FlyPaper Poetry Issue I January 2018
And then God forgot where He left us‌ Here the words become a spiraling staircase leading you to somewhere that may not yet be visible but you can almost hear the freedom in the echoes of whatever chamber we have become locked in and it is then that you realize it is really a transparent thing, like glass- this staircase, where one side is red and one side is blue and above where the thing is leading is an open sky and when the light strikes the room just right you could swear the whole thing was purple all over. I think this is what God had stopped to marvel at when He forgot where He had left us‌
TABLE OF CONTENTS: Roya Marsh
[Featured Poet]
i think i built that wall myself
or
my grandmother would never play craps
Blk Grl Puns Spitfire Anne Potts Knives and People Devin Kelly POEM FOR MY FRIEND MATT WHO AT THIS MOMENT IS RUNNING 300 MILES ACROSS TENNESSEE RUNNING IN THE COUNTRY ELEGY FOR MARY P. Randolph THE DOOR Gerard Sarnat Humpty Dumpty Circling Back: Buck Me Gina Marie Bernard Ebb Tide J.David there were flowers in their dreams, too
i think i or my grandmother Roya Marsh
built would
that
wall never
myself play
craps
i ain’t never liked gambling. my grandmother’s last hoorah was at the casino in atlantic city. she could talk then. i remember because she called home in a panicked haze when the jackpot lights were all too much and she forgot the bus that took her there was the same bus that would take her back. my family took a gamble when putting her in a nursing home. she could talk then. i remember because she hated that place and was of course fed up with the incompetence of those in power. she saw the country take a gamble on it’s first black president. the best eight years of my life. the last eight years of hers. she was mute for years before the end. i remember because she never wished me a happy 21st. or maybe she did, but i wasn’t close enough to hear it. i guess i forgot how to listen. i forgot how to talk to someone who couldn’t talk back. months before she died this country took a gamble on red. she couldn’t talk no more. i hadn’t been listening anyway. but i bet she had a few choice words for what’d make this country great. for the first time. he been ruining this country for 315 days. she been gone for 110 days. i been going double or nothing with my sanity at stake. like going broke gon fix anything. i was gon write this to her but i keep telling myself she’ll never hear it. i think i built that wall myself.
Blk Grl Puns Roya Marsh Knock, knock... who's there? Black lives matter too Black lives matter to who? *shrugs* New joke! What do you call that useless skin around the vagina? A woman Okay, okay...how bout this A father and daughter walk into a bar — no, each other's lives — no, a park (I always get that part confused) a father & daughter walk into a park in Brownsville to have beers and/or sex five teens approach with or without a gun father run *hahaha Okay, okay new joke A father walks into a deli say lemme use your phone cashier don't say "why?" don't say "you ok?" he say "no." "you drunk." "you sway." father run... pass cop/ in trouble don't stop double back boys run girl raped. news say more about playground & boy than young woman
treated as toy news say "alleged" her body say full fledged *ain't that shit funny? not funny haha, more like ain't it funny how no one say assailants cry consent when they inhabit a body; no rent they say: black girl big lip body thick need dick say you wore that say you did this say it ain't rape even with rape kit say more about the cop you bit say a park is no place to drink say a bench is no place to fuck say this just a black girl's luck say victim cry rape say why ain't you escape? say a drunken yes means you wanted this — to watch your obituary be headline &you ain't even buried. *what? they forgot to invite you to your own home-going? this was your train honey. don't you know? when 6 bodies take hold of 1 body they are pallbearers to a [casket] &your last rites on a cellphone video. a eulogy of drunken giggles. nobody told you a black girl's body is a punchline. the funniest joke. fit to be ran into the ground‌ *rimshot*
Spitfire Roya Marsh “In order to rise from its own ashes, a phoenix first must burn.” - Octavia Butler i carry the wood of men i have never loved {in my mouth} a strange man calls me bitch a cop calls me bitch my father calls me bitch my abuser calls me bitch my girlfriend calls me bitch when i remind her of her exboyfriend &all of these men lodge their wood in my jaw one way or another. each bitch be a full cord — a season's worth of kindling. the problem // i do not sweat. i spark! my hole heart - a wick each beat - a strike while each tooth a lit match my tongue doused in butane cautious not to swallow this is no metaphor this is a recipe for fire. i gnash &out spews the poem thee inferno i speak a 5 alarm onto the 3 family poetry slam the stage a brushfire. the crowd a blaze.
