Starfire Songs; 2024; digital painting in Procreate; 2048 x 2048 px
From the writer
:: Account ::
When I paint, I hope to create visual poetry. When I write, I lean toward brushstrokes of memory and emotion, some vivid and colorful, some pale wisps of yesterdays like the ghosts of falling petals. And when making music, I strive to explore landscapes of being through sound and words. All of this is intertwined. Reaching for fleeting and shimmering moments. Making them into forms that I can share.
My wander into digital painting occurred at the same time as my decision to step inside an art supply store and buy brushes, watercolor and acrylic paint, canvas, paper. There is a sense of vulnerable yet joyful liberation that comes with setting brush to open page. A sense of moving forward, of following the story unfolding line by brushstroke by dot, of warming up and getting closer to the waiting story with each try.
In these turbulent times when so many are grasping for meaning and fighting to end oppression, art, in its many forms, is a shining thread that connects us all and carries us forward. I am grateful for the moments when I can sit with some fragments and colors, turning them this way and that in my hands, until a poem emerges. I am grateful to be able to show a new painting to someone I love and hear what it makes them feel. Rather than pushing an explanation from my side, I’m far more interested in the individual stories that the viewer or reader bring while they experience a piece. Tell me what you see, what kind of future you want to build. Let us sit by the fire. There’s enough to warm us all.
lae astra (they/them) is an agender trans artist and writer who calls Tokyo home. Their writing has appeared in Astrolabe, Gone Lawn, Overheard, Star*Line, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. They are a Pushcart, Best Microfiction, and Rhysling Award nominee. Find them at laeastra.com/links.
:: David and Jonathan Meet in a Field Outside Ramah ::
Monarchs they were, dusting the lilies
with tunics bequeathed by a Titan they could not kill.
One would sprout hematic wings from the chrysalis
of a spear. The other would spindle the loss into
wombs, spawning (separately) an architect and a rapist.
But whatever is deeper than the love of women
imbues them that day; its glory, as they say,
the most beautiful of garlands. Brief. A girl’s.
But God needs heroes, hosts, men of oil,
so their departures are ordained, their hours
sprinting away from them like the boy
who scours the field for the prophetic arrow,
his arms outstretched as a voice calls, “Hurry, hurry.”
And so he does, but if it were up to him
he would find nothing, just run on like that. Forever.
From the writer
:: Account ::
I’ve been thinking a lot about my beginnings—how I became the person and the poet I am. The Bible is undoubtedly the first poetry book I encountered, and I find myself constantly returning to it, for the language but often to study the complexity of human relationships. I’ve been thinking a lot about endings too, particularly friendships and how hard it can be to close the doors on them, even when it’s necessary. The truth is that, if Jonathan lives, David never becomes king. This moment of parting is such a traumatic one for them, but the prophecies have been made, and there’s not much else to be done. I wanted to write about all of that: the love and the impossibility and the longing that happen side by side. Also, the line “the most beautiful of garlands. Brief. A girl’s.” is a nod to the final one in A. E. Houseman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young.” After the Bible, my next anthologies were my English textbooks, and it’s a poem I once read in one of them. I’ve loved it ever since.
Destiny O. Birdsong is a Louisiana-born poet, essayist, and fiction writer whose work has either appeared or is forthcoming in the Paris Review Daily, Poets & Writers, Catapult, The Best American Poetry 2021, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, Negotiations, was published by Tin House Books in October 2020, and was longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Voelcker Award. Her debut novel, Nobody’s Magic, was published by Grand Central in February 2022 and won the 2022 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction. She now serves as a 2022–24 Artist-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
When my sibling says they don’t feel subject to our father’s mental illness I focus on cleaving through the broccoli stalks. Separating florets from the trunk, dousing them in salt and olive oil. I want to question the stem severed from its leaves but this thread tangles when I start tossing with my hands. My sibling postulates how ordinary growing up was, how little we’d known about what’s heritable until later. Until trying to form relationships and being too much every time. How our narratives eschew slipping grips and siren wails, my sibling says. I watch my broccoli in the oven as I nod, try to toss the stripped green artery into the kitchen trash. I miss and hit the wall. I want a gesture that can prove them right. I want to glue the front door lock our father drove back to review each morning before work. To sand the floorboard his obsession tried to level. Last month, I tried cleansing sorry from my language but I didn’t last the afternoon. I tried until it rained and knew whose fault it was. I know our father would’ve folded long before me: would’ve blamed himself for gravity, would’ve safety-pinned the drops back on the clouds.
:: At the Midnight Show of Sleepaway Camp ::
My queers and I clear from the aisles annoyed
and damning the director, entering full takedown
mode. Onscreen a trans girl romps through
teens’ dark cabins, the panicked cry of she’s a boy!
giving this slasher its shock-twist. Today
the image we’re all killers remains deadly,
has only grown more mainstream. But others
in our group push back, defend the film.
All huddled at a Denny’s, we listen to them
fawn over the catharsis in a murder-fest.
Admitting over plates of fries to dreams
of wasting bullies, dropping angry beehives
on assholes throwing slurs. From the ruckus
of debate between our booths the film’s
subversion sharpens: critiques of gendered
violence, forced dysphoria emerge. Can’t we
hold both readings of the movie to be true?
Know the risk in such vindictive gore, that
it still offers us resistance. That we might
carry on with movie nights and diner talks,
the uneventful lot of it, an arrow pointed
at the next abuser’s throat. Can’t we
promise to slay whoever creeps these woods
and return thereafter to our quiet trees?
From the writer
:: Account ::
hough varied in their forms and themes, these poems investigate how the stories we’re told about our identities mark our lives. My forthcoming poetry collection Scream / Queen (Acre Books, 2025), investigates how representations of monstrosity or “insanity” pervade societal conceptions of both transness and mental illness. Through compacted prose forms, the speaker examines family lineages of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and its ongoing effects on their daily life. Collapsing the poetic line and stanza here complicates the poem’s sense of time to underscore the continued ramifications of their relatives’ struggles. Meanwhile, other poems respond to popular horror films to interrogate the complex legacy of gender panic found throughout the genre. Poems like “At the Midnight Show of Sleepaway Camp” strive to reinterpret the reactionary dehumanization propagated by trans villainy and reframe these horror narratives to allow for queer and trans survival. Here, monstrosity provides an opportunity to reimagine an existence for those living outside of cissexist and patriarchal confines.
CD Eskilson is a trans poet, editor, and translator living in Arkansas. They are a recipient of the C.D. Wright/Academy of American Poets Prize, as well as a Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and Pushcart Prize nominee. Their debut poetry collection, Scream / Queen, is forthcoming from Acre Books. They were once in a punk band.
:: Meeting the Ghost of Diego Rivera at a Dive Bar in East Los Angeles ::
I met the ghost of Diego Rivera at a hidden bar in East Los Angeles. He had a cigar in his right hand along with a fancy wristwatch. He was wearing a brown professor’s coat and a pair of dress shoes. It was early Fall. I asked him if I could buy him a beer. “I’ll take a Cerveza Bohemia,” he said. “How long have you been in town?” I asked. “I moved to southern California in the late 90’s. My house is now worth a small fortune,” he said. When the beers arrived, we clinked “salud” and watched a European futbol match on television. I wanted to ask him what Frida was like, but I knew better. “What was David Alfaro Siqueiros like,” I asked. “Very serious. But extremely talented,” he said. “What about Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock?” I asked. “They were down-to-earth and wild,” he said. “The next one is on me. A couple more Mexican Pilsners, Señor,” he asserted. As the sun set on the east side, we eventually said our goodbyes around eleven. I drove home and listened to a free jazz station on the radio. I couldn’t stop thinking about how friendly Rivera’s ghost was, though. So much for the chisme and negative rumors. When I got home, I painted a portrait of us having beers at the bar on a small canvas. Something to remember him by. Something for proof of meeting ghosts, I pondered.
