Nasiba Babale

When We Were in Primary School

We were made to pay a fine
When we spoke our mother tongue
They called it vernacular
And speaking it within the walls of school was a sin
It was high treason
It was so grievous we were made to feel the pain
In the sadness that engulfed us when we parted with our Naira notes
So, when we reached the school's gate
We leaped out of the skin of our native tongue
And wore that of English
But English was slippery and didn’t fit our skins well
And because our mother tongue was strong
It came at the English language
Held it by the neck and engraved Its marks on it
And so they laughed at us when we spoke,
At the traces of vernacular that echoed behind our English
So we tried our best, we bit our tongue
Whenever we felt our accent trying to come to its surface
We learned to be ashamed of our own language
To deny it, to speak it less
The better we spoke English, the higher our intelligence
In their eyes we were as smart as the
Distance we put between us and our own language
We kneaded English into ourselves
But our tongues were too coarse to make a dough
So we became crumbs instead
Too coarse for the English language
And too spongy for our mother tongue.

Nasiba Babale is a medical laboratory scientist and the Secretary of Poetic Wednesdays Initiative. She served as the moderator for Glass door Initiative's Poetically Written Prose contest from 2019 to 2021 and was the second runner up for the 2018 edition of the same contest. She was a Co-organizer of TEDxAminuKanoWay in 2019. She was one of the judges of the 2020 edition of the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize organized by Poets in Nigeria, and a fellow of Ebedi International Writers Residency 2022.

Jacqueline Hughes Simon

FACSIMILE OF A BOLD HAND

                          How to Steal a Map

Centuries before Gutenberg
taught Shöffer, the Moors learned
papermaking
from Chinese slaves.
And so it began. Information
pursued trade routes
on the slope of technology.

There are many ways to steal
                        a leaf from a book. I prefer.
                        this way. It is the most elegant.

Nuremberg, free Imperial City,
the seat of the Holy Roman Empire.
Anton Koberger endeavored
to print the history of the world.

It can’t be vellum (though that is
                                                                                                              lovely) as it is too strong
                                                                                      for this technique. You would need
                                                                                      a razor blade, another story.

In this chronicle you will
see experience clustered
in lead & wood,
paper & ink.

            These pages are paper. Fabricated
                                                                                  from pieces of petticoat.
                                                                                    At times a ruffle was found.

The margins are broad,
mimicking those needed
for the scribe’s hand to rest.
Homage to the past.
The shock of the old.
A facsimile of a bold hand.

You’ve arrived to your task
                                                                                    with a length of strong thread
                                                                                    in your mouth. It has soaked
                                                                                    overnight, rested in water, until you
                                                                                    enter the library. With your tongue
                                                                                         move the thread between your cheek
                                                                                    and your back teeth.

Woodcuts of towns and people
employed over and over,
were meant to suggest,
not depict, cities & men.
The order of the cosmos,
the world was composed,
in black letters.

Take a drink of water. Ask kindly
                                                                                   for the books. Call numbers:
                                                                                    ff IG4 . N8K6 . 1493sq   in German
                                                                                                                                 or
                                                    ff IG4 . N8K6 . 1493s    in Latin.

This informational madness
devised for commerce:
indulgences demanded
—many & quickly—
a task for machines.
Leaving behind
the scribal hand.

When the books are put
                                                                                         in front of you, find the page.
                                                                                    It’s near the middle. Move
                                                                                    the thread to the top
                                                                                    of your tongue, cover your mouth
                                                                                         and cough. There, in your hand,
                                                                                         is the wet thread.

Men were paid
and men were poisoned.
Nimble-fingered boys snapped
tailings of lead
from the type of a language
they couldn’t read.

Your hand rests in your lap,
manipulate the thread
                                                                                    toward your thumb
                                                                                    & index finger. Work fast
                                                                                    it shouldn’t dry. Lay it
                                                                                         in the book’s gutter, firmly
                                                                                         pull down. Close. Wait.