i Hiroshima & Nagasaki the venue &these men &their wood - ain't nothing more than a field of ashes & this mouth a charcoaled pit microphone or extinguisher all i know is it keeps me from torching myself this wood once a burden becomes the reason i spit fire a woman completed by flames & searing syllables scorching my way to survival even when fire silences women like sun do skin when you bask in it *so quiet you ain't know you was charring i start to think of black as burning with radiance or with churches so, i am not opposed to burning things to the ground. i have learned it is the only way to send a concrete message to god i don't know what rises more, souls of black bodies or smoke & no one who's communed with god comes back to fill us in. you've seen the news, only the survivors are the storytellers. each man's bitch is a combustible woman's reason to exhale & his wood his downfall. crumbling, he
asks me to be more water still wishing me wet his wood ________________________________ heaven is an ocean i've yet to learn to swim but i sure as hell know i can burn
Knives and People Anne Potts Dad always warned me not to say what I was afraid of always said people would find a way to use my fears against me but Dad didn’t know people already did didn’t know, I was never really afraid of knives— I was afraid of men with stabbing fingers who didn’t listen for an answer before slicing me open and I was afraid of women who whittled me down so I would fit into a box they labeled “normal” and I was afraid of friends whose words became wounds on my turned back whose lips curled up to reveal daggers in place of teeth and I was afraid of lovers who put blades between their knuckles made fists around my heart and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed— Dad still warns me when he leaves a knife on the counter he still doesn’t know, I was never really afraid of knives I was always afraid of the people who would find a way to use them against me.
POEM FOR MY FRIEND MATT WHO AT THIS MOMENT IS RUNNING 300 MILES ACROSS TENNESSEE Devin Kelly The names of towns sound kind enough: Sugar Tree, Pleasantville, Pine View. Once, while running, you turned to me & said don’t worry so much about dying – your brother had been diagnosed with cancer & I didn’t know. You said let’s roll & the road became frictionless, the air beneath a wing, a pillow firmed before dreaming. What is running good for? All our lives, old fathers say stay, work, don’t budge, bear your own burden. But you know two people can carry one another into infinity. How I hope this is what infinity is: the carrying multiplied until it has no number or time, only a motion so constant it is imperceptible. That day, the miles were a blur of miles. You broke away & I chased you with a grin, the rain caught in my beard, what was once a marathon no longer, only the unfound word for both love & rain. How I felt like a bear. How I want to say there is a cure for everything, but how I can’t. People tire & people die. Tonight, while I sleep, you will be shuffling slowly along Highway Sixty-Four in the dark, carrying what small load
you have left upon your back. For all my life I have yet to understand what to make of all my life. I grow scared & anxious with what I stand to lose & haven’t yet held in my arms. My first reaction to pain is instinctive. I crawl within myself, make of my body a den. I stop, all shiver & hide, forgetting that there is nothing to lose after that last, ultimate loss. I dream my own brother’s death & wake two inches above the bed in that last moment of falling. So we rise. So we go on. So each stride of yours is twice as long as mine but how we have learned to cover this distance at the same time. I’ll stay up late tonight, track your progress as I would a plane arcing over the pollution above Manhattan. Wasn’t that fun, you said. We had just finished, the salt of our bodies a desert of white sand upon our skin. I have run far enough that I can say anything. It was, I said. It was, it was, it was.
RUNNING IN THE COUNTRY Devin Kelly After bridging over the highway, the road lost its lanes, became one strip of char & sunburn. I could settle there, find a rhythm in morning, each sign labeled literal: Long Hill Road at the intersection of Church, Dave’s Place twisting down to one house under mountain’s shadow. I know what climbs must descend, but it takes time & patience to find the apex, & there, above, exists a pause. Cow & badger in the distance, hum of cars passing to a place that must be somewhere. I have run so many miles in my life, enough to bridge this country without seeing it. In the city, I prefer to run at night & it becomes a kind of blues, a tempo of alternation, cars jagging through the cadence – the orange hue of life & light turning night to indigo. But there, after what could’ve only been Dave’s home, the road found woods, became, for a time, unnamed. It was quiet enough for the hush of breath to echo off of trees. I wondered who would find me if I died, & what story they would tell – of a boy wind-burnt & sweating, still warm beside the road. I think of this too much, how nice & kind it is to be surrounded by other lives. When they disappear, a heart beats too loud & every ache becomes a worry-hurt of loss. Peace is a misconception. There are too many things to carry. Night rides a long hill toward dawn. Our bodies know methods to control pain – endorphins hush the nerves & breath finds other chambers to fill. But the mind worries. The mind aches. The mind never settles. & each stride begs for a lesson in disappearing.
ELEGY FOR MARY Devin Kelly Remember you when you die by lighting my hair on fire. Remember you when you die by the sound of an ashed cigarette in a basement echoing off the spines of old National Geographic’s & grandpa’s keepsakes keeping time through slant of light & the way dust can hang a little longer & a little prettier than a body or a word. Remember you when you die by pulling grandma out her casket & sleeping with her for years to see how it must’ve been to care for a body we all knew was dying but were too scared to admit. Remember you when you die in the white of hair dappled-down & light like snow paraded slow from the halogen, the firmament of sky. Remember you when you die as you once were, the way my father jokes bout you skipping school with Patti, the two of you near-twinned by hips & a love of Janis. Remember you when you die by drinking gold from a tulip, decorating my neck with a ring of teeth fallen out of dreams. Remember you when you die by cashing five-dollar checks & letting a record spin until the needle sings a song of scratch & burn, a hum of silence. Remember you when you die in the blue glow of the Buffalo Bills losing, the slow naked walk out into the chill of winter until my bones snap & shatter like branches in a storm. Remember you when you die by calling my father to ask what it was like to have & lose two sisters. Remember you when you die in the ember of George’s cigarette,
the moan of the pup calling forth the night, the whole of everything rushing to a hush, that slipper-shuffle across the universe. Remember you when you die because I’m so scared of losing. You see the way Lake Ontario sucks the grey from sky, pulls it into water, how the sun stains its cabernet into the space you could lay a rug between? You see the way we are all granted permission to echo our love across the miles? You see, you see, you see. I’m trying. The bottom has fallen out my soul. Look at me, I’m pouring. Look at me, I’m softening my vowels.
