Braided Anchors

The summer I met you, so humid I drowned
my prayers in sweat, knotted my hands into
fists I plunged into pockets empty of artifacts
save for the lone pottery shard lost from its
cousins, my hair so long and undone, I finally
learned to bend it into braids I hung from my
heavy head, the weight of hair anchoring me
to an earth I kept trying to leave though you
told me not to –

eight years later, I shaved my head clean,
stubble sprouting from raw skin red from
relentless scratching, my restless hands unable
to contain their worries between pockets I no
longer possessed, my slim pants too small, too
tight for anything beyond my thin limbs, you
called me gaunt and I pretended not to hear,
tried to eat away flesh out of existence but
you stayed my hand

fed me books when I forgot to read, the pages
so worn on my tongue, so rich the words melted
my tears into unspeakable memories I sealed back
in a mind made rusty by grazes I inflicted out of
desperation; you said it’d be okay, and I kept
believing you, my hair almost long again, and
braided, tethering me to the ground where you
held me steady though I longed to touch the clouds
and evaporate

where nothing but rain could touch me, where
lightning would set my corpse aflame and atoms
combust into something more meaningful than my
name, fuel for creatures I’d rather existed, organisms
we’ve tried to make extinct, a poem the earth
concocted  before we ever fell on mud floors,
accidents of evolution so joyous, so painful –
I sometimes can’t handle it.

What Does Homosexual Mean?

I ask my mother as we watch a NOVA special,
a documentary trawling an epidemic wreaking havoc
on a community boiled down to a word I couldn’t
pronounce at age six: what’s a homosexual?
She stares at me, keen and even, eyes betraying
the shame contained between syllables I don’t
understand, pauses on the threshold of definition,
arriving at the love between persons of the same
gender, explains the blood-borne illness cutting
down their lives, shriveling ambitions to the size
of scorned identity, my heart aching for something
I can’t yet name, knowing and not knowing why.

In high school, my best friend titters about the boys
she finds cute, glues her eyes to mine and asks what
about me — I want to say you, I love you, so I blush
and mumble some boy’s name and everyone laughs
and she kisses my cheek and blood rushes where it
shouldn’t: I watch her slow-dance at prom with her
boyfriend and imagine my hand capturing the small
of her back, our cheeks pressed close, her scent rosy
and real. I stand flat against the wall, swaying to a
fantasy I can’t shake: what’s a homosexual?

The label glues itself to my twenties, pins stabbing
my backpack to announce community in a parade
we shout freedom in streets in which we dare not
hold hands the other eleven months, not in this town:
at night, friends detail sexual conquests, dates gained
through the swipe of digits skittering emojis instead
of words, and I bury my eyes in my hands, pretend
familiarity with a vocabulary I still haven’t learned:
what is a homosexual? when you’ve never even tasted
the forbidden fruit for which you long, apples untouched
and hands so clean but dirty with intention and craving
the affection of another woman kissing you good night.

Marilee Goad is a queer writer residing in South Korea who attended the University of Chicago and has work published or forthcoming in Ghost City Review, ELJ, Barrelhouse, Peculiars Magazine, OUT/CAST, Bone and Ink Press, rose quartz journal, and Vessel Press. You can follow her on twitter @_gracilis and find her website at marileethepoet.tumblr.com. 

Double

The Camden Market psychic told me
I had a twin’s palm. Heart line splitting
in a way that doesn’t mean choices.
I half get it. That low voice between my eyebrows
that shouts in the artificial night –
buttery cinema darkness –
says No, or Now, or Bite.
I keep him checked, henpecked,
else he’d drag fresh-cut fingernails
over my hipbones,
gather all of April’s yellow
to spread thickly over the kitchen.
Sometimes I see him in my left eye,
feel his breath leave my right lung –
we’re a double helix.
Other days, I send him outwards
like a starfish ripping off a limb,
crab-meat-white and zombie-sinister,
to see and search and taste
the things I’m not supposed to lick.
Mostly, though, I like his nearness,
his hereness.
The world is built for two
and I have adapted.

