All rights to the works included in this magazine remain with their respective authors. All rights to this issue’s cover art (Untitled, 2017) remain with the artist @ArtyBots. Zoomoozophone Review is an online literary magazine dedicated to publishing contemporary poetry. It is edited by Matt Margo. http://issuu.com/zoomoozophone_review http://facebook.com/zoomoozophonereview zoomoozophone@gmail.com
Our fourteenth issue features some of our Best of the Net nominations since 2014 and is dedicated to the memory of Chester Bennington, whose voice still echoes. Many thanks to our previous contributors who granted us permission to republish their work.
kiran anthony foster liberal bias: a long-form poem
5
Rin Johnson TO O RE: YOUR LETTER
10
Dalton Day Among Other Things
11
Nooks Krannie the purple on your cheek
12
Sonya Vatomsky Rosa x damascena
13
Joshua Jennifer Espinoza remember when your body used to work.
14
Kou Sugita Do you remember?
15
Dana Venerable Church Bus
16
Sam Campbell Call to action
18
Jackson Nieuwland This Is Not a Life Saving Device
19
Barbara Ruth In Buffalo’s Tipi
20
Vernon Frazer Lip-Synching the Lowered Horizon
22
John Pursch Lurid Alley Dusk
29
Moss Angel Dear Hairless Andrew,
30
Penelope Jeanne Brannen the trans women who pee in the woods
32
Dona Mayoora Polar Sunrise
33
Contributors
34
ONE i. ‘don’t cite wikipedia,’ the science teacher at my christian middle school tells us, ‘because wikipedia has a liberal bias.’ ‘truth has a liberal bias,’ a boy mutters from the back. ii. new zealand is not well-covered on wikipedia. there is no article on the man who wrote new zealand’s national anthem. i write one, and it is on the main page for a day. it is the first thing i write for the site. iii. somebody welcomes me, and links me wikipedia’s core policies. keeping a neutral point of view, or NPOV, for short, is one of them. what is a neutral point of view? the phrase explains little more than the acronym. does neutrality equal truth? does either have a liberal bias? iv. i find out i am trans on wikipedia. a friend’s userpage has a box that says they’re pansexual, and when i read the linked article i find out that pansexuality presumes gender diversity, and i find out who i am. i owe wikipedia my gender identity.
v. ‘don’t cite wikipedia,’ my junior biology teacher tells me. i hand in a paper with flawless citations that i publish on wikipedia itself out of sheer spite.
TWO vi. this is the easiest way to sum up what many wikipedians believe: truth has a liberal bias. truth does not have a liberal bias. it is different for each person, and the least-heard truths are not the liberal ones. vii. ‘liberal is a bad word over here,’ a singaporean friend tells me on skype. ‘singapore is well-loved by liberals,’ i say. ‘liberalism is well-loved in singapore only by boys with identity crises who turned to reddit as their savior,’ she sighs. ‘and to wikipedia?’ ‘and to wikipedia.’ viii. when chelsea manning comes out, her article sparks a bitter controversy that ends up taken to arbcom. the supreme court of wikipedia. i end up talking about it with friends, and one says ‘this is all too complicated for me,’ and leaves. i envy his detachment for a moment, then it blossoms into anger when i realize that he is a member of arbcom. i fear for chelsea’s article.
ix. gender is not well-covered on wikipedia. ‘so fix it,’ somebody tells me. ‘wikipedia is full of liberals who will revert my changes as not meeting NPOV,’ i reply. he responds with three letters: AGF. assume good faith, it means. another core policy. ‘i can’t, though i’ve tried,’ i tell him. he calls me a POV-pusher. somebody who is unable to abide by NPOV. it means i am a problem editor. x. ‘singapore is well-covered on wikipedia.’ ‘only the pretty parts.’
THREE xi. ‘don’t cite wikipedia,’ my gender studies professor tells me, and i understand why. xii. new zealand is not well-covered on wikipedia. there is no real article on douglas lilburn, perhaps our most important composer. there is no article on fitzgerald v muldoon, a case where our prime minister was ruled to have acted illegally. lilburn was queer, and muldoon never faced real consequences. xiii. he calls me a POV-pusher like it’s a bad thing. all it says about me is that i am somebody who wears their opinion on their sleeve. somebody who cares more about some truth than they care about wikipedia. i am not ashamed of that.
xiv. i fear for chelsea manning, and i fear for me, and i leave wikipedia rather than come out as trans.
