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THE ANA \T͟ HƏ\·\ˈĀ-NƏ\ PRONOUNCED: AH-NUH (NOUN) 1. A collection of miscellaneous information about a particular subject, person, place, or thing. 2. The Ana is a quarterly arts magazine that celebrates humanity. We act and publish in line with the notion that everyone’s life is literature and everyone deserves access to art. While all rights revert to contributors, The Ana would like to be noted as the first place of publication. The Ana acknowledges that this magazine was founded on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We acknowledge the painful history of genocide and forced occupation of their territory, and we honor and respect the many diverse indigenous people connected to this land on which we gather from time immemorial.
Cover design by Minhee Kim Typesetting and design by Carlos Quinteros III & London Pinkney Set in Georgia (Matthew Carter, 1993) and Futura (Paul Renner, 1927)
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Editor-in-Chief London Pinkney
Managing Editor Carlos Quinteros III
Fiction Editors Santos Arteaga TreVaughn Malik Roach-Carter
Poetry Editors Oli Villescas Carlos Quinteros III
Art Editor Minhee Kim
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THE ANA Issue #7 September 2021
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Hello All,
To say the United States and European Imperialism has negatively effected the world is a vast understatement. The violence perpetrated by the US and Europe have destroyed the physical, political, spiritual, and emotional sovereignty of nations in the Global South. This imperialism and colonialism are not just metaphors or jargon, but are a series of actions with traumatic repercussions which have—and will continue to— reverberate for generations even if United States and European nations took accountability for their actions. Citizens of these nations must do their part to educate themselves and root out the lies imperialism and colonialism have taught them about the Global South. In our attempt to celebrate humanity, The Ana recognizes that we must also care for one another. The magazine has donated to the following organizations and we encourage you to do similarly.
Much love, London Pinkney Editor-in-Chief
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Editor’s Note
Afghans for A Better Tomorrow Afghans for A Better Tomorrow is an organization founded by members of the diaspora “who have one foot in Afghanistan; the other one in the U.S.” They aim to hold global elected officials accountable for policies “that impact and affect the Afghan people.”
Live Love: Beirut Live Love: Beirut is an organization that strives to relieve the lasting damage from the August 2020 Beirut explosions. The organization sets up disaster management and response units that match people in need with donations, services, or volunteers.
Cuba Decide Cuba Decide is a grassroots, non-partisan organization that strives to create where Cuban citizens are equal under the law and have equal access to opportunities for improvement.
Sow A Seed Sow A Seed provides healthcare, education, shelter and the arts to children in Haiti, Jamaica, and other Caribbean islands.
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CROSS-GENRE PROSE 38
Branches by Remy Chartier
FICTION
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Joshua’s Song by AJ Sorensen
NON-FICTION 8 42
A is for Atheist by Sharon Coleman Virtuous Women by Sharon Coleman
POETRY 3
My, My, My by R. Shawntez Jackson
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Inertia by Jordán Mendez
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a sorrowful reminder by Marissa Vidales
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The boy who was born upside down by Carlos León
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core by Noriea Rain
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lemon vodka by B. Rocha
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Where I’m From by Cynthia Le Monds
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POETRY IN TRANSLATION 49
Fraguionmentos de “Landsmoder” por Elena Salamanca [trad. Ryan Greene]
Script Scraps from “Landsmoder” by Elena Salamanca [trans. Ryan Greene]
VISUAL ART 2
When you leave your home, remember the unicorn, they are in your dreams… by Irina Novikova
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Untitled Works by Tashianna Jones
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Rebirth. Phoenix threw off his mask by Irina Novikova
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Soft Boys Love Better by Benjamin Lomeli
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the house on the hill by cylo
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Reborn as a snake by Irina Novikova
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Hypokondrisk by Bailey Haworth
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Re ection in the mirror. Time and bird by Irina Novikova
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SPOTLIGHT with Samantha Nichols
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In the Shadows by Oli Villescas
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Contributors
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When you leave your home, remember the unicorn, they are in your dreams…, Irina Novikova
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My, My, My poetry by R. Shawntez Jackson My sleep is restless My dreams spasmodic My days hazed and disconnected My vision cloudy My desires cause loud hunger noises, echoing throughout my actions. My intentions aren't filled with interests of possibility or positivity. My heart heavy from weight not my own. My legs carrying cancer in infancy My soul needs revival and a condom My hands need to pray, and hold tight to an unchanging hand. My desperation for change can be cut like cheese. My hungering for love and intimacy are drowning me in anxiety My thoughts aren't friends on lonely nights, not logs on the fire of smoldering excitement contained in future success or current contentment. My, my, my, I'm all caught up in myself again!!! Shake, pray, walk, breath, and repeat.
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Untitled, Tashianna Jones
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Untitled, Tashianna Jones
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Inertia poetry by Jordán Mendez for a thousand days, I mourn your loss silence, no sound escapes beneath the shade of the sleepy evergreens I close my eyes and dream, meditating over my past mistakes the sound of thunder awakens me, as the tree above bursts into flames so used to stillness, at first I freeze, but the heat begins to touch my skin unsure of what to do I run for the first time in years
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a sorrowful reminder poetry by Marissa Vidales there cannot be a void in my womb if i feel your heartache haunting me there
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nonfiction by Sharon Coleman The poetry professor handed me his gun. He was a rather good poet but was better known and knew himself as a professor who ran the college’s poetry center. To be more precise, it was a rifle. He had long retired but missed being a professor and held poetry court Sunday mornings once a month. He called it a salon and presided at the head of a table spread with plates of bagels, lox, capers, cream cheese, orange juice, coffee. Behind him, mounted on the wall, his hunting rifles. Four of them.
We were six, seven, eight or more people who loved poetry though only a few
were accomplished poets. We brought poems to share, not our own. For a few sessions, we focused on Dickinson. Down the hall to his right hung another rack of hunting rifles. “I’m the only gun owner who believes in gun control,” he’d say then complain about how difficult it was to buy bullets in San Francisco. I wasn’t an accomplished poet but wanted to become one. Just out of an MFA program that taught me very little, I took whatever opportunities that presented themselves to learn more. The rifle was beautifully crafted and heavy in my hands, the stock smoothly sanded, polished wood.
I was relatively young then and attractive enough that he agreed to read a short
manuscript of poems I had just written and give them a critique. So, I mailed them to him and later to set up an early afternoon meeting. The hills of San Francisco and streets that carved them into grids shone in unimpeded sunshine beyond his floor-toceiling windows. He talked mostly about his poetry and his beloved second wife, long deceased, who was a novelist. This was the most I’d heard him speak of her, and he became teary-eyed for a minute. He handed me a chapbook of his poems and then a new one and asked me to read them. I’d never held a gun before and mimicked the movies— holding the barrel in my left and the stock in my right, raising it to my shoulder and looking straight, one eye open.
He took every chance on Sundays to compliment one item of clothing I wore or
my bag or shoes. I took to wearing all black, nondescript clothing, and he frowned. The
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A is for Atheist
poetics and my manuscript was a bit experimental. He adored Wallace Stevens. I lowered the rifle and handed it back to him as quickly as I’d raised it.
In his office was yet another rack of hunting rifles. He still liked me. I was petite,
and my long brown hair was just beginning to grey, with a sexy streak where I parted it. My husband began to come to the Sunday salons, and the poetry professor would brag about the lead shot he had in his stomach from the quail he hunted and ate. My husband is from Texas. He wears a black leather motorcycle jacket. My husband has never shot a gun. The poetry professor, who could barely walk anymore, would swivel in his chair and mime shooting birds from the sky.
