate surveillance what else u do about it huh right something they already approved or tell someone how much u care and they scroll past anyway another representation rubs their attn as if they’re choosing anything tell them again nom nom norm Gorged on calories when hungry for the nutrition of ur sweaty skin ate so much i ruined my intestine’s inner cells with the ravages of modernity’s complex division of carbs, chew chew to stay sane mmm doesn’t even taste sweet so norm’ed i am to smol sucrose poured over factory dough i come to think it should all come like that coated in extra spackles tickle my palate flaky tension torn the psychodrama of my at home cooking show featuring eating have i ever watched myself watch someone watching themself pull their eyelid back to etch daggers on their lids wonder if they knew they were making soft pore porn conjuring the jagged wings of an angel if pressed for cash do i pay the worker or buy the eyeliner swoop past that pit of guilt keep spectating the stretch and pull of skinning pulling wrinkles tight and taut brush pat beat rub and most importantly blend into the surface, blur til its totalizing illusion cuts me open i too could be that a turn on the webcam, just a bite of dough, a dextrose brush across my chin, swallow what agony is there swipe swipe dab dab then bake til i glow full from within just powder mist to finish off my mask waiting for  Gabrielle Grace Hogan is a poet from St. Louis, Missouri currently pursuing her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has been published by or is forthcoming from The Academy of American Poets, Kissing Dynamite, Foglifter, DIAGRAM, Redivider, and others. She is the poetry editor of Bat City Review and co-editor of You Flower / You Feast, an online anthology of works inspired by Harry Styles. Her social media and projects can be found on her website, gabriellegracehogan.com. Girls’ Night at the Saturnine Aquarium
down Red River & 7th the Muppet drag show spreads its legs boys fill up on foreskins before purple paint smears the floor i have never seen so many beautiful people insistent on not being in love with me there is a Miss Piggy in lingerie boys in dresses long as eulogies poor-postured animals kissed up against other animals the vice grip of a tongue latched onto a breast i think about it the goodness of breasts drag queens resplendent as Coke cans coax my innerer schweinehund out with cold sticks of butter it asks if this is how you get the girl no they tell it the butter is a mere distraction boredom brings genitals slumped against genitals i am thinking again of the baby squirrel orphaned to the sidewalk her eyelids not yet formed the drag queen removes her gloves & we see that her skin is not actually purple outside Elysium i crave to crave a cigarette i cough & out flies a little bug so cute i will be alone tonight  Devin Kelly is a high school teacher living in New York City. He is the author of *In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen* (Civil Coping Mechanisms), and his work has been published in* Longreads, The Guardian, Lithub, Hobart, DIAGRAM*, and more. A SUN SETTING THROUGH A WINDOW or SEVEN LAYERS OF PAINT
after Matthew Yeager If you've said you were going to quit but didn’t. If sometimes even the largest room feels cramped. If you leave the ones you love to be with the ones you don’t. If you’ve built a house of fire. If you left the food in the microwave. If you forgot to fall asleep. If you woke to find a fly crawling the long crack between the wall & ceiling. If last year’s clothes no longer fit. If it’s not a question of size. If it’s always something else. If you’ve spent an hour looking for what was in your pocket. If you’ve collapsed out of sheer annoyance with the self. If you’ve wanted to scream but knew only the neighbors would hear. If you do not know their names. If you’ve cultivated a life of conscious avoidance. If you sometimes forget your mother’s middle name. If you do not always get the job done. If desire is your best kept secret. If it’s just one more cigarette out the window. If it’s just one more. If your friends are getting married. If sometimes you want to reject the invitation. If you think about joy the way a child thinks about algebra. If you’re just trying to figure it out. If it’s just another day. If you’re fine. If you don’t know what to order. If it’s another conversation. If you begin with I’m sorry, I forgot. If your friends say you worry too much. If you worry too much. If there’s gum all over the sidewalk. If the sign that reads caution, paint drying is five years old. If it seems everyone is throwing their furniture out in the rain. If you want to walk alone. If you don’t want to walk alone. If you want to say something about this life. If you don’t want to fight. If your pants are stained. If all your plants are dying. If you have no idea why. If you forgot to give them names. If there’s another life beyond this life. If there’s even tomorrow. If you hold your breath. If you’re holding it now. TONIGHT I AM THINKING OF EMIL ZATOPEK After the frost came, the cold stayed, & everything it touched began to hold a wind, like even the walls had holes. & on the subway this morning, two mice wrestling slid skidding on the ice between the tracks -- it looked like one of them might’ve been the other’s brother — & then the train came & they disappeared beneath it. Sometimes, in weather like this, I wonder what is going to become of us. It’s not the stuff of party-talk & banter. I can’t begin