The March, 2023 30/30 Project Part 2

Welcome to the 30/30 Project, an extraordinary challenge and fundraiser for Tupelo Press, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) literary press. Each month, volunteer poets run the equivalent of a “poetry marathon,” writing 30 poems in 30 days, while the rest of us “sponsor” and encourage them every step of the way.

The volunteer poets for March 2023 are Ashna Ali, Carmella Braniger, Caitlyn Coey, K Dulai, jawno okhiulu, and Alexandria Regilio! Read their full bios here.

If you’d like to volunteer for a 30/30 Project month, please fill out our application here and warm up your pen!

Day 30 / Poem 30

BAD EDUCATION / Ashna Ali

after Alison C. Rollins

I just wanted to be good, and learned that to be good
one has to learn, and learning comes from books.
The way to be good is also to be good according to god,
they said, and to find god one has to read god’s book.
My Nanu loved god’s book. She recited His poetry
to herself five times a day, even late at night, but would not
tell me what it means. I bled suddenly, copiously, in her bed.
Eyes wide, she ran to find my mother. She would not tell me
what it means, the secret sacred death petalling her sheets,
so I thought god might speak to me. I pulled down the book,
sought refuge calligraphy’s curvature until Nanu returned
and knuckled blood into my mouth, too. This is how
I first learned that I am dirty.

I just wanted to be good, and learned that to be good
is to be easy. To be easy is to curl, bend, stretch,
duck, shrink, magic into a plume but never speak.
Never take, but lay myself out on the grass like a picnic
blanket to protect everyone’s knees. Absorb spills,
insulate against the earth. But I am brittle and I broke.
I spoke and I need, and need, and need. I never stop
being hungry, and I cannot help but be loud. It hurts.
This is how I always learn that I am ungrateful.

All I ever do is write about love. Listen to pop songs
like a schoolgirl long after I start teaching schoolgirls
who do not. I’m no crooner, but I see where Swifties
miss the point. To you who are reading me, all you see
is the lovers. They have no names, marching through
my pages like toy soldiers. You don’t understand.
I love them. All of them. Individually. Even in all

of their horror and spite, even with their hands
to my throat, even thin-hearted and seething, I wrap
my arms around them all and hold their stories close.
This is how I learn that I am gluttonous, and bad
at learning.

Ode for Ketanji Brown Jackson / Carmella Braniger

For Elizabeth Grubgeld & Jeanelle Keck

Now, while the Oklahoma skies bleed pink,
And while the Oregon rainforest awaits
my ever-so-soft landing in the valley of giants,
your measured voice floats through the radio;

and to me there comes a quiet kernel of grief.
I hear them grilling you, over and over again.
NPR is broadcasting it live for the nation to know
just how unapologetically vitiate we’ve become.

Held high on the shoulders of generations
who never before had opportunity for justice,
you poise with grace, smile lighting the room,
each eloquent utterance a defense of your record.

How lonely to stand against the hands of oppression,
to be asked to define what it means to be a woman,
and, when you respectfully decline to comment,
to be called dangerous, deft, artful–a threat.

The politicians press on unsatisfied with your answers.
What personal, hidden agendas do you harbor?
How do you really feel about packing the court?
You are too soft, too hard, too close to the truth.

They don’t understand why you won’t weigh in.
You have an opinion, but you don’t want to share it.
Your silence speaks volumes about your integrity
to uphold the law in the face of irreverent disparity.

You will be contentiously confirmed without a doubt,
only after we’ve been made to witness your plight.
Yet, this is only the beginning of your not being persuaded.
Each prescient lone dissent you write will be absolute.

I Have Seen Cities / K Dulai

I have seen cities

Gutter valleys

Scorn

Now I live with

less

Have learned

Each grain

of sand

can nestle

in crooked streets

or soar away

for the sea goddess of many names / jawno okhiulu

we wear white in her honor
we see her
we don’t run
we freeze
we bow
we kneel
we kiss the ground beneath her feet
we listen

to see her is to be blessed
to feel her, i wade in the water
i sink my toes into the mud
i close my eyes.
i say a little prayer
i call out to her

what is the weight of our prayers

the ocean is vast enough

where do i call home

in time home calls to you

how will i know

listen to the ache

may i cry

may i break

wanted to say hello today / Alexandria Regilio

put on a gray coatwalked the few blocks
to the liquor store
like some small town
not a city full of strangers

bought flowers there (like before)
and a lime
so the cashier would think
party not grave
or i love you
not i messed up sorry

in front of your name
i feel the space between our hearts
it’s pinkish
and fluttery
with an unspoken promise
to turn ourselves inside out over bowls and bowls
tiny bowls of olives and almonds
like little girls trading cherry chapstick
without an agenda
except that every moment spent together
would be spent dissecting love

we were so good at talking about love
it was our favorite thing
how it cools
knots up like yarn
turned us both into kittens
all purr and battering paws
then cheetahs
who
mope
around between
hunts

every time
we confessed we forgave
each other’s evils
as if we were perpetrator and victim
each other’s woman in the mirror
shoulder to shoulder in the wine bar
across the table at rose’s tap room
on your blue couch every time we would cry
and offer each other forgiveness