It’s not that he’d never been shot down himself but precisely because he had.
Over Germany during the war. He was a navigator on a bomber. He wanted to be a navigator. “All the navigators were Jewish” he’d say with a big grin. When the plane was hit and going down and the crew all jumped and opened their parachutes, he was relieved. The war was over for him, he’d say. Everybody had heard his story many times. They still enjoyed it. The bagels were really good too, the real thing, not Noah’s. My father was a WWII vet who never talked about the war. The poetry professor would say he was treated well at the POW camp. His dog tags had an H for Hebrew because when he asked for an A, the woman scowled at him and stamped H. He got really scared when after a year all the Jewish POWs were put in a single unit. Then all went quiet. When the Russians liberated the camp, they called for one of their troops who spoke Yiddish to let them know it was all over. The professor didn’t speak much Yiddish, but he got the idea.
The Russians found the order to liquidate all the Jewish POWs on the
commander’s desk, pushed to the side. In one poem from my manuscript is a soldier who lies down in a field of red anemones. The professor didn’t criticize my poem. He didn’t say much about it. I guess it wasn’t his thing. My husband doesn’t have a motorcycle. He is an artist who made that manuscript of poems into a fine art book. He can look very tough, his way of being a Jew in Texas where once he joined a group of women to block the KKK in Austin.
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rifle stock was as sensual as skin against my cheek. I knew he didn’t like experimental
The poetry professor was not very impressed with my husband’s taste in poetry.
Ultimately, he came to respect mine when I brought in a poem by Jack Hirshman that genuinely moved him. The only one. He’d say he was not the only hunter who believed in forest conservation. He’d met maybe two others. He invited us to his house one evening to dine on his most recently shot bevy of quail. “Welcome to the saloon,” he handed my husband a glass of Laphroaig whiskey. “It tastes like armpit sweat but of the very best kind.”
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The boy who was born upside down poetry by Carlos León
The day I was born I didn’t come out right They had to slit my mother in half For since the beginning I’ve been doing things wrong Even at the uterus I was standing upside down Once a year they sing to me “el día que tú naciste, nacieron todas las flores” But I know they are lying, It was probably pouring As it has on all my birthdays. I was neither the eldest nor the youngest son Nor the fresh meat nor the wise man But somewhere in-between both Wherever all the middles grow, And bloom, and stumble, and flow As an infant I didn’t crawl through the floor I dragged my belly across the ceiling And growing up I didn’t try to reach the frame of the door But I jumped, trying to get my fingers to reach the floor In my youth I felt more alone with my friends Than I did when I wasn't with them
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I’ve always learned in reverse And chose to walk the wrong roads I sometimes cry at funny movies When the goofy character gets hurt And I have trouble sleeping Unless it’s through the days What am I? Depends on the day you ask I am either nothing Or all the things I shouldn’t have Somedays I don’t feel like I'm alive But I surely don’t believe I’m dead I'm only existing, not dying nor living Most days I’m not exactly unhappy But rather melancholic Nor am I ever enough Just about hands-reach close And I don’t think this will ever stop I will never change but I won’t stop trying Nor can I stop trying For this struggling is all I know Nor do I want it to change For the day I don't have to be trying I will also be dying
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The day I am finally living I will not be me Since I truly only exist In the in-betweens. And the day I give up, I’ll stop being in the middle And the middle is all I own
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Rebirth. Phoenix threw off his mask, Irina Novikova
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core poetry by Noreia Rain
life will puncture your stillness and bleed you. life will take away the smell of dried leaves, the orange brown gold, spread wide like the sky on a kansas city park in 2008 when you are twenty-four and the world is laced through and through with mystery and magic. the enchantment will be a whisper that is shouted over, life will be a heckler grabbing the mic just when you are ready to sing in a pure, clear voice like the porch in portland on an icy november morning. you were twenty-two and the soft grey couch there felt like home in a way you couldn’t explain. the damp air and your legs under a blanket, the balcony railing, the crows so high overhead: these were a language you had fallen into without understanding its form. life will try to smudge the ink of that drawing. it will take many forms, including a woman with long dark hair whose breasts pop aggressively out of her shirt and whose smile clutches her lips but leaves her eyes behind. she will claw and grasp at your child like a golden cup to be presented on a pedestal. she will try to pour sludge into his mind. you will try to inhale love and exhale peace and yet your pulse will rage like a drum under the earth, an autumn bonfire, the unrestrainable waves of the ocean against the stone walls of the tunnel when you were twenty-one and would walk, arms outstretched, through damp blackness,
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consumed by the growls of the surf. you will feel the sky as a black anvil pressing down, but don’t let her ceaseless chatter batter you into amnesia. you are the bright flames of leaves on grass, the clovesmoke air of the fall, magic in the heat-heavy shadows. you are the ice and rain, the couch on the porch and the crows and the roses. you are the irrepressible ocean. you are the bruised fists of an undulating storm, you are specks of firefly light in a black summer sky thick with grass and pollen. remember the real things, the things that crack you wide open in the face of so much beauty. remember to breathe them in.
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with Samantha Nichols
Are you a spotlight,
ashlight, street light, or neon light?
I’d like to think of myself as a neon light. Something that can try so hard to be subtle, but it’s not in its life-path to be subtle. It can bring lots of joy and inspiration when it’s on and shining bright!
What medium of art are you?
This is a tough one! My answer may be a little unexpected, but I think I would say that I’m sound. Sound is something you don’t have to necessarily see, but you can feel. It can heal, excite, motivate or relax you. Courtesy of Samantha Nichols
Summarize your work in one word?
My work is emotion.
What is your mission as an artist?
My mission is to give a unique perspective. To make people redefine their standards of beauty. To create tangible energy.
Courtesy of Samantha Nichols
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SPOTLIGHT
While taking my birth chart into a lot consideration for this one, I’m definitely from Jupiter. Jupiter is the planet of spirituality, exploration and good fortune. I relate to this in many ways and feel it’s a huge part of my personality!
What is your favorite part of the human body?
The hands are my favorite part of the human body. For function, they are great of course! However, I naturally notice hands on others because they say a lot about a person- age, interests/hobbies, health and how they care for themselves. Someone with calloused hands may be a builder or a musician. Someone else with polish or acrylic nails may be into fashion, makeup, etc.
What color are you?
I am the sunset!! I live and breathe the color
orange.
From where do you draw inspiration?
I draw inspiration from music, fashion, nature and life experiences. Inspiration comes from anywhere that brings up an emotion inside of you. That’s what fuels your fire and you have to ride on it and see where it takes you. Usually something beautiful or eye opening comes out of it at the end of it all.
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What planet are you from?
............ For more of Sam’s art, nd her on Instagram at @samnicholsart
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Courtesy of Samantha Nichols
Soft Boys Love Better, Benjamin Lomeli
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lemon vodka poetry by B. Rocha trauma filled daisies, smelling fresh with lilac bruises. lilacs were the botanical beauties my grandmother wore around her hips-printed on fabric, hanging to her ankles, long and light-weighted not unlike the feathers that were plucked from my body one pluck, two pluck, three fuck, four. fuck was the forbidden fruit that fell off the lemon tree that i laid under in the summer. iced tea with extra ice to put in a cloth and then under my eye. beauty beholds nothing but death-you were ten when you discovered vodka, your breath reeked of nothing. water filled to the rim of the bottle, spilling out like spaghetti noodles from your dural sack. your spine was never meant to hold two hundred and fifty pounds of flesh, of hatred. as you lay there, crushed,
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under the weight of the fallen lemons, resting in dead oak leaves, your body only feels the crackles of the brown and dried brush beneath you. a lemon falls into your mouth and you taste the sour, the sweet, the bloody seeds as they caress your gums. puckering up for a kiss from death, as you chase the sour with more vodka. reminiscing on the times in which you were nothing more than a fetus, innocent and smelling of lilacs.