From the writer
:: Account ::
This prose poem was written during a generative workshop I taught. I wrote a prompt for my students saying, “write about meeting a deceased icon in an otherwise mundane setting.” I decided to respond to the prompt with the class. I had already written another prose poem to this same prompt a couple years ago, one where I met Diego Maradona and Salvador Dali, so this is part of a larger series of pieces where I meet my idols, most of them from Latin American culture and history. When I meet these icons through my prose poems I like to have the meetings take place in casual, mundane settings. After I wrote the first draft in the workshop with the students, the next day, at home, I finished editing it and submitted it.
Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024), The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025) and Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red HenPress, 2025). He has been published in The Yale Review, The London Magazine, and in The Southern Review. He teaches generative workshops for Hugo House, Lighthouse Writers Workshops, The Writer’s Center, and elsewhere. Additionally, he serves as a Poetry Mentor in The Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program
a found poem: L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables
I beat her
when she said—
shyly, afraid—
that she felt like
she didn’t belong
to anybody
that the outside
of her heart
was a sad lonely blue;
I was her mother
and I wanted
her to believe
that I was
a cold sorrowful
blessing.
:: Every Frightened Moment ::
a found poem: L.M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon
She was a nervous wild thing—
a heretic
with a sorrowful waste of desecrated fear
in her angry red mouth.
She destroyed any beautiful garden
she was working in
had failed to always do good
and was haunted
by impending calamity—
how briskly it was waving at her—
dreaded horribly what awaited her
at the end
of the long unknowable
white road.
She reached for the moon
because it was lofty and mysterious
and who couldn’t it twist lovely
and sacred?
From the writer
:: Account ::
These poems are part of a series of L.M. Montgomery found poems I’m currently working on. To write these poems, I select a paragraph from a Montgomery text—so far, Anne of Green Gables, Rilla of Ingleside, A Tangled Web, The Blue Castle, Emily of New Moon, Emily’s Quest, and The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery—and only use the words from that paragraph to create a poem. I essentially write a poem while doing a word search using L.M. Montgomery as source material. I don’t allow myself to repeat words, add words, or edit the language for tense or any other consideration. These poems are simultaneously defined by both Montgomery’s choices with language as well as my own. They’re an homage to Montgomery that is heavily influenced by my personal interest in examining existential dread and the stark realities of mental illness; where Montgomery’s novels are (almost) utterly joyful, these found poems are often bleak and despairing. There is (often) an obvious contrast between the source material and the finished found poems that may appear jarring to those familiar with Montgomery’s work. Knowing that Montgomery herself very likely lived with bipolar disorder, I feel that I’m expressing through these poems ideas and emotions she was very familiar with and which she does touch on explicitly in novels like Emily’s Quest.
Nazifa Islam is the author of the poetry collections Searching for a Pulse (Whitepoint Press) and Forlorn Light: Virginia Woolf Found Poems (Shearsman Books). Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, Boston Review, Smartish Pace, and Beloit Poetry Journal among other publications. She earned her MFA at Oregon State University. You can find her @nafoopal
I never addressed you as Dear or Dearest.
Why start with a lie, why try
to pistol belief in the blood
vs water myth. I took your advice
about Asics, but remained a Nike guy,
my skinny heels suited for stilettos,
though I look awful in drag.
All shoulders, too thick for cinching.
I took your word on mutual funds
vs saving, which worked
until my knee surgeries
and the younger boyfriend
who wanted me to daddy him.
I’m still unsure how
I held you. At a distance, yes,
a day’s drive, many arms
extended for a side hug
when I entered your home
for a holiday visit, your squirm
when I named men in my life,
worse when they joined me,
unless they gave you a gift,
and even then, still on your heels
until you laced up and struck
mile after mile of gravel,
asphalt, grass, cow paths, the air
compressed between you and the earth
where all your happiness
gathered power. I’ll never forget
the 10K we ran early
in our runner eras, I kept your pace
the first three miles and halfway
through Mile 4 you said, Go, go on,
go ahead, the first permission
you ever gave me without condition,
my laces double knotted
and ready to leave you
in the blur where you wanted to
be yourself, smiling in the finish line
photos hanging around your craft room.
I never told you I ran the same race
the next year, placing sixth
out of two hundred and three
in my age group, my first
and fifth miles under six minutes,
a feat I never repeated. Now,
I address you as Dearly departed,
heed your advice about chewing gum
on cold weather runs. I try
the new bamboo Asics in red.
I hope the internet in the afterlife
has the answers you didn’t find
in the miles blurred behind us. Start
with searching “chosen families”
and “conversion therapy,” laugh at
“hedonist” and “heretic” endlessly
looping into each other. After finishing
“failure of the Roman Catholic Church,”
I hope you scroll my socials
and flag every nude I posted
when I believed beauty
vs truth was the route to eternity.
From the writer
:: Account ::
I prefer my poems to use family as inspiration. Nothing factual. Nothing grudgeworthy. Nothing to prompt a fist fight at a second cousin’s third wedding reception.
Then, in late February of 2023, my mom died unexpectedly, twenty-three hours of cardiac arrest that began during one of her weekend runs. Everything factual threatened a fist fight in that first week. Everything I wrote in the months after tried to be a fire inside grief’s cave.
Epistle, Dearly is one of many (too many!) poems I wrote from the cave. Drafted during the daily hustle of National Poetry Month 30/30 exercises created and shared by séamus fey and Dr. Taylor Byas, the poem is my first ever attempt at an epistle, a form I find almost painfully intimate. The speaker’s evasiveness, even in this moment of direct address, permeates the line breaks, the tidbits of a life never shared, reciprocal disappointments that suddenly feel like too much for the brisk couplets to sustain as the poem propels toward conclusion. Toward an eventual acceptance, though likely not the acceptance the speaker might have hoped.
Ben Kline (he/him) lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. Author of the chapbooks Sagittarius A* and Dead Uncles, as well as the forthcoming collection It Was Never Supposed to Be, Ben is a storyteller, Madonna podcaster, and poet whose work has appeared in Poet Lore, Pithead Chapel, Copper Nickel, MAYDAY, Florida Review, DIAGRAM, Poetry, and other publications. You can find him online at benklineonline.wordpress.com.
Please take a moment to fill out these forms.
Six hours later, yes, the forms have been filled.
I’ve drunk the bitter cup, eaten bread of sorrow,
lived to know that work is bad for your health.
The paperwork enshrouding it, the routine bills
and insurance premiums justifying it, like a kick
in the teeth of a thoroughly benumbed stud horse,
whose only value is to generate seed, as decreed.
Expecting someone from the slacker generation
to work 60-hour weeks and be delighted about it
is an unwholesome delusion in need of crushing.
Wealth as having an extra bag of boiled rice is a
measure of economic progress I long to surpass.
Am I more than the sum of every high and low?
