an ekphrastic poem after Kennedy Intihar's cover artwork
Click, click, click The buttons creak under my fingers, groaning as their old bones shudder.
Suspenseful music seems to quietly creep into the room, waiting, dreading, longing for the screams of the ringing of the phone.
Tick, tock, tick The clock drones on, he taunts and teases, almost trying to tell me I’ll be waiting for an eternity. His cruel lecture gets louder and louder as the otherwise quiet room holds its breath, like a predatory lion stalking, waiting to pounce.
Tick, tock, ti-
The clock freezes during mid sentence, the phone wire takes one last breath and grows silent as I fidget with it. My fingers freeze, the phone buttons snapping back to their regular positions. The quiet screams, the silence claws at the air.
Ring, ring ring The only sound, a life line appearing in a dark cave, Shaking hands grasp the life line, holding the phone up to my ear.
The life line withers away, as a scratchy static is the only sound that makes it’s way through the line.
Solving for X Sophie Zhu
Begin by seasoning the wound with neglect. Position yourself into history; say, your family’s. Warp the lineage until this world is a fabric of knots. Design a topography of vacancy—how the dark unclasps the air to hold your breath. To give it. Or your hands only an inheritance of angles. Inspect this wound with if. Look at its mouth as it undulates like a pulse with then. Fill in its blanks: with dream, with stains, with diffidence. Conduct the research you require. There is a grief to every opening; there is a rapture to every closing. Take the fist, or the open fields, how they quiver like ancestry. Question your wound, its limbs hanging over the banks of your veins, rippling and prehistoric. Pry open its obedience. Scatter the survival of your bones to brine. You could fill the wound’s vowels with touch. Little swallows that could shake the atrocity out of spit. Your red belly. Your unread waters. Tie them shut, tide them yourself.
Inventory: Blur Sophie Zhu
after Christina Im I enter the horizon. In waves. The way home branding my blood empty. I borrow
a silence to keep. I know nothing about this body except how to wear it. I unmake
the bodiless, whole. I shift the holes by years. This town, in its reply, falling
in. Falling so quick the dawn breaks on my shoulders. So let’s begin.
I cursive my tongue around & a round pill of wantbeads at my mouth. I litter
the roads with unpicked light. The distance between a girl & her sound
should not be kept. Keep the body close but its shame closer. There is no trusting
of light in these hands. This town fevering smoke
onto my skin: proof I am the exit wound of hunger. I am
the hunger. Call this echo. Call this to a voicemail of silence.
Who mothered this emptiness but me. I know the figures
in the dark by heartbeat & figures of speech by heart.
Like my mother, I pay this town in the exchange rate of mother & language,
child & knife. There is a shame to anything & a necessary to any hurt
& impossibility to this town & a noise to every sound. If you look
hard enough. I try on each history for size. I stitch my veins.
Up with blades. What home to hone as my own. I tell me this story. At a distance. I take up space in yellow. Time in white. I don’t hold
me. In lights only made to dilute a dark out of its truth. In a body, nothing more
than a way to mark the horizon. In a body born an exit wound.
Space Sophie Zhu
after K Ming Chang
I architect a batch of horizons in the space between smother and mother.1 These days, my tongue reaches past the question mark, the current season.2I measure success in years per silence. Or dead things per hour.3 Most mornings, my dreams will close like an eye, leave ash and sympathy.4 Close enough to the body to be its shadow.5 Memory is the past tense of a mouth is the tension of a wound.6 I do not know what makes a poem a poem.7 This could be an elegy, an array of sight lines, or a skin I fragment to fit between the lines.8 A thinning air. At night, I language my mother a -wake; I stitched her mother’s years a -go. Blackbirds ripple through our sighs like laughter.10 If only we knew to drink through our wounds.11 I want to peel a bruise from its color.12 I want to constellate what is lost and climb into those periods of a sentence.13 I unbutton my hands bone by bone14; I hold my mother, then her breath.15 Nightly, I pass a quiet between us like a ration.16 The stillness tilts17; our bellies so full they form zeros, as we swallow ourselves empty.18
Footnotes— 1 My mother’s first name means smoke. My mother is a fact separated from her grief. The only difference between a wound and a mouth is their shapes. 2 And to answer your question: what I love most about this body is where it began. 3 I want to stop fisting the negative with the positive. I want to stop equating negative and positive space. I want to say skin instead of kin, to know the difference between slaughter and laughter. 4 I am leaving sympathy; I am a eulogy of success; I am promising to quiet. By which I mean: I am so worthy of use. 5 Close enough to the surface to drown. Close enough to my existence, by which I mean thousand little murders apart, to open it. 6 Mother, the past is the only tense that is always on time. Now let it enter. 7 Srikanth Reddy writes, "War is a failure of form.” This poem, for instance. This language, for instance. You know, bullets refine you by letting light through your body by lessening you. You know, each of these lines could be another border my mother must cross to finally reach emptiness. 8 I know you want narrative. Here is. 10 Girl writes her immigrant mother a verse, girl writes her immigrant mother as averse, girl mistakes the word price for prize. 11 I speak through elegy. This one. 12 There is a violet of violent. There is a perimeter to every hurt but no circumference. There is a frontier to every abuse but no limit. A bruise held long enough is a stain, a mosaic of light. 13 They said, reach for the stars. Shoot for them. The boy did—bullets dotting the sky a perforation line to tear apart on. 14 Look: I am open-able, unlocked. Synonyms for open: vacant, ajar, bare, good. Synonyms for able: capable, apt, effective, good, good. I am so, so good.
