Issue 4
Cover Art by Jaqueline Evans-Shaw
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Ángel García You never mentioned the switches or stones, the unhung crucifijo tearing into your back, your father running you out, no eres mi hijo. Late-night, TV aglow, you never said the name of who hurt you. Instead, my head cradled in your lap, you’d tell me, I love you mi’jo. What bones we may break, may we break the bones of our pasts, skeletons dragged over scarred lifetimes, en nombre del padre, el hijo... the ghosts of our wounds, dark-winged words we’ve never shared, are what keep us bound, rooted for generations, de tal palo tal astilla. You’ve never been your father, just as I’ve won’t be you. Still, how could I be a better angel, Papi, when I’ve never been a good son. Ángel García, a proud son of Mexican immigrants, is the author of Teeth Never Sleep (University of Arkansas Press), winner of a CantoMundo Poetry Prize, winner of an American Book Award, and finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award and Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He currently lives in Champaign, IL.
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Ángel García he clears the jungle for track In Tuxtla she washes clothes on river rock the low growl of the tractor trembling near the river’s edge she sweats fever spreads through his body heart tense from her fear of the tree lines he cuts the motor and stumbles back home she tells her child to stay close everything green grows into dark shadows begin to stalk their young prey what slowly feeds on his wrought body will kill a child momentarily unattended dragging his body through a trail his cries echoed by a mother who mourns for home, he wants to go back home to live she knows they must leave here to get away from the train, the beast la bestia that will consume her family whole Ángel García, a proud son of Mexican immigrants, is the author of Teeth Never Sleep (University of Arkansas Press), winner of a CantoMundo Poetry Prize, winner of an American Book Award, and finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award and Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He currently lives in Champaign, IL.
Ángel Garcìa 1 Born two-eyed, one-nosed, fat-tongued, belly protruded, extraordinarily average, still they’ll praise you, your parents, as un bebe perfecto. How quickly you gorge yourself on everything you are given. And still, you wallow and whine for more privilege. It’s not your nature to savor your blessings. A healthy appetite, they’ll claim. He’s a growing boy, they’ll excuse, when before everyone else has been served, you demand having seconds. What you taste deep down in the back of your throat, bile-like, is not your heart burning —but guilt. Sour from what you feel you deserve. 2 Your love is conditional, admit it. It always has been. It’s ripe with your expectations: the cheap currency of tit for tat; vice-versa; bubble gum, bubble gum in a dish. More than your love for your immigrant parents, you’re consumed with how you must change them, to make from their poor, unfortunate lives a better inheritance. You make them suffer through your Sunday sermons, preaching about decolonization, the enlightened path they must follow to be saved from their self -inflicted misery, all while speaking a language they don’t understand. Homesick for a home-cooked meal, you order ahead, and stay only long enough to pick up your meal and riffle through cupboards for the expired canned goods they hoard to feed themselves, but not you because you deserve better. 3 During your graduation party, you strut through the backyard, bragging to everyone about the size of your citizenship, wagging your degrees in their dark faces. Finally, when you introduce your parents to acquaintances and colleagues, you snicker behind their backs when they mispronounce a word in English. When they divulge where they come from, or how they came here, you smack your teeth and talk over their past. Ever since you could walk, you’ve believed you could manifest your own destiny with no help from no one. You needed to believe that to make something of your -self. But no one here recognizes you, Chicano prince. Ángel García, a proud son of Mexican immigrants, is the author of Teeth Never Sleep (University of Arkansas Press), winner of a CantoMundo Poetry Prize, winner of an American Book Award, and finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award and Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He currently lives in Champaign, IL.
Ami Xherro Am I alone here? Am I the only masturbator on this page? Did you or did you not jerk to your white fleeting gods earlier today, reading the newspaper? You’re sorry, I know what you do when you’re all alone. You know what I would do to find a warm thing to be caught in. Anyway I wanted to know if I was alone here. I wanted a Really Big Romance. To clear the image from my eye, It will take a deep breath It will take a China It will take a Valium It will take a truck It will take the endurance of a family’s bickering It will take the language of love for desire to exit for something to take its place. Ami Xherro’s first chapbook, The Unfinished Flame, was published by Swimmers Group in 2017. Her work has appeared in the Hart House Review, Shrapnel, University College Review, Long con, Autodidact, the Poetry Institute of Canada’s annual anthology. She also makes sound poetry with the Toronto Experimental Translation Collective. We seek to renegotiate relationships within and across languages and media using homophonics and public transcription practices.