FOUR xv. that pansexual friend later becomes a lover, so i owe wikipedia my partner, too. xvi. there was a wikipedia editor who signed their posts with ‘truth has a liberal bias’ in bright red. their userpage is as smug as you might imagine. for a moment, looking at it, i completely understand that a wikipedia administrator i once knew would want to vandalize the site as badly as possible in a final drive toward getting banned. xvii. ‘science is not neutral,’ i tell a lover. ‘science is the product of the biases of the scientists.’ ‘wikipedia thinks science is neutral,’ ze points out. i pause for a moment. ‘what does it mean that the world’s most ubiquitous, accessible information source is an aggregate that explicitly requires content to be supported by academia, flawed though that is?’
FIVE xviii. when i turn eighteen, a wikipedian friend tries to convince me that the way to fix the site’s systemic bias problem is to upload nudes of myself.
xix. ‘what does it mean,’ ze muses, ‘that the people who are best equipped to fight the hierarchical system of information distribution and the ways it perpetuates oppression are the ones so willing to preserve it?’
SIX xx. truth doesn’t have a liberal bias, but wikipedia does, and these days, who knows the difference?
You write me a letter telling me you always loved me and still do and will forever. The letter is good and I like it but I get distracted while reading it and I’ve realized I have no more room left in me for you. The truth is I have miscarried a great love for you and that means that it is buried in the ground now. I don’t think I’ll ever answer your letter and I will avoid you in person. I do not want to show you how full I have become without you — I have become very full.
for Emily You are underwater. And then you are not. You are breaking roses, revealing the smell of teeth. This is smoke. This is an ankle, brutal with itself. You are back underwater. And then you have been there for a century. Above you, planets have crumbled. From this, flowers come down to you. You hold them. You plan to take them to another place. You are breaking light. This is air. This is blood. You are exactly where you are heading toward. You are impossible. And then you are not.
the purple on your cheek reminds me of a torn sweater/ the purple on your cheek is mine/ is a butterfly deathbed/ i forgot to wipe a chain knitted in moth balls/on your cheek/ on your cheek in butterflies/you mistook them for her/her rope was tighter than your sweater/ & her eyes were million butterflies in smoke/ puffing cigarettes in mistaken songs/ mistaken bruises on cheeks and yeah kind of stuff/ it swells up in mountains but that’s just a lie/ mountains are triangle/ & moth balls are nowhere near as safe as your sweat/your grass beads in a pink desert/ your torn sweater is purple/ but i think it’s copyrighted by jimi hendrix/ in threads / and beads / in threads of rose water.
She says anger is a house you’ve lost the plans for, a sprawling thing with a missing groundskeeper and rooms you’ve forgotten the purpose of filled with furniture handed down from relatives so distant the shared blood feels like ash in your limbs, a thick paste plugging up your insides as you walk the halls like a panicking ghost. There aren’t enough keys for all the doors, though the ring is massive and heavy enough to make your breath catch -- some open for you regardless, slide like buttered loaves across wood floors to beckon you in. A few cluck at the latch like old friends exchanging secrets; the rest ignore you and that’s fine when the yardwork is unfinished and vines everywhere, the garden overgrown and a small fountain looking like something you might have held in deep memory once, sculpted smooth but beaten back by rain and left alone in a place that’s on no straight line to anywhere; not even crows fly above.
remember when your body used to work. the prickliness of the air between winter and spring built a house in your lungs. prayer was like a breathing exercise. there are breathing exercises for everything except learning to love yourself. the body is a nightmare come true. you have dreams about being naked in public because nakedness is wrong. the body signifies so many things. almost desperately so. all you want is air and to walk outside safely but there are rules about that sort of thing. it has to hurt for people like you. you once baptized your head against a warm car window and now you eat the sounds that come out of passing cars as you adjust your running clothes. there’s always time for more life probably. no one blinks when your hands go numb because they can’t see it. no one feels your chest tighten under the weight of not having a name.