Tenuto Joseph Vendetti
You forget that I am a bird with mock wings doomed to die of the next frost & therefore adept at gutting a minute. At carving a home for myself inside its blinking redness & living it fully. I bleed & build & m/a/n/y-f/a/c/e my way into the yawning future, ready for the transformation. Ready for my nows to become something radically different than my yesterdays. I burned the photo albums. My check bounced on the golden sarcophagus. All I have now is the present, the tense that eats itself alive. I reached for the hands of the clock & bent them into pens, into kitchen knives, into shovels. I dig & shimmer & b/l/u/e-n/o/t/e until my home smells less like cold paint. My ribs blister from the seconds, an erosion of time-bent currents, & my hands are small, chapped things, but they can hold. Look at all the day they can harvest. Look at all the living they have borne witness to.
Here is the ritual: I breathe, twice, & open.
Birds of Prey & Paradise Joseph Vendetti
we children // panting in an eldritch spring, our childhoods // floating like dead skin // in the breeze. our days husked from us // like corn // like spent nicknames // like the flaky growing pains of // snakes. we children // guzzling faucet water // a blood stomach ache // bloated with lead. & // we children // ancient hybrids; metal // on our tongues & cut-white skeletons // of coral // lapping at our heels, at our // dirty nails & skinned knees. // the bedpost // etched with cipher // & our arms lined with burns // of sunflower oil. we children // swollen with afternoons of // scabbed fingers & ukulele strings. // megafauna reincarnating & reincarnating & reincarnating // in the cavities of our chests. we children // snapped collar bones & open wounds. the gravel clawing at the soles // of our feet. the gravel always hungry // for any offering of flesh. we children // no crying on this side of the fence // no matter what side // of the fence // we were on. // counting the months between your birthday // & mine: how much space // can i be trusted // to fill. // we children // our small wilting hearts // the brief trenches of sorrow // the ache of running // with the monsters. // there was once a wicked grin // & teeth fell like rain // until only bare gums were left // to tender the world. blue nerves like tangled jump rope. amen. // we children // wearing our sweat like a blanket of // summer, our fingers finding // all the cracks in the gutted // earth. jumping at the praise // of the unsmiling. shout raw // into the dark. we children // & the rigor mortis of old secrets. // we children. once there was a fire // & we never looked away. once there was an invisible cry // & all the coral // spawned at once. once we drove cars & left home // & realized // there weren’t any pictures where we looked // like ourselves; but // we never forgot. // we children-- // if we must no longer be children, let us know // at least this: // we were forged // by the depths // of these smells, this summer, our blood // ready to laugh // in the burning.
1 - the beasts that prowled our imaginations // the terrain etched with // an ocean’s footprint. vast & waiting // a world unafraid // of the dark. 2 - the plants we crushed // beneath our feet. we turned their sinews into playthings. we killed // whole gardens // saw beauty as something // begging // to bleed.
Fun in the Party Taichi Shimizu
The party goes on As friends having good time Everything darkened Until he comes into it
Funny moment comes in at night Shines a lot by the light Moment of the joy Special night to enjoy Making laughs at night
Lamp swings on the side Leaves on the wave Smiles on their mind Time to save our energy