Joseph Meads For instance: a pack of 10,000 wild dogs (that’s 40,000 canine teeth) surrounds us – & you bow your head forward, toward my right ear – to whisper, like a ghost or the ghost of a just felled tree: I too am colorblind... träume ich noch en Deutsch. Joseph Lee Meads is a diagnosed schizophrenic and currently an MA student in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has previously been published in Columbia Poetry Review, Chicago Literati, Lover's Eye Press and elsewhere. He posts images of his muted television onto Instagram: @joseph.lee.m
Ann Tweedy because i can offer you nothing i aspire to ask nothing of you is it a bargain we are stuck in or its absence the language thick on us now we are mimes or those live statues in San Francisco, grey grease paint, tiny robotic movements-- no--child stars, trapped in performance Ann Tweedy's first full-length book, The Body's Alphabet, was published by Headmistress Press in 2016. It earned a Bisexual Book Award in Poetry and was also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and for a Golden Crown Literary Society Award. Ann also has published three chapbooks, the first of which was reissued by Seven Kitchens Press in April 2020. Her latest chapbook, A Registry of Survival, was published by Last Word Press in December 2020. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Literary Mama, Clackamas Literary Review, and elsewhere, and she has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Net Awards. A law professor by day, Ann has devoted her career to serving Native Tribes. In 2020, she moved from Washington State to South Dakota to join the faculty at University of South Dakota School of Law. Read more about her at www.anntweedy.com.
Kitty Chu I I am sick with nausea but I hunger for meals to fill my mouth with guilt because I do not know how to metabolize gratitude served as white rice in porcelain palms I bring to my tongue. I am foreigner half-familiar with tongues home to Mom + Dad who were born in Taishan but came to the United States to pull money and Mom pulled thread into fabric and fabric was pulled onto bodies; she made clothes and waited for Dad to come home while Dad waited tables— a busy busboy until 11 pm, way past 6 when we ate, everyone but Dad. Mom cooked and home smelled like labor wafting through the rooms, the scent of steamed and stir-fried money: beef and corn with salt beads: Dad’s crystallized sweat to remind us at 6 we were eating his labor while he lost family time shifts until 11 but we were asleep our stomachs full and uneasy II I am sick with a fever living between Mom & me after her words slashed my fresh flesh I cleanse with saline tonight when big sister Sally played big brother and tattletale telephone. Bottles of Ensure sat in the vast vacancy of the kitchen and tonight I needed an ( ) bottle emptied into the sink. I poured $$$ down the drain instead of downing it for no reason but to have an empty bottle. Mom moves → past the hallway past the restroom past the closed closet door where she picks up a metal rod moves → past the bedroom door and finds my body folded in thirds with my head praying to my knees. She swings an X and my back raises its skin to yell but I shush bow my tongue saying $orry. III it’s been cold here since spring of 2005 when a baby bloomed in the belly of our mom who birthed and named my sister/ chicken/ baobuoy/ a treasure with her skin so golden it harvests youth from the sun kept in her eyes that slant up towards the sky to smile as the new favorite. I am a child five years older forgotten five years later after the arrival of the sun that keeps me cold. IV Coughs in my body store generations of souls mapped out by my nose lips Taishanese loy koy: I ask them to come be with me, with Mom and Dad whose mother tongues speak the land of their first home in Taishan where I am foreigner because I dress in cotton t-shirts from H&M and qipaos only on holidays when I eat the same food celebrate the same harvesting of rice and wheat under the same moon that heavenly ages to a crescent shining on half my face. In same sky of sim sim stars, my ancestors hum softly in my blood thicker than red twine knotted and burnt around our necks to honor the zodiacs we fall under as I wonder where my body first began. Kitty Chu is an Asian American writer living in the valley of Southern California. She is graduating from the University of California, Riverside with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing. Her works have been featured in Entropy Magazine and Matchbox Magazine, and she has received the William Willis Poetry Prize and the UC Riverside Chancellor’s Award. Outside of writing, Kitty enjoys birdwatching (especially ducks and pelicans!), going on sunset walks, and making caffeine-kicking coffee! You can keep up with her on her Instagram page, @kittyychuu.