Cora Ruskin is a lab technician who lives and works in Oxfordshire, UK. She is also an enthusiastic writer of poetry and fiction. She has had a poetry chapbook published by Dancing Girl Press, short fiction published in Fiction365 and even shorter fiction published in 101 Words. She blogs at www.corastillwrites.wordpress.com.

On the Oscillation of Light

I failed to discern the burning in my eyes
wasn’t sunscreen when I plunged into the ocean.

Such pretense, sans prescience:
I was blind before I knew it.

This isn’t the way we imagined living,
stars melting across our eyes,
arteries splashing neon fluorescence.

We imagined a sentence: an incarceration
of words & definitions.

I remember that I can’t see you
without photons bouncing off of you.
Even a shadow is an elbow of light.

It takes more than brightness to reach you.

From the basement, the kitchen
door sparks at the edges.

Everything else, black as teeth.

David Bankson lives in Texas. He was a finalist in the 2017 Concīs Pith of Prose and Poem contest, and his poetry and microfiction can be found in concis, Anti-heroin Chic, {isacoustic*}, Artifact Nouveau, Riggwelter Press, FIVE:2:ONE Magazine, and others.

Itzel

Cristina Incháustegui Massieu is a Fine Arts graduate who grew up in Mexico City during the 90s. She has always been obsessed with visual media, drawing and taking photographs from an early age. As years went by, she developed an intense fixation with photographing women and became a portrait photographer. Massieu’s main focus is to take women out of their common context and transport them to a magical fictitious reality where they become goddesses, queens, witches and fairies. She loves to create a cinematic atmosphere when working with her models.

Hellmouth

When I traverse through old memories, I hear my mother’s voice everywhere: talking about the collapse of our relationship. Sticky with regret and bitterness. I confront her every day, especially recently, since she’s always on my ass about taking Lexapro. I hear my mother’s voice everywhere: when I sleep, in every boy I’ve slept with. Some stain right there in my face. I can’t see past the day she told me that she didn’t want to have me, but my grandmother persuaded her. Or the time she told me God would forgive me for being queer, I like the scar it left on my ribs. Some foolish smoke in the air. Some home I grew up in. She would hate me talking about this. It’s a bird perched up high, staring down, luring eyes, gazing, judging—like her.

“You’re the boy blue, the one I would do anything for,” I hear her singing to me through the phone. I’m sedated and unimpressed, but I chuckle and pretend it means something. I can’t tie the cut thread between us. I can’t spool it back together. How unwoven we have become, like that slippery slope theory I’ve heard so much about, the avalanche kept coming.

The boy loves his mother. The boy wants to love his mother. The boy doesn’t know how to love his mother, but he tries. The boy stays up at night figuring out why mom kept taking those men’s side over his. The boy knows he hates men because of her. He likes men because of her. He hates himself because of her.

His mother has perfect teeth, and the boy needs surgery to fix his.

The boy wants to be loved, and his mom cannot get over his last ex, says he was the perfect one, and each boy after that cannot measure up to him. And him. And him.

His mother is beautiful, and she runs the room. His mom doesn’t like any of his new friends because he constantly goes through different ones, so much so that she can never care enough to remember their names.

It’s the boy’s fault. He has a mean-steak, cannot live properly. He tries to pray, but God hasn’t loved him since who knows when.

We stare at the walls. We know the mother tries her best, but she’s broken too.

There are stories left out there to dry up in the California sun, and the wind will pick them up. dust in the hands go away—just go away—as in memories swept out of the mind, forgetting seems the best option when you want to move forward. The sun dries up mother’s tears for never being there. The boy holds hands out with dust, waits for the wind to take all the bad memory away. How do stories find themselves back—dust always collects again.

The mother tells him to stop lying to his doctors, to tell the truth about his fucked-up mind. What do we do with darkness? I can’t turn on the lights. The nightmares stay.

Emotional support—verb—wish it were a noun, deeply embedded in the flesh. The mother couldn’t teach the boy Spanish because she was afraid of what the white people would think.

They called the boy hyper when he was younger, said he needed some therapy to cure his ailments. With an open wound, he grew up with an open mouth, wishing things would be different. When the boy traverses through old memories, they are stained with his mother’s voice, and he cannot tell anymore whose mouth opens to hell: hers or his.