a conversation with the sound of my heart waking me up at night & how I stayed up in bed waiting for it to burst out of me. I get the feeling it happens to all of us but I wouldn’t say it. I’d say Hell I Didn’t Sleep Well Last Night & someone would nod, maybe, & say Me Neither & then the rest of the night would carry on. I think odd things when I’m alone. Tonight I’m watching videos of Emil Zatopek, who, after winning the gold in both the five and ten thousand, decided to run his first marathon at the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki. Ten miles in, he pulled beside the favorite, asked him what he thought of the race so far, & the favorite, thinking it would ruin Emil’s confidence, said the pace was too slow. It wasn’t. But Emil pulled away & the favorite collapsed to the ground & almost died. The favorite didn’t know then that, when it was too cold to run, Emil would draw the blinds of his apartment that looked out on streets emptied by occupation & fill his bathtub with water, soap, & dirty clothes, & run in place over them for hours until everything was clean. What we don’t know about us is what makes us. Because everything is approaching the infinite it is how we approach the infinite that changes our lives. I am thinking of what to do with the unsaid, of all the empty space caught between us that could be filled with me telling you I Love You, over & over again, each time for the first time. This is the story, though, of my life, the story I want to tell the next time I cannot sleep, how it has nothing to do with you, this heavy beating of my heart, but how I want you to know anyway, how the pace is not too slow, but too fast, & how maybe you feel like this also, just sometimes? The weather outside, cold. Your mind running for hours in the dark room of your body. Everything about the world both too much & too little, all at once.  Danielle P. Williams is a poet, essayist and spoken-word artist from Columbia, South Carolina. She is a third-year MFA candidate in poetry at George Mason University. She strives to give voice to unrepresented cultures, making it a point to expand on the narratives and experiences of her Black and Chamorro cultures. Her poems were selected for the 2020 Literary Award in Poetry from Ninth Letter. Her work appears in Hobart, Barren Magazine, The Pinch, JMWW, and elsewhere. For more, visit https://www.daniellepwilliams.com Yutu 2018
I think a lot about bodies that aren’t mine. Swells of blue bullies crashing into one another, shadows over neighbors homes like an anxious reaper. My Nana is a perfect example of how us Chamorro are not easily broken. The waves come and go and we are always thankful for what reminds us of the land our ancestors willed. This summer, I finally learned what it feels like to know you can’t get lost somewhere with only three roads. I wonder if anyone else in the world knows that after Yutu hit Saipan my family went three months without power. The ocean is a mighty mighty body, pulsing in the pit of our design. Reef and rubble in our lungs. Why is it that we love things that hurt us? I wonder if anyone else in the world knows we were born from water. It can never truly erase us.  Alan Chazaro is the author of This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and Piñata Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). He is a graduate of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley and a former Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fellow at the University of San Francisco. His chapbook, Notes from the Eastern Span of the Bay Bridge, is now available for order on Ghost City Press. He’s on Twitter and finally IG, too, @alan_chazaro. In a Vernacular of Speculation
In 2021, a student told me: there’s incredible political violence while stepping towards beauty. It sounded true. I wrote inside my notebook: what would happen if authority was reversed? There’s a world beyond us that no amount of line breaks can enjamb. I’ve tried. Maybe that’s hope. But this doesn’t answer anything. In class, we asked how perspectives are disembodied & who receives evidence of happiness? We used phrases like this hits close to home, which is both terrifying & comforting, since it implies we’ve had a body to shelter a home inside of even if that home is now being hit. I wonder: What is kindness if not cyclical? What is poetry if not ceremony? These are topics we’ve circled together. There are things I’ll never understand about certain hues of blue, about loss. I don’t know if I’ve lost anything, really. Maybe this is a harmonized prayer about the things we have left. Maybe the world is burning, or maybe the world was already burnt. It’s a matter of perspective & speculation. Nothing is really original these days. We sample and borrow forgotten oldies. President Biden was sworn into office. Someone Tweeted how Vice President Harris locks us up. Amanda Gorman joked she was a 60-year-old woman in a 16-year-old body when she transformed in front of our nation on live television. I never said I’m trapped, but isn’t that what this sounds like? Confinement could be good or it could be bad. It depends on where you stop your doom-scrolling. It depends on how far you’re willing to go. This isn’t a matter of politics or poetics. This is a room filled with people, with the ceiling about to burst. Maybe that’s freeing, or maybe it’s crushing. I want to write myself into gratitude. It feels distant but my fingers are still moving. When I got my stimulus check, it arrived as a prepaid plastic card with directions for activation outlined by Money Network®. It seemed treacherous somehow, but wasn’t. My dad doesn’t care enough & wants to know if I’m watching the Warriors game. Truth is, I am. What else can I hustle right now besides Steph Curry’s wrists? Ball harder is what competitors shout when a game is getting out of hand. I guess it depends on what game & whose hands. I guess this about a shot clock & reading Ross Gay & being present in this moment. In a few seconds, I’ll have to exit this poem & get ready to Zoom. I’ll have to jump back into it like I’ve never left-- even when I’m already gone.  