Will He who smote great nations, slew mighty
kings, majestically vanquish my enemies, too?
Other than a couple awkward hugs, I have not
been touched in years. Forgive me, my body
has not been touched in years, thanks to the
invisible fencing I professionally installed,
otherwise known as an energetic boundary.
Words make or break us: bring peace, war.
I hold my phone like it’s a chalice or vessel,
when really it’s just a phone. What portent,
what auspicious omen do I expect to come,
funnelling through electromagnetic smog?
Gadgets jockey for my precious attention,
already subdivided like a federal territory.
Giants fall, mountains move, waters part:
no further proof is needed of God, I see.
I click to insert my signature, whereof I’m
glad: thou hast dealt bountifully with me.
:: Anemone ::
The white anemone is a cruel gift, Father.
A perennial, it’s born to die, and not return.
Anemone, Greek for “daughter of the wind.”
Something must have happened to the mother,
stewards of the earth say, when seeing a litter
of kittens, bunnies, squirrels, or baby birds
fallen from the sky. We mimic her motions,
her fastidious hovering, maternal diligence,
hoping abandoned fledglings might survive.
My sister wound a plastic flower at the foot
of my mother’s hospice bed, to bring cheer.
I adjusted the curtains: is it too much light?
Not enough? She stared at and through me,
unable to have or articulate her preference.
Instead, I spoke, because she could hear.
In heaven, nothing changes, save for the
concealing and magnifying of presence.
I can picture it, a bucolic pastoral scene:
shepherdess herding cows by your side.
Yet with a single turn of fortune’s wheel
I found myself impersonal and asexual:
no known next-of-kin, no cause or cure.
I don’t steal, I don’t harm or hit anyone.
I routinely act irrespective of how I feel.
For what am I preparing: my own death?
Forgive me, please, for misrecognition,
for preferring to stand alone in a field.
I thought to save you by saving myself,
which I know is the saddest departing.
The more I become myself, the more I
betray the world.
From the writer
:: Account ::
“Lamentation” and “Anemone” are included in my forthcoming poetry collection Requiem (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2025), a collection anchored in personal and collective grief, remembrance, and commemoration, journeying through the loss of a mother in a series of elegies, fugues, and lamentations that draw from the Church’s canonical hours of prayer as collected in a breviary. “Lamentation” constellates grief into anger towards techno-bureaucratic ideology and the depredations of corporate culture, ongoing through a harrowing loss, and a cri de coeur to a salvific god. “Anemone,” inspired by Louise Glück’s Wild Iris, is a meditation on mortality and the struggle to continue living while caring for my mother in hospice for close to two years. In those years, she had no motor function and limited cognitive function, and these poems became a way for me to speak back to the grief (anticipatory and real, after she passed away in December 2023), as well as the feeling that I had become not only her caregiver but also an interpreter of her agency and desires, no longer communicated in verbal or written language but rather the language of the heart.
Virginia Konchan is the author of five poetrycollections, includingRequiem(Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2025), and Bel Canto (Carnegie Mellon, 2022). Coeditor of Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (University of Akron Press, 2023), and recipient of fellowships from the Amy Clampitt Residency and the National Endowment for the Humanities,herpoems have appeared inThe New Yorker, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and the Academy of American Poets.
after Uwe Scholz’s Firebird and Marius Petipa’s Bayadère
the dancers are hovering in a radically avian sense
because power is all about the arms or at least
that’s what the score tells us. this story of a bird
on an ascending planet visited by a prince who
thinks it’s fun to keep the bird from flying, trapping
it from all angles with cabriole after cabriole.
to some, this is a dance. in another dizzy,
departed vision, a dreamer watches the spirit
of her lover glissade soundlessly. she sheds
her body in developpé. it is uncommon to witness
this unshelling of mortal form. from this sustained
violence, a standing ovation grows which shows
the company that this appetite for morbidity must be
sustained. with a collective hum, the audience savors the loss.
From the writer
:: Account ::
I danced ballet for 22 years. Upon reflecting about the great ballets of the 20th century (Gisele, Firebird, Swan Lake, etc.), it occured to me that almost none of them are happy or even neutral stories. In fact, a number of them contain the oddly specific motif of being cruel to birds. I ruminated on this for some time and decided it must be some kind of hyperdramatic move to push the stakes and create a context for exploration in movement which is not the easiest feat in this strict mode of dance. My aim was to create a poem that mirrors this property both sonically and thematically.
Rita Mookerjee is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Worcester State University. She is the author of False Offering (JackLeg Press 2023). Her poems can be found in CALYX, Copper Nickel, New Orleans Review, the Offing, and Poet Lore. She serves as an editor at Split Lip Magazine, Sundress Publications, and Honey Literary.
I.
There are no women in this story.
Should I be astonished
that the “she” has been pushed aside
in this ode to desire and denial,
published so long ago?
Melville may have been abashed
at the mere thought of a woman
in his man’s world of the sea, chosen
instead established character types,
men who rushed into actions,
ones who shed their veneers only
when their most cherished lies
were believed, when they resulted
in pain or lashes for the weak.
If the old story could be rehashed
the roles of men could be relinquished
to minor players. As it is, the only
mention of a woman in all thirty
chapters is to say that what is “feminine”
in man is like a pitious woman
who falsely tries to cry her way out
of troubles or in describing the titular hero
as beautiful, but like “a woman with
something amiss.”
II.
She is only a ship in this story
and a ship is merely a vessel.
III.
At the beach, water splashes and
in the mountains, spring melt brings
freshets. Rivers course through valleys,
and in an old woman, the blood ebbs,
flow vanished from her body’s ecosystem.
She has become invisible, each slight
a sheath that protects. There is nothing to
hint at her finished glory except perhaps
the polished wooden breasts at the bow
of a ship, this figurehead a stand-in for
what has been forgotten, an artful facsimile,
the power of a woman to bear the brunt
of waves and survive.
From the writer
:: Account ::
After re-reading Billy Budd, Sailor by Herman Melville, a favorite re-read of mine, I was struck this particular time by the complete non-existence of women in a story filled with themes that traditionally have involved women—desire, jealousy, morality, truth versus justice, purity and innocence, to name a few. This kicked off a project that is now a manuscript of prose poems, erasures, blackouts, and limited language landscapes that uses Melville’s elevated diction as a starting point to highlight the stories and concerns of women in modern society. This triptych poem served as an entry point into the project, using all of the instances of the letters s‑h-e in the novella to ponder erasure and comment on the traditional roles women are expected to play.
Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. Donna’s art and photography are featured or forthcoming in North American Review, Waxwing, Pithead Chapel, Thimble Literary Magazine, Penn Review, The Boiler and other journals. She lives in the Chicago suburbs where she hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.
Let us celebrate designs which yielded
sofabeds, printer/scanners, reversible jackets,
sporks, all the ideas hatched to serve
two masters with a single motion, every item rolling
off an assembly line to replace two others.
The modern condition won’t allow
us to merely do one thing well.
A great third grade teacher will soon be plucked
from the classroom and tasked to be principal,
because inspiring students to trace a hand
and discover in its outline a turkey
obviously means you’re a candidate
for budgeting and facilities management.
Doctors end up running the hospital,
inmates the asylum. And some do it beautifully,
find the soft skills were there all along
like tines hidden in the smooth bowl of spoon.
