CAN THE SUBALTERN SHRIEK? a chapbook by Mya Alexice
I am a poet, journalist, activist… [insert many -ists here] who seeks to discover the liminal spaces where ethnicity, gender and language coalesce. I believe poetry in its many forms—rap, spoken word, written, and so on—will be the medium that brings us together across time and space. This collection was written with many people in mind, but first and foremost I’d like to dedicate these words to my mother. She has the kind of strength you only read about in ancient mythology. She raised me into someone who loved the taste of words and the sound of a good story. Everything I do comes back to her. I hope these words find you well.
2
KRAKEN you come from the root krake, meaning an unnaturally twisted creature. when i try to latch onto you, to grab you by your oily neck— it’s like trying to catch smoke. I could never pinpoint where you began and where you ended, always a writhing thing— spiral staircase, sea serpent drawn on an old map half body arched up, the other hidden in green water; curling, coiling around me. I see you—there—slithering out of reach. Nothing but a wet dream, a tentacled lover easing back into the abyss. sometimes i wonder if you were only myth. if i truly saw you that night. do i light a candle at my bedside table, hoping you’ll catch its glare from the window? do i set a bowl of water on the sill, a small sea for a weary, travelling snake? do i offer a companion, a believer, above all a witness to your lore?
3
FLINT. curved at the edge like where the water meets sand. uneven, unbothered, unperfect. flint, michigan. here the first daughter of earth is brown like skin. a third world country in our own (gated, patrolled, neighborhood watched) backyards. suburbia killed flint, michigan. murdered it in cold blood. private homes, private schools, private bigotry played out in public.
4
us vs. them, I guess. it’s us vs. them. the body vs. the tumor. have you ever had a doctor feel the breast of your country? thanks for the pink ribbons. I’d rather have the chemo. take it out, no matter what. kill me in the process. kill me if you have to. flint. flint like start a fire like burn it down like scorched earth policy like witch hunt with pitchforks like heat in my bones like ancestors curled around a fire like maybe we were all human, once.
5
ELEGY WRITTEN IN A GENTRIFIED NEIGHBORHOOD From sylvan scope to battle/field, Now hooded eye of culture’s womb, A future’s fate is licked and sealed, Over pregnant checks in a board/ed room. Floor to ceiling windows are a milky cataract, Clouding a memory caked in human blood. The ghetto a colony; (the word can adapt) A sickly child only a leeching father has loved. There! A block’s corner haunted by state sanctioned rapture. Cowering behind a renovated edifice. Wicker outside seating options have legs like spiders, spinning web and wealth over what has bled and dealt and
6
didn’t they tell you niggas not to build over graveyards?
did we ask for an epitaph in metal? will you write it with anti-homeless spikes or use warped gates from all-bleach cul-de-sacs or use the ore from our newest slavery, the rusted bars holding back yearning hands? the ghosts in the schoolyard play casket hopscotch. peach tongues lick envelopes to their senators, stamp the corner with a pricked thumb. blood oath prevails over body. the inevitable hour stalks us both. mansion tomb or county morgue, the cold ear of death is deaf to all. say there is something more beyond browning bones in a battle/field. say we yank out the rod of empire which impaled us eons ago. will its end sharpen to a spike, the perfect size of the socket of your eye? or will we only need to shake the foundation of the master’s house—shambling slum built of peroxide bone and packed with stolen dirt—and kindle one of its corners? here in this after/place will you burn like we did will you covet your last breaths like we did will you die like we did? I thought we told y’all. I thought you saw the writing on the wall.
7
PORTRAIT OF A CORNROW PRINCESS she could swallow screwdrivers if she wanted to. pops pink bubble gum between gloss lips. she that alley cat. she that hood rat. baldwin book on her lap like open palms. thin chain around throat leads to golden cross swinging like pendulum like noose and rests above back-problem breasts. hours of sitting in the chair, spider fingers of the braider weaving like silk. waist length rope, thick and heavy from the cornrows buried at the top of her head. she that black girl magic. she that bruja bitch. pink tongue fingers the groove where her tooth used to be. the ghost of a fist burrows into her cheekbones. she that problem child. she that behavioral risk. as her neighborhood festers into high rise high end hyde she covets the little things. the end of days prophet on 125th. the bodega cat who mews at her manicure touch. the red undertones of the street at dusk. she could catch bullets between her teeth if she wanted to.
8
someone with dysmorphia writes the myth of narcissus the carrion in the mirror reaches out a flaking arm, skin coiling off like a peeling apple. grabs me by the pulsing throat. i swallow and choke on an adam’s apple, reflection un becoming like reverse womb bewilding me beloving me undoing what i’ve yet to have done conceptions of ugliness heavy in my socket. building up in my chest cavity like browning plaque until breath cannot make it through. the ghosts of my past selves run fingers through our unkept hair
9
kinking and straightening, rounding my nose, filling my lips ferrying me across the crumbling bridge before the weight of either side tips the balance completely. i want my teeth to fall out and tell my future like dice. snake eyes says we are all skeletons, just bone and negative space worked together by a careful hand. double sixes foretell that mirror me and mirror I will battle until death until absolute beauty whole mythic lost somewhere in between.
10
SACRIFICE take me into your mouth like a dog who has found a rabbit, her floppy ears lying limp and bloodied.
11
give me to your owner as a gift, as something to be proud of, as proof of your beastery. carry me across the yard with care, with something like love but not, with something we named and then forgot, carry me to peace and bury me, bury me so that when reconstructing history they can point to the churned dirt of the unmarked grave and say there she was, poor rabbit. don’t you know you can’t change the dogs? that they will always chase, gun you down, wear you as prize? they used to be wolves, you know.
12
IN SICKNESS mental illness is nuclear fission— it splits yourself in two. here: a collection of atoms of who you want to be there: another of who you are. a borderline, bottomless figure, cloak and hood pulled halfway over the grin-slit face. a slouching witcher, slinking in the street under rattling rooftop to rooftop, seeking temporary shelter from the grinding rain. not a ghost but a ghoul. not something that engenders fear but pity, perhaps. or a socio-political paternalism. did you know the mentally ill and the handicapped were the first to die? this creature dims in wattage with a morning every-other-day dose of lexapro. milligrams of white. is this my true self, this chaotic swath of human streaked against a crooked canvas? or is madness knowing the terminal fear of the masses— that there is no true self at all. that we all just slither from place to place, slotting infected tongues in open wounds, poeming ourselves into something beautiful, gaping at the figure in the shadows who moves when we move, rises when we rise.
13
Chapbook selected and designed by QUARTO MAGAZINE staff Editors-in-Chief Cameron Lee Priya Pai Editorial Team Samantha Caveny Erik Cera Anna Chavez Melissa Cook Nick Gauthier Lily Ha Sophie Lee Amanda Ong Alison Peebles Petru Rosu
Head of Design Charlie Blodnieks Art & Design Editors Mallory Evans Gisela Levy Sophie Levy Katie Mimini Dora O’Neill Mitali Sharma Iona Tan Staff Editors Willa Cuthrell-Tuttleman TJ Gill Jane Paknia Neeraj Ramachandran Catherine Valdez Tamarah Wallace
Thank you to our advisor Joe Fasano and the Columbia Undergraduate Creative Writing Department, especially Dorla McIntosh, for their continued support.
14