 Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, "Someone's Dead Already" was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book "Heaven Is All Goodbyes" was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award. A Sketch about Genocide
A San Francisco police chief says, “Yes, you poets make points. But they are all silly,” Police chief sowing a mouth onto a mouth Police chief looking straight through the poet Flesh market both sides of the levy Change of plans both sides of the nonviolence On no earth Just an earth character His subordinate says, “Awkward basketball moves look good on you, sir... Yes, we are everywhere, sir... yes, unfortunately for now, white people only have Black History ... we will slide the wallpaper right into their cereal bowls, sir ... Surveil the shuffle.” I am a beggar and all of this day is too easy I want to see all of the phases of a wall Every age it goes through Its humanity Its environmental racism We call this the ordeal blues Now crawl to the piano seat and make a blanket for your cell Paint scenes of a child dancing up to the court appearance And leaving a man, but not for home Atlantic ocean charts mixed in with parole papers Mainstream funding (the ruling class’s only pacifism) Ruling class printing judges (fiat kangaroos) Making judges hand over fist Rapture cop packs and opposition whites all above a thorny stem Caste plans picked out like vans for the murder show anglo-saints addicting you to a power structure you want me to raise a little slave, don’t you? bash his little brain in and send him to your civil rights No pain Just a white pain Delicate bullets in a box next to a stack of monolith scriptures (makes these bullets look relevant, don’t it?) I remember you Everywhere you lay your hat is the capital of the south The posture you introduced to that fence The fence you introduced to political theory If you shred my dreams, son I will tack you to gun smoke The suburbs are finally offended this will be a meditation too
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 Despy Boutris's writing has been published in Copper Nickel, American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Colorado Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Currently, she serves as Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast, Guest Editor for Palette Poetry and Frontier, and Editor-in-Chief of The West Review. BLOODTEETH
I went blackberry-picking, looked down at my index finger, & watched a wound bloom with blood. To compare this plasma to a flowering thing: amaryllis, orchid, chrysanthemum. To memorize creases, freckles, the sight of the thorn finding its way into flesh. All day, the breeze burns my ears, eyes blurring at the sight of sunlight filtering through oak branches, that golden color unbearable, the haze hard to believe as fable. My mother organizes her top-drawer & finds a box of my teeth. My mother tells me love never lasts, a river dissolving into a ravine with parched rocks. Nothing left to drink. I call my father to say I dreamt I swam the span of the Pacific, fled from everything I know. He reminds me my name is mythic—body built for saltwater, memory spanning centuries, trident still stuck in my spine. & what do we really have to count on but the sea, water, the light of the sun turning on the city? Hands made stiff from the cold, distant smoke rising, the scent of anise in the air.  Khalisa Rae is a poet and journalist in Durham, NC, and author of Real Girls Have Real Problems chapbook. Her poetry can be seen in Crab Fat, Damaged Goods, Hellebore, Terse, Sundog Lit, PANK, Tishman Review, Occulum, the Obsidian, among others. She is the winner of the Bright Wings Poetry contest, the Furious Flower Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the White Stag Publishing Contest, among others. Currently, she serves as Managing Equity Editor at Carve Magazine and Writing Center Director at Shaw University. Her debut collections, Ghost in a Black Girls Throat are forthcoming from Red Hen Press in April 2021 and White Stag Publishing Summer '21 Belly-Full of Gospel