Others manage just well enough
not to cock it up. But what of the sad sacks
who can’t adjust to spreadsheets,
who sit in Monday staff meetings numb,
who dream only of dioramas or laparotomies
or the quiet padding of a cell?
Kiss released “I Was Made for Lovin’ You”
in May of ’79, four earnest guys in face paint
proclaiming a single function was plenty.
I know Paul Stanley sang the lead
but imagine those words rolling off a tongue
as long as Gene Simmons’s. You could stretch
the phrase until it became tension wire.
You could send a funambulist across
carrying his pole. While he’s up there,
he’s only got to focus on one thing.
That’s the whole point of the tightrope act.
But Kiss fans hated that song.
They hated the whole album—ironically,
because Kiss was folding disco in
to their hard rock sound. There’s the rub:
you won’t survive unless you grow,
but no one wants to have to watch.
Of course there will be fumbles, failures.
What foal ever stood without stumbling?
Which painters covered their early canvases
in perfect brushstrokes? You’re just supposed
to botch it and biff it and bollocks it
and blow it and bungle it and butcher it
in private. Get a room. Rent a studio.
Ascend the stairs to a remote corner
of a clock tower. Build a hideaway,
a hush-hush lab, a shed not far from the edge
of the woods. Head to the basement.
Perfect it in secret. No one wants to see
how the sausage is made. Pretend you left
the factory as handy as the new sofa sleeper
or North Face puffer jacket. Knife,
scissors, corkscrew, ruler, bottle opener
all in a handy red sheath. What grace.
Not me. I’m backstage staring into the vanity
before the big show but none of the facepaint
glows me up. I’m the colt who wishes
he was back in the womb, the paint brush
that would rather just soak in water.
I’ve spent mornings behind the principal’s desk
at a failing school, dreaming of picture books
and cotton ball snowmen on paper plates.
I’ve spent afternoons blundering in boardrooms,
wishing I could sew a single stitch.
I’m in therapy, being asked to love myself.
It’s a lot to ask. I was made for lovin’ you.
:: Daybreak: This Could Be My Year ::
I lay my tongue over the morning.
Through every vein, glistening berries
ripen—platelets singing hallelujah,
ready to close the wound if new day
cuts too close. Dew leaves the blades
of grass as if in rapture. I steel myself
to return to stardust but perhaps
the creek won’t rise today, as it hasn’t
so many days before. Maybe deer
darting from the yard will stall
and stare me in the living eye again.
From the writer
:: Account ::
I think all the time about this lyric from “Jack & Diane,” the song that was omnipresent in 1982: “Oh yeah, life goes on / long after the thrill of living is gone.” I have, for years, assumed that the tone was mournful, that “Jack & Diane” was a depiction of the kinds of kids for whom high school would be the apex of their lives. Recently, I learned that Mellencamp said, “It has the spirit of people who think that the sun rises and sets with them, and the world is here for them, which it actually is.” That last part is so critical. The world is actually here for them. It’s here for all of us, while it’s thrilling and long after. I’d been thinking of poems as either celebrations or laments. They’re so often both.
Ross White is the director of Bull City Press, an independent publisher of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He is the author of Charm Offensive, winner of the Sexton Prize for Poetry, and three chapbooks: How We Came Upon the Colony, The Polite Society, and Valley of Want. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Tin House, and The Southern Review, among others. He is Director of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-hosts The Chapbook, a podcast devoted to tiny, delightful collections.
Pocket Knife Buffalo; 2023; Watercolor; 5″ x 8″
From the artist
:: Account ::
My primary goal with my art is to entertain myself. To make myself laugh, ideally.
I started drawing and painting again early in the pandemic. I drew a lot as a kid—cartoon characters, sports heroes, favorite comic book panels—but had barely even doodled in twenty, maybe twenty-five years. And it felt a little like picking right back up where I’d left off! Like riding a bike, like the patterns and rituals of the church services of your youth. My hands felt like they knew what to do—the art seemed better than by someone who was “just starting,” I had a pretty good eye and also spatial awareness—but also my “style” was still not what I wished it were. I wished could just draw—from my imagination, not only from what I was looking at—and also that I could draw… well, cooler. I needed reference images constantly, for everything, and everything came out kinda cartoony, goofier than I’d prefer.
In all those years since though, I’d grown up, I’d matured, I’d devoted so much of my life to writing—doing so myself, editing, teaching. As I’d let go of the kind of writer I wish I were and embraced the things I do best—as I became more myself—I got better.
And so, with my art, I leaned into myself, my personality. I smile, rather than get frustrated, at some of the goofiness. I use reference images constantly, but I combine two, three, four different ideas in ways that feel like encapsulations of myself, and also that make me laugh. I draw skulls because they’re look cool even if—maybe especially when—they aren’t perfect, and I mash them together with other things I love—Oreos, buffalo, pizza. I draw tiki mugs that look like skulls, or anatomical hearts, or fists. I draw tattoo-style pocket knives with buffalo blades and Mt. Rainier in the background because I love tattoos and knives and buffalo and the Pacific Northwest.
In our 10th year of Publication The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought is opening a new Interviews section. Championing this new venture is the brilliant Lauren Brazeal Garza.
Our inaugural interviews section features Lauren in discussion with former Account contributors Jennifer Givhan (poems in our 2020 issue), and Jenny Molberg (poems in our 2022 issue).
Lauren’s thoughtful introduction below.
*
Lauren Brazeal Garza: The Account Magazine is a journal that has always considered the author’s own account of their work alongside their writing, so it was the realization of a dream to begin an interviews feature for this issue. I was fortunate to have conversations with two former contributors to The Account: Jenn Givhan and Jenny Molberg, who have both recently released collections of poetry, Givhan’s Belly to the Brutal (Weslyan Poetry Series) and Molberg’s The Court of No Record (LSU Press). Over the course of the summer, both poets shared insights into their craft, exploring how themes of survived trauma and bearing witness manifest within each collection.
Lauren Brazeal Garza received her M.F.A in poetry from Bennington College, and is completing her Ph.D. in literature from UT Dallas, where she is also a creative writing instructor. She is the author of the full length collection Gutter (Yes Yes Books, 2018), a memoir-in-verse about her homelessness as a teenager. She has also published three chapbooks of poetry, most recently, Santa Muerte, Santa Muerte: I Was Here, Release Me (Tram Editions, 2023), a series of fictional interviews with ghosts. Her poetry, lyric essays, and fiction has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Waxwing, and Verse Daily among many other journals. She can be found haunting her website at www.lbrazealgarza.com
Editor Lauren Brazeal Garza: Jenn Givhan was kind enough to offer an account of her her wrenching and often heartbreaking fourth book of poems, Belly to the Brutal. During our interview, Givhan generously touched on ideas of motherhood (and how it changes time itself), generational and carried traumas, what it means to be haunted, and the process of writing as a means of spiritual survival
Your most recent collection, Belly to the Brutal, explores ideas of lineages of trauma and how trauma can be inherited. Can you tell us more about what inspired you to speak to this important topic within the collection and/or individual poems?
When I was a new mother time didn’t make sense. It stretched, it stuck. It grew ponderous. Heavy at times. Gauze thin at others. Motherhood is a time machine. Now that my children are teens, I feel the weight of their matter pulling me, stretching the fabric of spacetime toward their centers of gravity.
Rooted in my Mexica culture, my work explores cyclical existence, emphasizing the intricate relationship between women, children, nature, and the spirits that inhabit spaces between time and language.