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Where I’m From poetry by Cynthia Le Monds
There are no ladies— Just girls and women And hags with a smidgen Of bitch and butch And fists stout as stone Made to break flesh and Bone on boys and men Who don’t know when to quit. Where I’m from The women turn the dirt And some turn tricks But none turn the cheek When somebody crosses the line— And lots of somebodies Cross the line Where I’m from.
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The house on the hill, cylo
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Joshua’s Song fiction by AJ Sorensen Movement One: Adagio
The days after Joshua’s death slipped by like a fever dream. Time broke apart and came together, leaving breaks in my world, and in the fracturing, I became a wanderer slipping through the cracks. I moved from place to place without crossing through the places in between, only existing in the brief moments where my thoughts were unclouded by grief. My mom told me I spent a whole day wandering around the park by his old house, but I didn’t remember that. I didn’t remember sleeping that week either, but I remembered dreaming while awake. I remembered the moonlight slipping through half shut curtains as I sat on my bed rummaging through pictures of Joshua and I growing up. The photos felt foreign in my hands, artificial and distant. They were just sheets of plastic with colors and shapes imposed onto them, all recognition fleeting from my mind. My memories were no longer confined to the pictures of the past, instead they settled in my room and preened quietly over me as I sat in silence. I don’t think I felt human again until autumn had lifted me from my summer stupor. Though, even then, with the world settling in place again, when I closed my eyes, I could still see all the cavernous breaks in my world. I watch Joshua lean back against the couch. His hand tousles through his tangled brown hair as his focus darts across the room. His leg bounces in a rapid fever that shakes his whole body, shakes the couch, shakes the house, until everything is vibrating and bouncing and unstable. He tells me that he shouldn’t come over to my house as often anymore because his parents don’t think I’m a good influence. When I ask him why they think I’m a “bad influence”, he changes the topic. I don’t press the issue any further. I never do.
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Instead, I suggest that we head up to my room to watch YouTube videos and listen to music. When he sheepishly smiles at me and smooths out his shirt with his unsteady palms, I turn away so that he can’t see my face. I wonder if he can hear it, the frantic stroking of violins and cellos crying out in a sulking unison. I wonder if he can feel the way it clips through the air and injects itself under my skin like a mounting static. It’s the start of something, a precursor to an undulating turmoil, a high-pitched drone of a dissonant orchestra dissolving into the summer humidity. The first time I met the prince, I woke up to hear the grandfather clock in the hallway outside of my room strike three times. My curtains were drawn back, and the prince stood there beneath a silver light that illuminated his dusty gray-gray hair, like the moon. His square jaw framed a soft expression built from sharp features. The prince told me he had come from the stars, but I knew that was a lie. I had seen him slip out of one of the cracks left by the impact of Joshua’s absence. He donned the color of absence on royal attire, the darkest black I had ever seen, which made him seem as if he bled into the shadows of the room. When he spoke, his voice was calm and took flight between the gaps in my heartbeat. It reverberated through the night like the soft muffled laughter that used to brush against the walls of my room. When he offered me what I wanted, to bring Joshua back, or to at least let him know how much he had meant to me, I accepted. He told me to wait for the song, that I would know when my wish was fulfilled. In a low voice, however, he warned me that the world must first break again and again before it could be remade anew. I notice that Joshua has fallen asleep when the book he’s reading falls to the floor with a thud. The sunlight drowns us in an amber glow, but I am content and holding my breath. Outside my room, the clouds spread thin against a backdrop of a setting rose, and I can hear my mom watering the garden. I can imagine her tending her daffodils with a tender touch and teary-eyed appreciation for her own hard work, imagine the chirping sparrows perched above, lost in their garbling songs as they become preserved in the moment with us. When I look over at Joshua, he seems almost unrecognizable in the best way possible. I count backwards from ten and try to remember the way he looks when the whirlwind in his mind has ceased. The prince sits at the edge of the bed with me, watching Joshua’s chest rise and fall. I lie beside him
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and listen to his shallow breathing, its pleasant tempo. I close my eyes and try to remember things exactly as they are. The moments like this, the brief moments of refuge in this never-ending summer cycle, seem to happen less and less. In the dark of my mind, the image of him fizzles, becoming a slow cadence of notes waltzing on with a dissonant line lurking under the surface.
The melody
harmonizes with the prince’s song, a never-ending waltz strumming in the back of my mind. I wonder if Joshua were able to see himself like this, remember the way it feels to have the sunlight warm our bodies on this summer evening, if it would be enough to make him want to stay. After that night, I saw the prince more and more frequently. Though, most of the time, he never said much. As the maple tree outside of my house burned to a golden blaze with the rise of autumn, I wracked my brain over what seemed familiar about the prince. There was always this uncanny look in his eyes, something both human and monstrous at the same time. There was something distant and longing to be complete, something writhing below the surface, something I recognized but could not place. I did not know if he were an angel, a god, a demon, or something else altogether, nor did I care to know. When shallow words failed between us, the prince would hum a tune and look out towards the sky. I would hum a melody back to him and watch the way his head tilted in intrigue. His voice would romance the line between somber trills and clear legato melodies that danced through the air, and eventually, I found myself humming his song along with him. Before heading to work, my mother kisses me on the forehead and tells me that she’s proud to have a son like me. Out of the corner of my eye I can see Joshua looking over at us with his jaw slack. When my mother leaves, Joshua asks me what it’s like to not fight with my parents. He leans back against my bedframe and tells me that he wishes his parents were more like mine. When I ask him what he means by that, he doesn’t respond. I move to the bed beside him, and I lay my palm against the back of his hand . He pulls away and tells me that he thinks it’s best that he goes home. Music from a birthday party next door leeches its bass into my room in distorted booms and twangs. In the reverb of stripped sound, I sit there rubbing my thumb over
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the palm that had touched Joshua. I stare at the ceiling and wonder if things will ever change. Still, without knowing the answer, I feel compelled to continue trying. I try, and I try, and I try. The night Joshua hung himself, he had left me a letter on my doorstep. I didn’t check for a letter before going to bed. I didn’t know. I couldn’t have known. I figured that he would have texted or called me. If not to stop him, then I thought that maybe he would have just wanted to hear my voice one last time. The next morning after he died, before any of us found out what happened, my mom had found the letter and given it to me. It was sealed with some crookedly placed clear tape and had my name addressed in blocky black letters, “FOR MARTIN”. The edges of the envelope were worn around the corners, as if it had been shoved underneath books and into drawers over and over again.I didn’t open the letter that morning. I had thought that maybe it would have been fun to open the cryptic mystery letter with Joshua. It wasn’t long before Joshua’s mother was pounding at my door, demanding that we tell her where her son was, that he hadn’t come home last night. I put away the letter in my drawer and went to go look for Joshua, positive that I could find him. I didn’t. His mom was the one who found the body. I’m gasping as the air thickens and my lungs expand so tightly that it hurts. I’m more frustrated than I’ve ever been before because I realize that no matter how many times I try, I always end up failing Joshua. Countless summers have passed and yet nothing has changed. Nothing has changed but me. I dig my nails into my arm so hard that it draws blood. It drips from crooked bloody moon crescents, but I’m so numb that I hardly notice the warm trickle down my arm. I tell him that I don’t know what to do to make him happy, that I don’t know how to save him. I’m yelling at him, and I don’t mean to be yelling. I don’t want to be yelling. He looks at me and I can tell that he doesn’t recognize me. I can tell that he’s starting to realize that I’m not the same
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Martin that he’s known his whole life. In the silence, I become desperate. I don’t know if I can save him, I don’t know if we can ever be happy. He leaves my house without saying anything, but when he stands in the doorway staring at me blankly, I know it’s his way of telling me goodbye. I do nothing when the door closes behind him. It’s the last day of July and I know that he will forget everything when the sun rises again. The world halts and the baton rests on the first beat before another fall. The orchestra stops, watches, and then continues again in its perpetual da capo. I couldn’t bring myself to read the letter or throw it away. Lodged in the deepest recesses of my body, in the murky undulating pit of tar and regret, I knew that the letter was an ending. It was the last thing Joshua wanted to tell me, something so important that it was the only thing he left behind. I felt that if I didn’t read his letter, then there would always be a piece of him persisting in the present, an act of defiance against death and time. I laid down on my bed, closed my eyes, and tried to forget how much my chest hurt, forget the way my heart beat so loudly I could feel it in between my ears, the way it made my head spin and hurt. It’s summertime once again and the cicadas chirp in a chorus of cacophony. Joshua pulls on one of my backpack straps. He tells me he hates summer because of all the bugs. I don’t tell him that I love summer. I don’t tell him that I love the way the sun glistens on his tan skin, and I don’t tell him how I love the way the world feels when the sun goes down and there’s a steady warmth radiating from the pavement beneath us. I don’t tell him how much I love the aching familiarity of the quaint neighborhood wrapping around us, how I love that it sweeps us up in a compassionate embrace. The sky above us is a deep blue, maybe deeper than I have ever seen it before. We walk beside one another; two boys, hands almost touching, words almost forming. Almost. After a few blocks we stop, and when I look into his eyes, I can finally see him for what he is. I see the sunlight and I see the starlight that illuminates his crooked smile, but now I also notice the places that the light has never reached. I wonder what he sees when he looks into my eyes. The ambience crescendos until it’s deafening. It’s a whirlwind of buzzing and screaming. Then, at once, the sound stops and all that’s left is a radiating warmth.