The curve of the world
folds in on itself leaving
flatness and errors in books.
So that the reader,
upon finding them,
might feel superior.

The water in the thread dissolves
                                                                                    the paper, making a cut.
                                                                                    As you open the book, sweep
                                                                                    your hand down the page depositing
                                                                                    the loose leaf in your lap. You’ve had
                                                                                    the foresight to wear
                                                                                                             voluminous clothes.
                                                                                         It’s almost yours.

Jacqueline Hughes Simon received her Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Saint Mary’s College of California. She is a volunteer and board member of an environmental education non-profit, where she works with and trains the donkeys. Which, in her opinion, constitutes the most interesting thing about her.

Garth Pavell

My Friend Is

a transgender poet
that won’t publicize
sex in a 3rd person bio.

Nor will they submit
to being subjugated
by a woman’s prize.

These are their words,
carved out of alphabet
musings over lit mags

while sitting in a café
with summer pouring
people into thin shade.

Just go for it, get it
while you can, I say
sexualizing their grace.

They shake their head
and say don’t get me
started; take for example

how a poetry contest
can never be judged
without being prone

to tiny injustices like anti-
war songs inadvertently
glorifying the art of death.

We raise our dark rosé
wine and silently toast
what remains unwritten.

Garth Pavell is a New York writer and musician. His poems can be found in the recent issues of Hobart, Unbroken Journal, Wilderness House Literary Review, and elsewhere. You can find him on Instagram @garth_and_the_unwieldys.

Grecia Espinoza

What’s Eating My Sister

When we were girls our mother 
sewed knots inside our throats 
to muffle our cries. 
We learned to communicate 
in low and pained croaks 
and now neither of us knows how to ask 
for what we want
so we settle for what we have.
 
our childhood was spent hoping 
our mother would leave her room 
but she never did. When i cried
My sister would rub my back 
and brush my hair with her small hands 
gently combing the loneliness out of it
 
When she cried, she did so softly 
and always while I slept.
Her long hair draping off the bed- 
tangled with years of untreated loneliness
She’d lay there shaking, her small body 
moved by the ocean of sorrow 
that trapped and banged inside of her.
 
When the sadness of nighttime fell away
we’d fling pots at one another 
and say ugly things that we picked 
from our mother’s mouth.
We were storing our rage inside each other 
hoping someday we’d have the courage to use it 
When I try to calculate the magnitude 
of my sister’s suffering, I multiply it by my own
 
Each time I see her she’s smaller. 
And there it is, our pain, 
still multiplying in her hair uncontrollably, 
like cancer cells.

Grecia Espinoza is a writer and poet based out of Brooklyn. She received a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Central Florida, but has been writing poetry since before she knew she could study it. Her poems are inspired by moments of intense individual experience that illuminate a new way of life. In her writing, she hopes to expand the personal "I" of the individual to include the universal, so that you may see your life reflected in her poems. Her work has appeared here and in The Rising Phoenix Press. Grecia's body of work can be found on her website: greciaespinoza.com

Brandon Thein An Vu

Traffic Light

Sitting at the intersection
I wait
Watching cars pass by like petals in the wind.
Ahead is Suisun city
Where the marina is crowded by
A melting pot of familiarity.
To my right is bố’s hometown
Ho Chi Minh City
Where the water flows into independence
And pride.
I wait.
What do you do when your tongue
Loses the same language
That brought you and your family together?
I feel a tender grasp on my shoulder
Bạn có sao không
Mom asks.
It takes a while to process
I’m okay me
I wait
Remembering how bố shook his head
Again after I asked him to
Repeat himself in English
—then
I feel the same tender grasp
On my shoulder and it’s
mẹ pointing at the green light

Brandon Thein An Vu is a Vietnamese-American who lives in the Bay Area. He is an educator who focuses on empowering students through language.