You used to be so somber, a menacing look on your face always silent in reflection— I found comfort in that too. You used to hate me because I was a whirlwind, leaving your walkway littered and so you swept the dust with a broom. But rain fell, your quiet storm, the lightning in the distance, the thunder silent because no one was ever frightened— I thought you were merely overcast, so I was never adequate shelter. When we finally clashed by the stumble of my pirouette, you were laughing—your body loose like dangled curtains— and I was stiff like the mirror behind the stage, reflecting someone you never were. The gash on your knee, as if grazed by thorny bramble, bled, the blood trickling down your exposed leg and hardened at the base of your ankle. The darkness of closed eyes was no longer silent. The whirlwind and storm, cooling over like your wound doused in rubbing alcohol.
I wait on Girard and 17th, walking back and forth, deciding that yes I do want to stand in the wind and get carried away from my purpose as a human on earth, like the orange leaf in autumn with no purpose on the tree, not even for the hungriest of ants. I decide against it [not my time yet], and stand in the little bus-waiting-shelter provided for those who want to take the Green Line 15 Girard trolley – the land submarine. I stand; satisfied I escaped the wind, but unsatisfied with winter still being a thing. I have a white plastic bag filled with an elderflower & rose drink, a box of cereal, a box of sweetened biscuit sticks, a chocolate bar, and a used copy of La Mettrie’s Man A Machine and Man A Plant. I check my phone to see that I have five minutes left to enjoy this particular part of the Earth before the land submarine arrives. I hear outside of the shelter two older women discussing cable packages. One woman says: “The advertisement said $19.99…” The other woman interrupts: “Are you sure it didn’t say $29.99?” “Yes I’m sure. I don’t like how you sign up and then realize it’s actually $73.00 after installation and all of that…” I stand there wondering: what difference would asking if the package cost ten more dollars make if the total was 73? And what difference does having a cable package make at all. I think about how much older people are obsessed with television. It terrifies me. The baby boomers love television and other brainwashy stuff, yet they openly criticize behavior like traveling, unemployment, wanting to have lots of sex, wanting to have no sex, substance experimentation, vegetarianism, veganism, and not watching television. I think my parents are surprised that I took parts of their advice and now read books. This March Sunday is nice, I think, as the trolley arrives. I wait behind one of the two women, as the other says “Take care” and walks in the other direction. I wait for her to slowly get on the trolley. I step on and swipe my transpass, saying hello to the trolley driver. I look the trolley driver right in the eyes, something I always try to do. I don’t really know why. Maybe to brighten their day. Maybe to create suspense for the ride. I don’t know. She asks me how I’m doing. “Good” I say, and I ask the same. “Pretty good.” I find my seat, thinking, “this woman’s life is infinitely better than mine,” next to a woman with a curly golden brown weave drinking an Arizona Mucho Mango drink. She looks at me, waiting. I look like about 75% of myself: my hair is tied in a tight bun on the top of my head, I am wearing my green jacket with all of the pockets and a plaid detachable hood, and my black boots. My eyes match my coat. The only problem with hazel eyes is that they don’t express mood. The other 25% of myself would involve my hair being out and I want my eyes to express my disappointment at not meeting this person at 100%. I look at her drink mid swallow and smile and say: “That is my favorite drink, I love it.” I make eye contact. She laughs in approval. She finishes the drink. I look away. Maybe I should have said hello first. Maybe hello is bullshit. No. I’m perfectly fine with my choice of engagement. I look to an older woman who is talking to a man across the aisle. The man is invested in her eyes and mannerisms. He nods at times, usually at pauses. They look like they are coming from church. Maybe this was church. I look around thinking “this is church. Church bus.” All you need is a hat being passed around to collect change, but in Philly there are plenty of people
playing the roles of donation hats. The woman says, “You can’t control her. Let her be and do what she wants. You can’t control her or try to change her. She has a right to be the way that she is. Accept it. Accept her…” Freedom to be. I use my peripheral vision to notice the woman next to me is also watching the woman while waiting for a phone call. I focus my attention back on the churchwoman saying: “I love what God is doing for my life. More people need to love and accept what God is doing…etc. etc.” My body fills up with feelings, in the order of curiosity, disinterest and then dread. I eavesdrop to the phone call taking place next to me. The Mucho Mango woman is saying, “but every time I’m in Philly I want to spend time in the park. I laid down and spent two hours in the park! I just need to spend time in the parks…no no, the park.” The trolley rides across a bridge to the Philadelphia Zoo and I look out at the beginning of Fairmount Park. It is just roads and trees, but mostly roads. The trolley passes the High School For The Future. I think about Philly students in neighborhood public schools having their time wasted. I hate and love this one school of the future. I want to break into it and peel off the insides and re-stick them into all of the high schools. Post-it schools. Preferably recyclable. The trolley arrives at 41st and Girard. I walk up to the front door of the green trolley, say thank you and have a good one, and walk to Parkside Ave. toward my apartment. I breathe in and out and realize it’s alright to feel. It’s alright to feel. It’s alright to be unapologetic every day. I take out my elderflower & rose drink and take a sip. It says on the label “100% good.” “Maybe it is,” I think. I finish the drink and throw the glass bottle in a trash can instead of a recycling bin a couple of blocks up the road and wonder if I made the right decision and if people in Philly just empty all the recycling bins into the trash cans.
