Today is very long, with or without a map, in its attempt at meaning. I didn’t dress up as a heroine or stop at Hotel Eden. Nor did I disguise myself as a cyclist, or hail a taxi to the revolution. Instead I buried myself like an object of adoration. (Befuddlement sharpens intelligence.) There must be some way, I thought, to hear the canaries of reality. Then, a reader walked by, and I went with him, simple as that, with a zoom from the shaded area. 

Hoy es un día larguísimo, con o sin mapa, en la intención del sentido. No me vestí de heroína ni visité el Hotel Edén. Tampoco me disfracé de ciclista ni fui a la revolución en taxi. En cambio, me dediqué a enterrarme como a un objeto adorable. (Desconcertada, la inteligencia aumenta.) Alguna forma ha de haber, pensé, de escuchar los canarios de la realidad. Después, pasó un lector a mi lado, y me fui con él, como si tal cosa, a un zoom de la zona oscura. 


*

What a morning, this sadness! What a quiet cataclysm, this aspiration for a soul! Where are the living? No doubt, no worries, they weren’t sitting in the shadow of the laden journey and distinguished dust. I checked, but they weren’t there. Not even as they are not, extra clusters on the branches of time or nests too bare to notice in the room of the world. It’s me, I thought, the only intellectual object left. Nothing happened after that, except a light groan that blew and looked on.

Qué mañana esta tristeza! Qué cataclismo insonoro esta ambición de ser alma! ¿Dónde estarán los vivos? Sin duda y sin pena, no estaban en la sombra que hacían el distinguido polvo y el viaje con todo a cuestas. Me fijé bien y no estaban. Ni siquiera tal cual no son, racimos superfluos en las ramas del tiempo o nidos demasiado escuetos para notarse en la habitación del mundo. Soy yo, pensé, el único objeto intelectual que queda. Nada más pasó, salvo un leve quejido que sopló y veía.


*

Nervous, because I want but don’t, and on top of that, my weary heart. Taking three Aspirin won’t fix anything, won’t help me just be. It’s been so long since I’ve crossed that invisible lip between this place and the worldless. Like a caress that comes too late, writing is strung out and obsolete: correspondence to stake a place that at some point, maybe, will bear my name. Look in my empty hands. Tomorrow everything will start over: the disordered soul, the scandalous body stitched to lewd syllables, lunatic passions.   

Nerviosa porque quiero pero no quiero, y además el corazón cansado. Tomar tres aspirinas no resuelve nada, no ayuda a simplemente ser. Hace tiempo que cruzo un labio invisible, entre aquí y ningún mundo. Como caricia que habrá llegado tarde, escribir es muy largo y obsoleto: una correspondencia para fijar un lugar que alguna vez, tal vez, tendrá mi nombre. Fíjense en mis manos vacías. Mañana empezará todo de nuevo, el desorden del alma, el escándalo del cuerpo cosido a sílabas profanas, a pasiones lunáticas.    


*

A journey to where I’m awaited, at the very bottom of myself, by something I own. It’s not all that impossible. I only need to cling to my white box, the dead little house of language. Commencing, for once, moon expeditions around my room. Would a siege like that be any use? Chattels for walking in my own flesh and being reconnected? So many things can squeeze into the shadow: artist costumes, serial killers, the sheer duration of where. I feel more destitute than ever but anyway, this sky of skies where I play in silence, frail as I am, the lute of my music. 

Un viaje a allí donde me espera, al fondo de mí misma, algo que poseo. No parece imposible. Debo insistir tan sólo en el casillero blanco, la pequeña casa muerta del lenguaje. Empezar, de una vez, la expedición de lunas alrededor de mi cuarto. ¿Asedio que me sea pródigo? ¿Enseres para andar carnal y ser reunida? Tantas cosas caben en la sombra: trajes de artista, asesinos seriales, la duración del adónde. Me siento más desprovista que nunca y aun así, este cielo de cielos donde resueno en silencio, cuan frágil soy, laúd de música mía.


