X
 
A dimpled boy told me what forever means.
 
                                IX
 
His whispers the crumbling
of language
and earth, revealing

                                                                                              the hallway
                                                                                              of mirrors,
the prayer beneath all prayer--
 
                  Stay. Take me by all my selves and show me.
                                    What a miracle it is to be understood.
                  How truth becomes song
                                                                  becomes willful forgetfulness.
 
                  Wind shackled to the throat
until it is time to let go—I send to you a songbird, hellfire
                  at its claws, a name
 
at the border
                  between sound and meaning.
 
                                VIII
 
Singing of light, but not of what follows.
Promises of strong coffee. The promise of forever
 
                  we break daily
 
                  over bread.
 
The truth is every promise has already borne too much of the world to last.
 
                                VII
 
And when they find us, sweetheart,
                                              we’ll be light and only--
 
                                  Light. The shrapnel,
                  ​not the fire it came from. What remains of devotion
 
                                  drips into an hour so beyond us
only the page survives.
                                                                 Crystallized flame
                                  on the bedroom floor.
 
Our hands clasped
in prayer, invoking a god’s name--
 
                                VI


Only we remember.
 
 
                                V
 
Picture the world made anew.
 
                                              The song escaping the burning
                  ​is inside every other song.
 
The lightest touch
                  ​brings out the wrong frequency. The undercurrent
                  condensing spent stardust.
 
Alive, the fire asks its surroundings
                                  how they want to be remembered.
 
                  ​At the lightest touch--
A planet ignites.
 
                                IV
 
A mother sings her only son to sleep. Only their embrace
                  ​                  ​                  ​                  ​  withstands the burning.
 
                                III
 
                                  Hear the glass--
Its shatter--
 
                  ​Singing all we know of always--
 
 
                                II
 
What we haven’t realized: the earth has said all that needs to be said.
 
This time, the earth chooses not to speak against the fire.
 
And we burn in silence.
 
                                ​I
 
When they lifted me to heaven
                  ​all I could think of was what I left behind.
 
The loneliness—called want, called daydream, called
choir—                   
                  ​                  ​         My tailbone an animal
                  ​cradled by an angel in freefall.
 
Holding the memory of sunlight
                  ​                  ​                  ​     folded into clay
until it is so dark
                  ​the body can only remember
through emptiness.
 
                  Even now, there are still parts of me
that have not touched the Sun.
                 
I send to you a flame
like a bullet
                                             repenting.

Back to: Issue Eight

Next: 

​Our vision of summer       was sunken feet       sunlight
moths suspended over black water       mangoes
morning silence       evening prayer       absence of shadows
what we did not know was that a snake slithered on the beach
& died       skin alight with luster stretched like the heaven’s light
we scooped up to our faces and rinsed       in the mornings
we watched naked thighs & confused them for glory       desire
could never be pure like that       like a collage robbed of context
or the way sunsets unfolded all around blood red & unowned
when dusk washed over we felt clean & wanted       & somewhere
someone was dying & tearing & folding       when we gazed
across a flat plain scorched we thought the water was water       that
our bodies were the kind we tamed and understood when we speared
into water our bodies were crooked questions       unanswered
& somewhere       someone watched & did not speak

Back to: Issue Eight

Next: Aaliyah Daniels 

I keep             testing
          my limbs against the sea
and coming up                        with the same
 
          hollow body. before I ask          
for anything I cut away a portion
          of my own tongue              sometimes I feel
 
I have grown           so tightly coiled into deference
          my hands have ceased to be my own.
my grandmother tells me        
 
          I am nothing            without a body. at night I cut
my fingers to the quick, smooth
          and edgeless. say                    surrender.
 
when it is dark enough to speak, she tells me of
          a couple who slept            as a man
in blue warmed a bomb
 
          between his hands       at night, I dream
of pressing myself into every crevice
          of her skin               until
 
we glow brighter than the flash.
          once, I held myself by the
wrists and restarted        my heart
 
          with the same clinical
urgency           my mother jumpstarts
          her car. I am training myself              out
 
of viewing the world               in absolutes
          but when I hold the ocean to my ear
only the sound of our destruction
 
          echoes             back.
as the moon opens its mouth on the sea
          as do I,            ask                  
 
when I am gone                      please
          do not let them            section open my
skull, compound the history within to
 
          sequence. when I am gone, I want
to leave behind                          more 
          than     a          body.

Back to: Issue Eight

Next: Kara Knickerbocker ​

​Picnics were crafted around the suspense of a body
i.e. they were hanging out while the village boys hung him
off a branch, pants ‘round his ankles, tongue swole. Manhood exposed,
breast bare. To be hung is to be celebrated:
begins with a scared white woman and the protection of her virtue --
                          there goes  Smith, Tulsa, Till.
They take the body, force submission of the neighbors:
white families watch a body fall limp and enjoy
deviled eggs the body convulse, lemonade the body scratches for breath, whiskey the body fades plum. There goes the memorial, the itchy hands waiting --
to cut the body down,                         string the body up
bring somebody back home to their mama,
or back home to                      God.

Back to: Issue Eight

Next: 

I've once again wet the inner corner of my thigh
not holding the cup of my STP close enough
against my body. Either it was too far to the left
 
or the amount of liquid inside spilled up over
the lip patented specifically to prevent this,
meant to funnel the piss down and out efficiently,
 
to harbor any excess and make sure your pants
remain the only pair you wear for the day, unless
you're already the type to change more than once,
 
shift your outerwear to match your mood. In Florida
my dad Facetimed his new girlfriend every night
for several hours. I'm shirtless on the beach
 
for the very first time. My pink neckerchief
makes a hat-wearing veteran stop in his tracks,
stare at me walking by and shake his head. Twice
 
across the sand a tortoise crawled to the ocean.
Twice each shell was hand-deposited among
the reeds. Silly thing, back where it belongs.

Back to: Issue Eight

Next: 

There is nothing else to say--
It’s true I had wanted my neck wrapped in gold.
Come December, I needed the moon fastened closer

to God, or me stitched to them both. Fate was sure as fishing line,
a beacon of cobwebbed mercy in someone else’s language.
Before we could shake ourselves loose, there were pockets

of highway, our silence shoved into them, tangled metal,
glacier tongue. How many words for bullet do you know?
What about the wonder of a mouth, the sound it makes

when one fires into the back of the other? Look--
I have followed all the threads, tooth & nail, wrote
a dictionary of hurt, and I can’t blame the cracking sky,
​
the flameless fire, for what darkness swallows but the more
I unravel, the closer we are to driving straight into the wound,
the further we become from the only hope of heat.

Back to: Issue Eight

Next: 

So rarely does
​the wild animal
touch back
& so rarely
do the police
ask permission
before they position
us on our backs.
We should always
feed the animals.
We never have
​to feed the police

Back to: Issue Eight

Next: Katie Tian

Back to: Issue Seven

Next: James Diaz

Back to: Issue Seven

Next: Chiwenite Onyekwelu

Back to: Issue Seven

Next: Nikki Ummel