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Just as the prince said, the world began to break again, just as it had those first few days. The cracks in the world only grew bigger with time, gaping chasms and needle thin fractures began to run through the entire world. One morning, in a hazy stupor, I found myself falling into one of the cracks running through my room. Everything faded to black, sound and light being smothered out like a weak candle flame, then there was nothing. When I awoke, I was on my old, rusted bike in front of the church that Joshua’s family had gone to. The church was small, but clean. Wooden pews sat before honeyorange stained glass windows framed with off-white walls, and even with the congregation full inside, the building felt empty to me. I stood there imagining what was going on inside, imagined people with their heads bowed, eyes shut, giving thanks, praying for what they needed from God to continue living, praying for God to take away their pain from them, praying for a chance to be happy here on Earth. I could hear the organ being played from inside the church. Its somber hymns spilled out into the streets, filling the air with melodies that were somehow both triumphant and melancholy. Alone, on the smooth white steps in front of the church, were Joshua’s parents. His mother sat there, sobbing with her dainty hands over her face and Joshua’s father crouched beside her. He rubbed circles onto her back, a mindless attempt at comfort. I couldn’t find any hint of concern or remorse in his father’s face. Instead, there was the sense that the world had faded and gone transparent to him. There were thin jagged cracks zig-zagging across his face. Cracks like the breaks in the pavement, cracks like the breaks in my world. I felt sympathy and anger all at once, a strange combination that both ached with a soreness and flared with a stabbing pain that echoed throughout my body. I wondered if they truly thought God was more important than their son, that being perfect was more important than being happy. I stood there in silence until his mother noticed me. She stood up, wiped away her tears, and walked closer to me as my eyes struggled to focus.
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Movement Two: Expedire
I noticed her black dress fluttering in the wind, the way it draped and flowed like a dark robe. Then, I noticed the way she walked with a broken stride, like every other step was too difficult to accomplish, like she found it too difficult to muster the energy to move her entire body, which resulted in a jerky pace. Then, I noticed the corner of her lips twitching as she bit down on her bottom lip so hard I was sure it was going to draw blood. I was so sure that she was going to yell at me, going to say, this is your fault, we should have never let him near you. The world started fading to a hazy fog. And then she hugged me. Her face was damp and hot against my shoulder as she tried to whisper something. She pressed her face deep into my cheek, she filled her lungs with all the oxygen she could muster, but all that came out of her mouth was a sputter of air. Then, after a reprise of silence, the words came—not like an avalanche, but in little drops, a slow drawl that was cluttered with sharp inhales and jarring pauses. She told me that she was so sorry. That she was so, so, sorry. That she wished she had her baby back, that she could apologize to him too. She told me that she could have loved him. She paused, sucked air through her teeth, then clarified that she did love him. She looked off at her husband and tried to pry open the cracks in his face with her gaze. Joshua’s mother didn’t look through her husband the way he looked through us, the way he saw us as glass people. She saw him, saw the man underneath the stoic stare, saw the shame living in the fractures of his face. I remembered Joshua telling me about how his father believed I was going to hell for being gay. I watched the man look off at the horizon, and I wondered if he still believed that, if Joshua had left a letter for him as well. I’m at Joshua’s house and my eyes linger on the photographs of him as a little kid, in between framed bible quotes and silver lacquered crosses. I look at the way he’s smiling with missing teeth while being embraced by his family. Joshua laughs when I tell him that I think we should run away from home. It’s a weak laugh, something uncomfortable and fidgeting. He jokes and asks if we would catch a train heading to
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the countryside with our belongings carried in burlap sacks. I tell him that I’m serious, that we could go far away and never come back, that I’ve been saving up money from my part time job, that we could get an apartment together, that we’ll find a way to make it work. I don’t know how it would work, but I promise that I’ll find a way. He tilts his head, folds his arms, licks his lips, and says, “the world doesn’t work like that”. I pull him close. Chest to chest, I can feel his heart beating. I feel his body tense up against mine, and then I kiss him. When I pull away, he cries without knowing why-soft quiet tears that never make it down his cheek. When I got home from the church, I opened the drawer and took out Joshua’s letter. The letter was short, with scrawled handwriting and ink smears. — “Dear Martin, I know you don’t believe in heaven or hell, but I do. I imagine my version of heaven like this: you and me are watching the night sky at the park by your house, just like we did on your sixteenth birthday, feeling the grass soft underneath us. In my heaven, I’m strong, and brave, and I can love you the way I want to, the way you’ve always deserved to be loved. In my heaven, I kissed you back instead of leaving you there alone. In this world, things don’t hurt as much. I don’t hurt you as much. You would probably deny it, but I know how much I hurt you. Whenever I do or say something shitty again or pull away from you for the millionth time, I can tell how much it hurts you. Even if you always tell me that it was okay or that you forgive me, I always know. I tried hard to be happy. I really need you to know that I tried. I don’t want you to think that I gave up because I think everything is pointless, because that’s not true. I think the main problem with me, really, is that everything mattered too much. Everything hurts too much, too often. I’ve always been a horrible son and friend. I wanted to be a good friend, a good son, a good person, all at once, but I ended up fucking up all of that.