CRASHING, Dreams — cracking like concrete when the bills are due. The last egg out of the fridge snaps and bleeds to me, “Which cloud do the isms come from — the filing cabinets that massacre the earth generations at a time? Or are they sprouting, reaching for some sky? Do they burrow their heads in flesh and manifest bulbed bodies of crisis?” Fry this sucker like a credit card. Defer a rate rattling overhead, a cloud bursting like a yoke. This gooey cheddar, sharp and melting, is how I pay my debts. Envelopes of fluffy egg meat, salt, pepper, and cheese fresh off the skillet greased and sizzling. The toast pressed and buttered. Crunchy with a savory drip in the middle. The collectors will bite, sigh, and think, “Why won’t this last forever?”
The end is never actually the end. He is just a shortened form of her. I use the word I too often I think. Shakes uncontrollably when anxious. I use the word I too often I think. Superpower: bad at arm wrestling. Never say never say never. Once upon a time time didn’t exist. The end is never actually the end. And then we wondered what came before. Like an amnesiac historian. I use the word I too often I think. Fantasy is just as real as reality. Everything is a life saving device. Superpower: shakes uncontrollably when anxious. Anagram is an anagram of anagram. V is one of my favourite letters. I use the word I too often I think. Never say never say never say never. Genitals have nothing to do with gender. Don’t tell people what to do. Excitement is exciting. Volume does not always affect value. I use the word I too often I think. Certainty is the most terrifying thing in the world. Everything is fantastic.
Red She Bear says more Native women kill themselves each day. “It’s the squares that do it. Living in those rooms with all those corners makes us crazy.” I know of squares have found myself too often in a corner back against hard walls. I carry in my body manmade stainless steel and liquid plastic. They saved my life. They robbed my soul. They changed me. We sit in Buffalo’s tipi, wrapped in skins and smoke. All mixed-bloods, dykes, many nations yearning to become one tribe, hungry for the love of one another. Even here I feel different lonely for another Jew another mixed as I am mixed I always want it all. I am afraid of doing something wrong disrespect through ignorance. I need to be taught which way to move how to hold the pipe. I have no chant to share do not know my name in Potowatomee. Red She Bear speaks of warrior training: piercings, sweats and fasting to purify the heart. Because she is a pipe holder, it is forbidden for her to return violence, to avenge. Her intentions must stay clear. Buffalo puts down the drum she made. “So often at the conferences, in the universities it’s the mixed-bloods who are chosen to be speakers. We all see who gets the money.”
The light-skinned who have passed as white and who may pass again. It is no accident we have the education, verbal skills no accident our words get published more no accident the full-bloods speak of this in anger. I do not want a privilege my darker sister cannot share. I do not want my life to be based on what kills her. I cannot draw a bow or fire a pipe. I’ve never seen the sun dance never made a drum. And yet, and yet, I feel I too may die of perpendiculars. I have no use for parallels which never meet when still my dearest dream is reconciliation. I cannot be the spokeswoman for Indians cannot deny my privileges or pain. Cannot suppress the Jew, the white woman I am as the native child circles to the left. It must be all at once. It has always been.
