Sirens Zine Issue #5

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Bl.M. Kali G

Lives are on the line We tend to save what we want The masculine ones Feminine energy left To devices that destroy It is true that Black lives matter, but whose lives are the ones on the front line? We hear piercing roars of the mother bears who lose their unarmed cubs. Cubs who have disappeared without justice, their killers proud to take yet another life as their souvenir.

We raise our fists in defiance, hands shake in anger at our loss while racism rears its desperate fangs and poisons our hearts.

Poison that dissolves our ability to see one another as counterparts.

Potent like toxic masculinity that eats at our vulnerability, seeking to destroy, sexuality.

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Seeking to destroy, sexuality, our sense of blackness, has become tainted.

The ebb and the flow of the polluted waters are filled with the uncertainty of what it means to be a man, to be yourself. Pollution comes from all over, even the places we had thought were free from the same toxins that carry over, a side effect of the poison that aims to divide and conquer, Black versus gay.

Who hurts more? Do we all suffer the same?

Who is to blame for the flame that betrays who we have become? Clearly gay Black man, you have to find a suitable game plan.

Painful side effects Of devices that destroy Two worlds divided Never reconcilable Everyone always forgets

Who has to find a suitable game plan?

Those who don’t have spiritual forebears, no one onto which they can compare their lives to. No one left to lend a wise hand to those who need its touch. We who must be both gay and black, Black and gay, forever blurring the lines of masculinity, crossing between communities cleverly embracing what we must, survival.

Not every one of us can be king of Wakanda, the one archetypal man our brave mothers dreamed of us being, Our Black is distinct, it is not finite, We are marked undesirable, outright.

With life on the rim Everyone always forgets Those who play on teams

Sickness or lifestyle What does it mean to be Black?

To be told you’re not Are we just an idea?

Byproduct of oppression We are marked undesirable outright, not given the chance to move past bias.

Humans who are likened to a virus, infecting the pool of possible knights in shining armor, prepped for a battle with fetish seeking savages that‘ll stop at nothing to fill distasteful needs.

For it is upon us on which they feed and hunger for Black traits and Black features from non-Black bodies.

They fall deep in love with the idea of us, us creatures.

The reality of us consists of more than a predetermined level of masculinity, an elusive love.

Not their own, incongruous What does it mean to be Black?

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Chaste fin S I wanna get away from me I just feel so fucking bad Need to extricate myself From this nightmare I’ve been dragged Like I really need some help Don’t mean to make you all feel bad So let me introduce myself The saddest friend you never had Look for me where there’s no throttle At the bottom of a bottle You can find me resting easy Like there is no fucking problem Inside sores that won’t stop weeping And the wounds that never heal Parasites that just keep feeding Bearing teeth that are not real I live in deepest corners of A mind so absolutely frail I can almost feel your love From my little spot in hell Swathed in suffocating bleakness Postulates of the insane Fed by cruelly kept secrets Made of unrequited pain Steeped in tear soaked pillows Riddled in unrighted wrongs Nerves brittler than willow I’m melting and my hands are gone Between a nightmare and a dream Needles underneath nail beds Please don’t listen when I scream Peace in existential dread

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Drowned in unsung tears From an unseeing eye Monolithic cosmic fear That your soul may never die That you’ll always remain here No room for truth amongst the lies It’s like tourniquet for fear A millennial’s necktie You can find me in scars of worn out handles And when your throat begins to bleed Burning like a roman candle You delude yourself you need A slave to this latent gamble From which you will never be freed Cuz you created your own vandal A truly hopeless case indeed

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Wanton fin S cw: n-slur I wanna taste something sweet I wanna feel something good make me drink it all in I really wish a nigga would I mean completely tailspin I fuckin wish a nigga could Cuz like where do I begin?

So that my thirst is understood

It floats in lemon latent baths And coffee colored eyes Drifting into softened slumber Giving way to lucid highs Captive to this silent thunder Woven through cutely hitching sighs Sinking into listless wonder Under an ever burning sky

It’s between honey thighs Soaked in sun kissed skin Amid hips that never lie But can somehow spell sin Nestled on languid tongues Spin sweet nothings to nowhere Through lilting lover’s eyes And candied jasmine scented hair

It lies pliant in penthouse suites Beneath midnight silken sheets And it’s all that you can see Because you’re whipped beyond belief Yet it’s all you’ll ever need Your single source of sweet release A cause for which to bleed Its squeaky wheel gets all your grease

Rides on praline dipped whispers Of what still lies therein That flows into sweet oceans Leaving dribbles down your chin Canting over petrichor Umami honeysuckle grin Leaving your body craving more If you would only let it in

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Chapter Seven: The Tempest Spawned (An excerpt from A Tale of Two Planets, Volume I: The Sowing)

by Avery Xelyntino cw: brief self harm mentions Synopsis: A Tale of Two Planets is a sci-fi/fantasy/drama series in three parts: The Sowing, Efflorescence, and The Reaping. For millennia, Earth has failed to recognize the existence of life on other planets in its solar system.

