Among Schoolchildren, Early May, at the British Museum / Joanna Grant
You hear them before you see them. The soaring white dome of the central courtyard amplifying their babel of tongues—French, English, Spanish, German, Portuguese. Children in uniform, rumpled dress shirts and crooked school ties, piercings studding noses, bellies, and ears, great swoops of black and brown and red and blonde hair falling into eyes. Haggard schoolteachers herd the sullen flocks from bathroom to gift shop to café, with ever more forced stops at the Rosetta Stone, the Gebelein Man, and the cabinets of curiosities, with their ranks of shells, of Greek vases, of taxidermied birds. The children only with eyes for their phones and each other, arms and legs intertwined as they slouch on benches and up against the walls. A skinny blond boy shares his bag of sweets with his dark-haired girl, chocolate drop after chocolate drop. Someday, decades from now, that boy, now a man who’s been advised to give up sugar for his cardiovascular health, will bring his dark-haired grandchildren here to give them some culture, and he will remember the day he first tasted art. The sharp taste of beauty.
Kalpa / Judit Hollos
a tetraptych
last migrant train
a molting horseshoe crab
sheds its shell
rite of passage
budding twigs covered
with a halo of rime
counting foxfires
all those summers slipping
through my fingers
amphitheatre ruins
bygone life’s arch in
an empty snail shell
I want Paul B. Preciado to spit in my mouth / Zach Hauptman
apply 40.5 mg of androgel
topical
daily
this is you
this is your toxicity
it is unusually high
for someone of your sex
would you like to fix it
would you like to fix
tits
the only thing keeping me good
healthy, wise and gentle
softnesses are where femininity grows
acquiescence
bowing like movement of long curls
on my pubis
the hair on my face bristles neatly
trimmed like a bonsai
a human planted
in the soil of socialbody
clipped and shaped, flayed delicately
and twisted into place
growing bent and warped by the gardener’s sheers
this is a soul left to unfold
in a bottle
I’m living in Dysphoria Mundi
anti-pathological discomfort
this is your toxicity level
apply 40.5mg of androgel
topical
daily
cis feminist holds up a map of my body
it is unusually high for someone of your sex
toxicity
misogyny is (of course) inherent to manhood
but femininity exists as its own blessed thing
saint judith of the
butlerian jihad
is this why i’m bad
i’ve always been bad
this tomboy girlboy boigurldyke
swimming upstream
from femininity
measuring its goodness against
my badness my love of badness
my love of boyness in my girlness
when i tore down the feminity
of me
broke the stage
sewed new costumes
built new sets
was the poison already in me
dear judith
of blessed memory
i saw a man say
(i’m sorry judith . i thought you were dead)
the key / Brice Maiurro
he door has opened for me
i see before me the world as it is
& the world as it is is many things
a tassel-eared squirrel on an early spring day
where above the moving river
still hovers a sheet of snow & ice
& in the warm vanilla air signals
the return of the sun to the ponderosa bark
below the sun my wife my child & i
dwarfed by the trees that lunge
towards the sky but never forget
also grasp so deeply firmly to the earth
my child says wow & we say yeah
& we say wow & my child says yeah
all of the words become our breath offered
to the astonishing life that continues
in spite of the endless violence of humans
despite the blood split over books
books that are meant to show us the way up
up to where the trees are reaching
i am here beneath the tree beside the river
in the gentle woods with my beloveds
on a timeless day on a planet where water
springs forth from the mountains
some say the only way into heaven
is through a messiah through repentance
through consistent sundays spent inside
respectfully i disagree–
i have a found a key to the back gate of heaven
& i keep it snugly in the pocket over my heart
My Grandmother Teaches Me Weather / Kimberly O’Connor
The devil’s beating his wife, she’d declare
when rain fell on a sunny day
in the way it does sometimes spit
from a pretty sky, or light evades
its gray affliction for a moment.
I was a child and imagined
the rusty devil, horned, fist raised
to his aproned wife, doubled
over from his blows. Even as a child
I thought it an odd thing to say
to a child. Wives in my family weren’t
beaten–we can note that with pride–
yet the threat of violence lurked
in the way the women hurried
to ready the rooms as sunset
hit. I could feel the air harden
when the men burst in from work.