Darkness unfolds in cricket whispers. My eyes open but see nothing; only segmented sky, clouds before the waning moon, gliding jets, rickshaws lurching through lurid alley dusk, lamps flickering to empty faces, stares of yearning hobos, hunger undeniably congealed to power-suited businessmen in poverty of feeling, needless want converging senselessly on credo companion grillwork fins of dorsal memories, subterranean demolition teams asleep at mammoth wheels, smothering earthen warriors from ancient civil unrest pleas to qualities of circus strife and stricken feline causes gone flexibly to nightfall’s urgent lullaby. How pale the noonday register becomes beneath the swollen sun in starlet filter tip of towed insinuation’s dancing daily carousel of gypsy rain and curling cataracts. Terrifying longings evoke our most passionate survival leap from metal barrier, wicker aqueduct, and grimy pedestal of common decibels in shouted anguish, raging silently against inevitable ageless death. Our unacknowledged static origin, infinity of softly sundered word by worldly wisp of causal daffodils and hummingbirds and smokestack sovereigns, scraping higher lung caresses into starkly noticed distant flash of legendary light… We navigate in skillful disregard for coral reefer succulents of all who ever joined in vocal acts, however insignificant, to touch the hand of unknown verity and quiet wizened estuary tide. Pooling empties frost the gully’s wine-soaked grass with detritus of teardrop onset, soothing fragrant wonderers before embarrassment defies their early axioms of peacetime storytelling ambience, lost for now to spinning taxidermy talons. Owls maneuver into headlight bliss, rotating other population centers down to viewport emulsifier trysts, told desperately to closing miniature endearment engines.
Today is a good day to not have hair. Yesterday felt like a train being driven by plants that had somehow gained the ability to drive trains & break the hearts of young women such as myself, but today feels like the train has fully passed into another city somewhere further up the coast. Somewhere in Bellingham, women are having complicated emotional reactions to a plant train but I am here writing you this letter, & I feel good about it. How long has it been since the last time we got together and compared the growth of our hair & nails & asked the sky about why bodies keep producing in these specific ways only? Was it a week? A year? Because I feel like my nails have been fully cut grown & polished a hundred times over, & have acquired the dirt of way too many dogs’ skin & I don’t own one so we’re talking casual dog encounters here.
Once upon a time I had ten dogs, five on each hand, & they worked well as a pack but as individuals were completely untrainable. Just a total mess. It wasn’t until I really put my money down on the sidewalk & watched it blow away that I understood what a dog was & how we try to understand them through sacrifice, without ever knowing what it actually feels like as a thing to do intentionally. If I showed you a series of pictures & could make you believe that each was god, which one would you be willing to leave your home, partner & all your possessions to find? Would it come down to hairstyle? Or appropriately abstract method of representation? I think for me she would have to look like the feeling I had when my mother first told me my teachers weren’t always right about everything. She would have the look my face had right then & gently be trembling the way I tremble when I can feel the right person’s breath coming back on my skin, their hand in the curls behind my ears. & by right I mean god & by god I mean holy & by holy I mean fully meteorlight & called down like whole rocks falling like weather to deeply change our most closely kept holding patterns. You know what I mean. ~~Moss
they told us to stay out of the ladies’ room
and so we went into the woods
we squatted under oaks and beside ferns and over moss and we peed in the woods we took trees as our wives and raised mushrooms
as our children
we covered ourselves in earth and grew roots and spread pollen and we blossomed at night the moon sang to us and the wind made songs
for our dances
we turned into wolves and chased deer and drank the rivers and we were free