Day 29 / Poem 29

Another School Shooting (March 2023) / Carmella Braniger

For Alexa Royden

We are degenerates.
We are complicit.
What else is there to say

(while the news focuses on the shooter
and the president eats ice cream)

about the little girl
who smeared herself
with a friend’s blood
so the shooter would think she was dead?
About even the smallest
of children learning
how to cower in classrooms?
Would I have the courage
to block my students’ bodies
  with my own?
Could I wrestle the monitor
  off the podium,|
hurl it at a shooter
  before he cuts
my body in half
  with an Armalite 15?
(Will I be impervious to bullets?)
Or could I get the windows open
(they don’t always open)
  To get my students out
before the door
  that never locks
fails to stop
  the shooter’s barge?
These bloody bodies of dead children
is a reasonable
  price to pay
for second amendment
  rights, right?
(Nothing to see here, move along).
And what about the survivors?
The little leaguer
  who in his terror
will throw up
  his birthday cupcake
during the next
  school lockdown?
Or the lead in the school musical
whose nightmares
  will feature
rows of dancing
  machine guns
ricocheting through the theater?
We try to shape these horrors
into something hopeful;
our hate gets in the way.
But hatred only leads
in one direction
and there’s no heroism
in violence.
I turn on the TV
and turn away;
it is too much and never enough.

After Natalie Wee / Caitlin Coey

Always attend to yourself
before anyone else.

Limbs start itching
with post-trauma adrenaline.

All we know of survival
is exit strategy.

The secret is: be
bigger than your alone.

29th Poem for the 30/30 Project at Tupelo Press / K Dulai

and

stone

could

sing

love,

would

have

your

voice

Okhiulu-ism / jawno okhiulu

noun: The art of second guessing one self
A word since sixth grade
Even my teachers knew I doubted my voice
Running over myself to make way for others
I leave no space for self assurance
To wrap her loving arms around my gut
And pump my truth from out my belly
An Okhiulu-ism
“I was gonna say that”
As in I had the thought but thought it wasn’t worthwhile,
wasn’t right, wasn’t for me to say
As in I am only confident saying something
after I know its the right thing to say
As in strong when not wrong
petrified and paralyzed otherwise

Feeling So Well, Part 2 / Alexandria Regilio

I was right before,
you know,
California is for lovers.
The innocent
who sit in the wine bar
and know nothing but interlocking lives
to make babies and discuss colors.
The sweet who have made that last.
Then there is us.
The ones driven by desire
who want dark caves
that stretch into the unknown.
Secret pools in the moonlight
where we grow claws,
where we embody the taboo.
The women are frightening here,
they don’t fit into the story.
They will shred you with their fangs
and put you to bed
for the best sleep of your life.
The men,
oh the men are capable here.
They will hold your head while you cry
and pull your hair
while you cry.
I imagine a heaven that blends all three.
But for now, most of us must choose
which waters to swim.

Day 28 / Poem 28

AMERICAN MIRACLE / Ashna Ali

My first day without pain creeps in quietly, an interloper
reversing the hangover of years in my sleep. I woke up

lungs full, and hungry after a winter carved by angered gods.
The sun rose long and high, my limbs, miraculously, with it.

This is the curse of the American miracle. It prompts
the question of possibility and participation in the same breath.

Are we recipients, or the ones simmering the pot that oozes
them from our skins? Consider whether this haunts you.

The difference is whether the gift of a day without pain
is a crisis of existential consideration. Send you bounding,

as if gallops are your body’s natural gait, across
the borough to drink the streets, its wild faces

Stories tumbling down the stoops. All those braided
fates and open questions, bodies that move in the world,

dancing with time. How I envied and mimicked them.
Drank wine in a feeble patch of sun, chatted about Gwenyth’s

court outfit, the premise of Succession: curvatures of time
carved more gently. Air so rarified the clock

was always curling it at the edges. Every embrace
something other than an ignition to the soreness

I crave, learned to find delicious. What a concept.
Hegemon epistemologies, those powerful ghosts

from whose whispers we create our breath.
Sometimes, in the right weather, we can see it.

Observe its shape like a plume of smoke,
and lose a god. Pain, my buried diamond battery

powering sleep, dance, eating, love-making, my mind.
It’s trickster cousin, some celestial puck, chose this day

to take a honeycomb to my brain, scoop out
its grammar and, a poor scientist, not wait to observe

the results. This guy, They like to get involved.
They took up immediate residence in the swirl

of Their new office. I woke up to Them draped
on the furniture, my real body place back in to me,

and Them holding my gaze, poised, yet nameless,
but ready to make demands.

On Becoming Someone Else / Carmella Braniger

For every woman in academe who goes unheard

When I walk into your office,
tell you I am becoming someone else–
you don’t believe me, shrugging your shoulders.
Then, settling in nicely to your look of apathetic sadness,
you try to argue this isn’t about me.

We don’t turn blue overnight. None of us.
Becoming is always happening.
No need to mark this one off from another.
Besides, every organization has its problems.
This wasn’t misogyny, this wasn’t the world against me.

This was about passing. About forgetting
no one out there quite heard or even listened.
One didn’t become more woman over time.
This wasn’t me standing before him, he said.
Early snowfall outside the window.

***

Come spring, they gang up.
Change is hard. Loud voices agitate.
No one likes to see the open wound of becoming.
Such gaping madness must be contained.
A letter of concern will do the trick.

Signed by every single member.
Dismantling my process of becoming,
Quieting the voices of dissent, my objections
to unethical values and double standards.
I listen when they cry at being passed by.