Julia Kooi Talen

& Let’s

a found poem from “Opened Up” by Amanda Petrusich

let’s paint over our wounds         & then
       tell me
 
about your        nature,      home
honeywhite & fingerpicked
 
patterns pinning vessels deep in the tender
catskill mountains where we’re
 
all in. & there, let’s slowly unfold
in the creek next to the mossy bluestone
 
sorting the sorrow of spring into
wooden drawers & dive bars & coffee shops.
 
& in this place, where we’re the birds,
let’s watch the water move sun
 
a craggy & delicate multitone ribbon,
an abstraction of hours in the trunks of saplings.
 
& as books half read let’s
just want a place
 
grow flowers barefoot,
speak in shapes, sound filled
 
the reservoir with our big morning light,
soft hands clearview.
 
& with your blue enamel coffee cup
books lined up, your
 
notebook self-reckoning
blueberry eyes
 
let’s accumulate in every corner
of this home, let’s
 
light a penultimate          offer
candles more liquid,             and listen

to the bugs          opened up
       into our holy               birdsong
 
into always
     a pair of.

Julia Kooi Talen is a queer poet and essayist living in the midwest with their cat, Otis. Find more of her work at juliakooitalen.com.

c m taylor

Witness

With the warm, weird spring rain
I misted & fogged the smoking porch

at the first bar I drank at during my first
Buffalo fall; I planned to leave earlier,

from this city, this party. The gorgeous woman
whose name should have been mine

keeps hugging me like a sister. The rain
spritzes the hairs at her temple till they curl, &

she says if before I remember. She throws
knowing looks. I wasn’t there to know, but I’ve heard

so much it’s become like I’m collecting your survivors
around me, once again the lone woman-body

pouring stories of some violent boy’s destruction
down its pretty, chokable throat. She calls me she

& this is one of the occasions I’m not bothered.
I can swallow stories of you, what you’d hate

or the way you could choreograph a room
to separate people who shouldn’t cross paths,

conspiracy implied by the sound of your name
in the mouth of every person I meet

who loved & never found a way to lose you
when you left. Your wickedness not incompatible

with how big you are missed, so I can love you
without complication because I haven’t felt

the path of your wreckage through me, only
the moments you alight on my shoulder

to witness. We’d have been brothers,
you & I, tearing down hearts.

c m taylor is a poet, mover, & musician, kind of from many places but currently residing in buffalo, new york with their spouse and three cats. their debut poetry chapbook Yes & Yes &, a celebration of queer love & sex, is forthcoming from Knight's Library. they're on twitter @carma_t.

Ewa Gerald Onyebuchi

The music of birds in exile

With a line from Romeo Oriogun's poem: Cotonou

mama is not dead.
she sits under the plum tree beside my window.
she's a bird with prominent feathers. she's  a girl of fifteen
she's just like me—broken and beautiful
her eyes are armed with letters from the past:
darts of war and hunger splitting the bowel of cities in halves
 
tonight, mama calls me by name: nkonye.
the river in her voice drowns the ache in my chest. her face wears
the iridescence of the moon. in her eyes a thousand shooting stars 
spring with the weight of what they know—deep yearnings yolked in baskets of time.
 
on her hand, i trace planets of fresh warmth,
memories pulsating with every intake of breath—the first time
i said mama with the guttural inclination of a child
from her body i drank the first sun and morphed into a garden of promises.
 
mama's voice is a guitar pouring a sea of broken tones and semi-tones
the earth under our feet is a mouth sucking the secrets of the night
the wind drums the tale of bodies meshed in love and loss.
 
tonight, a trickle becomes a deluge
tonight, my body learns the music of birds in exile
 
she takes me through a door in her eyes and
we amble down a valley of bones—

a long line of women who gave up silence
to sing their loved ones to the afterlife
women who carried the world and their dreams on the bald field of their palms
 
tonight, my mother teaches me how to carry my dreams—
in jars of wet clay  she  mends the rift on my
tongue with her tears of supine pronouns and the verb-to-be
& weaves a new language from the butterflies ligning her teeth.
A girl is a mirror to many worlds, she says. a fine mix of blood and water and fire. 
 
