Guest Editor: Karissa Lang
May 7
A Ubiquitous Man by Jake Kendall
May 8
My Naming by Eve Black
3 Poems by Paul Brookes
May 9
The One-Eyed Elephant Trainer by Ivy Ngeow
May 10
3 Poems by Shriram Sivaramakrishnan
Genesis of a Writer: A Memoir by Deborah Hansen
Continue reading “Identity: Crisis, Creation, Multiplicity, Singularity”
i was taught to be pink—
the blushing cheek of a virtuous girl,
or the pearl of her unspoiled innocence.
i was taught to be the color of the rose
lovingly selected for the virgin Continue reading “2 Poems by Lisa L. Weber”
fat ass hot cock ass
thunder thighs
bionic booty
pretty eyes thick thighs
basket ball butt
5th grade child bearing hips
linebacker in a strapless dress
getting chunky
grown woman’s body now
don’t be prancing around the men keep that butt from jiggling in a thin
dress 4 years old perverse booty jiggle
you better hope you can fit into it
buffalo butt
you too big
itty bitty titty committee
you are too skinny
sloppy fat
fat fingers
self-hating well
you ain’t missing no meals I see
don’t make sense to be that heavy
need to push back from the table
eating all natural still fat as hell
talk trash deny food
low key slut shamed
offering lipo make you
feel bad for feeling bad
you can live off your fat don’t need
to eat big arms like your grandmother
don’t be making up a plate of food
of the food she fucking cooked
there are men in this house
man
I thought I imagined the slick stuff
Grand our mothers were
poets and didn’t know it
Soliloquy For The Loner Spectator / Ultimo espectador del mundo is a translation by Cesar Torres from the book “Conciertos Imaginarios” by Camilo T.
[ Brief splendor. The world beheld.
Things falling apart as this man enters]
Spectator: I sit here to watch; one man leaned his soul close to me,
I am here, straw man, bum, getting closer to, perception,
I’m trembling on my seat, trembling seat drifting on high tide,
stroked by the mare, or maybe by a crazy-one; me, slender
who could not stand nor defend his place, see the stars,
see the falling lights of the sky, madly,
witness those words that never had been spoken,
sit here, without relief from the coldest loneliness, you’re here to watch. Continue reading “Soliloquy For The Loner Spectator translated by Cesar Torres”
i.
when pushed to choose, i always fall towards abstraction;
the f/64s would not have liked me very much.
ii.
if you ask for a song,
i will give you song lyrics
written backwards in watercolors.
The City of Dreadful Night is my response to the 1874 poem of the same name by James Thomson which dealt with depression, alienation, suicide and the urban landscape. With these images, I sought to respond to the spaces or penumbra between Thomson’s words; to capture the poem’s feeling of dread, to transmute this to my own setting here in Trinidad and Tobago; to suggest his dread mirrors something of what local marginal communities (LGBTQ, disabled) experience. The range of images in the book includes asemic writing, visuals generated by performing random functions on text, illustrations and photographs. I wanted the multiplicity of media – deployed in response to a source text – to suggest the multiplicity of identity/diversity, all while retaining the dread of Thomson’s poem.
Continue reading “The City of Dreadful Night by Andre Bagoo”
My earliest memory of Grandpa Melvin was when he fought Ronald McDonald out near the McDonald’s Playplace. It was my fifth birthday, and family and friends watched through the glass as the two men squared off.
Here is a photograph I never took:
I am holding a woman in my arms
as if it were for the last time.
Her half smile holds a secret.
In the background, the Bay Bridge
is a bodybuilder—outstretched and posing.