Mateo Lara is from Bakersfield, California. He received his B.A. in English at CSU Bakersfield. He is currently working on his M.F.A. in Poetry at Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA. His poems have been featured in Orpheus, EOAGH, Empty Mirror, and The New Engagement. He is an editor for RabidOak online literary journal.

“Winged-Man & His Stars”
For H

Stripped-down                        where              our holy spaces           filled with ants.
I’m ripe & thinking of the first time someone fucked me.

Blades supplemental hot-iron             wings silver-slicked     down my back
I’m hungering here      nested  in the backseat                        of his cobalt.

Soft clay forms       spot sticky with newness       so much newness white & impure
Not saintly      he tells me god does not exist             pay attention to the stars.
I’ll float & drift within his silver-slicked push—take & give.

I enter  his indifference            unwanted but satiated             we last three years
Before my flesh pulses with memory                        flying above & under him.

He talked about cosmic intent                        whatever the fuck that meant
Cosmic intent              super nova & its burst                        orange death/rebirth.
Black hole       sucking & fucking a galaxy      he studied chemistry in college
I studied          his eyebrows               how much he cried when we broke up
How much my mother            loved him        before she started loving me
& stars                        dead pulse       bright dead pulse         so much stars
In the sky        that god did not create                        that’s what the winged-man said
When he unfurled        his silver-slicked wings           to cover me
to cover           my       eyes.

Mateo Lara is from Bakersfield, California. He received his B.A. in English at CSU Bakersfield. He is currently working on his M.F.A. in Poetry at Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA. His poems have been featured in Orpheus, EOAGH, Empty Mirror, and The New Engagement. He is an editor for RabidOak online literary journal.

…then burn

what ways do you like it?  / strawberry sweet ? / or bitter like a glass of tonic water / still lingering inside your mouth / just like swapping spit / in a dark room/ hands finding crevices / hands finding chests/ hands finding hands / the type of sex you don’t keep hushed / that’s bold of you / & it’s bold of you / if love is folded into the lust / it burns like a thick blanket / flopped over a body / during the middle of summer/ so if it’s love / on top of thigh clutching lust / that turns your skin inside out / then burn / let yourself burn beneath the sheets / on top of them / all over them

Vanessa Maki is a queer writer, artist & other things. She’s full of black girl magic & has no apologies for that. Her work has appeared in various places like Really System & others. She is also forthcoming in a variety of places. She’s founder/EIC of rose quartz magazine & is involved in other spaces as well.  Follow her twitter & visit her site .

ICEcream

Around nine a.m. on the morning of July 4th, you power up the TV and Univision is on.
Later that afternoon, you’ll have to explain to your shockingly white boyfriend exactly what Univision (and Despierta America and Caso Cerrado and Primer Impacto) are.

Univision is running a report about how ICE has detained 30 undocumented workers in a raid. The reports have been stacking up, even though you’re pretty certain you and the folks at Univision are the only ones counting. You wonder if your boyfriend knows what the acronym ICE stands for. The anchorwoman ends the segment by offering a condolence to the families who are being ripped apart.

Immediately after the report ends, the anchorwoman cues to a video of a bear walking through a fast food drive-thru. An employee sticks his hand out of the window and feeds the bear soft serve ice cream, which it hungrily runs its tongue over. Suddenly, you find a deep guttural urge, a gnawing in your stomach, for ice cream.

Thank God your boyfriend had suggested you go out for ice cream that afternoon.

Ruben Reyes Jr. is the son of two Salvadoran immigrants and a senior at Harvard University studying History & Literature. He has written for The Florida Review Online, Poynter, The Harvard Crimson, La Horchata Zine, and other publications. Follow him on Twitter @rubenwrites and Instagram @rubenreyes_jr.

Claudia

Give me your tired,
your poor,
your huddled masses
with constellations hearts.
And I’ll give you
the Border Patrol
yearning and ready,
equipped with
rounds of black holes
for the automatic chips
on their shoulders.
Trigger fingers always aching,
groping for even
the tiniest tendrils of threat
to the American dream.
They can’t sleep peacefully
if anything other than drugs
and weapons cross this border.