Each morning my grandma rises to find her Bible still breathing, belting her favorite aria. A lion, a well, a sacrifice. Crack-of-dawn, coffee-stained, scrolls making music at 6am. Each page turn a chord she knows better than hot water cornbread and collard greens. Wailing Blessed Assurance, What a Friend to crackling bacon– all a belly-full of gospel summoning spirit to be there in the midst. Her back buckle and hand wave awakening a holy ghost- Bash-sha- Shadrach, Meshach- tongue-speaking spells cast out the demons haunting this old house. “While I’m on this tedious journey”— a sovereign song soothing her aching, calligraphed hands. Walk with Me, she asks, inviting Him in the room. What a meditation, a ritual to welcome Holy into a place held together by broken bread. A sacred invitation to dine with her and the browning hash. Nothing but the Blood and sunrise slicing sound-- stirring a tent revival lasting ‘til nightfall across her wobbling kitchen table. Ode to Uncommon Things for Pablo If this world has taught me anything, it has taught me we are obsessed with naming, with calling a Ren a Ren, with deciding the weeping willow was heavy with grief, with echoing the words Nightjar and picturing nocturnal hawk. Maybe it's the god-like power of it all, the villain of conjuring titles, calling a thing broken and watching it fall, then calling it chosen–phoenix, and watching it rise. Who are we to be cataloged and filed? All of us just common things waiting to be named uncommon, waiting to go from bird to Nightingale, from pigeon to white-wing, crest-backed Long-tailed widow. The sonnet we hoped would be written for our raised backs and color stripes— unwritten. Instead, we watched while handkerchief and pitch pipe got 83. Mementos to things less miracle than we. Time spent crafting sestinas to penny loafer, and pocket watch. But we are not listed-- we, the uncommon, silvery tokens.  JinJin Xu is a filmmaker and writer from Shanghai. She has received honors from The Poetry Society of America, Southern Humanities Review, and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation. She is currently an MFA candidate and Lillian Vernon Fellow at NYU, and her chapbook There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife was selected by Aria Aber for the Own Voices Chapbook Prize and is forthcoming November 20. Days of Hourless Mothers
i. Herbal, thick, my mother’s insomnia wets my nose, You are leaving me again – My mother’s insomnia wets my nose, exhales her abandon again – into the muffled orifice, Exhales her abandon into night, guilt unclenches the muffled orifice, old tissue, balled-up grief Of night, guilt unclenches, herbal, thick, balled-up tissue, old grief. I am leaving. ii. Each hour an organ, a zodiac beast, twelve hours separate my mother and me, our days halved, up hanging down, shadows splitting this American sun. Hour of the tiger: my mother calls on the tip of night, her sun spitting my American shadow, sorry, sorry for disturbing your sleep. Midnight tips me into my mother’s lonesome noon, always, I apologize in my sleep. Only one is allowed pity, Pity my mother’s lone moon. Double the organ, double the beast, only one child is allowed to flip the zodiac onto its knees. iii. Hour of the lung and its cyclings of qi, vital, untranslatable beasts wailing songs of abandon into night, I wake to Your call, vital, untranslatable, my abandon strains your voice, Why are you awake? Organs need sleep to heal. I abandon you to the bright of day. Listen, your daughter is sleeping， her organs unclenching your night’s far shore. Soon, your tomorrow will ring her into yesterday’s outstretched lungs, and when she wakes, forgetting to call, let her -  Ashley M. Jones holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, and she is the author of Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press 2017), dark / / thing (Pleiades Press 2019), and REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press 2021). Her poetry has earned several awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. She was a finalist for the Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in 2020. Her poems and essays appear in or are forthcoming at CNN, The Oxford American, Origins Journal, The Quarry by Split This Rock, Obsidian, and many others. She teaches at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, she co-directs PEN Birmingham, and she is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival. FLOUR, MILK & SALT
after Celestia Morgan flour a universe is born between her brown hands—flour, a cloud of Southern possibility when she makes it hover and sigh. how this could become our sustenance is magic, is Jesus making bread to outlast bread. what God but a mother’s hands? what a prayer in the biscuit dough clinging to itself, readied for the fire? milk thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama thank you mama you gave your life so that I might live-- salt they say it will kill us, silent as it is. salt as it is. how it makes our blood so deadly in our veins. how it, tableside, can be a weapon, even if it makes the meal sing. a death song for me and my people. precursor to diabetes, that great southern meal.  Sam Herschel Wein (he/they) is a Chicago-based poet who specializes in perpetual frolicking. Their second chapbook, GESUNDHEIT!, a collaboration with Chen Chen, was part of the 2019-2020 Glass Poetry Press Series. He co-founded and edits Underblong. Recent work can be found in Moon City Review, Sundog Lit, and Bat City Review, among others. Perchance, read more at samherschelwein.com. How to Cook Your Family