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And this might be my biggest fuck-up, but at least it’ll be my last. I wish I could explain how overwhelming everything feels, but I don’t think I can find the right words for that. You’ve always been better at that kind of thing. I’m sorry, and I hope you can forgive me. You deserve a better friend. You deserve to be happy. Sincerely, Joshua” — I put the letter back in the envelope, tucked it back into the drawer, and fell down on my bed as something horrible began to take hold. It moved from the tips of my fingers up to my neck, wrapped itself tight against my skin. My lungs felt as though they were being emptied, as if a thin blade ran smoothly across my chest to steal the breath from my body. As my lungs withered, I cried out in pain, felt myself seize up and shake as the cracks drummed and vibrated. That’s when I saw the prince’s face looming over me. He was smiling, admiring my pain as if it was something exquisite, something ephemeral to be cherished. There was something consuming about his smile, something selfish. I welcomed it anyway, welcomed the way his presence drained sound and feeling from my being. I looked into the prince’s eyes and for the first time, it looked as if the prince were whole. It was only then that I realized what seemed familiar within the prince. He kissed me on the forehead to quiet the burning. In his eyes, I could only see myself reflected in his comforting dark gaze. Movement Three: Momento
I wake up the same way I always do now. The sun is rising above familiar rooftops and I marvel at the way the sky lights up as if I haven’t seen it a million times before. I live the last year of his life like a cassette on loop, playing back my time with Joshua until the tape sputters to a stop and resets. Something always goes wrong in the end. The world always resets, forgets, but I don’t. I remember it all. I don’t notice the prince as often anymore, but when the world flickers and stops for a moment
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I fuck a lot of things up.
before a reset, I can feel a piece of him in my chest. I can hear his voice as a quiet whisper. Every morning, I decide to persist. I decide that I would rather watch the world created for us die and collapse upon itself again and again before I give up on saving Joshua. Alone, I carry the weight of every memory, every instance. Alone, I feel the compounding of lifetimes of heartbreak and joy until it solidifies and becomes my shackles. Insanity becomes muffled beneath a concert of a dizzying warmth radiating from the pavement and a dissonant chord vying for resolution. One late summer afternoon, after I have lost count of all the times the world has reset, time and time again, I sit in my living room listening to Joshua play a song on the piano. It starts out slow, like a meandering waltz that drifts back and forth before gliding back down into a hypnotic drive of syncopated triplets. The melody dances back and forth deftly. I feel myself drifting out over the countless silent moments of warmth, through the screaming moments of loneliness. I realize that I have never heard Joshua play this song before. In all the countless loops that we’ve gone through, he has never played this song before. The piano moves into the second movement and drifts into fervent arpeggios in a minor key that swings into major. Every note explodes into my mind and cascades into my memory in a flurry of lights. The song feels like a promise, fulfilled. When the song ends, I clap and smile and tell him how amazing the song is. That’s when I see his eyes. It starts with a few tears that he paws at furiously, but then he’s crying so hard he can barely breathe. It’s a stutter of air building and releasing in hiccupped bursts. Then, he looks up at me, smiling and laughing in between sobs. “Martin?” He asks, his voice cracking. In that instant, I can see every forgotten memory surfacing through the darkness. I can see the recognition I have ached for surfacing through this eternal summer. I tell him that I’ve missed him. He nods at me, and it feels like I’m bursting with light, bursting with a sticky amber colored warmth. Joshua stands up and moves away from the piano bench. He takes a step towards me, stumbles, stops, and then he falls to his knees. I cry because I’m happy. But I also begin to cry because I’m terrified. The fear makes me frantic, desperate. For the first time in this endless loop, it feels like the last
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time. It feels like an end. The space in my chest, the aching where the prince had resided in, begins to fade. No more resets. No more chances. All that’s left is a slow warmth and the crazed fluttering of an uncharted future. I know I should feel vindicated, should feel like I’ve won an insurmountable battle, but all I can feel is the fear of the space below us. A straining dissonance loosens, falls apart, and comes back together in a grandiose harmony. I see the sunlight and I see the starlight that illuminates his eyes, and I also see the places that the light will not reach. Outside, I watch a singular leaf on our maple tree turn a deep orange color. “I’m so sorry,” he says.
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Reborn as a snake, Irina Novikova
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cross-genre prose by Remy Chartier
There is a joke my mother tells about her childhood. That the family line, on both sides, is all brown-eyed brunettes, as far as the eye can see. Her mother had brown eyes, brown hair. Her father had brown eyes, brown hair. So did her grandparents, all four of them, and all of their dozens of siblings. My mother has green eyes, brown hair, and her two baby siblings have green eyes and red. Coincidentally, so did the mailman. This is the punchline of the joke. My mother says monogamy is boring. She says this to explain the string of exhusbands that I have never met, although once she showed me a little velvet box where she kept all the wedding rings they gave her. I cupped it in my hands and shook it, to hear the soft clinking of the tarnished silver, bringing it close to my face as if to drink from it, but really to see the grime winding around the deadened stones, streaks of grey and milky white against the apple-red velvet. I think of her sometimes as a sailor, my mother, and there are lighthouse paintings on every wall of the house I grew up in. She collects these too. I was behind the wheel of a car the first time my mother told me her father had hit her. Fifteen and skittish, my knuckles were white and sore at ten and two, my leg half asleep from clenching to keep my foot from jerking from the gas pedal to the break, a tattered copy of my birth certificate crammed into my pocket to serve as a learner’s permit. She told me that he had hit her, and her mother too, quiet and offhand but so sharp that it blanked out the conversation that preceded and followed it, leaving just the words carving into the backs of my knuckles and the tendons of my leg, my eyes staring forward through a windshield glazed with first frost around the edges. My father hit me too, but only when I was small, took me over his knee for reasons unknown or unremembered and spanked me until I cried. My mother said nothing, or nothing that I heard, and a few months later they were separated, although the two events are unconnected. I don’t remember the other woman, the one my father ran to, except to
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Branches
mother says that him leaving was the best thing that ever happened to her, that she was clinically depressed living under the same roof – and this part I understand – but I think sometimes about the disdain in her voice when she talks about that other woman. Monogamy is boring. There is a difference between non-monogamy and cheating, I know. But my mother doesn’t tell her friend, two streets over, about the boyfriend in Washington, when the friend buys her beers in town on Saturday nights, because then he might stop doing it. Four college-level courses on human sexuality weren’t enough for me to understand what makes this different from my father, but I don’t want to ask because that would be too academic and more than a little rude. My grandfather died before I met him and maybe this was the best thing that ever happened to my grandmother too, but I don’t know that either, because when I was a child, I was always too busy trying not to stare at the three brownish, gummy teeth in her wrinkled, old mouth and when I was older, she was dead, and I couldn’t ask even if I wanted to. I inherited a lot from my mother. There is a story she used to tell me, to stop me bouncing on the waterbed in her bedroom, where she would sit down next to me and lay her hands flat, as if she could smooth out the ripples with a touch, and she would tell me a story she said was from her childhood, but maybe it was borrowed because as I got older she stopped telling it. The story is about an apple tree, at the foot of the hill her parents lived on, and it goes like this: Down the hill and out of sight, there stood an apple tree. It was green and bent and gnarled, with the branches out of reach. And when the autumn came, the apples swelled to bursting, crisp and juicy, tart and sweet. But you had to wait for autumn, and you must never shake the tree. This last part was something her mother said to her, like a fable about patience, but I get it mixed up sometimes with another story from a book, about an axe and a cherry tree. My mother didn’t have an axe, and she also didn’t listen. She didn’t wait for autumn, and she chose to shake the tree. The apples, hard as hailstones, came pelting down too soon. One hit my mother in the eye, and a bruise began to bloom.
