En Route (Capitol

Bakhur Nick

SOPHIA ASHLEY

The beauty feels ghastly— riding en route to a capital punishment from your dead end. that in the chaos you mistake the word capitol for grave, knowing Grave is an inflection of a name once lived though, we do not know the house to acknowledge. so we liken it to a loanword, to whatever language that permits the rubbing of harsh surfaces: tyre to asphalt— becoming corpse. but this shouldn’t be just a murder poem or metaphor for slavery. It should be about this brake, failing mid-transit & the awful terror of this town calling you a problem it would kill to resolve without trace, as the blood polluted sky: a violent slaughter you think, while pedaling down unaccompanied. since what is racism, if not having whites you cut off. what beheads this moment, if not the wind. & what is noun in motion if not you strapped amuck seatbelt, evading death traps to find your negro skin & half American blood drifting far apart, as a branch calls you to space from a prison yard screaming it’s own innocence. see, how the pedestrian wake of leaves you bypass daily is only a drop in the ocean of thirst that keeps sending you down this mournful alley, repeatedly. blood ready as a wounded hound, regardless of how often you feed each lively hole in your midriff, to find it staring back thirsty like no one ever shoved hate down its lung. like, no one has ever took law into their hands, lashing at the little white you bring. this much use of violence. you ask yourself, what color kneels on the other for pleasure? as you ride enroute to your capital punishment from a dead-end, way too burdened to suggest the chaos ahead.

Sophia. N. Ashley (she/they) are writers of poetry. They have their works previously published in NativeSkin lit Magazine, Wondrous Real Magazine, The Capilano Review & elsewhere. They are the author of “Dumb Mandate”(unpublished). On Instagram, they are @sophiaashley631.

Crime, Having to Repeat Itself

SOPHIA ASHLEY

A teenager housed a bullet in his midriff at Pennsylvania, the night before our prom. months after, his brother housed more in every part of his torso. a coyote teethes on the blood, dragging the animal of his body down the crumbled stairwell. somewhere, a bench of ghost concludes: ‘if an officer flags a car in motion, you strike the pedal down to a neighborhood. there’s something about witness that terrifies them. surveillance cameras, the listening dog lonely as a sadist. the gun says my body lacks the spark to cause a controversy, no matter how I polish my immediate hands or accent. no matter how often I wear my name with the purpose of not living through the next minute. the urge— to be creative with dying. our roof hoards the last shoot of hail. summer came, erasing one-third of the tortured ice. the frozen perimeter of our cottage, ratted out by heat— the way it warms up to a mortgage. the snow keeps mounting like white debts. we retain the roof, even as heat stalks a ruptured part. I praise the other spot for it’s resilience, for being wide enough to harbor life in this dying summer. I overstate, when I say one-third. I never took likely to figures, never took amnesia seriously. still, I forgot the fine detail of all our frozen food melted down by heat. gambling never spurs me. the only risk I can barely afford is myself. but, I bet summer wiped out the ice— careful without trace. As the month an officer erased a part our surname, at the slightest provocation. I need history to repeat itself, for this poem to sparkle. gaslight me with a loaded controversy.

Jorm S

tomnamon

Street Cred

SOPHIA ASHLEY

a truck crashes into this body, and springs back thanks to roguery & her bestial appellations. for whatever teethes us to this land as reasons— a boy sheds his canine on my trunk. thanks to necklace & it’s byzant aggression. the CPR donor meets me mouth-for-mouth, asking after a consciousness lying in her state. God! I’m not conscious of my language Lord! see my people lying-in-state. see the dead fetus accompanied in it’s wake. the hate keeps revamping corners for us to die in. anywhere from this spot is an affront. we’re snipers away from the colonist’s verb & everything goes south with this cold vocabulary, including pregnancy. the messy contractions. her male pair, inactive as grammar blooms brightly from his tongue— an oral projectile. it’s tip, sharp as a heartburn. eight years of parentless ordering brings me to speed with the outcome of a lad playing Nazareth for his country. how his mother Marys & remarries, time and time again. A cop, unmindful of how I’m wired bumps into me and witnesses a wound thick as his badge. no hot-chases this time. just grief weighing grief by the number of bullets they’ve outpaced. violence is iron fonts trailing black skins to their first sport. I bet, Kenyans never saw this one coming.

Monologue with my Teenage Dogsitter

SOPHIA ASHLEY

The while I nose around in the same breath with my keeper, for me is work. yet, I’m Idle as a lawn. the bone which I seek is mine.

I lay still and belt my voice round the dog year. I’m worth seven more barking days than his scattergun.

a leash pulls me close to him, & it hurts like slavery. I have the handcuff scars for proof.

my greed buys into his driver’s seat. getting to town, I am awful as brined persimmon. I outpace the German Shepherds, regardless of my black race.

I sniff negritude. dump my furs like sheared heritage in the parking lot, leaving follicles for contact trace. no one comes for me.

I wail in fierce pitch to imitate him. I avoid language, claw-ready carving out glyphs from the rabid soil. I cannot graze the occasion of dialects. I yank seraphim off my teeth, and grace whitens in there like a bad bleach. I am ghosted to him, till my skin collide with colours. at dusk, my lids are moon-eyed: a white manner of approach.

somewhere close to his softness, I attend a wilding. I scratch till I leak heavily. I have five more seconds to bleed.

I wrestle a rottweiler. my teeth, agreeable on it’s flesh as jam. I am his troublesome gadget in the grand scheme of things. the pink reptile in between my tongue is nobody’s plaything.

you’d know me as the proverbial sting, shuddering, sonic lash & every other sibilant nature withholds from me, till I grieve in all the letters I cannot vouch for. I bloat with a lone dizziness, howling to space. calm rests in between like an early astronaut.

I’m an almost discovered globe. my rage, brightened as stars. I am in the yesternight of your world, dear readers & your mistakes sits wisely in my palm.

hypnocreative

karakotsya

Aye! Gulorbo

SOPHIA ASHLEY

cooling off in Father’s Peugeot, our ear catches the town cry of friendship from teenage lungs. aye! the one with malnourished dread yells. Gulorbo, his friend retorts, amidst fondling of palms. their big mighty paws, woven together as men.

fingers snapping like they were warding off misfortune, and there, the sonic boom surrounds their immediate joints. the next minute had their turned backs in different destinations.

Father consults me, with a grin unspooling his mid 90s rascality from the lower teeth. You gatz know this wan, Junior.

aye! Gulorbo. e geh meaning? he beckoned, still tongue-soaked in the wild pool of naiveness. Yea. Good-luck bro, I chew on each word till it comes clean as buttered bones. dis go bi veri tait frends dem, he chirped, nearly brought down by the kindness learnt from what his church instinct perceived as riffraffs.

aye! Gulorbo, we echoed in turns, subsequently chipping the rough slang into every conversation. aye! I yell, fine-tuning the foulness of each note.

Gulorbo! he beckons, after the first pause. his retort hounded by the rustling of nitrogen bubbles. aye! Gulorbo, we say to each other amidst crash course & mock exams,

as though a cheat made potent by how its concealed. yet the teenagers did it right there, in the open space & the world watched.