Still, they remain in power over everyone.
They cry so loud that other women,
even unknowing observers pity their plight,
point their fingers, “it was her–it was her,”
Magnolia blossoms tossed by wind.

***

I tell you again, I try explaining a second time,
when I come to you about the new office,
how I am becoming someone else.
The repeated refrain of my existence
since her father passed not so long ago.

And left before that anyway
And I had to change to survive it all–
not just the death but the way of dying.
I am convinced that this time around
I have made a choice.

Or maybe I haven’t. Or won’t.
Maybe this new becoming is still survival.
And you turn me away,
Say to stop playing the victim.
Summer heat presses through the panes.

***

The next thing I know, fall comes back.
With little earnestness left between us,
You finally make a last and lasting slip.
It’s of no significance to my becoming.
Nevertheless, questioning my advocacy,

you advise me not to speak for others
and insist they stand up for themselves.
I notice your eye twitch.
I pause to collect myself, what I know,
my gaze shifting from your open mouth

to the almost bare branches
outside the window behind you
then back before my final question.
Straightfaced you lie,
the last leaf falling from the tree.

Still, I look to find a reason to be me.

Self-soothing / Caitlin Coey

Sometimes I only watch
the scenes where the villains
are caught, just to activate
my mirror neurons,
remind myself what empowerment
feels like.

Song of the Chiru / K Dulai

I don’t know what the body remembers of war

I want to forget

Our marrow is hot as the grit and heme that stew after battle

it is best we forget. Once the chiru lived unbound

Long before the Tommy’s march, please don’t remind me

I want to forget

Long before the Mongol horseman on his steed

before folds of shahtoosh filled the hollow of our bones

You carried me from Africa, a journey of millennia

Over ice ice cold that my flesh shudders to forget

Before the Tundra tried to engulf us, and the Indus almost drowned us

Let us not forget

The chiru leapt unbound

for every bloodied man we found at our feet

let us not forget

for every horde that stole a womb

for every breach that birthed a tomb

The chiru sang unbound

How we sparked a Black Renaissance… / jawno okhiulu

How we sparked a Black Renaissance in the 21st Century that wiped away racial capitalism and replaced it with realized Black dreams of Black freedom and love and solidarity: a retrospective conjuring

we gathered ourselves
FUBU ass spaces
and we fed ourselves
and we dreamed
we stopped asking for permission
asking for recognition
asking for dignity
asking for publication
asking for admission
we stopped explaining Black punchlines
we stopped being the punchlines
we let em’ know
dem niggas ain’t playin’
we insisted and declared
that we be us and we mattered
and we built many homes
that allowed us to be so
we ran away from our impotence
but not the kind that tickles the balls
we escaped our defanging and declawing
we rewilded and reclaimed nature
and reclaimed our sanity in the process

we partnered with Afropunk, Lost in Riddim, and AfroNation
to put on a global music festival tour that spread our dreams
across the entire (insert phrase for diaspora
without the pestilence of erasure)

we wrote and performed sci-fi
but not the played-out aliens-vs-the-world, us-vs-them-shit
none of the aliens invading and murdering Wakandans shit
we wrote and performed the expansive reality of Black brilliance
without the apartheid,
in partnership with our hometown engineers and comic book whizzes
we let the kids know that we had the tools we needed
to build the world we’d love to be apart of and

that world we danced, we shook, we broke,
we cried all that shit out. we allowed ourselves to feel
real feel,
like every bone, every muscle, every cell,
every memory, every feeling of ours
was exactly where it needed to be
we bore witness and we renewed

we plastered the internet with our roots
we planted the heritage seeds of our resistance
snippets of Nikki and Jimmy,
Malcolm and Martin,
Zora and Octavia,
Aretha and Whitney,
and Frantz,
and we watched the trees start to grow

we planted gardens all over the chocolate cities
we reclaimed our spaces, we birthed life into our worlds
we revived our bookstores, and our hair salons
we dismantled the urban apartheid

we remembered
that Black love
is Black wealth

we took hella notes
we saw our siblings out in Palestine
heard them shouting “no more!”
and so we gathered up our voices and
decried that shit too

we took notes
we brought our people home
from all the war stations
we stopped serving the burning house
that wasn’t serving us
we took hella fucking notes

we sang freedom songs like they were
the only anthems that we knew

the drums cracked gaps in every piece of concrete meant to bury us

for every heavenly soul bound by the belief that they weren’t worthy
we rebuilt the tower of babel and graffitied it with every blessed language there was
and it – and we – were beautiful

and this Renaissance was all of us
for us, by us

Feeling So Well, Part 1 / Alexandria Regilio

It’s true what they say:
California is for lovers.
How can it not be when every
trail a prism, every sunset
an opportunity for forgiveness?

From my perch, I know
that the vole, who glides silently
through cattails, is king of the lake,
of eternity.
That nothing is greater
than the sum of the horsetails,
those breezy ballerinas.
That love
is dizzying and holy.

From my perch on this bench,
I am feeling so well I can barely stand.
and this is not a problem when
yesterday and tomorrow begin
to lose significance.

Day 27 / Poem 27

WAKING UP NEXT TO YOU IN SPRING / Ashna Ali

I wish I were not such a sun worshiper.
It whips my soul around, Jack Russel chasing
its own tail until dizzy with glee. I always said
I am something of an unhinged puppy. What can I do?
Can you blame me? The sun is bathing your face
with promise, so primed for dozens of kisses.
How could I not place my paws on your chest
and show gratitude for this most blessed of gifts?