Yetta Rose Stein It is spring with the lilac stench reaching for me. I barter with the gods for rain. I missed you and am wondering: were you in town last weekend for the wedding on Saturday and the funeral on Sunday? The father of the bride stood in front of everyone, begged the gods for a moment of silence. Our Alberton wind blew in a fierce gentleness knocking down the altar, like a sign of something alive. It is spring with everybody dying in the summer. I missed you and the way you hate good things like rain and weddings. Do you still visit that park? The one where we thought we might be in love? Like a sign of something alive? It is spring and there are yard sales on every other block. Everybody is dying and everything is for sale. Where do you go to pray, in this town with as many churches as bars. It’s raining now, starting to rain, I see god in the old buildings that still stand. The lilac stench wilting, leaving me behind. I see god, her lightswitch between matrimony and martyrdom, flipping, easily. I pray these hills are green come August. Yetta Rose Stein is a graduate of Hellgate High School. She lives in Livingston, Montana. She spends her free time trying to embrace the wind. You can follow her first drafts at @yettaworldpeace on Instagram.
Oswaldo Vargas I got far in the pilgrimage toward the equator that browned you. The next one will finish it and pose for pictures. He too will count the keloids on your back, big and small, like blessings. Oswaldo Vargas is a former farmworker, a graduate from the University of California, Davis and a 2021 Undocupoets Fellow. Anthology features include Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color and Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century. His work can also be seen in The Louisville Review, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Huizache, West Trade Review, Narrative (upcoming) and the Green Mountains Review tribute issue to former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera (among others). He lives and dreams in Sacramento, California.
Oswaldo Vargas He gets me a beer halfway through it, I unravel. mistake mistake ohgodmistake The waitress asks if I'm ok how do i say that I hope he knows my weight before the night is done? He can sell my bones when he's done with me and I'd still ask which one fetched more money He drops me off but i still pretend my steps lead up to his family home A spot in the hallway, reserved for the portrait of his bride mount me on a wall call me a success. Oswaldo Vargas is a former farmworker, a graduate from the University of California, Davis and a 2021 Undocupoets Fellow. Anthology features include Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color and Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century. His work can also be seen in The Louisville Review, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Huizache, West Trade Review, Narrative (upcoming) and the Green Mountains Review tribute issue to former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera (among others). He lives and dreams in Sacramento, California.
Laura Anne Whitley Pros: no one will ever keep you as a pet Cons: no one will ever keep you as a pet On being a haunted house Pros: nobody will make a home inside of you Cons: nobody will make a home inside of you Laura Anne Whitley is a comedian who accidentally became a poet, and is delighted to report they both use the same muscle. Her mission in life is to create mythology, and her favorite form of intimacy is through confession. She finds inspiration in chaos, nostalgia and The Invisible. She hopes that when people connect with her work, they’re not connecting to her, but to a part of themselves. Her work can be found on Instagram @laurabreadkitten.
Jennifer Cox We tell our son The dog died That she was sick and Couldn’t get better We tell him She isn't coming back Our son is confused He doesn't know death Only smushed a few bugs sometimes He asks "She is . . . Somewhere?" I do not tell him That she is in the vet's freezer I do not tell him that soon She will be cremated I do not tell him we will spread her ashes Over the lake she loved and her remnants will settle On the lily pads and mint lining the shore And will stick, undetected To the bottoms of our feet As we come out of the shallows I do not tell him That then our feet will carry her Wherever we go So I do not tell him that soon She will be everywhere Jennifer Cox (she/her) is a poet, lawyer, and mother. Her poetry primarily revolves about motherhood, birth, and the impending climate crisis. She enjoys reading, spending time outdoors, and playing with her children. Her work has previously appeared in the League of Canadian Poets' Poetry Pause and Bywords.ca. She resides in Ottawa with her children and husband.
