issue 1: punishment
Discussions with the Historian
(after Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson)
By Eileen R. Tabios
1.
Speculation is philosophical.
The word “Pragueing” belies the advantages—the beauty—of Prague; just another word that dilutes what it signifies. When a name loses itself, it is usually to negative effect. “NangMarcos” becomes verb for theft, like how the dictator Marcos set the Guinness World Record for thievery. “NanDuterte” becomes verb for duplicity, as when the murderous Duterte feigns cognitive impairment to avoid trial for his crimes against humanity.
Or am I channeling Anne Carson who asks, “Is it just that everything sounds wrong today?”
Long before I could theorize it, I refused to make babies with my body.
Then I made a baby out of myself.
My answer is Yes to the poet who asks, “Do you fear the same things I fear?”
A sincere blush unfolds slowly, from the inside. When I blush, I do so suddenly—I am invaded by the outside world. This heat…
Inside becomes outside only from the light of unknowing (not to be confused with not knowing).
There are reasons why, in Hokusai’s world, wind thuds like lions leaping to claw the stars.
Audubon searched for truths, for which he killed birds before stuffing them into poses that he judged more appropriate than life.
I am newly a fan of professional volleyball. I love that so-called “volleyball I.Q.” which turns the spiking hand into a spear cutting through an angle that came to exist only because the hitter discerned a chink through a defensive wall of soldered opposing bodies. “To think is to create. To create is to think.
Aristotle surfaces with the reminder: metaphors exist because of mistakes. But enjoying the error is a different matter—reconciling rather than enjoying seems more truth-ful?
What do a poet’s eyelashes look like?
Speaking of, unless you’re a matted terrier, I have zero interest in combing the hair around your genitals. Look out the window: the oligarchs have gobbled your lawn!
Living is long. Dying is too short.
When a writer publishes work with the phrase “first draft” completing its title, is the writer lazy or tired? Personally, I always suspect the merits of exhaustion as an excuse—but that’s because, against the lessons taught by my lifetime as well as the lifetimes of my ancestors, I still want to keep trying.
2.
I want to transition from this life saying, “I loved you more.”
I don’t want to transition from this life saying, “I loved you more.”
I want to transition from this life saying, “I loved you more.”
Ocean
Ocean
Ocean ocean ocean
3.
So many alleys contain my diaries
fallen from coat pockets
Yet I don’t feel lighter
When I die, I hope to be amidst laughter.
Kapwa
is the light teaching
when all colors mix
the result is white
like this page
where I write
I come from
where I never left
where I always arrive
And you are there
(N.B.: “Kapwa” is Filipino indigenous concept where everyone recognizes others as part of one’s self, so that everything and everyone across all of time is interconnected.)
Art Gallery Features Exploding Heads
By Elle J. Snyder
The world will let you be
until you are useful.
Heads are meat
and ripe fruit
ready to be splayed upon the walls.
I’ve been smearing
my mind on walls
for a long time,
in the hope that someone
could decipher
its meaning.
Red chunks
aren’t always art.
Squelching can be
its own reward.
Derelict,
human junk
could be found
useful.
The Fall of America
after Wangechi Mutu’s The Seated III, 2019
By Z. T. Corley
We survived but could not remain human. When we were barbarians, we warred over blood, language, and earth. God became an excuse and pride was a blade we aimed at our own chests. Before the Fall of Babylon America, we remembered the myth of the flying African. Ruin required (r)evolution. The people could fly again, and pierced the atmosphere like spears, seeking a new homeland, somewhere past the stars we already knew. To the naked eye, we resembled comets, streaks of blue light splattered like paint across a black canvas. We drifted like rogue planets, dense with knowledge, among stars who had been dead for quite some time. When we arrived on the New World, we were strangers to even ourselves. The people here are nothing like the people on Earth. In America, we were always naked1, beast and burden, animals whining for a cage in every iteration of the story. Here, we are people—not animals, not Americans—people. (Forgive us, we were not accustomed to acceptance.) Our story began with abduction—from one continent, across oceans, to another—but when we were in the fields praying for someone else’s God to intervene, we should have been praying for the arrival of something extraterrestrial who, in those awful days before the Fall of America, seemed much more plausible than the divine.
1 This line is a remix of a line from Ama Codjoe’s “Strangering Distinctions”: “I am always naked in America.”
Rubberneck
By Paul Hostovsky
Don’t you love that it’s a thing,
the wretchedness
on the other side
spilling over, puddling
like transmission fluid or
blood, forcing us to slow down
because it’s all so irresistible,
so infectious that we can’t
look and we can’t stop looking
at the beautiful catastrophes—
beautiful for the way they
bring us together over them—
in a world where every last one of us
is stuck here with no idea why,
hoping and praying it’ll all become clear
somewhere up ahead,
the unseen hands of angels
bearing brooms, bearing stretchers,
and wreckers with winches,
not exactly clearing it up
but clearing it away somehow
before we ever get there,
so we never know in this lifetime
what it was we were waiting for
or the reason for our long suffering.
