Abuelita wraps me up in tamalitos, so warm, But she cools me down with Fresa Tropical, ah Canciones de mariachi cry in the background, and we Dance like we’re wearing clothes made of cucarachas Executing imprecise movements like forced twitches Fixating, fixating, fixating, on las guitarras Gently strummed, unlike the singers’ vocal chords Harsh, hoarse, heartfelt vibrations that tingle my eardrum I’ve never seen tears fall in tune to a beat like this before Just watch my mother’s head sway back and forth Knowingly imitating the tapping of the performers’ feet Like her body embodies the songs of melancholic mariachi Musical notes invading her bloodstream, her lagrimas shine Nosotros – felices en nuestras vidas sencillas Oblivious to our nearing flight departure Persistently ignoring the dates on the calendar Questioning what life could have felt like before this Repressing the thoughts of once existing outside of this Sin mi país bellísimo, sin mi país, sin mi This is my people’s holy land, but it doesn’t feel mine Unfathomable experience of being both free and shackled Vulnerable with no country, vulnerable within it Withholding parts of my soul, trapped in two places Xenophobes in two nations targeting parts of me, I’m just Yearning for my country to be mine.
Emely Rodriguez is a Latina writer from the D.C. / M.D. area. She is in her first year of the Creative Writing and Publishing Arts MFA program at the University of Baltimore, focusing on poetry. Her work has been published in 45th Parallel,The Voices Project, and Welter Magazine.
Sometimes I’m shopping online, which is something I love to do, shop online, as every store is a new puzzle to solve, like, which clothes would I buy if I shopped here, and sometimes I end up buying the clothes, so I guess you could say it’s very meta and works on a few levels, and I stumble across something that I didn’t know I needed, like, say, a black bardot crop top, and it’s like suddenly I’m meeting the lord Jesus Christ or found the path to Enlightenment because I feel, out of nowhere, absolutely convinced that this is the one clothing item I have always been missing, like since infancy or conception, and that having this thing, wearing it but really just the owning it, the possessing it, will finally Change My Life in the ways I’ve been waiting for it to change, and it’s like I enter a fugue, I short circuit, I hit “purchase” and there I am, sort of shocked, addled, kind of post-coital, like exhausted but satisfied but not totally satisfied, and if I’ve ordered, say, a pair of bright pink palazzo pants that I know will need tailoring and I know I will never tend to, I feel itchy, and blue, and a little dumb, maybe, or sexless and vast like the last woman on Earth, and I start wondering after creepy stuff, like regarding my personality and whether I am worthy of love despite all the raisins in my bed, and I open another website and hope I don’t get struck by a thunderbolt of object fancy but sometimes I do, sometimes it happens, I hit “purchase” and the cycle repeats itself, and has been, really, repeating itself for some years, you should see my dresser, the drawers don’t close, they’re all overstuffed with shit, with pink and sateen fabrics that I don’t wear or know what to do with, that I drape around my hips like a hand, like a gift, and I know, at least at home in the mirror, alone among my things, objects too precious for this city with its leers and grime and violence and dripping virulent ugly, that I am beautiful, a Chaos void spotlit in pink, singing my body’s sweeping arias.
Sam Regal is a playwright, poet, performer, and recent transplant from Brooklyn to Athens, Georgia. Her translation of Yao Feng’s One Love Only Until Death was published in 2017 by Vagabond Press, and her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Sum, The Wild World, NoD Magazine, Lucent Dreaming, and elsewhere. A former resident at TENT within the Yiddish Book Center, Sam was awarded the Colie Hoffman Prize in Poetry in 2017. She earned her M.F.A. from Hunter College and now studies within the Creative Writing Ph.D. Program at the University of Georgia.
Scott Laudati lives in NYC with boxer, Satine. His writing has appeared in The Stockholm Review, The Columbia Journal, and many others. Visit him on Twitter or Instagram @Scott Laudati
By discussing our mutual hurt we could ground ourselves in a
shared reality. Through our conversation something might solidify.
As a solid, it could be located and placed elsewhere.
I didn’t think it through.
I’d had the experience of telling a friend. Someone who’d been
through similar shit, also lived to tell the tale. We had a feeling
about each other, before either of us said a thing. It would happen
this way, again and again, with other people I would come to know.
But the first time I told her, I felt sucked out, 2-D, hysterically on
the verge of hyperventilating, hallucinating, as we stood outside
the bar. I was back to feeling unreal in my own body.
I don’t discount this telling’s necessity.
It was a quest to know, thus doomed to come at a cost.
The box with Pandora’s warning. I kept paying for more.
I wanted to meet someone who had also seen his face. Heard him
speak. Could recite back the twisted things he’d said and done — I had
no doubt he was a repeat offender, and relied on rehearsed technique.
I found one victim I could talk to — not part of the family tree.
A single woman, young, like me.