Wax Phonograph Cylinder / Carmella Braniger

You didn’t exist, I know,
before I thought of you,
swaddled in hospital sheets,
or was it my bridal veil,
or an old copy of lost news.
an unwanted package
out of which, just in time, you unabashedly burst forth.
The long-awaited night howls,
silenced only by my own
amber moans of abandon,
reverberate across the river.
Your lost wax cylinder spins
Just one song at a time.
Those loud sweet grooves
turning down church aisles
until it sounds like the blues
The old, slow, low-down blues.
But they don’t exist, like you,And never did except as virtu.
All I think I have come to know
about your being here at all Is
only half of what we call truth,
the other half sown by you,
who spent your childhood
unknowingly teaching me
there’s more than one way
to cut a groove, to convert
vibrations into sound that–
like the sun, or earth rumbles,
or a sperm whale’s cry–
no one may hear, like the way
your violin sounds when it shivers
in place, nerve pulse of strings–
almost ready to snap.

Spring Sunday / Caitlin Coey

After Ross Gay

A balm of light,
stove top sweet potato biscuits,
flowers in a vase on a big wooden table,
the last of the cake, the Norway
maple, the clover’s bloom,
fig tree, a galaxy
of wildflowers
shimmers.

Great Barrington / K Dulai

Under a cold star

starvation—

brown skin stretched over vines, over

white, roped bones

This is the you

who is not you

Away from potted cityscapes,

in-love in a snowbound forest

exchanges of simple words

with future sophisticated men

taking a break from their ambition

Under open night skies,

behind a llama’s cry

frigid jeans covering hips, covering lips

against fevered kisses—

against another night’s anguished heat

lust wide open on white snow

Love lost in a jungle of it, of snow

In My Mother’s Kitchen / jawno okhiulu

Daddy may call this his house but this is my mother’s kitchen

In my mother’s kitchen
there is always something to eat

In my mother’s kitchen
there is food memory
In my mother’s kitchen we don’t read the recipes
we taste them

A smidgen of salt, some nutmeg and cinnamon
A hefty helping of brown sugar
Sliced ripe peaches, make sure they real sweet!
A whole lotta butter
Get you some flour and a dash of cornstarch
Combine all of that
With some boiled water
Always top it with extra cinnamon and sugar

I sho’ did inherit my sugar love from my mama

In my mother’s kitchen

Unless I came in picking out the meat from the pot
I was always welcome
Even when I came home with paint on my fingernails
And them dangly earrings I love to wear
I am welcome
The whole neighborhood is welcome

In my mother’s kitchen
I learn my grandmother’s kitchen
Talkin’ tradition baked in cobblers of compassion

I was fed
Never had to beg
Prayers were always said
In my mother’s kitchen

First Aid Kit / Alexandria Regilio

For Abby

I wish someone had told me
how much wisdom we hold at
eight. Often, this is the age

of change. Pull the strings of
Little Kiddom through the
holes of the number, top and

bottom, and bring your dreams
through to the other side where
you will soon grow taller than

some parents, and if not taller,
certainly smarter. You’ll want to
keep a lock of horsetail in your

pocket for strength, seed paper
for poems and offerings in your
notebook and chamomile in a vial

for a hint of psychic spf. Consider
these items your eyes and ears,
your first aid kit for summers between

school years when structures melt
like orangesicles and boredom is
anything but your best friend. When

in doubt, turn toward the plants.
Sit quiet with them. They’ll remind you
of what you already know.

Day 26 / Poem 26

A SMALL HISTORY OF PLEASURE / Ashna Ali

after Richie Hoffman

The movie ache of a young thing, waiting. When the coil
of the phone cord could muscle between rooms, suffer
the squeeze of sweaty palms, recounting surges of hope
before a dance. Eyes wandering toward the oblivious
during class, the indulgence of sighing over
what I’ll never have. Some of us had no choice
but to nurse the unrequited. One does what one can
with what one has. Which is to say that I was well-versed,
can still remember how to yearn as the practice of joy.

I walk twenty minutes from the subway past the male
springtime ritual of choral hollering, purchase nicotine,
keep working on my phone right until the door. Order a glass
wine alone, catch up on the bartender’s week. As they enter,
I hug my friends, ask all the requisite questions, feel the jolt.
Anachronism of cord coil in my fingers. Oh. Oh dear.
Friend, I am anticipating the scent of your hair, soap,
deodorant. I conjure its cut across the beer and bodies
the moment you enter. I inhale. Drop my phone
in a pocket, zip it closed. Smile.

The next morning I make eggs. I know you must be running,
imagine your trek under the sun. Sip coffee, remember
the squeeze on my shoulder. Perhaps it was stolen.
Perhaps just warm, which you are, always. In the evening,
I drop my jaw to curl my lashes with mascara, induce
slow-motion replay of your mouth saying my name.
Your satisfied shimmy across the 2am floor, the songs
you’ll choose that send me back to that young thing
belting to the radio, delighted to feel, wanting nothing back.

The Türk to His Coffee: Stillwater, Late 90s / Carmella Braniger

For Miriam and Siyavus

For you who keep my eyes wide open
in this foreign land of brilliant, wide skies
as I stay awake and watch for her to come
and join me over a cup of you–black coffee.