*

It’s been many days, twenty years, that I’ve travelled north, and now I have insomnia that drags on from the day to the night of departure. Can some airplane ship me to consciousness? To this beast on the other side, locked in its four legs, between dozing institutions and the heart of the nation? Needles in the wind. Poetics split by fear. Abstract moon that asks for more more more.  

Hace muchos días, veinte años,  que viajo en dirección al norte y ahora tengo insomnio entre el día de partir y la noche de partir. ¿Qué avión podría llevarme a la conciencia? ¿A esta fiera del otro lado, encerrada a cuatro patas, entre instituciones que cansan y el corazón nacional? Agujas en el viento. Poética partida por el miedo. Abstracta luna que pide más y más y más. 


*

Argentine poet and critic María Negroni is the author of twelve books of poetry, two novels and five collections of essays in Spanish. Works in English include Mouth of Hell, Dark Museum and The Annunciation (all translated by Michelle Gil-Montero, published by Action Books).

Michelle Gil-Montero is a poet, publisher and translator of contemporary avant-garde Latin American writing. She is the translator of Poetry After the Invention of America: Don’t Light the Flower by Andrés Ajens; Mouth of Hell, The Tango Lyrics, and The Annunciation by María Negroni; and This Blue Novel by Mexican poet Valerie Mejer Caso. She is the author of Attached Houses (Brooklyn Arts Press). She is the publisher of the translation press Eulalia Books.

Art by Leif Holmstrand, from “Holy Helpers.”

ALLOWANCE

Mommy Mommy
Can I have a gun
to shoot down the butchers
of childhood
I need my own cash
to buy splooge grenades
& lethal fireworks
for rape holidays
Mommy
Why do you keep paying me
bullets to the skull

*

THE ACID KWEEN

I’ve gone rancid
In the boodlyjank
At meat o’clock
I expire
My skin drags magnetic south
My heart ulcers
are full of poodles
My scabbed scalp
is a screamer
My eyes buckle
in the plop shop
The whack of ages
& I’m being chummed
into a meat cloud
Stank oceans roil
Hell
is a ripe daughter

*

A MAGYK TONIC FOR THE NERVES

So I drink the blood of virgins
Who doesn’t
That’s patriarchy for you Who am I
to claim I’m on the outside
So I’m a bottom-feeder So what
Bottom’s up!
only means one thing
when there’s a boot on your neck

*

UNEXPECTED GUEST

I take my cream hard
I like my bloods stiff
with deathswoon
But that one
who just rolled up is
An annihilation
I’m eye-fucking
a marvel of a bucking
young Prince
at the height of
his clit-shaking powers



*

A TASTE OF VICTORY

Nom Nom Her swiney thumper
on a platter
tickles my brittle flank
My rank veins flash freak sugars
My skin pinks My clit perks
How now Magik Mirror

*

Lara Glenum is the author of The Hounds of No, Maximum Gaga and Pop Corpse! These poems are from SW, a restaging of Snow White.

*

Grave Piss Manifesto

Let me reiterate my repugnance

& reify the ashen body so I might piss on it in its entirety.

Dead dad died & all I got was this lousy imaginary eulogy.

Dead dad died from diner food & damnit

I want the heart heredity that doesn’t risk giving out

in the heat of the night

jammed past the hilt.

Hearts should be bloody

& hearts should

beat

& hearts should explode

& when incapable of taking in

the birdsong of ambient affections

blockages become prevailing wind.

Blowback unlimited

& I like to sunbathe in the puddles formed.

Sewerage is my favorite suntan lotion.

Daddy slathered hatred hightails it for the heavens when I try to attract it.

Daddy escapes atonement & speaking of skeletons

I can’t find a speck of soul to interrogate

nor an inkling of remorse to extend to projector

when he’s all ground to powder

& it doesn’t even taste good enough to season steak with.

I’m so hungry I could eat disparagement

& call it enough calories to get through the day.