Mars has seen imperialist exodus and incorrigible greed. A handful of young people are drawn into the crossfire, becoming the front lines of their respective planets’ aims. Dren is a young man from Ignaar, called Mars by the Earthlings, and after volunteering for what was supposedly an educational mission is trapped in a political, spiritual, and systemic web he can’t seem to escape. Keisha is a devoted band geek in her first year of college when she suddenly becomes a metahuman and joins a vigilante agency dedicated to protecting the proletarian public from Earth-origin as well as extraterrestrial threats, developing her mysterious weapons and powers as she navigates relationships and develops in her own intersections. This series is an exploration of adolescent and young-adult angst, queerness, madness, identity, intimacy, and power; coming of age as a late-blooming outsider in the midst of a brewing interplanetary war.

Keisha couldn’t explain herself.

Use your words, her mother had scolded many times when she’d expressed incomprehensible frustration in explosive syllables and actions or stood transfixed in exasperation. And in the heat of the moment, use her words she never could.

“What’s the problem?” her roommate and friend Marcie had been asking, watching Keisha pace back and forth in the dorm room cracking her knuckles from their bunk. “Something’s obviously bothering you.”

“I don’t know!” Keisha yelled.

“Ooooookaaaaayyyyyy.” Marcie dragged out the word, exasperated. “Is it about Rajesh?”

Rajesh, Keisha’s new close friend and the only non-roommate member of their squad. He’d fainted that afternoon and she saw the horrors he inflicted upon himself. But then an alien appeared and without willing herself to, she’d shifted into her meta form, ready to give the sorry fucker the beatdown of his life. Now she stomped her foot. “No!” she shrieked. Her burnt-umber to orchid ombre hair fanned voluminous and wavy round her as she shook her head.

Hell, she was acting like such a child. A cursed brat. But what could she say? The alien’s face—Dren’s—flashed before her eyes once again and her veins hummed with an unsettling power.

“Fine. I won’t ask.”

Keisha didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t do. She wouldn’t do.

Marcie climbed down from their bunk to retrieve their laptop. Of course they would do that, be all responsible and do homework.

Keisha continued pacing. She wanted to scream. She wanted to hit something. She wanted to hit something and scream. Malia (her other roommate-friend) would flip. Cautious, careful, contradictory Malia whose sense of adventure encompassed scuba diving and five-star spicy tom laeng yet excluded change to her personal schema.

Outside.

She had to go outside, leave the room, leave her body and her mind.

She paced.

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Malia was out getting dinner with her Bible study friends. Good. Keisha didn’t want to see her anyway. Not now, not in this state of perturbation.

Keisha put on her shoes and jacket and grabbed her lanyard. Down the many twisting flights of corner stairs, out the door, across a tree-lined path to the music building where she kept her trumpet in its locker.

The practice rooms were stifling; the stadium open and free. She left the music building for the storied jaws of the stadium, her fall season home. Punched in the entry code and left her case on the sidelines, stood at the center of the field.

Keisha played.

She wove ribbons of clarion resonance in the night, staccato artillery and soaring silks jubilant and mournful, condemning and inspiring. She danced, kneeling and swinging her bell to the sky, curling her spine in a spiral away from her spread-stanced feet. Her body and soul furled and unfurled, raveling and unraveling with the gyrations of melody and rhythm. The field was her temple and her horn was her conduit as she existed in tandem with the liege waving their hands from the podium of gods, directing the band of young spirits on a clearing below, even if only in her imagination.

A brilliant white light enveloped her, filling her vision and burning her skin. She blistered from the inside out, the cells of her body transmuting in the surrounding resplendence, her bones molten and skin dissolved. The nocturnal breeze solidified her reconstituted skin and she was once again under the stadium lights.

Keisha felt as if she had been unearthed. She simmered in action potentials waiting to be triggered. Her arms and legs, once covered by her pants and jacket, were bare; the red garment from the Vision draped over her instead. Her skin tingled with exuberance. She was at once herself and the bitten-peach spirits of nine thousand Hokkien and Tagalog ancestors and no one at all. She was as she had been rebirthed in the Void. She was filled with the vastness of the Universe and all its fluctuating glory, bursting with the forces of everything that was and had been and would ever be.