Aicha Yassin A friend once told me about this ritual in Argentina, Where people get in their cars and travel as far north as they can get. they stop by small villages on the way, and explore the pristine land, Some would end up in Venezuela, and in Colombia, the others. He told me this story as we sat in a small bar in Ramallah. And I thought to myself, if I were to take a car and do the same A checkpoint will stop me, And if I pass the checkpoint, A border will stop me, And if I pass the border (miraculously), I will be stopped by war. Aicha bint Yusif is a 26-year-old Palestinian living in Haifa.She holds an English literature degree and is currently studying Medicine. She is passionate about poetry, and her works appeared in World Literature Today (NYC) and Rusted Radishes (American University of Beirut). She also likes yoga, working in the land, and making crafts.
Anthony Negrón Don’t you raise your rifle, boy, It will change the way you see. Don’t take aim, he’s just a child And this desert belongs to him. Don’t you raise your rifle, boy, the future is at stake. Yours and his Are intertwined, so leave your arms At your side. Don’t you raise your rifle, boy; His friends want to live as well. The sand has drunk it’s fill Of blood, it does not need theirs too. Don’t you raise your rifle, boy, Let their laugh-song carry on. They do not wish to take your life; Your instinct led you astray. Your heat-dreams Have changed even children into horrors; The price is too high and rising still. Don’t you raise your rifle, boy; He’s a child like you were once. If you can both grow to be good men This war may end one day. Don’t you raise your rifle, boy, You’ll forever view him through iron sights. The fear and violence in your heart Will become a feast for consuming regret; Making every dark corner remember Your intent, and take Aim back at you. Don’t you raise your rifle, boy, you can become human again. The hate that the desert taught you has Not reached permanence. Don’t you raise your rifle, boy; There is no bomb on his chest. It is filled With joy and wonder that you must Let go on. Oh, boy, you raised your rifle; committed to the sin. The sun has risen on your fear and set On the child’s hope. Now that you’ve raised your rifle, boy, The memory will haunt you as a man. Tear your dreams to bloody death and drown you in shaming sweat. You raised your rifle and so are doomed To dread and ruminate; to lie and rot, and wander Lost while forever taking aim. You raised your rifle, boy, And, though you both survived- The price was too high and The cost is rising still. Anthony Negron is a Black and Puerto Rican-American poet and disabled Iraq war veteran. He resides in Hampton, Virginia. His poetry is centered around his relationships and processing traumas. He has a BA in English and is currently working on his first poetry collection, Letters To Us. He can be found @shatteredsentimentsva on Instagram.
Anthony Negrón I remember the face of my youth; Its castoff eyes and dry brows, Clumsy ears Intent on finding nuance Within scenes of obfuscate duality And disorder, blood- Soaked streets and carports, Buicks and beat-down Fords With unnatural holes where Natural light shone through, Suggesting miracles like plate- Glass windows filled with obsolete Evidence of white deities and Prophets Who never saw Black Death coming? In a ghetto Or honeysuckles in spring, Their sweet centers giving Me a sense of Aprils in a better world; Odorous hope like pollen To my nostrils Spent brass clinking and Ringing in the alleyway at my feet As I clamored ignorantly for more- The ground seemed like such A cruel place. Scattered grass grown beside needle- Lined cracks in paved sidewalks Like veins; Poisonous blood leading To the field where I played As I had my first taste Of malt, a half-empty Double Deuce I Chugged and felt warm Less alone, vomited On my shoes, found Kinship in consequence When I thought that it was love; The face of my youth all Red with bloody error, skin soaked Boiled and fermented, Habit a process- I learned how to die on East Indian River Where all my firsts Took root in my blood. Anthony Negron is a Black and Puerto Rican-American poet and disabled Iraq war veteran. He resides in Hampton, Virginia. His poetry is centered around his relationships and processing traumas. He has a BA in English and is currently working on his first poetry collection, Letters To Us. He can be found @shatteredsentimentsva on Instagram.
Trishala Vardhan they could have given me metal mandibles and i still would have managed to make music of your name. Trishala Vardhan is a 24-year old Dalit Indian who has lived in the lap of language for as long as she can remember. A practicing (not yet publishing) poet, she believes both in the promise of peace, and the penance of its absence. She has currently just completed her masters in English Literature, and is working at the National Institute of Smart Governance in her hometown. Grappling with the grief of the current world order, Trishala is doing her best to be kind to her own disillusionment in a country where both death and dreams are disregarded in equal measure. Poetry is her skein of light in this survival.
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