Visar is a writer and artist with poems previously published at ghost city press, agbowo, Kalahari review and elsewhere. Twitter: rabiutemidayo.
~*~
It’s not your first day at sea
It’s not your first day at sea
struggling to grasp them by the head
Laughing louder than the sea
Wading out wet with guilt
Reeling in the fishes
Through and through the black waters,
Dripping down till only silt —
The unholy ledger
~*~
Azure
Before the rooster this morning
Grandmother was already barefoot on her farm
Watering plots of cassava
She wears white underclothes stopping right on her knees,
It is evening already
to permit all the heavy lifting.
When she is in the bushes she would
Do along with songs
In the voices I’ve grown
to associate with the blue sky,
hovering as clouds do
Over sunny afternoons —
A sureness of rain
To join her I…
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you have to count them quickly
the bite-marks on my son’s arm
–
either you touch a goldfish
or become
a dentist
–
does it matter whose dream
my mouth is
–
make art and make it empty. god has run out of room.
Marisa Crane is a lesbian fiction writer and poet. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pigeon Pages, Pidgeonholes, Drunk Monkeys, Riggwelter Press, Okay Donkey, X-R-A-Y Magazine, and elsewhere. She currently lives in San Diego with her fiancée. You can read more of her work at http://www.marisacrane.org. She tweets @marisabcrane.
~*~
Power
Wailing. Searing nerve endings. A home isn’t a home
without bodies that punish themselves. They remain silent
until the day they don’t. No one hands out earmuffs
at birth. We learn by crying. We learn by finding
what we needn’t ever find. Sometimes the medicine man
is the one that lives inside your brain. Branded like a farm animal,
I can’t forget the terror of powerlessness. What is the shape
of power? Is it anything like the form an island takes?
Isolation. Shame, misnamed. I want to lounge
in the language of self-love. Steeped in saltwater
choreography…
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Q: what is a ghost?
A: you have a mom and god finds out
Serving
poems, Kari Gunter-Seymour
Crisis Chronicles, 2018
‘A lone bird pecks
at some once-seeded thing. ‘ – from Six Months Into Your Second Deployment
I don’t know that I should start here, but will anyway, and will add my wife when I say that my son’s disorder is just the current name of the first nobody to tell us he was sick. I start here because this is where I am after reading Kari Gunter-Seymour’s gutting and sentient Serving, the narrator of which breaks bread and waits for distance to lose its warmth all the while employing a verse that enters the fog of ache on an empty stomach and proffers hunger as a photograph snapped by a child devoured by others. Here, place begins as the coordinates of one with nowhere to be and ends as an else-less language so new it has no word for return…
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thru August 13th, Lulu is offering free mail shipping or 50% off ground with coupon code of SHIPIT2018
poetry collections, mine, self-published, are here: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad
mine, self-published, are here:
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad
~
some recent poems:
[cigarette gospel]
on a stage
in a beaten
field
a man
new to walking
is opening
with his hands
the belly
of a shark
that’s eaten
by word of mouth
a local
priest
whose fingernails
miss teeth
like an angel
~
[bowl and psalm]
his inner monologue made of water.
a pill
in a drop
of rain.
a rabbit on a leash. a dead bird
in a woman’s hat.
wind.
my eye for my other
oh town
of Ark.
~
[untitled]
I vandalize the outside of a church in a city designed by men with bad teeth and there I mistake a drop of blood for a penny and begin to last forever
~
[the men of left field] for brother Noah
I think / in a past / life / my sense / of touch / was yours
–
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Natasha Kochicheril Moni is a 2018 Jack Straw Writer and the author of four poetry collections (The Cardiologist’s Daughter, Two Sylvias Press, 2014; Lay Down Your Fleece, Shirt Pocket Press, 2017; Nearly, Dancing Girl Press, 2018; A Nation (Imagined), winner of the 2018 Floating Bridge Press chapbook competition, forthcoming). http://www.natashamoni.com/
~
When Asked What You Know About Grief, You Remind Me
of me—that I don’t believe in umbrellas
or eggs or beets or anything
that could pass for an egg,
an umbrella, a beet.
You tell me there is a meadow beyond
the fence over there and how it disappeared
your dog—but that fence is falling,
has been in a perpetual state
of suspension since you and I have—
and you are allergic to fur.
You are in the middle of an omelet
without ketchup, only because there isn’t,
and you tell me grief is…
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poverty has its own alphabet. we speak only to expand our understanding of what came second, be it silence or the ventriloquy of god. no one here has lost a baby but there are enough of us to go around. I’ve nowhere to tell you about place.
kingsoftrain 