In my moment of duress at the news of Dad’s eternal rest

I had nothing to do but laugh & get undressed.

Philharmonic harmonizing & the invisible din thud squeal

& the imaginings of mourning that must’ve been farcical

with snotty tissues balled up & volleyed

off a coffin I’m disinvited from viewing

despite my disinterest

& my morbid commitment to dignity.

I want dick for breakfast & dick for lunch & dick for dinner.

So much dick that clouds part

& on my knees blessings resounding & Gabriel’s horns screeching

Levi’s unzipping appear as fortuitous angels in the sky.

I look up & Dad’s whinging

Never forget. The heathen bull

does not fuck other bulls. Balls shouldn’t smack balls.

The earth trips off its axis in the presence of filth.






*


CJ Waterman is a writer living in Providence, RI. He holds a degree in literary arts from Brown University and an MFA in Poetry from Notre Dame.  Other poems appear in Smoking Gluegun, Tarpaulin Sky, Similar Peaks and elsewhere. He is currently at work on a novel. 

i

The church fills

                   with what will never leave me. Men here

         say they want to live, and then they die.

It is seven in the evening

         and it is forever, a tulip forever shaped

                  of its wilt.

My mother is the soil,

                  our lives the garden. And I am the rain.

         Remember that.

What I am is still in strange rooms — a decayed

         girl with black hair, cherry nails,

a small girl who speaks in tongues

         to the god in the rafters, to the death

in her palms. My mother spoke

         at the podium and the birds flew overhead.

She is at the atonement stage,

                  and I am a budding rose whose friends are serpents.

Have you ever seen so much sickness

         the rest of the world appears as an oil painting?

Have you ever watched the summer

                  meet a mother at her place of grief —

alight in the hum of vein-songs and apologies? I know what it means

         to watch someone ask of a human what they ask of god.

         It is a wretchedness that happens in children’s hands.

I am still half-child. I am a half. I am the blood of the moon.

                  I am I love you, I forgive you

         but I will choke you. I am the earth

and its forests fucked and fired.

How I was lush once, too, as the earth. And then the embers.

My mother will remain small when this is all over.

         And I will remain small too. Our gardens undead.

I am an orphan under the table shaped as a dog. Loss is a child

         whose house has been swallowed by vines,

who has become the vine, whose heart is buried

         within rooms in rooms in rooms where

         flowers grow upside down so they are beautiful only where no one sees. 

We are always in houses, in churches, in gardens

         waiting. For eviction. For custody. For the seed.

Orphans at night, my body and me, we dial mother, are you there?

         We build a fort of prayer. We grow wings in the soil.

ii

I will tell you the shadow. Its sound. Its plumage, and all the rest. I will only make a home my own when I have collapsed into it of utter need, that’s my glitch. I am addicted to houses that aren’t my own. I am pissing in the floor boards to stay somewhere forever. In its wreckage is a salvation in the shape of — what is it? The shape is me. I am my own territory. I miss the way the sky looked when I held food stamps in my hand. I know that sky, as a sister, though she is no longer mine. This is a poem that has done a badness to its twin. The other poem tries to say it all without saying it. Not now. This poem means the sky and says it. This poem means poverty and sings it. Can you feel the way I move through time? Can you feel my secret soiling you? That my body is perpetually there and now and now. I keep my rot hidden the way young things do, with that spectacular shame which becomes organ. I am a summer full of orphans, and then summer ended. All I know is in a dream my mother stood at the window and looked happy. It was long ago, but that is what I know.

