by Atia Sattar but it’s less a returnmore a re-calling because when I was bornthe Azaan was whispered in my earand still echoes within because I tuned out Muslim at eighteento the boom of hijacked airplanescolliding with steel, untrainedin mindful listening, untrained in self-love because “I was raised Muslim”wasn’t cutting it everlike I could just…
Category: Poetry
seethe
Lesley Younge The rage shows up as four glasses of wine a night,a brief and disastrous affair, fifty unshakeable pounds,or a fender bender while texting furiously, injury heaped upon the insult of living life within a cage of our own making.Big girls don’t cry (except on the toilet) and they don’t say ‘fuck this’ while…
i don’t know how to be poz
AJ Romriell so i’ll consider the socket on the wall instead,the socket & the fork in my hand, consider jabbing the metal inside—my head—his head—can i call it a mercy killing if everyone else makes it out alive? he made himself a ghosta week after he killed me, after he’d sworn he’d break me in…
I am Trying to Paint my Daughter
Lindsay Adkins with watercolors.Nurse Dawn asks if I paintand no, I do not but you have designated 2 pm as arts and crafts time, Dawn,so yes, I am saying yesand I am trying to paintmy daughter from memory, since you do not allow phones up hereand I can’t look at the picture of her I…
I Call on Memory
Daniella Toosie-Watson Just when I almost have youin my mind’s eye, you are a crane in the water at the park behind my grandmother’s apartment where I was going to tell you, I love you, in my new blue dress I bought because I thought you’d like it. Once—that good night—you touched me with your…
Am I Woman?
—An argument in the Twitter Comments Rickey Laurentiis But “I make no sense,” or made, according to the Man.But his typo made it Jade. I jack no menses. I sack no genius.I gat no business, according the man, in thisGender masquerade, accordingingly, I’m in.I lack no decency. I wade no tact. I spareNo day these…
Rape Poem
Rickey Laurentiis The Night was Specific.I was almost Raped. Once. It was DarkRoom Only. It wasn’t Murder. It wasInterruption. I was on the Crying room Floor.Make poem. O was I so Owed this, too, this tense of a Girlhood scorned?Rape Poem. Everything slowed. Yes.Make poem. Everything Took up withA brief Light, then went Down Black…
feed
Adam Ahmed In Gaza Palestinian crowds clamor for flour drone footage shows the scenegrowing violent as aid trucks arrive from this angle the starved resemble ants swarming around a stray crumb At the briefing the press secretary smiles between somber expressions as he fields questions about the crisis says terrible tragedy and right to defend…
in place of a beginning
Ali Murat Gali UNDEVELOP ME!ask the mountains for my name,sit as if a boulder defining patience; what keeps on falling? what stretches on as if smoke?these houses as the bones of a valleythis plane that falls off its bosom;arrival, is a sedimenting. blood could not yet dry and the river rests brown,thirst of the majesty,…
postcolonial flirtation
Ali Murat Gali I lean into my destruction;this olive treeis a monsterfrom a time that would not begin. I had prayed to serve, to service you, a rusting silver platter of names I heard given to me; I sought to charm, to appease you, an excuse for my interruption. a pirate ship arrived here before…