mama breathes into me and I become dough—
a pile of soft white thing she cracks open with her fingers.
i watch her knead me into several shapes—versions of myself tucked in a box
versions i revel in. she runs me through the furnace in her mouth
and i do not melt. she says a girl must be both silk and rock to
survive the manliness of the sun. it was dawn, and  i rode into the sky with a smile.

Ewa Gerald Onyebuchi is an Igbo storyteller from Nigeria. He writes short stories and poems with a deep interest in queerness, sexuality as it relates to the body and feminism. He has been shortlisted and long listed for a couple of awards and contests, including but not limited to the Spring 2021 Starlight Award in Poetry, received an honorable mention in the L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future Contest for the fourth quarter, 2022, a finalist in the 2022 NSSF righting our story contest, Ibua bold call in 2020 and 2022, the 2022 Spectrum Poetry Prize in 2022, 2022 Kendeka Prize in African Literature, the AUB international, poetry prize, 2022, the 2023 Abubakar Gimba Prize for creative nonfiction. Some of his works have been published or are forthcoming in the fantasy and science fiction magazine, efiko magazine, uncanny, the temz review, afritondo, brittle paper, and elsewhere.

Sy

My river runs just south of all beautiful things,

A line which traces tips
of fingers, of mountains,
 
of fingers of mountains,
touchless as the air
 
between our bodies
of water, the wind which blows
 
treedrops across our arms
while we lie
 
apart from each other
inventing beautiful things to believe in.

Sy is a queer non-binary Scottish poet. They write through the haze of cat-/child-induced sleep deprivation to make sense of gender, relationships, and ADHD. Their work has been published in Popshot Quarterly, Perhappened, and Capsule Stories, among others. Find them at sybrand.ink and on Twitter @TartanLlama.

Lily Andrews

Speech

After Victoria Chang

After the abortion,
I peed positive on a stick.
 
The doctor’s movie screen projected
my story without beginning—
She was ship sunk
to the bottom of my belly.
 
Water-torn, still.
 
The Catholics say, Call for a second chance.
Anti-abortion media advertises pill reversal.
I looked into all of it.

Someone named Mary left a voicemail on my phone.
Hi, Lily, When you’re ready to heal…
She hosted a discussion group in the evening.
 
Was I a disciple? Of discipline, or form?
Choice, or beauty?
 
Evening didn’t work.

Lily Andrews is a creative writer from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is an MFA in Writing candidate at Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has been published in Rio Grande Review. She lives in NYC and volunteers as a nonfiction editor at Variant Lit.

Kate Arden

What you owe

in this one I walk in to the gas station & you sigh.                        I buy aloe vera &
pretzels & I feed you  the quarters for the washing machine.           in the basket on my hip
is the sleeping baby you gave me.                       in this one she’s awake.              in this
one we walk out hand in hand. in this one      you’re in the passenger side of the bed,
so I get in the glove box again. in this one you shake your head      when I enter the store.
tap the. “we reserve the right….” sign. I buy a coffee with my last           dryer sheet &
pour it in the engine.         in this one—I swear—it happened in a field. you pulled up
my skirt and put it in the basket.    we both know I was wearing shorts.        in this
one my therapist says you were saying things always get better   in the spring? & it’s
August.                  the sun is setting again   so I stir you into my slushy. we both
know it doesn’t matter what I drink this time.      wake up please. the baby’s crying.
        I say this is like one of those sitcoms where they do an alternate timeline.
      you say it’s half like a sitcom & I say it is pretty funny isn’t it?                 & you
say you’ll have to pay for that.            I say pay for it how &                 you ask why I didn’t
dye my hair in this one.      & I say this is my cum shot, get off.                     & you say I
don’t work here.  I ask if you ever dream about me   & you say          wouldn’t you
like to know.                     but I do know.   in this one I write my last poem about you & I
mean it    again.   there’s nothing we both know, is there? I put the baby in the washing
                 machine & ask you to watch her. she strikes me in the naval        & pulls me by
our umbilical.                   you say I’ve got to get back to work.                        I say tell her
                 it’s petrol in there. you say        you tell her. my tumbleguts tightening the
distance.          it’s a mother’s job. in this one at least. you ask why                  I write
you like a romcom.                     always the com, with you.          & I ask why you raped
me.