I wait for her with you in hand, my mug
full to the brim, steam clearing my head.
Your aroma fills my lungs with energy
I will need to court her properly tonight.

Oh deepest dark coffee from silky beans,
you know the secrets buried in my core.
My longing for the homeland, my mother,
the son I never knew I would have.

Even so, dark brew, you see me through
the night, the golden wave of desire,
uncertainty pulling me toward her legs,
her thighs, the purse strings of her heart.

When I wear the guise of a poet I’m okay / Caitlin Coey

After Lucy Grealy

but when I try to wear the guise of a woman, it’s a disaster.(1)

And I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for – but I’m so lonely.(2)

I feel like there’s a hole inside of me that at times
Seems to burn.(3)

When I have anxiety these days, it’s all about being alone.

(1) Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
(2) Saoirse Ronan as Jo in Little Women
(3) Sandra Bullock as Sally Owens in Practical Magic

San Jose Fools / K Dulai

Those first years in California

we learned to live with the absence of rain

We landed in a river city in the middle of a drought, not far from a crackling Guadalupe River

that once flowed heavy with salmon. For generations, the site of celebration

I sought comfort in driving the highways, past dry brush and Ebay, Apple, JDSU HQs

the right distraction from not feeling at home

We had moved here like fools

thinking the valleys still had gold to give

only to discover all that glittered were ranges mounds of hairy, yellow earth in the distance

Girl, Find Your Phone / jawno okhiulu

I wanted to tell you that your poetry tore me a new one
Filled holes I didn’t even know I had
Milked, gagged, and spanked me numb
I wanted to let you know
That your words sent me on a furry flame course
Through all the haters and the traumatized lenses
Beloved, you helped me burn my inner demons

Damn, I wanted to tell you to your beautiful face
Sitting pretty above your beautiful beating heart
Bearing audacious self love and divinity, my god
how much your excavation dug up out of me

But dammit all, i didn’t get your email address or nothing

Just your Instagram that you can’t access
Because there are two steps to your verification

You well secured muffucka you I hope you feel so safe and secure
Even without your phone, I hope you’re finding peace without your phone
I hope you know you’re still out here impressing the girls
Even without your phone but selfishly more than anything
I hope you find your phone!

a note to men / Alexandria Regilio

don’t be afraid of dreaming in keys
that unlock doors to blue-black winter nights
where you will lose your breath
at the beauty of a woman who has lost track of time
wants to know how you drank your coffee at twenty-five
versus how you drink it now
and what you want to plant in spring
watermelon or zucchini

where you will have permission to stop feeling so fucking old
where you will have permission to die and die again
until your veins run the darkness as freedom
from the desperate pursuit of joy, that little minx you think hides in plain sight at the beach and yet you can’t find her

until you know the taste of your own blood
until you master your own heartbeat, shed your skin and are willing to learn the language of desire in her eyes so you can take without asking,

until then

dream

Day 25 / Poem 25

These Stories We Tell Before the Loom / Carmella Braniger

after Rita Dove and Elizabeth Bishop

It is strange learning to let go
of something you’ve harbored—
the ultimate movement
away from the center of self.
We move slowly, in concentric circles,
without asking or saying why—
only to find ourselves as close to
or far away from where we started
as we need to be. Patterns vary—
watch the way, great-grandmother
crochets afghans for hours
on end with no end in sight,
they keep bringing more yarn
and pills, and she continues on,
no longer in any more pain;
We all find ourselves before the loom
weaving and unweaving our stories,
hoping someone might be listening:
love, loss, heartache, betrayal, glistening
gold birch tree leaves in the dead of winter,
light shimmering down through branches
casting shadows onto the sheen of snow—
or the summers spent on our stomaches
crying for hours, sometimes drifting
off to sleep in the late afternoon sun,
occasionally arousing for public display—
almost entirely broken save a few postures
of integrity moving us through our days
still, we swirl back in, and then, out again—
the story changes each time we tell it;
she stretches out an arm
from beneath the awning—
a daring bold gesture
for a Midwest prairie girl—
to turn oceans of grass into salt,
another cool pillow
on which to rest her tired head,
inlets of respite,
a quiet third-floor loft,
dozens of white down comforters,
out of sight, not in view—
never fully giving up the mystery of it.
And what about this story, daughter?
The one where I gave you a mirror
to look at your own vagina,
mistaken bit of nomenclature,
what a stranger cannot touch.
You were only seven,
and you called it your baby hole—
I silently tried to tell you about
the power
the pleasures
the pain
the deep deep love—
oh, what love comes
from such holiness
and you, in your beauty
and innocence and simplicity
asking “how can it be so ugly?”
Oh, Bishop, and those horrible breasts
and every woman who’s been repulsed
by or attracted to our burdens—
Oh, Dove, and the pink within us all—
these voices rush in on me as I stand
in my bedroom holding the mirror,
watching your eyes take it all in, I say,
no baby, you will learn
in time just how beautiful
it can be.
You smile, gold rings already starting
to spin out from your glorious new center,
as I watch you take off down a new path
so much joy in my heart, it aches wide open.

Self-gaslighting/ Caitlin Coey

I have a low tolerance

for bullshit

but a high rate of clamping

my mouth closed over

my own feelings

second guessing

third guessing

compassion sometimes,

consideration and also

ask me how I feel some days

and I’ll look at your face

for the answer

Leaving Salome / K Dulai

In Rue d’Aerschot, somewhere along its flashing streets

a lonely man slips in and out, between the legs of a dark-haired woman perched behind glass

just minutes before.