@ArtyBots: “I invent and paint math equations. Then I help other bots talk about them!” Barbara Ruth wonders as she wanders through the Valley of the Silicon, searching for a home, as she’s done for three years now. One of the things she wonders is if writing bios in the third person leads to dissociation. Someone should study this. She is pleased to have been published by Zoomoozophone Review more than once. Dalton Day is the author of Exit, Pursued. Their poems have appeared in The Offing, Shabby Doll House, and The Matador Review, among others. They tweet (a lot): @lilghosthands. Dana Venerable is a writer from New Jersey, more specifically the Jersey Shore (lol). She studied English Literature at Dartmouth and is continuing her studies at University at Buffalo, SUNY focusing on multiethnic literature, critical race theory, performance studies, and poetics. Dana likes to tap dance, sing, and attempt to make music via DAWs in her spare time. She created her own vault, like Prince, to make sure no one hears any music until she is dead. Dona Mayoora is a bilingual poet, artist, author, inkophile, and techie form India residing in Connecticut, USA. Her poetry and art works have been published in various international journals. Jackson Nieuwland likes unicorns. Please give them a job. John Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona. Twice nominated for Best of the Net, his work has appeared in many literary journals. A collection of his poetry, Intunesia, is available in paperback at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/whiteskybooks. His pi-related experimental lit-rap video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l33aUs7obVc. He’s @johnpursch on Twitter and john.pursch on Facebook. Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet living in California. Her work has been featured in The Offing, The Feminist Wire, Lambda Literary, PEN America, and elsewhere. She is the author of i’m alive / it hurts / i love it (Boost House, 2014) and THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). kiran anthony foster is 148 centimetres of mixed-race intersex migrant in-betweens. instead of thinking about how different they are, they’d rather think about how similar we all are, and how possible everything is if we work together. kī’s hobbies include sucking at video games, reading marx, and being entirely incompatible with polite society. Kou Sugita is a Japanese-born poet who currently lives in Tucson, where he teaches mostly shitty cis white conservative “bros.” Some of his work appears in Juked, Hawai’i Review, Sundog Lit, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and elsewhere.
Moss Angel is an agender artist, designer, writer, magic-user, creator of books. Hir most recent book is Sea-Witch v.1: May She Lay Us Waste (2fast2house, 2017), the first installment in hir abstract transgender fantasy series. Sea-Witch v.2: Girldirt Angelfog will be out in September. You can follow and support and read hir newest work at http://patreon.com/monstr. Ze is otherwise online at undying.club. Nooks Krannie is a Palestinian/Persian female writer from Canada. Her 1st chapbook, I have hard feelings & I wish I could quit chocolate, was published by Moloko House Press in 2016; her 2nd chapbook, candied pussy, has been recently published by Thistlemilk Press. She tumbls at http://nkrannie.tumblr.com and instagrams @nookskrannie. Penelope Jeanne Brannen is a transsexual lesbian cyborg from the future. She is a poet in the NEOMFA through Cleveland State University. In her spare time she posts w4w missed connections on Craigslist based on her dreams. Rin Johnson is a sculptor and poet who has exhibited widely in exhibitions and fairs in Europe and the United States. Their website is http://rinjohnson.com. Born and raised in Cary, Illinois, Sam Campbell currently resides in Boise, Idaho. He earned his BA in English from Concordia University-St. Paul in Minnesota where he was a running back on the football team. After a stint of professional football in Germany, Sam spent time in Colorado and Montana before landing in the Gem State. His work can be found in numerous literary journals including Poetry City, USA, The Bees are Dead, Zoomoozophone Review, Yes, and elsewhere. He is an MFA candidate at Boise State University. Sonya Vatomsky is a Russian-American non-binary writer and researcher from the Pacific Northwest. They are the author of Salt Is for Curing (Sator Press, 2015) as well as a staff writer at Haute Macabre, and their work has appeared in NY Mag, Atlas Obscura, Mental Floss, Slate, CityLab, and more. Find them online at sonyavatomsky.com or @coolniceghost. Vernon Frazer’s most recent books of poetry include Selected IMPROVISATIONS, ANCHOR WHAT, and Definitions of Obscurity, a collaborative work with Michelle Greenblatt. Frazer’s web site is http://www.vernonfrazer.net. Bellicose Warbling, the blog that updates his web page, can be read at http://bellicosewarbling.blogspot.com. His work, including the entire longpoem IMPROVISATIONS, may also be viewed at Scribd.com. In addition to writing poetry and fiction, Frazer also performs his poetry, incorporating text and recitation with animation and musical accompaniment on YouTube. Frazer is married.