Best of Issues 1-3
A glimpse of Rejected Lit's first issues
Cover Art by Irina Novikova
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Ilya Kaminsky You step out of the shower and the entire nation calms-- a drop of lemon-egg shampoo, you smell like bees, a brief kiss, I don’t know anything about you—except the spray of freckles on your shoulders! which makes me feel so thrillingly alone. I stand on earth in my pajamas, penis sticking out-- for years in your direction. Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union in 1977, and arrived to the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. He is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press) and co-editor and co-translated many other books, including Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Harper Collins) and Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (Alice James Books).
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Damieka Thomas White girl, Black name. White girl, Black friends. White girl, Black sister. White girl, You a shell, A sponge to soak up our culture, An unwanted weed encroaching on our roots. White girl, You taste of nothing. No, You taste worse than nothing. You taste of sugar And watermelon And cotton. You taste of them— The ones who taught us to hate our skin as much as they did. You taste of minstrelsy. You taste of thievery, Of heritage exhumed and Men taken from their homeland in ships too small to fit their bones. White girl, White men don’t want you. White girl, Black men don’t want you. But you just keep claiming your half-life, Treating your skin with cocoa butter And talking in large platitudes of oppression unknown to you. White girl, You are a fraud. White girl, Why ain’t you more proud? Damieka Thomas is a mixed-race writer and poet. She holds a degree in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing and a minor in Education from UC Davis. She currently works as a Librarian Assistant and bookseller. Additionally, she is the cofounder and Public Relations Officer of Mad Mouth Poetry, which is a collective of poets dedicated to creating equitable spaces in poetry. She has been published in Open Ceilings Magazine and Poets.org. She is the recipient of the Celeste Turner Wright Prize for Poetry from The Academy of American Poets and The Diana Lynn Bogart Prize for Fiction from UC Davis. She is applying for MFA programs this Fall and hopes to attend a program next year. In her spare time, Damieka enjoys reading, writing, hiking, yoga, traveling, and indulging in the frequent Netflix binge with her cat by her side. You can find Damieka @damiekat on all social media platforms.
Meghan Sterling like mother’s milk, the snow has scent our bodies seek and hunger for, while the black sky bright against the white reveals the shape of things, our edges, ghosts, the meanness of ice, and winter’s too-slow return to light. Late at night, the sky threatens this sinking earth as we walk along the coast, my family and their dreams lost in the waves, the shtetl that they fled across this water and all in their graves. I don’t know how to explain to their memory what has happened, what I have done with my time here, how I have tried to love this place, to save this place, fed too as I’ve been by love and struggle by loss. And all of this beautiful snow the joy and cruelty of snow the way that winter contains us in its endless fields, its massive hands, the way it brings us closer to our beginnings— dark, light, and altar. Meghan Sterling’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, Rust & Moth, SWIMM, The Night Heron Barks, Cider Press Review, Inflectionist Review, The West Review, UCity Review, Sky Island Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review Westchester Review, Pine Hills Review, Menacing Hedge and many others. She is Associate Poetry Editor of the Maine Review, a Finalist in River Heron Review’s 2021 annual poetry contest, and winner of Sweet Literary's 2021 annual poetry contest. Her collection These Few Seeds is out now from Terrapin Books. Sterling is Program Director for the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and lives in Portland, Maine. Read her work at meghansterling.com.
Georgii Martirosian I put on your lenses and, beautiful in my broken nakedness, blind with my tears, lay back on the floor, remembering how you stood at the open window and wiped the rain from your face with your hand, how I did not move because I was the sad God of Beckett and these were our days without love; and you could not lift my eyelids and see your slashed lashes on my retinas because, oppressed by the beauty of my body, you fell asleep and with our anavolias covered the rotten tamarix united their shadows. You were the last widower of the South and it was not me who you loved. Georgi Martirosian is a writer and PR Consultant. Born in 1997 in Belgorod, Russia. He is based in Moscow and was on the shortlist of the Arkady Dragomoshchenko Award (2020). He is the author of the book ‘If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem’ (‘ARGO-RISK’, 2021, Moscow), which was translated into Polish and English.
Georgii Martirosian Sweating under his Sam Browne belt and leather mask, clinging to my body, he listens to the bells of The Church of St. Louis of the French. The semicircular apses of Cappadocia attract him and the years of blooming life hang under the dome. Milky white circles behind my ears trickle down my ‘celan,’ tattoo; the culture is fertilized by us – the evening boys who do not talk about love. We shine like musgravites amphibious. Georgi Martirosian is a writer and PR Consultant. Born in 1997 in Belgorod, Russia. He is based in Moscow and was on the shortlist of the Arkady Dragomoshchenko Award (2020). He is the author of the book ‘If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem’ (‘ARGO-RISK’, 2021, Moscow), which was translated into Polish and English.
When you think of usefulness, think not of the bone But the advantage of marrow, what might not technically Constitute a meal, but that which grandmothers heaved Into soup bowls when the trees thinned of animals. I am trying to be less morbid, but if we were the Donner party Could I pass for a respectable Thanksgiving meal or at least A sizeable charcuterie board? I remember asking teachers this To watch how fast the red climbed their throats. A lesson in childhood-- To learn that we are meat before we are anything. If you wanted a bottled kidney, or my midday slaughter I’d ask only for the grace Adam gave the animals Give me your namings— you, my late spring, My stoppered hunger. Bianca Braswell is a Cuban-American poet and writer currently enrolled in the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where she is studying English and Film. She has previously been published in Mineral Lit Magazine, Marias at Sampaguitas, and Stark Poetry Journal. She is currently working on her first poetry collection.
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