Too Much Credit
By Kelly Washatka
I am so avoidant
Of oblivion
That I have said
“I think I could find beauty
Even in the experience
Of damnation.
I’d take anything
Except the void.”
I imagine myself:
Finding a dragon
In the licking flames
As if my bones were just campfire logs
Looking up at the sky
From a tarpit
As if lounging in a Colorado hot spring
Making lovers
Of snakes and leeches
As if satisfying my yearning skin
Seeing a glimmer
Of shared humanity
In the eye of another damned
As if we were strangers passing in a dance
Instead of
Through a demon’s intestines
And then.
I stand
sleep deprived, wobbling, surrounded
By smelly, idiot travellers
Waiting….waiting….waiting…
For my goddam bag
To come out on the
Goddam baggage carousel.
And I know.
I am full of shit.
Getting Murdered
By Andrew K. Peterson
drop a wooden clothespin
beneath a wide pine tree
& everyone you ever loved
falls off their hinges
gather them in buckets
hold them to your ear of
seashells listening back
for breath between
cracks on the third side
where thought becomes
utterance, utterance
becomes breath
breath becomes
music, music becomes
prayer untouched
obscene, un-invisible
Arrhythmic Envy
By Aubrey “Bee” Case
a count-down clock tick-tock-ticks my life away
with every beat, beat, beat of my sputtering heart.
there are days when the arrhythmic flicker of my blood
mutters, stutters, flutters until i’m beaten into submission.
i hydrate, a silent obedience, drinking up fluid until
it thins and fills my cobwebbed veins with half-life,
tattered fingernails digging into the flesh of my palms,
leaving half-moons where pain once sat in a silent plea.
there is peace under the Moon as my mind wanders, wondering
if she too screams in vain emptiness until the Sun illuminates her
surface—pulverized, dented, beautifully beaten.
perhaps she is jealous of the stars that glow
without assistance, just as my eyes shoot arrows of envy
at the innocent bodies rushing past me, whose minds will not
pulsate empty worries with each footfall, stopping their fun
to breathe every five minutes, cursing medical rejection from joy.
some nights i desperately cling to consciousness,
my heart pumping water-thin liquor and medicine
to my brain, bile biting at my tongue and fog filling up
my mind, blood pressure bottomed out below safety.
there is no enjoyment without consequence. no sport without
the heaving agony of my chest. no nights of laughter without
the hunched-over figure retching.
i sail the ocean of every possibility i’ve lost, opportunities seeping
like slick ichor through my fingers as i watch my future dim with
each odd pulse. i arrive at the palace i’ve built on debt as i borrow
minutes from death, sinking into the floor as doctors deliver
roundabout answers,
a misdiagnosis,
a possible explanation,
a symptom to log.
This Unsaid
By Philip Athans
He said it—the words
Coming out of his mouth
And even
As they left his tongue he knew
No—while the words were still in his head
And he cringed
But not in that figurative sense of social media <cringe>
His face pulled inward as if fleeing the words
His eyes closed—though not all the way—as if to not see the words
Half a breath pulled in, only half of that let out
Heat inside him, under his skin—sharp and searing
That’s how it felt
The words turning him inside out
Him, turning himself inside out
His face and his whole body, his tongue and his voice
Trying
So hard
To turn in the opposite direction from what he wished
Had gone unsaid.
MURDERS DAY
By David Williams
Soon, in minutes, it’ll be Murders Day again
And— where would we be without them?
All the little murders?
And the big ones, too—
War and Genocide
But, also, Soul Murder
The murder of truth, the murder of simple honest sense
N such as that—
?
Start with those… and,
O
Where
Would we
Be?
Without the murder by duty, the self-murder by cop,
the murders for Gods, and honors and insecurities?
O, where could we— ? O, Where— ? —
Would we be—
Except this the exact same day after yesterday
Where the fuck we all are right now—
Counting the minutes until an un-promised tomorrow
Arrives like an almost silent killer on histories nimble toes
Come to finish the story of too many without the sufficient armour?
Into a Desert Place
By Ben Nardolilli
It’s easy to imagine the world after I fill in my lifespan,
It's something the office trained me for by accident,
After the lessons on proceedings and requirements,
They tossed in something else, a freebie,
A class I get to attend every weekday beyond pass and fail,
When the others begin to clutter near my demi-cubicle
And they talk loudly and launch videos off of their phones,
Filling the air with no concern for their distractions
Here, I get an early taste of the urn, ignored now
Just like how I will be ignored then, the only difference?
Someone else will get to drop their crumbs on this seat
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