On the bed

between the press press prowl of her body,

she does not contemplate love.

She knows the night is almost over,

a warm drink of Turkish coffee and a precious memory of the hum and drizzle

of her grandmother’s restaurant in Ephesus, not long away.

She no longer bothers with longing for morning or counts time backwards to a bus stop in Izmir where she abandoned the ghost of Salome.

Her body has journeyed west from

Istanbul, in a plane that stutters like her clients as they

push through their Hail Marys

on their flights back

to their wives.

She thinks of the emptiness in the sky from the arch of an airplane window,

speeding against the hint of night—

stupid, cranking love, that damned machine, nowhere in sight.

Prayer / jawno okhiulu

I grew up praying with my family before we ever left the house
And singing hymns on Sunday mornings to keep the bad spirits out
See my family knew the world for what is was

Knew that out there was a lot of loss and the remedy was a lot of love
I love the loveful lovelessness of my upbringing
Under urban apartheid, where the caged birds keep singing
We stared statistics in the face and said come try it
We knew a Black becoming beyond destruction was possible
And we ran there, we stumbled, we fought,
But we kept on

One day, I pray, there will be come between us
No more fear and anger to negotiate with all the love

Rewind / Alexandria Regilio

“Does this remind you of dad?”
she yelled at me, across the dance floor.
I only nodded
and we both sang out every lyric, too loud
and not loud enough.
It was my wedding and she was my sister
and the song was Call Me Al.
She had a different girlfriend then,
I had a different heart.
Almost twelve years later,
I wish I had held her in that moment, instead of making
sure whatever fool told the DJ to play the song, thinking it would be funny,
knew that I knew
every single word from that beautiful track,
played on a cassette tape in a beat-up blue Toyota pickup truck
over and over again.
I was too busy being brainwashed
by the bride,
to hold her, really hold her
and ask her,
“Does it remind you of him, too?”
I’d put my whole life on rewind
to go back to the moment and trade the white dress for a t-shirt and jeans,
the dance floor for the ground above our dad’s grave,
my sister’s hand in mine,
like two bodyguards
who are both named Betty.

Day 24 / Poem 24

ODE TO MY GIRLIES / Ashna Ali

Liver paté, red wine, chicken overnight brined, we are golden, I insist,
when you tell me how much we have aged. Remember when we’d drown
our last dollars in the dive bar, battered shoes slick with stick. We’d unspool
as we do now, shot glasses and salt shakers staging the most perilous
of our recent plays. The man who chased you across three states.
The window through which you threw out your mother’s memory.
The groom gone mysteriously missing, the cursed pregnancy.
How many rounds of hope horribly thwarted. Thickened with thought,
we got grown, still garrulous and gorging ourselves on our griefs,
egging each other on to be brave again, and again. My girls, how you get me.
How we make trials light for our banshee braying in the back,
spiraling, but stacked around one another’s blocks
in getaway cars, armed with wisecracks, prepped for war.

Memoir of Desire: An Address to the Lover / Carmella Braniger

Reach for me only at your own risk.
At the beginning, on the high branch.
(Your moans are shuddering horses,
Not quite delight, but almost danger).
Sweetfire dilemma of body and senses.
Sappho sings the blues to lure time.
Erotic missiles tempered in honey.
Greedy to please, you learn to weep;
replete to live, you learn to die.
The heart is an ancient descant lyre,
strings pulled taught enough to snap.
(So much hunger for what is missing).
Crying above the pain; I forgive you.
Lack loosens limbs, limbs loosen heart.
Pleasure begins, on soft wings departs.
Perceive only sweet rapture’s undulations,
soaring, holy delectations of the body.
No chords of desire as a cold fire ignites
the hot tongues of lovers; even Sappho
sings the pain of longing in latent beds.
What free-range- roping western cowboy
wastes precious time reaching for me
with so much left to conquer?
Deserted, I leave you to your burning.
Quiet the buzz so you may hear the coming
of wild horses across the vast prairies,
and remember the wake of their shudders.

A Mood Soon to Be Forgotten / Caitlin Coey

After W.S Merwin

Dragonflies were

made of light

as common as

sunlight, crosshatched

backward and forward.

Crowd / K Dulai

The lords of play
operate swiftly
beneath
rock and muscle.
Your life is
one
striation
In a horde
of sinew and bone.

Tango / jawno okhiulu

Let me tell you about our dance with the fruits
This one setting sun adorned by the tangy flavors of the Amazon

Let me tell you about the dented knife that unveiled each of their secrets
one by one, Chris twisted and pulled their bodies apart as juice poured onto
the wooden slab in his lap.

I could use words like succulent, tangy, juicy, creamy, intoxicating…

But I’ll leave the flavors up to imagination, to be honest it wasn’t all about the flavors
No, It was the tango of it all, the sinful reflex that turned the sweet fruit spicy
Our laughter filled the gaps that the soft flesh left to be desired

We did not come here in search of lovers but we found them
In the afterglow, in São Paulo,

sharing fruit together under the fading light

Holy Montezuma Cypress / Alexandria Regilio

Your spine is a root,
a holy montezuma cypress
burning in the distance–signaling
the start of a new cosmic year.
We wait for your opening move,
for you to turn our petals
into thicker skin, our breath
into a breeze that will carry us
to safety when life feels a little off–
or like a tsunami.
Since childhood, we’ve watched
you map the way with fingerprints,
love hard when others couldn’t.
All this when humans have made
truth the most complicated thing.
Aries, you remind us truth is
best distilled
down to something so pure
it evaporates like water wisdom on the tongue.