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picture her with my stepmother’s face, although they weren’t the same person. My
since nobody had seen her. What my mother did instead, I think on quite a lot. She ran to my grandmother, her eye swollen black, and she lied. Not a harmless lie, but a believed one, and one that wasn’t caught. She said a neighbor boy had hit her, had punched her in the face. He was soundly punished because my mother couldn’t wait. She went to bed with bruises, chewing apples to the core, and I believe this story like the lie she’d told before. I like to think it’s true, though, and only question just one thing. Who was my mother thinking of when she chose to shake the tree?
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And if this were a fable, there’d be a lesson here. About patience, maybe, or truthfulness,
Hypokondrisk, Bailey Haworth
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nonfiction by Sharon Coleman Once you consider your skin as working clothes, art modeling’s a pretty good side job. It’s like getting paid to meditate. The drawbacks are sore muscles (a perennial problem), finding sufficient work (classes use a variety of models), and the occasional voyeur. The latter comes in different forms: students from other classes, various workers, passers-by. Also poets and, even worse, fiction writers, who look for nakedness in nudity—who think this job is kinda sexy. Truth be told, you have to spin your thoughts to keep from getting bored. And stay almost absolutely still. But since this routine works for me, I sit like Eve—in blessed shamelessness—in a miniature Eden. The students come in hauling supplies, leaning to one side to counter the load on the other. Most are retirees. Some still middle-aged. An occasional college student. Some come early to chat. We’ve known each other for years and we’ve watched each other age. Each year, my hair’s greyer, and they mix in some white pigment to show it. Today I learn Jim’s last name, Reisman, and that he passed—an obituary’s taped outside the prop room, his life story in seven paragraphs. Others arrive right on time or while I’m doing the one-minute warm-up poses. I watch that only they come in, not some curious stranger. Actually, most of us keep an eye out for voyeurs, especially Jody, our teacher, who has the arm strength of Artemisia’s Judith—should she need it. All around, Jody’s got strong ethics: curtains kept closed, students reminded to tip, slight movements of the model are dealt with by the artists, and no photography— unless the model agrees and is paid extra. All the reasons why I’ve worked with her so long. Today the students take a while longer to settle into wordless rhythms as their lines become forehead, cheek, shoulder, arm, a composition on newsprint, canvas, or thick pastel paper. Theirs is a choreography of measuring and sizing up proportions with one-eyed squints and a thumbnail on a stick or brush end. All muscle memory. And when they settle into theirs, I settle into mine: muscles relax into the pose and my mind’s free to float.
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Virtuous Women
Ginny is late and just settling on the horse-plank with a pad of newsprint and
charcoal. After chemo, she gets tired easily. Monica stands behind an easel and a goodsized canvas; she’s been drawing me for fifteen years, starting with small canvases and controlled strokes. Her sense of composition has vastly improved. Chuck is still dawdling with naïve abstracts in acrylics and tipping me well. Again, Mary reminds me that we once shared surnames before marriage changed hers. And again, I wonder whether her ancestors had mixed as much as mine—my surname a last remnant. Only Jody doesn’t settle. She rarely does even if she’s sitting at the back table filling out supply forms or working on a portrait. Her home studio is filled with almost done paintings. Before a show, she picks a few and finishes them without a model like the portrait she did of me years before: she completed the torso with her own breasts. Not as ahistoric as Michelangelo’s uncircumcised David, just odd and interesting to those who know. Thirty minutes in, the door opens—a bamboo screen at first shields me on the model stand from an unknown person. I scan his quick, uneasy steps— long dirty-blond hair, white button-down shirt, worn blazer, a sketchbook gripped like a bible. He tells Jody he just signed up and sits down, removing the cellophane from his pad to draw. The class is already five weeks in. Eyes that normally pass from me to the work in progress now glance at him and each other. Jody goes to check his registration at the office. Seven minutes: Monica watches him while she wipes a brush in a rag with solvent; Ginny leans back pretending to measure proportions; Chuck just paints; Mary leaves her easel and stands behind Jody’s table, turning pages of Grey’s Anatomy, a plastic skeleton grinning behind her. Mary looks up, and her scowl matches my greatgreat grandmother’s in a family photograph where she sits Irish stiff among her American children. Between my shoulder blades, through my chest, up to my neck, a wave of heat turns my olive skin red. Whenever the intruder’s eyes rise, mine shift away from him and then back when he looks down to his sketchbook. His hand ceases to move around the paper and just glides across, left to right—knuckles pumping. He’s writing. I fix my stare, hard, let his
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point. He looks left and to the ceiling. Years ago in Jody’s class an older man to my left held out his pad to show his drawing to the younger man next to him. “The shading is everything—with it the body is there,” he ran his finger over the sketched figure. “This is my son.” They both looked into my eyes, smiled, returned to their craft discussion. If only more fathers taught this way. The man in front of me, channeling his special kind of perversion, opens the pad to another page. Drops of sweat bead across my back. One rolls from my upper lip to my lower. My eyes statue-still. Of course, visual artists know the body’s no more than a contoured projection screen. It could be any vase, plastic fruit, silk flower, the old sewing machine collecting dust in the prop room, where we models change amongst these inert colleagues. Artists have no entry into my spinning thoughts—the part most invisible. Jody returns, makes a beeline to him, her steps heavy. Just as we suspected. She leans over his shoulder. My mind falls upon the jeweled dagger in the prop room—dull as the day is long.
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eyes meet mine. His right hand grips the yellow pencil until his thumb breaks the lead
Re ection in the mirror. Time and bird, Irina Novikova
fl
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In the Shadows feature by
Oli Villescas Trigger Warning: Suicidal Ideations & Childhood Sexual Abuse ____ There is no light without shadow, just as there is no happiness without pain. - Isabelle Allende
Solitary. Isolation. Healing. Between cold white walls, I sat on a plastic tan chair and called my mom from a public telephone, “I’m doing better and haven’t had any bad thoughts since I’ve been in .’’ My stay at a mental hospital in Southern California was an experience and stirred up many feelings, to say the least. Though I stayed for only five days, I used every day to better my mental health and focus on problems I had been suppressing for years. My willingness to fully open up came forth like the ubiquitous red Jell-O they served for dessert at dinner. Between forgotten pills and sleeping all day, I had gotten here; to a point in time where I saw myself hanging from my shower pole, only to come to the realization that it would snap from bearing my weight. Or the atrocity of someone finding me, swinging back and forth. Those were the few reasons I had to freeze-frame and unhinge myself, back and away from oblivion. The sounds of screaming and crying surrounding me through thin walls as I checked myself in, my sister and various medical professionals swapping seats from hour to hour. Every morning would start at 5:30 AM— being awoken
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by a doctor who is monitoring my medication and progress, making sure I didn’t have any consistent bad thoughts. There was never a moment in my life where I considered being capable of sleeping through hours of screaming. These shrieks of terror came for unknown reasons and rarely ceased— from morning to late into the night. I couldn’t tell the difference between afternoon and night time as it all blurred, at first. But groups were my absolute savior. They gave me structure and consistency, control in a time when control was merely a construct in my mind. From therapy sessions of the past, I had concepts of coping and noticing triggers come back to me and I was able to consolidate what worked But more than anything, I learned that bottling up emotions is one of my coping mechanism’s greatest flaws. And this flaw had adapted over the years. So much so that I pushed down childhood sexual abuse for 18 years. This shadow of secrecy has haunted me for nearly two decades too long, but now I am done with silence. To this day I believe recounting these events to be a severely positive and negative thing— continuously fluctuating in peace through answers, and terror through reminder. I had read psychology books about sexual abuse– specifically about abuse that occurs at a young age– and, at first, thought I was beyond repair. That I was downright lost entirely. But then I read a morbidly confirming statistic from Bessel van Der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps the Score: Each year about three million children in the United States are reported as victims of child abuse and neglect. Sometimes I keep my shadowed screams inside. I write this not for the evocation of binary emotions like happiness or sadness— for peace or to frighten—but for the grayness that many survivors live in everyday. The bewilderment, healing and struggle. Here’s to finding, that to simply exist is a fluid vastness beyond any essay.