All of these hidden or underbelly experiences speak of what travels through the cells, the inner workings, what’s in the DNA, what we pass on in the unspoken as well as stories.
My work delves into the unspoken, the omitted and forgotten, the buried and record-struck. I’ve long advised writers to say the damn thing—and I try never to shy away from the unsayable. Secrets in our house and my mother’s house and her mother’s before that meant a girlchild harmed and I’ll never abide by keeping things hidden that need to be bloodlet and the poison pulled out. I’ll never be shamed or harassed into silence. And yet—we can make omissions as writers for the haunting spaces they create in their wake—the sense that what once lived there has moved on—narrative, memory, or pain. Louise Glück says that “deliberate silence” is “analogous to the unseen… to the power of ruins… [which] inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied.” Something of their spirit is still intact in the work. The ruins of what might have been linger. Even that which stays buried can be redeemed.
All of this relates, for me and my poems, into what we carry through the DNA. Wounds through the womb.
Our genetic memory carries tales of trauma and triumph, passed down from our antepasados, connecting us in ways both tangible and intangible. Scientific revelations suggest we carry trauma in our genes, echoing our ancestors’ experiences. The language of our lineage can bind us to our past for better or worse, as Sandra Cisneros and Gloria Anzaldúa have expounded in their seminal works. For some, societal discrimination against ancestral languages has led to cultural disconnection and rootlessness.
The fact that we actually carry trauma in our DNA haunts me. It expands horrifically like an imaginative bomb in my brain… to think of all the world’s horrors within us, claiming us, and not letting us go, and that this is cellular, in the blood…
But there is a saving takeaway. As sociologist Avery Gordon in Ghostly Matters argues: “The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, something against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as transformative recognition.”
The key word here is transformation. When the ghosts of our past or our ancestors’ pasts come to us, in means that something needs to be done, something needs to change.
In our poems, as in our lives, we have the marvelous ability to transform reality, as well as to see the transformative reality that already exists (around and within us).
So while our genes carry our Ancestor’s trauma, we must also be echoes of their joys. I have started trying to capture this in Belly to the Brutal, but I sense the next journey of my poetic path is to keep capturing the joy onto the page.
In this collection, ideas of wounding, being wounded, and the woundare woven in almost every poem in this collection. These manifest both as physical, psychological, and spiritual injuries. Can you speak to how this theme developed?
As writers, perhaps more than average folks, we likely have a deep, abiding sense that in some way, we’re already all broken. Or, we’ve all been broken at some point. And that the narratives we’re writing and revising and recreating in our poems draw from that foundational fracture. As Leonard Cohen sang, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
In my poem drafts I tend to write the same beating heart over and over. Cheryl Strayed calls it the second heart and writes about getting down on the floor to pull this second heart from one’s chest onto the page. I think of “The Two Fridas” by Frida Kahlo, each with a heart, one broken.
Tony Hoagland calls the flood subject or foundational fracture one’s “mythical wound.”
Kim Addonizio writes in Ordinary Genius, “I had discovered the thing I wanted to keep close to me for the rest of my life, and if I did that, my tutelary spirit would watch over me, would teach me what I needed to know… This is your genius: your own profound desire to write.” Desire will only get us so far. It’s when we put our “ass to the chair,” she says, that our demons will show up. The demon, then, for some of us, is whatever holds us back from writing the thing we’re meant to write. That keeps us scrubbing floors both literal and metaphorical rather than sitting down at the keyboard and, as Hemingway famously said, bleeding.
Addonizio’s demons resonate with my own, which spew venom in my ears, even after publishing five full-length collections of poetry and two novels; my demons taunt: I’ve been writing the same damn poem over and over—I should be more political. No, wait, I should really be more personal. But somehow universal, and not narcissistic. I’ve been accused of confessing. I should be more esoteric. I’m lost. I’m floundering. I cannot scratch my way out. To hell with it, I give up.
Except, for me, giving up has too often meant more than never writing again.
So writing has been survival.
I must continue writing.
And what almost invariably comes is my deep mythic wound, in whatever form: Heartbreak that stems from my first love having a baby with another young woman—when I’d lost our baby to miscarriage.
No matter what else I write. The mythic wound often finds a way of needling itself through.
I’ve healed again and again. I write myself into healing again and again.
But the second heart that continually needs excising every time I begin a new project is this: I wanted to become a mother and couldn’t. And then I could.
After struggling for years with infertility, I adopted my son when I was twenty-three years old—this was seven years after the traumatic experiences at the Clinicas de Salud with my high school boyfriend.
In my life, I transformed my reality.
Later, I wrote a novel about a young woman who gives birth to a stillborn—and then comes to believe that a baby doll she names Jubilee is the daughter she lost. The story was inspired by Reborns, dolls that are created to look just like “real” babies, and that can be custom ordered to look just like children who have grown up or passed away; they are “reborn.” Reborns fall into the uncanny valley and are often described as “creepy,” though I see them as a beautiful transformation.
When I couldn’t have children, when my body wouldn’t cooperate, when the lines wouldn’t transform into a pink cross, or when the pink cross did appear but then the bright red poppies began their painful stain, I made myth. I became a mother in my poems and my babies were alive and the blood flowing out didn’t mean dead.
When I adopted my son and I had no idea what I was doing and felt like a body snatcher like a thief like an imposter and his colic-stressed body and his sleepless-helpless body kept us both in perpetual dreamstate and I was afraid always he’d wake some day and scream You’re not my real mother, instead, we created myth. We became mythical, to each other. In our mutual need. The myth of motherlove carried us; it carries us still, through thick reality, through thick reality we learn each day to love.
Whether I have a story or poem or spark in mind when I begin writing, every journeying onto the page begins for me as a plunging downward, into the heartgut or through it, and there I must begin digging.
I don’t know if the wound will ever heal. But I’ve created so many beautiful things from it that even if I die with this hole in my heart, it’s a hole that’s sprouted whole ecosystems that’ve fed those I’ve loved.
An overarching theme in The Account Magazine is the act of offering “an account”—of bearing witness, or carrying and offering testimony. How do you see the poems in Belly to the Brutal interrogating these ideas?
Most of my work deals with the monstrous in some way. Belly to the Brutal grapples with monstrous motherhood. Mothering through mental illness.
Sometimes the monsters don’t need our slaying, but our compassion—our empathy and understanding. Sometimes the monsters are not monsters but captive to the dark power wrecked upon them. Sometimes, they need us only to witness. To see them.
This newest collection was about extending that same compassion I give outward monsters to myself. Seeing the seeds of trauma grown into violence within me—and forgiving myself. But first, I had to bear witness.
And it was damn painful at times.
Of writing monsters, Karen Russel writes of having empathy for them: “Poor motherless thing. Look at it looking.”
I wanted to show how even mothered things can be accidentally mothered into violence that needs rooting out. How machismo culture, how the violences enacted upon girls and women… how that can all contribute to unintentionally passing those on as norms. And how one mother needs to be brave and self-aware enough to stand up and say, Basta. Enough. To stop those cycles of violence from repeating.
So the mother at the end of my collection births herself anew, as Frida Kahlo in her visceral painting, birthing her own damn self. And in my collection, the mother does it when she births her daughter and realizes that she has a chance to remother herself alongside her daughter.
In bearing witness to my children’s lives, I was able to witness, again, my own childhood and my mother’s struggle from a new lens that lent me empathy and grace I couldn’t feel when I was hurting within it.
Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the Southwestern desert and the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices.
Her newest poetry collection Belly to the Brutal (Wesleyan University Press) and novel River Woman, River Demon (Blackstone Publishing) both draw from her practice of brujería. Her latest novel was chosen for Amazon’s Book Club and as a National Together We Read Library Pick and was featured on CBS Mornings. It also won an International Latino Book Award in the Rudolfo Anaya Latino-Focused Fiction category.
Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, POETRY, TriQuarterly, The Boston Review, The Rumpus, Salon, Ploughshares, and many others. She’s received the Southwest Book Award, New Ohio Review’s Poetry Prize, Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, the Pinch Journal Poetry Prize, and Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry Prize.
Editor Lauren Brazeal Garza: Jenny Molberg’s The Court of No Record searingly draws inspiration from court proceedings and criminal investigations, showing how the criminal justice system ultimately fails women. During our interview, she offered wonderful insights into the creation of the collection, touching upon erasure—and how victims of crime are often called upon to erase themselves and their truth in persuit of justice, the banality of evil and silencing, and how poetry bears witness to the unsayable.
Your most recent collection, The Court of No Record, explores ideas of trauma and how trauma can inhabit and even erase one’s entire identity. Can you tell us more about what inspired you to speak to this important topic within the collection and/or individual poems?
In an essay I return to again and again, Solmaz Sharif’s “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure,” she writes, “After all, the proliferation of erasure as a poetic tactic in the United States is happening alongside a proliferation of our awareness of it as a state tactic. And it seems, many erasure projects today hold these things as unrelated. Still, when it comes to erasure, this very form of palimpsest, the ghost is not only death or the degradations of time—the ghost is the state itself.”
In the wake of intimate partner violence, with experiences of past trauma and sexual assault pressing their hands against my inner mirror, I found myself in court, several times, trying to articulate my Truth against what the court allowed me to speak of the truth. The whole story, the context of a situation, the big picture of the Truth, I’ve learned, is alarmingly irrelevant to the U.S. court system. It’s interesting that you use the word “erase” in this question, as I wrote many of these poems as an outcry, a reaction, and a defense of the self I knew, fighting against what a toxically masculine culture, and a “justice” system wanted me to erase of myself. In the midst of trauma, I often had the sense that I, as I had once known myself, was slipping away, buying into the gaslighting waged against me, until my own perception of reality became muddled, like I was looking at a familiar lake through thick fog.
After the events that were the impetus of this book (which, ironically, are dangerous to directly address in writing), I was left with nearly 400 pages of court transcript. I wanted to create, in Sharif’s words, a kind of palimpsest with that text, where I could write the truth over what happened to me—a complete and violent disregard of my truth, a state-supported silencing. In writing these poems, I had experienced enough self-erasure, so I wanted to insert, to footnote, to make additions to the text of trauma. I wanted to paint over the existing portrait of me, because it wasn’t the truth; in doing so, I felt that I was probably speaking towards the experience of many other survivors who are unsafe in telling their stories. I wanted to write in a kind of secondary language to anyone who had experienced intimate partner violence, abuse, and assault—to create a courtroom where we might be heard, an underground record of the actual truth.
Hannah Arendt spoke of the banality of evil. Many of the poems in The Court of No Record explore this idea though their form and technique—particularly in the second section. Can you speak to how this evolved as you wrote the collection?
I think this question is a perfect segue from the first—in order to create a truthful courtroom setting, I had to play into the banality of its silencing, to use form and language that spotlighted its sometimes-absurd evasions of the truth, and to invent characters that embodied the relentless silencing of survivors. For example, when I wrote persona poems from the perspective of the abuser’s lawyer, I wrote mostly in misogynistic verses from the Old Testament, as this mirrored the experience of being shamed and humiliated for living in a female body and speaking out against abuse. When I wrote the second section’s “evidence” poems to capture the undocumented evidence of abuse or assault—the invisible proof of memory—I used Adelaide Crapsey’s cinquain form, a highly formal syllabic verse, to show that evidence of abuse can be proven in exact measurements, but is all too often dismissed.
The fact that I had to be careful about what I was saying—that I needed to, in Emily Dickinson’s words, “tell it slant” in order to protect myself and others—created a similar situation to writing in fixed form. That is, I needed to write from the margins of my own experience rather than in a Confessional mode—there were intrinsic formal constraints. I looked to the work of female forensic scientists, dream language, and metaphor (like the dogs in the book’s second section, or in “Bitch as Sheepdog”) to get to the heart of the violence and silencing I had experienced.
In terms of how the banality of evil evolves in the book, I was cognizant about the way the sections grew out and away from each other—the first addresses cultural obsession with violence against women, the second confronts the court system, becoming more personal, and then in the third, I adopt the “bitch persona,” a voice that allowed me to more openly rail against those damaging systems, letting a sense of humor and defiance into the voice. Writing poems like “Bitch Interrupts a Wedding” and “Bitch Under a Tree Eating Wendy’s,” I wanted to take back my own voice, inhabiting the sexist language that had been waged against me, to grapple with the fact that my own internalized toxic masculinity had led me to believe that speaking up for myself made me a “bitch”.
An overarching theme in The Account Magazine is the act of offering “an account”—of bearing witness, or carrying and offering testimony. How do you see the poems in The Court of No Record interrogating these ideas?
Lauren, thank you for these thoughtful questions and thank you and the entire staff at The Account Magazine for doing such important work—seeing poetry as testimony is integral to my own creative process, and so many of the poets I cherish and return to. With The Court of No Record, the idea of an “account” is central to the book’s existence. The great Björk comes to mind: “You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.” “Lying,” or bending facts to get at the emotional truth of a situation, was one of my earliest lessons in poetry, and one that I began to interrogate as I was writing this book. In writing these poems, I sought Truth-with-a-capital‑T, while simultaneously balancing the fact that speaking the Truth about my personal experiences with abuse was not safe for me. This leads, I think, to a question about the author-speaker divide—it’s difficult not to conflate the two—but that conflation can lead to a dangerous situation for the author, which I’ve unfortunately learned through firsthand experience. How can poetry tell the Truth while simultaneously keeping the poet safe? How can writing serve as testimony in a situation where witness is a dangerous act? As a longtime disciple of the poetry of witness, the work of such poets as Carolyn Forché, Paul Celan, Muriel Rukeyser, Czesław Miłosz, Yusef Komunyakaa, and so many others (I could go on and on), I repeat Forché’s words on resistance in the poetry of witness like a prayer: “If we have not, if we do not, what in the end, have we become? And if we do not, what, in the end, shall we be?”
Poetry, unlike other forms of writing, allows an embodiment of the unsayable on the page, through metaphor, negative space, elision, and other techniques. With these poems, I wanted to embody the silencing that often occurs, personally, culturally, and legally, when survivors speak their stories. I wanted to, as Forché writes, look beyond the personal and the political to “the social”: “a place of resistance and struggle, where books are published, poems read, and protest disseminated.” I hope that these poems contribute to an often-silenced dialogue about intimate partner violence, gender-based violence, and emotional, psychological, and physical abuse—that they both serve as testimony and bear witness to a larger societal problem. Though the subject matter is dark, in the end, I hope that readers can feel hopeful—that to write into the canyon of silence is possible; that, when able, if we can speak against the pact of silence that so often accompanies abuse, we can create a barrier of safety; and that, in confronting and interrogating commodification of violence against female bodies, the power of toxic masculinity will be diminished.