And still she felt tumultuous.

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Furious.

Turbulent.

She hated it all.

She hated the authority figures and peers who minimized her struggles. Hated the greedy billionaires lusting after corporate growth at the expense of the civilians they depended on. Hated the supposed officers of justice whose first instincts were to kill and maim, the crescendo of Earth’s cries in her debilitating struggle to support a human race enslaved to profit, the complicit governments and officials who turned their backs to such corruption and left stranded the citizens they claimed to be by and for.

But most of all, she hated whoever, whatever, whichever entity or force drove one beautifully eccentric and passionately sensitive boy to cut and presumably starve himself.

She bellowed, a rumbling roar from the depths of her stomach where a sea of chi swirled and churned to break in devastating waves, and stomped one foot hard into the ground. The shock waves traveled from her striking heel up her spine, making her whole body shudder in exhilaration.

She stomped again, and the surrounding turf rippled outward from the point of impact. Remembering the martial arts classes she’d taken as a child—her grandmother had suggested the after-class kung fu practice to give her a constructive outlet for the simmering energy building in her through two painful hours of Chinese school—she took a fighting stance, throwing punches and blocks into the empty night at a carelessly breakneck pace, arms and fists pushing through the air they displaced.

A wobbling bass thrust its way through the stadium with a low vrooming whoosh. Fifty yards away, the arms of the goalpost swayed ever so slightly.

Keisha watched its gentle undulations in awe. Her chest heaved as she caught her breath, and her skin tingled as the sweat oozing hot from her pores clashed with the cold late-January air. The cuffs adorning her wrists glowed golden with a soft yet furious intensity and the iridescent jewels adorning them radiated potency. Her superhuman strength, perhaps, was from their luminescence.

She imagined herself standing at the bastions of a great city, casting fire from her fists, defending the innocent civilians within from threatening colonial powers. Illuminating the night with flaming pillars from her hands and sending incendiary wheels clean through enemy ranks. Casting opposing warriors aside with a simple downward block without even touching them, instead displacing them with waves of energy from her movements. Punching, hitting, crossing, blocking, kicking, ducking.

The air began to shift more and more, visibly and audibly with each maneuver. A low sweeping kick, and the turf rippled in a resounding buzz-roll zing. An X-block pushed in front of her chest, and the air before her rushed forward in another wobbling bass wave. A knife hand strike, and the stadium echoed with the bell-like ping of an energy wave striking the metal sideline bench in its path.

Keisha, the sound-disrupting, chaos-making, system-displacing paladin. She was a tempest.

She remembered the vermilion eye in the clouds, recalled the trails of light in the Void. She brought the storm; she made the storm.

She was the storm.

Night had long since fallen over the concrete and glass hovels Montlake University called its Northeast Square.

Keisha lay awake in her bed, staring at the empty ceiling. She’d eaten a bowl of ramen spruced up with sesame oil, wakame, and a hard-boiled egg. She’d taken a hot shower and put on a face mask. She’d set her alarm to wake her up by ten the next morning, put her phone in her wardrobe and shut the door so she couldn’t scroll the night away.

Yet sleep evaded her still.

Shivering in her pajamas, she quietly left her dorm room and building. She crossed the courtyard. Ran across an empty road through the quad past an angular abstract statue that happened to be a Pokemon Go gym into the university’s Red Yard, named for the stubbly red bricks that comprised the ground.

The silence brought her mind back to the Void in which she’d heard the Voice; the cold air hitting her face, cutting through her pajamas, chilling her breasts felt like the caress of Death herself.

She knew how they did it.

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The magical girls, the shapeshifters, the trickster deities.

But how would she? No one had given her a phrase or a suggestion, not a hint of her metahuman form’s origin.

Was she to speak herself into novel being? Perform a rite? Or simply will herself to become?

Keisha recalled the Void. Heard once more the Voice, saw the light trails, felt the garments and crown in her body-mind heart. She shuddered. Her fingers and toes tingled. Her back arched, sending her shoulders forwards then throwing them back to expose her chest to the sky. Her belly button stuck itself to the back of her spine.

She felt her body floating upwards, leaving her slippers behind on the bricks. Her clothes dissolving. She was naked, suspended in the air.

And then she felt the vibrations. Energy pulsating in waves from deep inside her body, surging through her torso and limbs, crackling on her skin.