Deema K. Shehabi is the author of Thirteen Departures From the Moon and co-editor with Beau Beausoleil of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here (PM Press), for which she received the Northern California Book Award's NCBR Recognition Award. She is also co-author of Diaspo/Renga with Marilyn Hacker and the winner of the Nazim Hikmet poetry competition in 2018.Deema’s work has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies including Literary Imagination, the Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Poetry London, and Crab Orchard, to name a few. Her work has been translated into French, Farsi, and Arabic, and she has been nominated for the Pushcart prize several times. A Summer’s Tale with Fire Birds
Ghosts of hybrid hummingbirds, iridescent green, lurch forward in the charred trees along the highway. We drive to the lake basin as thousands of acres burn: redwood, white fir, ponderosa pine, giant sequoias, the rhythm of their fall apparent only to firefighters & prison inmates making two dollars a day. No sign of the large pebbles, mossy and slippery at the lake’s entrance. We barely notice the water’s altered eyelids, shallow at the sky’s mouth. This time, our entry into the cool current at high altitude leaves you with no air, and our boys gawk at the spectacle of a breathless father. Bruised with sea eyes, they know nothing of checkpoints nor functionaries with ruby-lined fingers at passport control windows. They have a home beneath a live oak and Siberian elm, its windows are married to arbutus marina, its fences are lined with honeysuckle vines. Our sadness, a penultimate inertia, is more expectant than theirs. In the morning, you crave a lupine grief, an easel kiss on the nose. In your dream, there are two of me, one through the keyhole and one on your side of the door. Does she wear a nightgown with anemones, too? I ask. We gleam open like the lake, our rib cages still intact.  Kayleb Rae Candrilli is the recipient of a Whiting Award and of a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. They are the author of Water I Won't Touch (Copper Canyon, 2021), All the Gay Saints (Saturnalia 2020), and What Runs Over (YesYes Books, 2017). What Runs Over won the 2016 Pamet River Prize and was a 2017 Lambda Literary finalist for Transgender Poetry and a finalist for the 2018 American Book Fest's best book award in LGBTQ nonfiction. All the Gay Saints was the winner of the 2018 Saturnalia Book Prize, selected by Natalie Diaz. They are published or forthcoming in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Academy of American Poets, TriQuarterly, Puerto del Sol, Bettering American Poetry, The Boston Review, and others. *"POEM IN WHICH I CHALLENGE..." appears in Kayleb's 2021 collection Water I Won't Touch.
POEM IN WHICH I CHALLENGE MY FATHER TO AN ARM-WRESTLING COMPETITION AND FINALLY WIN // More than a decade has passed since I saw my father, in the parking lot of a Wilkes-Barre strip mall. More than a decade since he took my sibling to the Hawaiian Islands and dosed them with oxy, meth, and heroin. In that order. None of this should have surprised me. But, of course, it did. When my sibling finally came home, they brought home blown veins, a back full of scars, and a pillowcase filled with bruises. My father once forced a crack pipe into my hands, right after I was discharged from the hospital, and right after my 18th birthday. I’m sure there’s something beautiful to say, somewhere, tucked between the facts of our lives and my old Pokémon collection. My sibling is sober and vibrant and alive. My sibling is way more fun than I’ve ever been. Nothing should surprise me, but it does, and that’s enough. // I have so few fond memories of my father, but what I have, I hold. He read me the entire Kamandi Comic series. and I studied that Last Boy on Earth. I learned how to survive an apocalypse and how to be a boy. It’s 2020 now, and both are proving useful. When I was 7 years old, my father and I play fought with inflatable circus swords in the sunroom. When it came down, I expected a knighting, but instead, the plastic seam sliced my cornea. I suppose most children taste this same bittersweet syrup when they think about their fathers: sugar dressing up a lemon, an eye patch over a rivulet, a pretend pirate only until the wound heals. // When the stock market crashes, I am happy to have nothing but Hot Fries and Orzo invested, in the pantry. Sometimes it is easy to have so little, or at least uncomplicated. My mother loved Hip-Hop and my father beat her for it. If she and I drove around alone, she’d turn up the radio and explain: It's like the more money we come across the more problems we see. My mother had our property logged of all its timber, so I could move away and learn to write poetry. My father spent all that maple money on marriage counseling, but my mother wasn’t in attendance. Sometimes