Jenny Molberg is the author of Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017), Refusal (LSU Press, 2020), and The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023). Her poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, VIDA, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. Having earned her MFA from American University and her PhD from the University of North Texas, she is currently Associate Professor and Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she edits Pleiades: Literature in Context. Find her online at jennymolberg.com.
:: Letter to Future Me While Rewatching Game of Thrones ::
All the small centers of the center
leak now. People dress themselves
in endings. Tell me you haven’t
washed the snow from my hair.
I’m still cross-legged in the angry
age of our little epoch, blaming
the girl who turned herself clock
to get us this far. I hope you will
still be foolish enough to forgive
who we love, & that I am finally
among them. Today is when I
gave us a name you’ll braid white
down either side of our future
face. I cannot stop craning to see.
I spend so much time with you now
I hardly touch me anymore. Pleasure
is the smell that refuses to cast its
inevitable goodnight. Big spoon me
in the street. Your palomino knows
someday I’ll pull in that gravel drive.
Already I’ve named the pines for sap
tacking animal hair from my hands
to yours. Every center, like I’ve said,
ignores its eye. Did you stop fighting
artifice? Have you let yourself best
friend your assigned AI? How lonely
are you there, scoffing at the nature
of my reductive inquiries. Of course
the woman who succeeds me shall
be smarter than I. So yeah. Anyway,
the one thing I know won’t change
is everyone—you included—wants
a woman who saunters out of a fire.
:: Letter to Future Me Regarding Our 11s ::
Your face will slacken someday. Even
if it’s that day. That day that comes
more in the mirror now
than in bed or under running
water scalding as mother
said. Should’ve slept with your bra
on if you wanted a man. These days
sagging alone, I watch the whole
Game of Thrones just waiting
for that tragic moment Wylis
holds the door. I am, after all,
yours. Your braless daughter,
Sad Mom. Doesn’t that just burn
your jaws? I know. Shh. Future me—
are you listening to the temperature
of my voice? My barometric
pressure? Do you know how
many heavy rains I’ve needed you.
From the writer
:: Account ::
Over the years I’ve written letters I’ll never send, letters to my dead, letters to lovers, letters from an earthbound poet to an astronaut in space (and back), who were both, of course, parts of the speaker’s self needing distance to be seen/to see clearly, to try make sense of what it means to be alive. Always they’ve been letters of missing. Recently, the person I’ve been missing—who I was afraid I might never see—was me, specifically Future Me. If I wasn’t worried she wouldn’t arrive, I was waiting impatiently for her, as if moving through trauma and grief and an especially difficult year could have an end goal dressed in a better version of me waiting at the other side of the seemingly never-ending tunnel. The heavyhanded and all-too-familiar metaphor aside, I’ve been writing to her as a way to make a list, maybe, of what I might like to see in my future (or not), and then she wrote back. This work, I guess, is a flare sent into darkness, and I’m making room for it because even if I can’t see clearly just yet, still, I have to tend the desire to keep looking. This is how I know to look.
Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of HOST (Wisconsin Poetry Series, forthcoming 2024), tether (BlackLawrence Press, 2020), Errata (Southern Illinois University, 2015), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition, In the Carnival of Breathing (BLP, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition, and Small Girl: Micromemoirs (Harbor Editions, 2024). She is also the editor of the grief anthology, In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (BLP, 2024). She is an NEA Fellow, Associate Professor of Poetry &CNF in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska Omaha, and Chapbook Series Editor at Black Lawrence Press.
I’m dead by now—car crash or bad fall. Or I’m still here, but feeling dead inside, yelling at
Target cashiers or maybe staying home, my Tower Vodka delivered by Total Wine. I have more
cringy stories or stories swirling about me. I might have slept with a student by now or a dean
who’s a drunk like me. I might have been fired, actually, claiming my dismissal was all someone
else’s fault. I never developed the good habit of flossing daily or trying to get eight hours of
sleep in a row. I might have drowned in a pool or the ocean or a bathtub. I might have pissed
myself in public. I have surely forgotten the rent check, credit card payment, lost my voter ID. I
might have stopped writing poems entirely, with excuses about why they are stupid. I might have
stopped reading them too. Or there I was, until I wasn’t—a high-functioning, lampshade-wearing
jokester who tripped on a step and hit her head, who tore through that stop sign on her way
home.
:: POEMINWHICH I BEFRIENDROYALTY ::
During quarantine
a lizard so green
she looked like a toy
latched onto the screen
door of my balcony—
she must have climbed a tree.
The sound of her scared me.
My blinds closed, I thought she
was someone trying to break in.
I peeked through the slats
ready to scream,
ready to dial 911.
The foot-long lizard
had climbed as far as my knee
and I shook her off, gently,
afraid she would rip the mesh.
I kept talking to her
the whole time. I was so lonely
that Florida winter, I almost
invited her inside.
She had matching lime green
eyes. When I googled her later
I learned she was a Cuban Knight.
Clearly she was able
to fend for herself. Still I mashed
a banana and served it to her,
al fresco, on my best earthenware.
From the writer
:: Account ::
These poems are from a series in which all the titles contain the word “in which.” I began this series as a way to imagine other outcomes to my life or what might have been—a prose poem, for example, in which I never became sober and am possibly dead. But the “in which” was also expansive enough to bring me to glimpses elsewhere—private moments of shame or loneliness, imaginative leaps into the inner workings of my body. For me, it’s been a magical literary device, the “which” like a “witch” casting her spell. The work in this series has gone in surprising directions, the titles tethering me down. I find it increasingly liberating to state my premise in the title, to let the title do a lot of the work to ground a reader.
Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.
Inspired by The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within US Slave Culture, by Vincent Woodward, and after Catherine Pierce
In protest, I say the word delectable.
Woodward’s text-title has, for me,
rancid-washed this word’s flavor.
In protest, I repeat the word, delectable.
Craggy letter-bits stick in my craw.
Once a pleasing and delitable word,
for me, is delectable, no more.
I spit it out.
In protest, I say the word, Negro,
and find me shadowed in a corner,
flirting with views past and upon me.
Years ago, at Thanksgiving, my brother asked,
Why don’t they sell Negro turkeys?
No one in our family ate the white meat.
In protest, I say the word, voyeur.
I stare out the window onto the street
lush with jacarandas. My new country.
The purple canopied calles of my neighborhood,
are named for poets and statesmen.
Maimonides. Arquemides. Lamartine.
In protest, I say, I have done the thing.
This fucking thing. I crawled out
of the beast’s belly and slithered away.
Breathing. Human. Black.
Gut juices painting my path.
My dreams creep back,
enter my bedroom with caution, lest I relapse.
In protest, I reclaim the word ease.
I say the words copiousness and abundance,
in near disbelief.
I nap, voraciously.
I am overdue for a leaching.
In protest, I say the word sinuousness.
I say the word luminescence.
I remember night-quiet, wintered Philadelphia,
ice-sliding Osage Avenue with R.,
translucent spears clinging to skeletal trees
and telephone lines.
My grandfather steepled churches
using wood gathered from the Great Dismal Swamp.
Watch me maroon, fellow maroons. Watch me prosody.
Watch me cacophony while incognito,
persnickety into clandestine.
I am the right brand of paranoid.