First Six mixing bowls. Fourteen blenders. Who needs this many kitchen aids? An avalanche of appliances from the taut, turquoise shelves. Every rubber spatula you’ve ever dreamed of in the pull-out cabinet next to the stove, packed so tight it’s stuck shut, inaccessible Then Mother makes Challah most weeks, though she often makes extras, for the weeks she wants just to pull one from the freezer. A special Hungarian mixing stick, an overnight dough, hidden recipes she changes just barely over time, they’re impossible to copy Next Clean out grandma’s house. She’s in a senior’s apartment complex now. Not a nursing home, my mother says aloud for herself. Though Grandma wouldn’t know. Her Alzheimer’s, ten years old. I’ve inherited many of the extra kitchen bowls, tools, essentials she kept buying. Don’t forget to mix Yeast for the bread to rise. Raisins on holidays. Gefilte fish from scratch, Brisket recipe from Great Aunt Esther. My grandmother was the best cook in town, in the Jewish community. My mother was the best cook in town, in the Jewish community. Where I grew up. Sprinkle, ever so gently sesame seeds. Sprinkle dirt on the grave. Sprinkles in your eyes, reading a speech goodbye. All good cooking comes in pinches, my mother once said. And she lives that way, too. Pinching out her sadness, the sprinkles hardly visible. Not even coarse. Leave out to cool I was like that. I was a balloon of smiles. They’d shoot out of me with so much force. Pinching back my hair, back my hurt. I’m learning to unfurl. I have a book of recipes, but I don’t need them. This tart, I baked anew. My own strawberries.  Marianne Chan grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of All Heathens from Sarabande Books (2020). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati. Ars Poetica Say what you mean already, the man snarls with a string of floss hanging from his teeth. You imagine that if you pull at the string, his whole mouth would click on, incandescent. You stand in a friend’s bathroom. The night drinks a glass of Diet Pepsi. You feel refreshed inside of it. And yet, the man is here yelling: Say it. Spit it out. The story. What’s the story? But sometimes there is nothing. No story, no character, not any reason to be at the party, other than the fact that you like games of Twister, aperol spritzes, the rolled-up prosciutto on a sugar maple board. Sometimes there’s only the smell of bleach, a clean bathroom that never looks clean, only the slush of memory tumbling into the gutter, dark and barely solid. Sometimes there is only the silhouette of an owl outside, the sheet music of its hoot, the German houses on the street that remind you of a version of Germany you once floated within, but now, can no longer imagine. You want to say the story, it’s here somewhere. But at the party, you’re under- water with no goggles, your reading glasses floating to the surface. What is there more to say? It’s all bubbles and tile down here, but no speech, and you’re ready to come up. VALLEY OF FIRE, NEVADA
for J., A., & C. October and the world alternates in vermillion, cantaloupe, gray and tan. Limestone swirls: cream stirred into orange coffee. We find ourselves in the petroglyphs. A thousand years ago, people carved their own image—four figures holding hands—into rock covered in a patina of iron and manganese. But we are not the descendants of these original people. These minerals did not leach from our bodies and evaporate over hundreds of years. We are sullen transplants in search of red Aztec sandstone, knobby desert knees, blue agave. What does sedimentary mean, really? I think of the four of us—an accumulation, broken segments cemented to broken segments. Before you, I was a single person carrying a bike up the stairs, listening to the radio in a tiled kitchen, but now, we are glued here in this lumpy land, this amphitheater. We lay our heads on each other’s rock shoulders. This was all sea at one point. All strung together by water.  Jason B. Crawford (They/He) is a Black, nonbinary, bi-poly-queer writer born in Washington DC, raised in Lansing, MI. In addition to being published in online literary magazines, such as High Shelf Press, Wellington Street Review, Poached Hare, The Amistad, Royal Rose, and Kissing Dynamite, they are the Chief Editor for The Knight’s Library. Jason is a cofounder of the Poetry Collective MMPR, a group of poets who came together for laughs, bad memes, and nerd culture. They are also the recurring host of the poetry section for Ann Arbor Pride. Crawford has their Bachelors of Science in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University. Their debut chapbook collection Summertime Fine is out through Variant Lit. PReP