I want to go back, just for a meal of Steak-umms and frozen orange juice. But who has the time to rewind. My parents are finally divorced. I am writing poems. Those downed trees I used to climb are sawdust. // A POEM ABOUT ONLY BASEBALL for Bubba Bubba, we were out there on the diamond together, and you were always shining the brightest. I remember you catching a pop fly just to roll your body right into a front flip. For you it was about being the best, and looking good while you did it. God, we were just children and the world was ours and we couldn’t be hurt even when we were hurt or hurting. Every small town has a story about a talented and beautiful boy who is smoldering. I was the only girl on the little league team, and though I am no longer a girl, you were always so fiercely soft with me. When I lost my teeth at second base, you searched the rocky infield dirt and told me not to worry about the money it would cost to put me back together. I think about your daughters often, and I want to pass down some of the gentleness you gave me. I keep it all in my wallet, still, tucked between receipts and the coordinates of our town-- our town that takes all the good ones, and never looks back.  Julianne Neely received her MFA degree from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where she received the Truman Capote Fellowship, the 2017 John Logan Poetry Prize, and a Schupes Fellowship for Poetry. She is currently a Poetics PhD candidate and an English Department Fellow at the University at Buffalo. Her writing has been published in Hyperallergic, VIDA, The Poetry Project, The Rumpus, The Iowa Review and more. WOMAN, IRONING
A man asks me if I have ever seen Picasso’s Woman Ironing. Yes and no, it depends on what you mean, man. I have seen my mother ironing my father’s shirt while he watches TV, no willingness to smile, an unruliness that kicks you in the teeth. Yes, I have seen a friend, a woman’s face through hot steam. I have seen myself growing inside of tree, a root, that’s it. I count them, the women who I have met with polymer fiber materials in their chest. Man, yes, I have seen the painting and no, I have not and did you know, man, that modern doctors suspect Picasso was a sufferer of a disease called Meniere’s and that is where ideas for his paintings came from and leave it to a man to make a billion dollars off of it. I am a woman and yes, I am bitter while I lose my hearing and the room spins, and I tell the neurologist my vision looks like a Picasso painting and he nods because Picasso paintings are so damn famous and mercy never arrives on time to save such grief and I wish I could see straight but moreso I wish I could tell the doctor my vision looks like a Kusama or a Bourgeois or an O’Keefe but no, it looks like a fucking Picasso and so back to you, man, yes, I have seen women ironing and no I have not, but I have seen women give an hour for every minute and I am a woman and I have watched as we have overdrawn a revolution and I have looked in the mirror as if I am not supposed to be there so no, man I have never seen the woman ironing and I never will run alone at night and never forget the sound of men laughing and yes, man, I did see the woman ironing my tongue smooth so I could not scream, and it is the little things I hate about his pictures so small I have nowhere else to store them but my eyes and to hell with men who make art I really mean this go ahead and inhale my saccharine scent and yes, man, of course I have seen the woman ironing of course I have not seen it and if Picasso were here with us, man, in this room I would see nothing but he would see me ironing. How Do You Take Your Coffee, Mr. Armstrong? Twelve men have pressed airy boots on top the pubescent surface of the moon. Forty-six years and twelve men have pressed airy boots on top the pubescent surface of the moon. O irony! O opportunity to construct metaphor of man’s hulk yet ethereal foot traipsing upon the budding face of a womanly moon! Though, one must keep in mind, they say there lives a man in the moon. Who they are I do not know nor care to hear what else they have to say. If Earth’s natural satellite were a man, then surely I would have seen him opening up [jars for lesbian households and wearing] cologne trilling brotherhood. I would have seen the moon breaking things with his mouth. Yet, it is suspect only coming out at night, glaring center attention of a vast sky. Maybe I am seeing it—the man in moon pulling on a cigarette, floating down to a woman walking in the park, twisting his lips with a har har. O Moon Contrite, look at your hands, I wouldn’t eat off them! Perhaps no women have been to the moon because it does not need cleaning yet or because the moon does not want to deal with a bitch on her period or because strawberry daiquiris are not served on the moon or because the moon prefers a man’s firm handshake or maybe the moon just doesn’t want to get married or because [women know nothing about] sports and everyone knows the moon loves a good game of football. One small step for earth, one giant leap for mankind. I wonder what they found on that whaling leap for I wouldn’t know I am still drowning in the deep end of the shallow puddle they jumped. Scientists say more is known about the moon than the deepest parts of ocean. I find this hard to believe. Us women have been bustling across floors of unlit seabed for years bearing pressure on chest until developing gills to breathe and have found something prolific in sinking over flight. |