And with perfect tastebuds, no delectable for me.
Watch me polish the ‘I’ in thrive.
:: Gone ::
an Expatriate’s CV1
________________________
1I was born
I was born I burst bookish into poetry & charismatic color
nearly blacklisted but hallelujahed by countrymen not my own
swam under sprouting clouds I was born
testing testing in a place Neruda dubbed ‘Dawn’s Rosy Cheek’
I spoke Yiddish soon after I was born
schvartze means Black I was born
I hankered for chitlin’s & oxtails enjoyed forbidden fruits
I wailed the blues with an ear for opera but no peonies or peace lilies for me
I grooved with Pete Seeger I worshipped Paul Robeson &
we marched we protested we believed we patienced
I lusted for excellence I sought success (American style)
I was born justice-oriented for all
like King I was born dreamer Like Langston I deferred dreams too
After reading We Charge Genocide
at age 9 I plotted expatriation at the age of 10
realized I was born in a place ripe
with false promises & hoods my country tis of thee sweet land
I embraced your values I drank your tea
then dropped your mic this caged bird flew because
this country that birthed me the Amerikkka I know
does not love me back does not want me Black
From the writer
:: Account ::
In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress presented a book-length petition to the United Nations entitled, We Charge Genocide, The Crime of Government Against the Negro People. This book documented (with graphic photographs) hundreds of lynching cases of Black Americans known to have occurred in the eighty-five years since the end of slavery (the number is estimated at 10,000 individuals.) I happened upon this book at the age of nine. I was a voracious reader and had been given carte blanche to read any book in my parents’ library. I was aghast and wondered what could possibly provoke a person, or groups of people, to levy such cruelty on other human beings. I promised myself, that, given the opportunity, I would leave the United States to live in another society. As I grew older, I developed a sense of dual self-perception, of which WEB DuBois spoke, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 2). This dual self-perception was another reason for my leaving the U.S.
The concept of flight figures prominently in my poetry, particularly, once my path to expatriation became clearer. I have grown interested in the concept of maroonage and have researched extensively the history of maroons (enslaved people who fled their bondage and sought refuge in swamps or hills) in the U.S. and the Caribbean. I have also done research on the African American folklore about the ‘flying Africans’, Blacks who escaped enslavement through flight.
Joanne Godley lives in Mexico City, having emigrated from the U.S. a year ago. She is a physician, writer, poet, and a first year MFA candidate in Poetry. She is a Meter Keeper in the Poetry Witch Community and an Anaphora Arts fellow in both poetry and fiction. Her poetry has been published in the Bellevue Literary Review, Mantis, Light, FIYAH, Pratik, among others. She was twice nominated for a Pushcart prize. Her prose has been published in the Massachusetts Review, the Kenyon Review online, Juked, Memoir, among others. Her poetry chapbook, Picking Scabs from the Body History,features poems of witness and resistance. Her website is: joannegodley.com
:: The Liquor Store Delivery Driver Considers Ornithology ::
A swift flies like a bat made of straight razors. In summer
I watch them sweep and curve through the mazes of moving cars,
chasing the proliferating insects—mosquitos and caddis,
black flies whose guts rorschach my windshield in yellows and greens
and always the swifts behind them, like hunger given weight
and weightlessness, like hunger given speed. The way they fly,
it seems they do not remember the ground is there.
And nothing makes me feel grounded like watching them.
Watching them, I might as well be a cattail by a retention pond
or a shopping cart sunk in that retention pond, or a pond
full only of oily overflow and no red fish darting
through reeds. When a swift doubles back its belly feathers shine
like surgery. I am driving my car full of liquor
into the city, under the swifts’ oblivion joy.
:: The Liquor Store Delivery Driver Considers Quitting ::
Leaving feels like something for which there should be some ritual.
On my last day at the store, a brand-new driver was t-boned
in an intersection. I went to get him. Parsed his story
from those of the witnesses, peeled the company decal
off the totaled delivery car. The other driver
though stumbling refused an ambulance. My driver spent
the ride back to the store with his head in his hands. The ruined
car we left in a restaurant parking lot for the morning.
What ritual for this? In the end I spent too much money
on a bottle of rum and drove home under open skies.
I left my uniform—a black t-shirt, a matching hoodie,
a fake-gold magnetic nametag—lying on the counter,
what else is there to say about it. A job is not a life.
I went out into the night wearing only my own clothes.
From the writer
:: Account ::
When I moved to Thornton, Colorado, my first job was delivering liquor for a local liquor store. These deliveries were primarily residential, not retail. I’d been a patron at the store for a few months prior to receiving their email advertisement seeking delivery drivers. Having been out of work for nearly two years at that point due to the pandemic, I was eager to contribute to the household’s finances in whatever way possible. And having at the time recently completed my first Covid vaccine regiment, I felt relatively comfortable returning to a retail environment. Now, a year since having left that position, it’s still hard to capture the regular absurdity of being part of a liquor store delivery department. I’d anticipated that the job would provide me with countless stories I could use as fodder for poetry or fiction. And I’m still trying to figure out how to chisel most of those stories out. Unsurprisingly, driving factors heavily into the experience of these poems. And driving has been a major theme in my prior books. But this was my first opportunity to discuss driving in the context of personal labor.
Andrew Hemmert is the author of Blessing the Exoskeleton (Pitt Poetry Series) and Sawgrass Sky (Texas Review Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various magazines including The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. He won the 2018 River Styx International Poetry Contest. He earned his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and currently lives in Thornton, Colorado.
I live my life as the heroine
of a novel I am authoring.
Hers is the story of a woman who moves
from Chicago to Vermillion, South Dakota,
to follow her husband’s job.
It comes with better benefits than hers.
The story she tells could be my own,
or it could be the story of insurance
and the things insurance makes us do
when we feel the soft spot
on the baby’s skull and imagine the world
impressing itself upon that head.
I could console myself:
the new insurance is spectacular.
It slays fears like a great, muscular hero,
thundering into the scene astride a horse,
making me blush like a virgin in an 18th-century novel—
a foil for the heroine I’d been molding.
At the university where I begin to work,
my students ask for leave to go pheasant hunting.
Their hunting excursions are sacred, they say—
religious rites, or practically so.
Go.
Miss class.
Kill the birds.
Confer upon a lost life
a meaning. A pheasant
knocked out of flight,
hurtling over the snow,
will be your glory.
What’s vermillion, I wonder,
about this white, white town.
Outside my window, the striped cornfields
write new lines onto my brain.
How dare they, I think.
I’m the writer, after all.
One day, walking along the gravel driveway,
I spot a dead fox—
a splotch
on the snowed-over corn stubble.
Vermillion.
From the writer
:: Account ::
I am intrigued by how we relate to the fictions that we consume and write—how we project ourselves onto characters and, if we are writers, how we can become moved by our own creations, as if they were not entities we’d brought into being ourselves. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein had a profound influence on me in my youth, and as I grew into adulthood, I revisited it, reading it as a portrayal of how the artist’s creation can be a monstrous mirror, a beloved, a therapist, a sinister twin. Writers often speak of writing as therapeutic, but I’m especially taken with the ways that writing can haunt and cast strange shadows on “real” life.
Carolina Hotchandani won the 2023 Perugia Press Prize for her debut poetry collection, The Book Eaters, released this past September. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, and other journals. She is a Goodrich Assistant Professor of English in Omaha, Nebraska.