He asks me if I am on PReP or why I am so careless with my own body He has seen boys like me before eager to ruin what little we have I am drunk off my ass and this man now looks like an open field or I look like open season to these other older men This is, after all, The Chicago Jackhammer where the men feast on the young like me But I am drunk and willing to be a plate for any mouth here Surely, it is the sadness that brought me to the table with an apple in my teeth  Jee Leong Koh is the author of Steep Tea (Carcanet), named a Best Book of the Year by UK's Financial Times and a Finalist by Lambda Literary in the US. He has published four other books of poems, including his most recent collection Connor & Seal (Sibling Rivalry). Originally from Singapore, Koh lives in New York City, where he heads the literary non-profit Singapore Unbound. https://singaporeunbound.org/ Palinodes in the Voice of My Dead Father "A palinode or palinody is an ode in which the writer retracts a view or sentiment expressed in an earlier poem. The first recorded use of a palinode is in a poem by Stesichorus in the 7th century BC, in which he retracts his earlier statement that the Trojan War was all the fault of Helen." (Wikipedia) Palinode II Tell your mom I don’t love her less than your sister. I didn’t speak to my wife last because we had a whole life together. I thought it was fair since she has our vows your sister has her dad’s last words. I’m full, I nodded to the bowl of pork porridge she brought. If I had to do it again, I would have done it differently, but there’s no do again when one is dead and now your mom is always hungry. Palinode XV
Our last dinner at the burger joint with the bikers theme, eating not with disciples on the road, I did not have any, but with my family, reassembled from the winds, you and your worldly American, your sister, her husband, and her two hearts, your mother sagging and smiling, brought me unspeakable happiness until the waiter, leather-clad, dark glasses, who had been staying out of sight diplomatically, asking us just once how we had enjoyed his recommendations, saw we were done and brought us the bill.  Geramee Hensley is a writer from Ohio. They are Poetry Editor at Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Their work has been featured in Button Poetry, Indiana Review, Hobart, New Poetry from the Midwest 2019, The Margins, The Recluse, The Shallow Ends, and elsewhere. You can find them @geramee_. Redundancy Limit
The office job boils down to a series of tasks that could ultimately be completed by anyone. Please apply Zeno’s paradox of the arrow to social mobility and the desire to scale the corporate paywall. I do mean paywall. It is no secret that how much money you have is directly proportional to the number of dolphin tears for which you are responsible. What an ocean before you! An unending playground of mammalian sadness. In the words of the inimitable Rachel Ray: yum-o. In the words of my father, drink up, bucko. There is simply too much heartache to go around, and you have only three stomachs if you count your lungs. Repeat after me: everything about your life has happened before, bears repeating and is a series of tasks that could ultimately be completed by anyone. Repeat after me: the violence you commit is uniquely destructive in the sense that it occupies a specific slice of space-time. There’s a series of people erased at the end of the first sentence. There is a set of innate conditions, let's call them privileges, readily available, and more importantly unavailable to a series of people erased at the end of the first sentence. Repeat after me: the love you make is uniquely creative, generative of a soft tissue in the core of an abdomen. That tissue is a series of repeatable cells emergent of a redundant organ performing a repetitive task. From the single-cell task to a multicellular repetition yields an increasing complexity of redundancies asymptotic to what? Repeat after me: you are an unrepeatable anomaly in a series of unrepeatable anomalies performing a series of uniquely creative, differently-privileged tasks that could ultimately be completed by any series of replicative r e d u n d a n c i e s a p p r o a c h i n g a d e l i n e a t i n g l i m i t. Y u m - o. |