I am told, Lady Liberty
waits in welcome
at the foot of the ocean,
but if you stand on
the American side of the Bravo,
you can hear the river yelling
“Keep my name
out of your mouth.”

But you came anyway,
following the pathways that
would soon line your coffin.
Stepped out of the water,
ripe with expectation,
the dogs sniffed hope in the wind.
No questions.
Just the sound of sovereignty
splitting the air before
rippling through your hair
like capillary waves
on the surface of a river.
Dispersed tongues.
No last words.
Only stuttering syllables
landing hard and unforgiving
like boats dashed
against the unseen.
You collapse and
a dam of tall grasses
mercifully cradles you
while the earth murmurs,
Claudia,
your breath is not welcome here
in this stolen land
though hands that mirror
the darkness of the soil
built it with
the bones and teeth
of their memories.
No last rites.
Just a flightless bird
and your blood
rushing towards the Rio Grande,
begging to be taken
back home.

Black Girl

                                 What my mama describes as ancestry
sends White folks cowering in fear.
I don’t do anything in particular to tower
over the masses.  I suppose it’s just the big
power in my walk that makes them shrink
into my shadows.  I get it though. I imagine
I’d be frightened too if I ran upon a woman
carrying every tribe from Ashanti to Zulu
in her hips.

                                   Though often mistaken
for a loud-mouth bitch with nappy hair,
I pay no mind to the way they try to define
what can only be described as indescribable.
Not everyone is meant to decipher
the white noise from spoken hieroglyphs.
Not too many can separate the ostentatious from
the call of a lioness. And as you can imagine,
folks who’ve never had roots don’t know much
about kinky curls that keep
the past, present, and future moving
in one smooth figure eight.

                                     So they try to pretend
they’re appalled by my skin, but I see the
secret glances.  The longing to wrap themselves
up in my midnight sky. I know they wish
they could steal my coat of many colors.
                                     And that’s why wherever I go,
                                      I take my Self with me.
I transport my flesh in armored self-esteem
knowing its worth, knowing that from its blackness
all the worlds were made.

                                      And even though they try to redefine it
as hideous, inferior, a strain of disease for
which there is no cure, they know with each
vertebra of their dismantled spines that I
am the entry way of everything that ever was,
is, and forever will be.

From a young age, Sean developed an insatiable love for the written and spoken word and has performed throughout the country. She is the author of the chapbooks Unpredicted Prophecy and My Name Be. Sean has had art work and poetry published in 29 anthologies worldwide, and in 2014 her poem “Rearview Mirror” was nominated for The Pushcart Prize in Poetry. All My Heroes Were Assassinated is her first full length collection with two of its poems nominated for “Best of the Best” by Edify Fiction and Lunch Ticket, and she was recently nominated for Texas Poet Laureate. In addition to her poetic endeavors, she is also a painter, teacher, rock star auntie, and humanitarian known for her monthly homeless outreach, disaster relief program, and mission work in Africa.

This Gymnasium 

i keep bending like this not so
a man will want me but will

want to balance a pound of me
on his tongue.     

this meaning a rope i imagine
tied around my waist pulls
my hips toward heaven
where they belong.

this meaning i feel my wrists chained and lift    
the arms behind my prone weight a praise
into the air that leaves the back
open for what service it may offer.

which is heavier:
a teaspoon of sweat?  
a teaspoon of spit?

this chant is a kind of want
we throw into the mirror.

this worship sounds like the shower running
so it can drown the hymn we hum below it.

what we’re sure of we hold in vibrato
but other songs in this sweatbox jump better  
in the raw back of the throat.

i know.
i keep trying to sing them.

Sam Pittman is the author of the chapbook Mostly Water (Seven Kitchens Press), which won the 2016 Rane Arroyo Chapbook Prize. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Grist, Frontier Poetry, Bellevue Literary Review, Newfound: A Journal of Place, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and The Good Men Project. He is a graduate of the MFA Program in Writing at the University of Pittsburgh and holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley. Sam lives and teaches writing in Pittsburgh, PA.