iii

This shelter is built of secrets. Four floors in an ancient church where angels hover within the walls. The windows speak ivy. Sometimes we think we see the angel. We’re not wrong. I am 11 and I cut my ankles in the fourth floor bathtub. I am shaving my darkness away while everyone else sleeps. A woman excretes her addictions in ritual. Through the bottom of her door, sweat and pale blood; my mother is somewhere in there holding white linen to her forehead. Her kids will be too young to ever remember, but I will. I do. It’s not about god here. It’s about something bigger. My blood smells of iron, crying outward until it is almost pink, and then gone. I imagine this is what everyone in every room feels. I weep so often in the communal spaces that other women mother me. I am at church in their arms. Each woman a pariah; each pariah, my chapel. My mother the pariah, my patron saint of vice. They braid my hair in rooms of death. They make me pretty in kitchens of folk prayer and yuca. My lipstick, donated. My clothes, donated. My body the ivy now, the ivy handcuffed and medicated. The whole garden an in-patient waiting for light. Sudden divinity sudden blood. Some of the angels die on route. Why don’t they know this themselves, that we feed the earth with our pain? Today I avoid too-small rooms. I like beds to be my own. I like to pretend I am another body with the memories of a beautiful thing. But I am not a beautiful thing. I am the daughter of the forgotten. I am the keeper of stories. I am the disciple of rot and savior in a garden without a name.

*


Lisa Marie Basile is the founding creative director of Luna Luna Magazine, and is the author of a few poetry collections, including th recent Nympholepsy (Inside the Castle, 2018). Work has appeared in Spork Press, Atlas RevIew, New York Times, Narratively, Entropy, Catapult, Best American Experimental Writing, PANK, Best American Poetry, and more. 

Artwork is from Leif Holmstrand’s series “Holy Helpers.”

from Myself the Photograph (pt. 2)

numinous like a cloud,

like the flat matte painting of the sky,

oh god, i lack

the vision to see deeper.

BANG, BANG, BANG.

my star & left arm

this desolate, irradiated planet

the green glow

folded into cake batter

houses & chairs, kitchen crumbs

plates, water

is this

existential dread

or lead poisoning

 wired, wired

You read Jill Magi, Bhanu Kapil, like visionary literature. Like something hermetic, harnessing weird psychic energy.  The work of ghosts. Emily Dickinson.  OKAY BUT I DON’T BELIEVE IN ANYTHING! I AM IN A CAVE IN THE DESERT, RENDING MY CLOTHES!

In my notebook is written in a descending column:

somatic → visible soul → insubstantial essence mirroring the haunted body → contaminated by art →  radical embodiment, hyper-corporeal→  DOG DIRT

REPEATED:

EAT THE DIRT.

In my notebook, reeking:

I am desperate to be like you. I have your photograph taped inside my dictionary. Do you have a favorite book? What color is your pen? How do I receive a prism on my head? Are you pleased to read my note? Wait— I haven’t sent it yet. Where’s my book? May I please have your address?

In my notebook, unsent:

Dear X,

Scorpions are leaking out of my blood. They are eating me alive.
         I am chained to the radiator.

*


m. forajter is a MFA graduate from Columbia College Chicago. Her work has been published in several magazines, including Tarpaulin Sky, Court Green, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Luna Luna, Petra and Witch Craft Magazine. Her chapbooks, WHITE DEER and Marmalade Girl, are available from dancing girl press. She really likes Nirvana, werewolves, and medieval art.

THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC 2

Deviating from the Bibliothèque Nationale’s original record, our newly transubstantiated Joan is lying on flagstones in the shape of a cross. Her body is too many voices. It’s amassed too many jeers from too many tormentors. It’s caught in the middle of a slow dissolve and she is kneeling before herself. Her soul is one divine intervention too many. I watch her lapping from a small stoup on all fours. I watch her brandish her perspiring head like an aspergillum. And when a surgeon enters the cell dressed like a blacksmith, I watch that too. I watch him operate with hammers. I see her body collapse. I see three soldiers insert a long straw between her legs and take turns to inflate her. Hear how they consider her equivocally gendered. How in reply she says how God has stood before her, and how the God she saw was trans, and how her sky is full of thirteen moons. She says, ‘At home I am called all the imagined saints.’ She says, ‘Here I am called possessed by the Devil.’ And the perceived blasphemy of her surgically reassigned Almighty upends the incels. And they turn green. And they turn greener. And they cover their ears. And she says, ‘I was born this child of nineteen, with short hair, dressed in boys’ clothes. I was born versed in the art of indecency. I was born martyred and full of tears. I was born inaudible to myself. My head crowned in thorns, in straw, in men made of straw. And I feel your odium but I bring you pity, for nobody loves the English, not even God, not even the English. Oh and tell me,’ she says, ‘do I have hair on my head? Did God shave me a tonsure right through to the brain? Do I have wings?’ And she curtsies for the court, bends over, offers the judges her judas. And they cannot help themselves as they cross-examine her colon. And a prelate in the prolapse is witness to a vision—of the crowning head of our Father so ignominiously reborn. And all the mendicant friars cannot force her into a gown. For she will not obscure the shameful costume of her body until the shame itself has gone. Until her being is no longer cosmetic, no longer insincere, no longer heresy. And to me? Me: sat genuflecting before all transfigured daughters of God. When I can’t even decide what socks to wear. When I’m in this heavenly light pulling worms out my ears. When I’m standing on tiptoe getting closer to God. And they feed her wafer to a dog. Until out the other end… and still all she can taste is the Eucharist. And she’ll cross herself, she says, until it draws blood. Until the judges warn her: ‘Raise your eyes to heaven again and we’ll cut them out.’ That if she doesn’t hold her tongue they’ll stick it with a fork. For how dare you be pretty and childlike and illiterate and destined for paradise. How dare you hum the absolution. How dare you eavesdrop on the salvation of your soul. Wherever her visions come from the torture chamber will cure them. And so she counts her broken fingers and they are as many as the days since her last confession. And she takes the Sacrament in increments, in punches to the face, in threats to drown her in the Seine. She dreams she drinks the eyes of God from every chalice, that her vanity is less tear-stained than her soul, her prayers less divine than her madness. She refuses again to foam at the mouth. O sancta simplicitas! And then they bleed her and the Y is upside down, like a middle finger. And they watch her sob in her sleep. But the witch is gone! Because she’s sharpening her nails on the flat stones of graves. Because she’s caking her face in consecrated mud. She’s blood-letting poisoned toads, and binding missals with their backs. She’s advancing on Rouen in Guerlain nails and glitter mesh Louboutin spikes. And so giddy is she in her expiated skin that she does not hear the inquisitor’s peroration: how this apostate is dancing with dancing bears, how she’s contorting with contortionists, and singing litanies with infidels, this idolatress, this monster, this agent of perverted Mass. And yet is man not too small a morsel to cover with so many kisses? And are our death beds not water beds? And do we not fill them from a holy spring? As our ascetics get fat. As our delusions become real. As our states of grace become ever more inelegant. Our glory infirm. And because all interrogations must conclude, it concludes. Albeit with some apophatic biology for a coda. Albeit inconclusively. And what foul irony to arrive at the stake for the abjuration of a phallus. And to burn there an exemplar for the intricacies of man. What ignominy! What comedy! What a voice thereafter calling for Jesus and screaming like a kettle whistle. The flames sounding like a prayer. Like the twelve articles of the Creed. Like a billion bifurcated tongues stuck to a hot plate. And the screen now her face, pressed flat against the window of heaven, struggling to breathe. And so she dies again. And so her body burns again. And so the executioner rakes the ashes and does not find her again. When even the heart is gone. Because it never came back. Because it remains in the river where it lives like a fish. Where it cannot be incinerated. Where God cannot see it. Where the hyenas cannot eat it. Where its chambers shun the light from any sky of any number of different moons.

*

Gary J. Shipley is the author of ten or so books, most recently 30 Fake Beheadings (Spork), Warewolff! (Hexus), and The Unyielding (Eraserhead). He has published in numerous magazines, journals, anthologies and academic journals. His monograph on Baudrillard is forthcoming from Anthem Press. More information can be found at Thek Prosthetics.