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FRAGUIONMENTOS DE “LANDSMODER” poesía por Elena Salamanca [trad. Ryan Greene]
SCRIPT SCRAPS FROM “LANDSMODER” poetry by Elena Salamanca [trans. Ryan Greene]
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Landsmoder is an anti-nationalist poetic performance that Elena Salamanca staged almost exactly a decade ago by mounting the oldest standing monument in San Salvador and reading her book-length series of poems aloud. Ten years later, they remain an urgent cry against the intersection of nationalism, dogma, patriarchy, and violence. In Elena's words— "Landsmoder was written in 2011 to speak out against the bicentennial celebration of 1811, the first revolt against Spanish rule in San Salvador. This year, El Salvador is celebrating the 200th anniversary of its independence on the 15th of September, while the Salvadoran government prepares its celebration rooted in the hegemony of violence, with the militarization of the country and a discourse based on "internal and external enemies."
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de GALERÍA DE LOS HÉROES I Soy una reina de belleza y tengo las tetas hinchadas de leche: Mis pezones son vastos para alimentar a las generaciones nacidas y por matarse. Un reportero me pregunta: a quién admiro. Yo me planto en la plaza con mi tacón de charol, caigo de hinojos frente a la mujer con vestido de mármol, respondo: Yo admiro a los próceres. Los próceres de mi patria, que tienen la nariz quebrada y los ojos de concreto. Yo quiero ser como ellos: un busto sobre un pedestal. Voy a cortarme las piernas y entregarlas a los paralíticos. Yo soy la reina: Y tengo los pezones erguidos. Con mi ubre hinchada alimento a la nación.
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II Mi árbol nacional tenía labios por raíces. Sus labios chupaban todo lo que depositábamos en la tierra. Sus flores no llamaban a abejas ni pájaros. Mi árbol nacional daba frutos constantemente y constantemente sus frutos se podrían. No iban por ellos los niños ni las ardillas, jamás los pájaros. Todos se alejaban de nuestro árbol nacional al verlo florecer nuestras vísceras.
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from GALLERY OF HEROES I I’m a beauty queen and my tits are swollen with milk: My nipples are vast so I can feed the generations newly born and soon to kill themselves. A reporter asks me: who do I admire? I plant myself in the plaza in my patent leather heels, I fall to my knees before the woman dressed in marble, I answer: I admire the founding fathers. The founding fathers of my fatherland, with their broken noses and concrete eyes. I want to be like them: a bust on a pedestal. I’ll cut off my legs and hand them over to the paralytics. I’m the queen: And my nipples are erect. I’ll feed the nation with my swollen udder.
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II My national tree had lips for roots. Its lips sucked up everything we deposited in the earth. Its flowers didn’t call out to bees or birds. My national tree bore fruits constantly and constantly its fruits rotted. Children and squirrels never went after them, neither did the birds. Everyone steered clear of our national tree when they saw our entrails in bloom.
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de EL CUERPO DE LA NACIÓN I Muchacho, amor Voy a levantarte del camino, muchacho sin casa. Yo te condeno a este amor: bésame las manos, bésame los pies. No te enamores nunca: tengo una piedra por corazón. Quítate los zapatos, quítate la ropa, párate ante mí: arrodíllate, baja la mirada, ponte como un perro, las rodillas y las manos contra la tierra, arquea esa espalda, ténsala. Bésame los pies. Me subiré en tu espalda, muchacho, me pararé sobre ti. Camina, muchacho, yo soy tu amor, arrástrate, sángrate las manos, sángrate las rodillas, mancha esta tierra. Yo soy tu patria, muchacho, y te condeno a este único amor.
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III (corazón) Y sirvieron en mi mesa un plato con corazones: los corazones de todos los seres vivientes en mi tierra: pájaros, sapos, hombres y ratones. Todos latían con sus arterias y sus ventrículos y esas líneas azules y rojas que se dibujan en las tareas de primaria. Tomé las servilletas y limpié las manchas que los corazones dejaban en mi boca mientras latían: eran unas manchas parecidas a otros corazones y, sobre todo, parecidas a los niños que cruzan la calle en busca de la escuela.
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from BODY OF THE NATION I Boy, love I’m gonna take you off the street, boy without a home. I’m gonna sentence you to this love: kiss my hands, kiss my feet. Don’t ever fall in love: I’ve got a heart of stone. Take off your shoes, take off your clothes, stand before me: get on your knees, lower your gaze, get down like a dog, your hands and your knees on the ground, arch that back, tense it. Kiss my feet. I’m gonna get up on your back, boy, I’m gonna stand on you. Walk, boy, I’m your love, crawl, bloody your hands, bloody your knees, stain this ground. I’m your fatherland, boy, and I sentence you to this one love.
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III (heart) And at my table they served a plate of hearts: the hearts of all my land’s living beings: birds, toads, men and mice. They all pulsed with their arteries and ventricles and those blue and red lines drawn on elementary school worksheets. I took the napkins and wiped off the stains the hearts left on my mouth as they pulsed: they were stains that looked like other hearts and, more than anything, they looked like children crossing the street on their way to school.
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Letanías a los muchachos Muchachos: recién bañados, aún dormidos, altos muchachos extraviados en la mañana. Siempre perdidos: frescos como la naranja al desgajarse, suaves como el pan recién horneado. Muchachos húmedos: humedecidos, de falos limpios, recién lavados, con olor a cloro, con sabor de agua. Altos como obeliscos de mármol blando. Guapos muchachos. Recios muchachos. Recién peinados en la mañana de un país que cobra la vida con la vida propia. Pobres muchachos, limpios muchachos, vengan a mí. Y de mi pecho de virgen manará leche.
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de LETANÍAS A LOS MUCHACHOS
from LITANIES TO THE BOYS Litanies to the boys Boys: freshly bathed, still asleep, tall boys adrift in the morning. Always lost: fresh like split orange, soft like fresh bread. Damp boys: dampened, clean phallused, freshly washed, chlorine scented, water flavored. Tall like obelisks of soft marble. Handsome boys. Sturdy boys. Freshly groomed in the morning of a country where the cost of life is life itself. Poor boys, clean boys, come to me. And from my virgin breast milk will flow.
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Contributors
Remy Chartier is a queer and trans author from New Hampshire who has finally escaped to the west coast. They currently attend San Francisco State University, where they study Creative Writing and Cinema. When not working on their original fiction, Remy is a dedicated advocate for and creator of fanfiction and fancraft, because the world could always use more creativity. Sharon Coleman's a fifth-generation Northern Californian. She writes for Poetry Flash, cocurates the reading series Lyrics & Dirges, co-directs the Berkeley Poetry Festival. She’s the author of a chapbook Half Circle and a book of micro-fiction, Paris Blinks. Her poetry and fiction appear in several publications, including Your Impossible Voice, White Stag, Dream Pop Press. She’s been nominated twice for a Pushcart and once for a micro award for blink fiction. She received a scholarship from the Luso-American Foundation to attend the Disquiet Literary Conference in Lisbon and was a finalist for the Jane Underwood poetry prize. She’s taught composition, poetry writing, creative writing, and production & publication at Berkeley City College for 18 years and directs their art and literary journal, Milvia Street. cylo is all of the above. Ryan Greene is a translator, poet, and book farmer from Phoenix, Arizona. He’s a coconspirator at F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS [www.fiikbooks.org], and he's translated work by Elena Salamanca, Claudina Domingo, Ana Belén López, Giancarlo Huapaya, and Yaxkin Melchy, among others. Since 2018, he has facilitated the Cardboard House Press Cartonera Collective bookmaking workshops at Palabras Bilingual Bookstore. Like Collier, the ground he stands on is not his ground.