THE DOOR P. Randolph what the hell does the rest of the god-damned world do at 3:33 antemeridian on a tuesday? cry? wallow? dread? surrender their HERE? fold? commiserate? empathize? covet? lust? glutton? sleep?
no one would believe the conversations i'm hip to at the moment; doors shut; open; coffee, clank; booze, clank; smokes; and, laughing; we are all in awe; did we? can we? did we? : the greatest coup, the only coup, for all sentient beings... the few of us fucking left, 88 persons.
so, I commune with the trench fish; if I had my way, i'd slam you behind the only door that exists.
Humpty Dumpty Circling Back: Buck Me Gerard Sarnat Half century ago, as a wasted med student only interested in sexdrugsrock’nrollVietnam protests and San Francisco’s 1967 Summer of Love shoe/shirtless plus waist long hair over paunch proving particularly bellicose, I was more than asked to vacate Buck’s Bar & Restaurant redneck premises. Now that I’m a benign invisible grandpa/burgher the proprietor who caters to Silicon Valley dealmakers is delighted to charge $18 per burger or omelet.
Ebb Tide Gina Marie Bernard Three visits to a sex therapist—whose diploma hung push pinned from her paneled office wall— hardly prepared me to forge my first confession. Yet here I was, avoiding eye contact with my wife, instead steepling fingers, clumsily searching for a disarming phrase like an embarrassed tourist thumbing through a foreign language dictionary. Or perhaps a more apt analogy is to say I cast a stone. Cratered still waters. To fill the rushing void, I assured her I needed only to pronounce my truth, pledging these words would now disperse in rings, seek distant seas, furl over foreign shoals like a string of champagne pearls loosed from barrel-clasped waves. But they had their homecoming. In the same way echoes cross darkened tarns, or how tides favor given gravel— a whispered assonance of repeated secrets. Admissions always wash ashore again to bleach bone-white under a published sun.
there were flowers in their dreams, too J.David The trailer-park dreamcatchers bloom hyacinths each and every Mayawash with worlds where it rains from the sun and clouds collect light, until they’ve grown fat as caterpillars gorged on milkweed and burst forth into a small and temporary conflagration. Here, everyone is underneath umbrellas and holding candles, which in this world are gold, and burn so surely- staving off an ever-encroaching dark. Such things happen when all that is precious to us is imaginary. In May, the clouds open up and the hyacinths grow and grow, and even here it is beautiful sometimes.
FEATURED POET: Roya Marsh is a Black Queer Woman, writer, educator currently serving as the Poet In Residence for Urban Word NYC. She is a candidate for the MFA in Writing and Activism at the Pratt Institute and lives to end white supremacy and all of its cousins.
OTHER CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE: Anne Potts is from Pickerington, Ohio and attends The Ohio State University. Her main ambition in life is to simply experience it.
Devin Kelly earned his MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and co-hosts the Dead Rabbits Reading Series in New York City. He is the author of two collaborative chapbooks as well as the books, Blood on Blood (Unknown Press), and In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen (CCM). He works as a college advisor in Queens, teaches at the City College of New York, and lives in Harlem .
P. Randolph writes to distill meaning into a tangible form. Having taken a graduate degree in philosophy, P. Randolph's writing reflects a real and honest pursuit to find meaning, place, and belonging, and to display it to an audience, with an eye toward creating a modern “myth” that sublimates realism, nous, and religion.
Gerard Sarnat has been Pushcart-nominated and authored HOMELESS CHRONICLES (2010), Disputes, 17s, Melting The Ice King (2016) and been published in Gargoyle, Margie, OCHO, New Delta Review, New Verse News, Main St. Rag, etc. Harvard/Stanford educated, Gerry’s worked in jails, built/staffed clinics for the marginalized, been a healthcare CEO and Stanford professor.
Gina Marie Bernard is a heavily tattooed trans woman, roller derby vixen, and full-time English teacher. She has completed a 50mile ultra-marathon, followed Joan Jett across the US, and purposely jumped through a hole cut in lake ice. She lives in Bemidji, Minnesota. Her daughters, Maddie and Parker, own the two halves of her heart. She has written one YA novel, Alpha Summer (2005), and one collection of short fiction, Vent (2013). Her poetry has recently appeared in Mortar, The Cape Rock, New Plains Review, and Leveler. She also has a poem forthcoming in r.kv.r.y quarterly.
J.David is from Cleveland, Ohio; likes Phoebe Bridgers; and hopes one day to become lovely.
*Photography in this issue is the work of Jacob Ockunzzi.