Day 23 / Poem 23

TARAWEEH / Ashna Ali

The day before Ramadan, I eat Korean fried chicken
at Peter’s. We watch raptors fall out of the New Delhi sky
in the hundreds, their carnivorous souls as unwelcome
as the Muslim brothers who save them, heal them, or grant
honorable burials. That morning, the Yemeni brothers
threw an Afrobeat party at the bodega in preparation.
They asked me my plans as I ordered an egg and cheese
with ham. We integrated, I shrug. He smiles broadly,
offers me a Yemeni husband with whom to fast.

A cluster of dead kites, vultures, and storks
arranged delicately on the rooftop before going
in the ground. Contemplation of finitude to lend
meaning to so many abundances. A Jewish Italian
therapist from Staten Island once told me that most of our
problems are blessings bumping into each other.
They are still driving brothers and sisters out across
unknown borders, burning their homes. Side-eye us
at the airport. When I was twelve, the men at the mosque
put me too far back in my body to come before God.
I smoke on the stoop as the sun rises, imagine
my mother ten hours ahead choosing the silkiest
of shawls to cover her hair, silently doing ablutions.

The next day, I will eat as I always have,
have a cocktail at a poetry reading where
I will listen to ourselves milking our own macabre
for amorous declarations. While my mother
recites on her janamaz, eyes closed, who will ogle
her shape? How many? Will God hear their prayer?
Or is it hers that will be silenced, the signal
jammed by prurience? Do I ask her if it is
too late for my American character to shed
everything, cleanse my bowels,
purify my soul? Do I have one?

Conversation Not About Race / Carmella Braniger

For C. Beck

We sit outside at night, in your buick,
planning which set of plants
to put in your window next,
and watch your neighbor’s tv reflecting
in his Jeep that sits out front
where his cats come and go.
You say you haven’t seen him
with Fox News on lately.
We both chuckle as a dark-haired
damsel in distress flashes across
the big-screen broadcasting
all-day-every-day this white man’s
picture window full of shutter.
It’s not always about race, you say,
which might be true.
The neighborhoods here are mixed.
I change the subject\
to the surreal play from last evening,
and you ask for a summary,
and I don’t say race, I say,
(the reflection wobbles like jello)
it’s about how who you are affects
how you see, except we both know,
when the child steps off the stage–
out of the story–and asks
the white audience to switch places
with the black cast onstage,
it’s not supposed to be
about how I feel or see
(cubes of gelatin tumbling down).
He notices my step to the side.
Exchanging glances across the dash,
we are off talking hypermasculinity,
and over-feminized culture,
not about how we are built, necessarily,
but about how they build us.
How they inscribe onto us all
expectations for how to be.
I say, remember the cactus
the owner of Taqueria La Perlita
gave you last December
on that day you asked about her
winter harvest of them
all stacked right inside the portico
where we come to pick up
our tacos al pastor?
The prickly pear cutting
came with instructions for drying
on its side in the shade
before planting in the bright sun.
You look in the rearview mirror
at how you took your time
picking out the one you liked best.
I poke you in the arm to bring you back.
Remember what she taught you,
“no seas un pinchazo.”
We chuckle again as the engine purrs,
your long dark fingers against
my white thigh against
the moonless night.

Things we say to each other / Caitlin Coey

I’ve got my arms wrapped
around you.

You’re doing so well,
keep going.

My days are so much richer
with you in them.

Forget half full or half
empty, you see
the whole glass.

Legacy / K Dulai

They appear before us, the divine and destructive, mocking
our reprimands—the swirling echo of sands on a gut-drenched beach

In the shudders of our howls our daughters wield
swords, swinging their wrists

Every jagged word they have swallowed
billowing into corrugated triumphs

What does it mean to be made from stardust? / jawno okhiulu

For all the star-children curious about where they come from:

A star dies of burnout, billions of years pass,
a planet is born from dust and frost.
Divine order Divine chaos Divine happening.

Divinely we happened,
children of star death and time.
The cosmos is our birthplace.
Everything we are is outer space.

Water is the tears we cry,
The carrier of our lessons,
The source of our life.
Am I a fool to fall for water?
In love with the unconcerned fervor of it all
Paradise in fluidity
The deep blues
Like Langston Hughes
Is calling out to me.
What is out there for me?

Something’s in the water
A deep, quiet, rocking sea
A boat untested
A course of unknown possibility

I hope
After we are all gone
That the universe remembers how cool it is
That it was able to create
Such ludicrous creatures
And absolute anarchy
Out of thin space

I hope the universe takes notes.

goodbye, alcatraz / Alexandria Regilio

the coast guard
is perfectly timed.
she flies over the bay bridge
at the exact moment i should be parking.
i am late.

the motorcyclist in the left lane
knows it. she shakes her head at me
inside her helmet and roars past
toward the coca cola sign.
it is my lateness she resents,
not the fact that my blinker has been on for a mile.

i exit fremont street
and admit that i secretly want to miss this boat
to scatter her dad’s and uncle’s ashes.
maybe i lost track of time on purpose
and am a bad person.

halfway down the embarcadero,
it hits me why:
i am no longer the earthquake support beam
i used to be.
how will i comfort her
when my heart is no longer rock?

on the water,
i cry behind giant black sunglasses.
suddenly, everything i have is black.

black pants,
black blazer,
black shoes,
black journal,
black tourmaline,
brought, of course, for grounding,
something i always need in air
or on water.

grief, she says, is learning who you’ll be in a world
without them.

i stand in the bow
and accept myself as weak,
as someone who cries at funerals,
as someone who is brought to her knees
by how beautiful
the ashes look circling the water’s surface.

i cry for two men who raised my best friend,
i cry for two little girls who raised each other.

then
it happens.
i cry for the strong one inside of me
who has finally surrendered,
wonder what life will be like now
without her.

goodbye, mitch.
goodbye, mike.
goodbye, alcatraz.