She saw nothing.

But this time, the nothing was light. Pure light, stark and cold. It burned.

Was this pain what Rajesh felt, that drove him to self-destruction? Or was it the feeling the blades gave him, one that he sought?

She couldn’t.

She wouldn’t.

She refused to allow herself to imagine it, pushing the thoughts down into the sealed-off gutter in her mind where she kept such destructive things. Slide away the manhole cover and everything violent and self-destructive and catastrophic she ever imagined would come seeping out and slowly poison her until she was mired in necrosis.

That same headspace as her friend, that searing yet simultaneously numbing hell which he felt could only escape in shamefully concealed draughts of blood and steel.

“No,” Keisha said forcefully. “No more.” She thrust her palm outward as if to ward off the Hadean sludge of self-cataclysmic potential.

She opened her arms, palms to the sky. Invoked life and invited vibration, allowing her bubbling emotions to boil over and make space for raging vigor.

She would not destroy herself, but guard her confidant.

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After a moment she was back in the darkness, surrounded by the nighttime blanketing the university.

It felt different.

She looked down at her feet and examined her clothing, which was once again the garments of her metahuman form. Extended her arms and felt the energy radiating from her fingertips.

Keisha, once again, held power.

She jumped. She was high above ground, eyes level with the rooftop of a large lecture hall. Carefully she moved her legs in the semblance of a step. She didn’t fall, yet didn’t move. Maybe she had to glide. She brought both fists above her head and straightened her arms like Superman, and up she went. She turned her body to one side and found herself flying in that direction.

“I can fly!” she shouted. “I can fly!”

Somehow, she didn’t feel cold. The wind whipped at her face and sent tears streaming down her cheeks, her hair in a halo around her as she flew in circles and twists and figure eights, took sharp turns here and hard banks there, shot up and plummeted down in the near-freezing air.

At last she landed, exhilarated.

What about weapons? Keisha wondered.

Once again she recalled the Void and the nothingness she’d felt in that liminal Vision-space. She felt nothing new.

“Why not this time?” she grumbled to herself.

Frustrated, Keisha punched the red bricks of the ground, careful not to deliver too hard a blow in case her energy-punching abilities had not also granted her superhuman durability.

It didn’t hurt at all.

Carefully she drew back her fist to examine the damage. The brick bore the imprints of her striking knuckles.

She punched again, harder.

The brick cracked clean in half.

“Whoa!” she breathed. “That was cool!”

But did she have weapons?

For a moment she considered once again invoking the Void despite its previous failures to bring her power.

She quickly cast aside the idea as foolish.

Instead Keisha immersed herself in memories of the past drum corps season, that time of power and discovery and becoming . She reimagined her deified summertime self: bronze and glowing in exertive secretion, body

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projecting transcendent authority as she skimmed across the competitive field; conjured the exchanges between her own tumultuous being and loyal armament with the steadfast earth and fickle sky; inhaled once again in the shelter of her fancies the life-force offerings of an enraptured crowd. She was back in the midst of a crackling magnetization, muscles straining under the weight of her horn as she breathed and was one with her comrades in song.

Have weapons, she did indeed.

The sudden weight in her hand nearly made her drop the manifested object in surprise. It resembled a battleaxe, with a glimmering ebony shaft approximately the length of her thigh and a pair of angular, wing-shaped dual blades at the base of the weapon’s pointed crystal head that cast a deep red glow in the darkness. She swung it wide. There was a heavy whoosh as the blades cut through the air. She swung it again and the blades cut through the still night.

Keisha reveled in the power surging through her blood, life and destruction and magic and liberation humming in her veins.

She didn’t have to be the nice girl and good girl in order to be respected, didn’t have to dampen her colors or dull her sharp edges. She could be dangerous and she could be free and unhinged. She wouldn’t be the crazy girl who punched pillows and allowed herself only one scream into the void, forcing herself to a degree of restraint for fear she break something important or people look at her and call her psychotic and scurry away at the sound of her footsteps, just the way her parents warned as her outbursts continued long past the appropriate age and into adolescence.

Not anymore.

Instead she could manipulate and form the power originating in her brazen heart and tangled feelings into a force to be reckoned with. Break out of the conditioning of her youth which required her to be less direct, less confrontational, polite and pleasant and reasonable instead of uncooperative aggro hustle argumentative.

This form was deliverance. Transformation. Transmutation and evolution into a queen mage of gold and steel.

Blood.

Fire. .

Continue reading on Wattpad. Search “A Tale of Two Planets” by Eyes_of_the_Earth

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