Kate Arden is an M.F.A. candidate at the University of Kentucky. She received a B.A. in English and Political Science from the University of North Carolina. Her work has appeared in Cellar Door Magazine.

Grant Chemidlin

Last-Ditch

The dull, rhythmic beeps of machinery. I wake 
in white light to a man standing over me. 

You’ve made it, he says. 

On my chest—the hot sting of wet stitches. 
What happened? I ask.

A last-ditch effort, the man says.
We took out your heart & replaced it
with a horse’s. 

What?

Wait, no, no, sorry, I am mistaken, you got 
the hawk’s.

 

The tiny pulsing in my chest says it all.

Poor guy donated his body to science, his tree 
got cut. 

Why? 

For beef, of course.

No. Why did you give me a hawk heart? 

The man’s face wilts, then:
Yes, it’s extreme but it’s the only thing 
we could think of, at this point.

Where is my heart? I say, The human one.

You mean the one you weren't 
really using.

Yes. I mean, no. 

Look out the window, he says. Tell me
what you see.

I lift my head from the bed: I see 
sorrow. I see every blade of grass 
on fire. The willow tree—
weeping, no screaming, at the top of its lungs.

Grant Chemidlin is a queer poet and currently, an MFA candidate at Antioch University-Los Angeles. Recent work has been published or forthcoming in Quarterly West, Iron Horse Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and River Heron Review, among others.

Byron Xu

he hesitates on the peak of mt moriah

i am no kierkegaard
                  knight of faith. i am no abraham
 
exordia, beautiful murderous exegesis
i have fucked and kneeled in share
 
                  of agnostic days.
 
but dear god—
 
                                    a thousand miles away
an expanding space
 
what do we talk about
what is there to do, the furniture ours
 
and not ours? i am begging
                  begging in this infinitesimal piety
 
faith in her return, that the three days and nights
                                    slaking devotion
                  and knife to the throat of what could be mine
could have been mine
                  it would not have been better—
 
i believe it would not
 
isaac
                  a blind heat raw seized
in the miracle of an idolater please
 
i must believe 
i cannot
it would not have been better

Byron Xu is an Chinese-American writer studying at the University of Texas at Austin. His works are published or forthcoming in The Florida Review, The Hunger, Lammergeier, Indicia, and elsewhere.

J. Freeborn

The only dog I ever loved was Lois Lane

This is the dream: I kiss the foothill
of your hip and feel you come against
my jaw. Waking, you are married;
have a baby with someone else. Pity
 
 
is absent in nature, survival either
borne in the bone or not born at all.
 
Make of me an animal defenseless
save its racing heart and spectacle
 
 
of sacrifice. The Times inform us
resilience is not dwelling on unchanging
pasts, uncontrollable futures, but living
in the now. Resilience sounds like
 
 
crisis. My teeth miss yours.
How time contracts to simple hours
 
for anchorites walled up and burning
bright amid god’s boundless prism.                 
 
 
Don’t seek the easy lesson;
know only that the house was built
from memory’s faulty ebb.

J. Freeborn is a social worker and the anthology books managing editor at The Poetry Society of New York. They have recent work in Dream Pop, Occulum, Dear Poetry Journal, Voicemail Poems, and elsewhere.