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San Francisco-based illustrator and filmmaker, Bailey Haworth, has been spending the majority of his life practicing his skills and finding ways to explore his own experiences through his work. Growing up, Bailey was heavily influenced by the time he spent watching movies and reading comic books, which would later prove to be useful when pursuing his goals as an artist. His ultimate desire is to create new and entertaining art for everyone to enjoy while exploring his own personal psyche and experiences within this universe to better understand what life is all about. To find more works by Bailey, you can follow his Instagram page: @ mr.themenace. R. Shawntez Jackson is an award-winning poet born and raised in the Bay Area. Their work seeks to uncover the potential treasures of the trauma in our lives. Tashianna Jones is a Queer black photojournalist living in San Francisco and attending San Francisco State University. Tashianna is passionate about the advancement and liberation of the Black Diaspora, not only are they passionate about their community but also the liberation and right to live unapologetically for all people of color in America and other countries that have been struck with racism and colonialism. Tashianna is also a mental health advocate and spiritual creator who prides themselves in allowing their work to heal their ancestors through the spreading of Love, Kindness, Gratitude and Growth. You can follow Tashianna on Instagram @tashifuckinjones & you can view their work @tashisview ! Born in Mexico City on a rainy summer day of 1999, Carlos León began writing as part of therapy when he was 12, and still finds that pouring onto the page the entanglement of his inner world is the best way to understand himself; and he keeps doing so in hopes that someone else can too. Benjamin Lomeli is a Long Beach based creative who experiences the world as Queer and Brown. He has used poetry as well as other mediums to make sense of the complexities brought forth by identity, love, and time and place. He is inspired and guided by visions of a Queer future that puts into practice mutual aid, love, care, compassion, and affection; things already found in his Queer utopia.
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Jordán Mendez is a Two-Spirit freestyle artist and poet from Guatemala. They were raised in Los Angeles, and now reside in San Francisco while pursuing a psychology degree. They like to fuse visual art, sound and music with the written word to tell stories in the artform known as Poetronica, or digital poetry. Some examples of their work can be found on Instagram at their page @theriverssong With roots in the Mississippi Delta, Cynthia Le Monds lives in the Bay Area. She holds a BA in political science and an MPA from St. Mary's University. She's pursuing an MFA at San Francisco State University. She's been published in the San Antonio Express-News, the Raw Art Review, the Conclave, Balkan Press, High Shelf Press, Hey! I'm Alive magazine, and Transfer magazine, and has work forthcoming in Mojo | Mikrokosmos Journal and Kind Writers Literary Magazine. She recently won second place in the 2020 Mikrokosmos Poetry Contest and honorable mention for the Mirabai Poetry Contest. As a child, Samantha Nichols was magnetized to the world of fashion and design. It’s only natural that as she got older, her love for sewing grew into a love of other mediums such as paint and clay. These fun, hand sculpted and hand painted pieces are to represent the unique qualities in us all. These aspects are to be celebrated and also acknowledged not with shame, but with pride. The way that the mainstream media has depicted beauty, especially in Sam’s hometown near Los Angeles, California, has been harmful to many. It’s caused them to believe that in order to fit in or feel attractive, they must alter themselves and inject their faces and bodies. This is not Samantha’s message. She has made these designs to dance on the line of androgyny to speak to all as a whole in hopes to inspire others to appreciate quirks and unconventional features. In Sam’s eyes, being strangely beautiful is the most exciting and interesting of all. For more of Sam’s art, find her on Instagram at @samnicholsart Irina Novikova is an artist from Minsk, Belarus.
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From the artist: Hello. I am an artist, graphic artist, illustrator. Graduated from the State Academy of Slavic Cultures with a degree in art and the Moscow Humanitarian and Technical Academy with a degree in designer. My first personal exhibition "May soul is like a wild hawk" (2002) was held in the museum of Maxim Bagdanovich. For me, art is the goal of my life, the transformation of the world through my works. The first thing I rely on is the beauty of nature, the beauty of landscapes, mountains, forests, fields ... With my art I make a journey of human transformation, direct him to my roots and memories, to my secret self. A person should try to get away from the negative and the insured, in order to leave them and let go, like the reins of a person who has lost his mind ... I have been writing for many years on the topic of environmental safety, that is why I have done a series of works dedicated to the Chernobyl disaster that happened in April 1986 … "When a lie closes its arms, no one will understand something, someone was telling the truth ….” I always strive for something new and something that can work for the result. The historical space is interesting for me for its context, culture, preserved household items with which I like to work. To do a lot of different things for me is not easy to show myself, to include in the historical and social context, to make hidden symbols visible to contemporaries .. I like to make visual texts, illustrations for secret memory, past moments, the past is not just some episode, but a tangible phenomenon, the creation of something new, something that has yet to be invented, is reborn as a page in the memory of invisible people who have not come into the world. We went out ourselves in childhood, princes, magic horses, evil old men and beautiful girls ... in childhood we imagined ourselves, a fairy tale as the context of our childhood ... Noreia Rain is trying to remember the soft sound of a pencil on thin, recycled paper. She is grasping at the feeling of boots sinking into wet earth, the air alive with rain. She is a question whispered in warm night air: What if you peeled off the musts and the shoulds and let yourself flourish in all your wild, unbridled, thorny beauty? B. Rocha is a deaf, trans-masculine, and eclectic writer who has been creating art, of all forms, since they were a simple but inspired child. Rocha discovered the gratifying process of writing early on and, over the years, they have molded a complex style of poetry
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emphasizing everyday botanical undertones. They use this nature poetry as a foundation for revealing the subtle constructs of ableism in society. Through this style they have produced and published many captivating pieces that play with the elements of craft through a more accessible lens. Elena Salamanca (San Salvador, 1982). Writer and historian. She has published La familia o el olvido (2017 and 2018), Peces en la boca (2013 and 2011), Landsmoder (2012), and Último viernes (2017 and 2018). Her most recent book, Claudia Lars: La niña que vio una salamandra (2020) is the first volume of her “Colección Siemprevivas” series dedicated to the stories of more than 40 women who were born or lived in El Salvador between the XVIII and XX centuries. Her work has been translated into English, French, German, and Swedish. Since 2009, she has combined literature, performance, memory, and politics in public space. She is a doctorate candidate in History from the Colegio de México, and her thesis investigates the relationships between Central American unity, citizenship, and exile. She earned her masters in History from El Colegio de México (2016) and the Universidad de Huelva, Spain (2013). FB: @elena.salamanca IG: @forevermaitra AJ Sorensen graduated from SFSU in 2019 with a BA in Creative Writing. He has previously been published in Transfer Magazine and writes as a hobby in his free time, when possible. He can be found @talruil on Instagram and Twitter. Marissa Vidales is a published poet residing in Sacramento, California. Her short poem "a sorrowful reminder" includes a drawn image that creates a visual for how the loss of something unknown can be seen and felt. She is an incoming graduate student enrolled in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University; she intends to expand current works there, as well as create new works for cross-genre interests. Her Instagram is @madeesaa.
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