She took on a life in my mind. I would imagine meeting her
in a café. Small talk, small flurry of female compliments,
then down to business. I would lean forward, and with trembling
righteousness, speak the words: He raped me.
She would pause — then shift in her chair as she steadied
her attack. She’d smirk, get angry, then laugh in
my face. He raped me, too… And I liked it…
Get over it, she added, her face turning to stone.
It wasn’t such a big deal.
It was similar to what happened when I had to
imagine for therapeutic purposes my present-day
self going back in time to comfort and advise the
teenage self. The younger self would always win, would
praise him, and together they would laugh as he threw me
down the stairs, against the wall. My teenage self was
full of mirth. Cruel and bubbly when she said take it.
This violence I imagined came from within
came from the him in me and also came from me.
In Real Life — I never met her. Chatted on the Internet
in a twenty-minute burst that scared us both
that we would come to regret. Scared of him, scared of each
other, scared of repercussions for sort of speaking aloud.
It was clear we lived under the same gag order.
“I just want to stay completely out of this, out of his life.”
“I had the most bizarre dreams last night. Yes, seems it’s best
to let sleeping dogs lie.”
“Agreed!”
“Stay safe and warm.”
“You, too.”
*
Sure — go ahead and ask. But not every question has an answer you will like.
If you know too much, you will lose your mind.
Clare Needham is the author of the novella Bad Books, published by Ploughshares Solos in 2015. Her work has appeared in New York Tyrant, Catapult, Bodega Magazine, Fiction Attic Press, and Armchair/Shotgun. She has been a resident at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
to commit murder, slice a dog in half, reassure its trembling
fur, its anxious eyes that I will do it clean, by running a
sharp knife fast along its length. Though each time I trembled
with the dog, said do not be afraid
for us both.
Instead I now find the dog in two pieces
split in half but still alive, and it is my task
to glue her back. I take my time, I do it
almost perfect. The dog is healed, is whole, yet
I haven’t aligned her right, one back leg
is too high; she limps slightly, moves
— haltingly —
away.
Clare Needham is the author of the novella Bad Books, published by Ploughshares Solos in 2015. Her work has appeared in New York Tyrant, Catapult, Bodega Magazine, Fiction Attic Press, and Armchair/Shotgun. She has been a resident at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
When I read about the one girl who studies orangutans
suddenly my passion for apes knows no cage-like containment.
Another young woman travels widely in the summer
and there I am zip-lining alongside her above Cozumel’s white sands.
When they hate black licorice, I swear to ne’er eat it again.
They all like Mad Men– seriously, they all like Mad Men–
and so I don my best clenched Draper jaw, click and upload accordingly.
It’s all a perfectly amiable way in which to pass the day,
sifting through a sea of smiling beauties, sailing witty inquiry boats.
But if I’m being honest, I miss you-
-r better moments, your silent laugh, body shaking in soundless guffaws,
or those nights you spelled letter-by-letter words on my chalkboard back.
And your hand in mine, which deserves its own line.
Strange, to sit here with infinity at my fingertips, wondering
how I got it so wrong – that what I thought a spark was actually a wildfire.
Josh Lefkowitz received an Avery Hopwood Award for Poetry at the University of Michigan. His poems have been published in Washington Square Review, Contrary, Electric Literature, Court Green, Shooter Literary Magazine (UK) and Southword Journal (Ireland), among many other places.
Sometimes my brother decides not to breathe. I yelled at him last Saturday over bread and he
dropped a piece of slightly roasted fish in my cup of water. I can hear the storm outside.
In summer lonely and buzzing I braid yellow shoelaces like friendship bracelets around my
ankles. Feet swelled up like water balloons, rubber acrid when the wind blows.
The air in my bathroom is thick with grated skin, muddy in strips, scattered by huffs of breath
from my nostrils. I look up and see the sky, can hear bells when the wind blows.
I am clutched in a storm at the art museum in Cleveland, wrapped in Roman tapestries, aloft
and unafraid. I can float forever, spin in bare space when the wind blows.
I hold my breath when I run, scuttling, chest stiff. I can’t let go of this sick white heaving breath
like salt on roads in the not-winter not-spring slush, diffused when the wind blows.
I was 12 and scared of becoming wind. I could see the trees bending and trembling and I would
bend and tremble. I don’t need to see air-like-river, I can hear the storm outside.
Rebecca Oet (Solon, Ohio) is the winner of a silver medal in the National Scholastic Writing Awards, the River of Words Youth Poetry Grand Prize, the VOYA Magazine’s Teen Poetry Contest, and the Young Poets Network Short Poems challenge. Her work appears in Constellations, Abstract Magazine, Dunes Review, Columbia College Literary Review, Qwerty Magazine, Silk Road, The McNeese Review, Healing Muse, Tears in the Fence, Forge, and many others.