Day 22 / Poem 22

EXODUS / Ashna Ali

I am the kind who leaves. Walking out scrapes closer
to the raw material. Digs under the false parallel
between repetition and comfort. The body knows.
The body knows better. The body puppeteers.
All the things we have backward. Consider the mind
that drives the nervous system that drives a body
that spends its days making itself dizzy, hurting,
bursting into flammable paralysis. We read that
as a problem. But the body knows. The body knows
better. The body knows that the mind is a poor
listener, and that too many minds in a room
breeds dangerous blindness. You tell me I’m sick.
I tell you: listen. Listen with me. These ancestral
hieroglyphs we call limbs, their magic. We can
start there. We can amass what we have always
known, thank it for its efforts, and walk away.

Variation on Bishop’s “Little Exercise” / Carmella Braniger

after Elizabeth Bishop

Think of our daughter, swinging recklessly
in the balances, like a monkey swinging
from branch to branch. Listen to her screams.

Think how she would play now, violin strings
vibrating indifferently to the bridge of mourning,
joy-filled melodies floating down from the sky,

to which a sparrow might suddenly turn his beak,
maddening our neighbors with his glistening black
unwanted shine, and choke down a worm.

Think of the power lines and evening dusk,
birds snaked in circles across the skyline,
the quiet hum like a possum in deep sleep.

They are singing now, the power lines,
lowly hanging among stars in every sky,
longing to be free, the birds to be gathered.

Then our daughter spins out again in a series
of large, graceful arches across the lawn,
each one another little bit of something.

Think of her walking along the top of a tightrope
tuned to a violin or the undertone of a comment;
think of her as unstoppable, barely bothered.

Aha Moment / Caitlin Coey

Per my last email
We need to redesign your goals
for OOO during TO,
so notify me if you’re AL
hasn’t added the deliverables
to the EO ASAP at EOB COB
POS POC QT time-tracking
the all-staff at the strategic planning
meeting to the values and the mission
Empower you to leverage your best practice, core competency your
key takeaway, jumping the
shark 110 percent, reinvent
mission critical
synergy,
boil the ocean!

The Fruitpicker / K Dulai

A peril in an orchard

coiling and distressed—

a soiled thumbnail,

a spoiled fruit

Then, a fall from a paradise

no rib can recreate

Ten Sweet Things Worth Saving / jawno okhiulu

1
Bischoff cookies and you
dip them in coffee and
they melt into delicacy

2
All the little ones

Playing laughing
crying tinkering
dreaming thinking
learning breathing

3
Honeysuckles and the
tradition of pulling them
from their vines in the
summer, like bees in
need of sweet nectar

4
Record Players, Vinyls
and the machines that press
‘em into existence

5
the strangers that find the whim
or the courage to fling a
compliment your way and
brighten up your day

6
the poets

7
some type of frozen sugar ice
for the sweltering summer heat
cause that right there ain’t
junk food, it’s medicine

8
love and dreams and
dreams and love

9
Laughter

10
The one song you have
On repeat in your head
As joys Hail Mary

Sad Girls Party the Hardest / Alexandria Regilio

It’s all fun and games for the Sad Girls. They have nothing left to lose. Everything has already been lost. Innocence. Safety. Purity. Now it’s high time to destroy; finish what they fucking started. To sleep with vultures, you must become remains. “Look at us now!” the Sad Girls say, hanging from the roof of complete annihilation, splitting a pill because it’s cheaper, then splitting another. Wooden Dr. Scholl’s sandal dangling from her toe; her hand dancing under the water of a bathtub filled with goldfish. There is nothing more boring than a freshly showered boy. Dark alleys taste delicious. A messy car makes Sad Girls salivate. Lying is like a lemon on a sunny day. At the first sign of real love, Sad Girls say, “Nooooo, you can’t be serious. This can’t be serious. I will fuck this up for you.” Certain boys need people to know they’ve been with a Sad Girl; it makes them seem less scrubbed clean by their mamas, less homework at the dining room table, done under the watchful eye of a parent who cared. So they announce it. One writes a poem about it and reads it to the poetry class he has with Sad Girl. Another says something crude about her pussy into the mic at a show his band plays. Sad Girl doesn’t blink an eye. Doesn’t blush. Sad Girl doesn’t care. She quit feeling a long time ago, remember?

She tells another one this. He says, “I know, that’s why I like you.” It stabs her in the gut. The realization that everyone knows. The jig is up. She’s in the crosshairs. Terrified, she begins to cry and doesn’t stop for three days. The bathtub overflows and the goldfish swim to safety.

There stands the Little Girl. Ready to use her sadness as strength.