A woman’s job, I sensed, was to fix
what might be wrong before he
noticed it—he being father,
husband, uncle, brother, son–
so the weather might stay sunny.
Carrying Ties with Angel / Michael Schad
Work, it always comes back to it.
The slow methodical work,
the heart wrenching, loving
work which makes you
joyfully sad; it ruins your clothes
and swells your hands.
Today is a day of work
with Angel, Herman, Hosea, Marco.
Our task, unload a truck of 6x6x16s
down and around a house so my uncle
can build a retaining wall for these people
who want a green yard in the back of their yard
in Oyster Bay. We begin early in the day and each one
of us put a tie on our shoulders and down and around
to the backyard, again and again for about 8 hours
and then we drive home, exhausted.
Work, it wash over you, like a wave
pull you down, hold you until
you become water and the weight
of the day feels like the only way.
Recipe for Making a Human Poem / Kashiana Singh
Ingredients:
- 33 joints (preferably feet, full of secrets and stories)
- A touch of Adam & Eve’s fevered passion
- Fingers tracing an ocean’s map, vast and deep
- A handful of forests, wet with crackling sounds
- A pinch of dance, spiraling in circles
- A dash of sin, fragrant with the scent of desire
- A splash of paradise, sticky and dark
- Angels, twisted in a pageant of forgotten glory
- 1 voodoo doll, fragile and shattered
- 33 parts, scattered like lost whispers
- A mother’s hands, cupped beneath her chin
- Fractured rhymes of exile and yearning
Instructions:
- Prepare the Feet: Start with 33 joints, full of untold stories. Let them feel the weight of the world as you trace them with your fingers.
- Mix in the Touch: Add Adam & Eve’s fevered passion, intense and primal, soaking into the bones.
- Map the Ocean: Trace an ocean’s map with your fingers, feeling the vastness and the crackling forest beneath.
- Spiral and Dance: Spin your poem in spirals, allowing the dance of desire to grow, slowly pulling the poem toward its dark, sticky heart.
- Add the Darkness: Pour in paradise turned dark, charged with temptation and sin.
- Twist the Angels: Twist angels into a pageant of forgotten glory, fading like a memory.
- Shatter the Doll: Shatter the voodoo doll, scattering 33 pieces across the page, each a fractured story.
- Mother’s Hands: Let your mother’s cupped hands guide the tale, with characters exiled in fractured rhymes.
- Bake: Let the poem simmer, feeling the warmth rise in its longing and memory.
- Serve: Serve it as a tale of loss, desire, and the human heart—always searching, always incomplete
When One Door Closes / Elizabeth Wolf
Sad Girl took the post off the board.
They followed the gas station directions
down old route 4, which at times seemed
more like a creek rut than a road. Brody,
a city boy at heart, kept saying
the scraggly old forest looked like
a good place to hide the bodies. Finally they found
a half-mounted sign by a mailbox slanting south.
It was indeed dogs for days. There were
about fifty on site: dogs boarding for
training, breeding show dogs, puppies
for sale. Also a herd of sheep, for shearing
and mutton; a wall with hutches of bunnies
for meat or pets; a goat that had been
abandoned next door; and a muster of peacocks
strutting and pecking around an old coop.
The farmhouse, shed, barn, and outbuildings
were sturdy yet all in need of attention.
The place was owned by Brownlee, who had retired
a few years ago from a career as a college librarian.
She shared it with Mary, who had been a housewife raising
five children until her husband found a younger woman
and a way to have her committed. Mary spent two years
on the wards and still crept around the edges of life,
most comfortable training dogs, who adored her
and followed her every command. They were looking
for live-in help, offering room and board and decent pay
for someone they could trust to stay while they traveled
the dog show circuit. They hadn’t been looking for a couple
but allowed that there was plenty of fixing-up
a handyman could do.
Sad Girl wanted this more
than she had ever wanted anything in her life.
