*

 

***

Karyna McGlynn is the author of Hothouse (Sarabande 2017), The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution (Willow Springs 2016), and I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande 2009).  She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Christian Brothers University in Memphis.

From the trunks of trees             and bare stones
Sprung the dead and abducted girls
And the terrifying bodies of men and older boys
From the air sprung the monsters
From the air sprung the horror
Of knives in the dark
From the ground came the voices of the people who had lived in the valley
Before settlers came
Their missing voices and bodies sprung from the grass
From the animals sprung the warmth
Of internal worlds from my skin sprung the silent
And bitter mystery of my solitude
The shame stretching throat to groin
Sprang from a place or a moment or a thing
I did not know and could not see or remember
The shame came alive singing back to  the invisible things everywhere
These things that were real            the most real
When I was young

 

 

 

 

 

 

***

I am native of rural Oregon though I lived for some years after college in northern Italy.  I hold an MFA in poetry and PhD in English from Washington University.  My poems, translations, and articles of literary criticism have appeared in journals in the US, the UK, and Italy.  My first book of poems, The Paled Guest, was published by Aldrich Press in January 2018.  Currently, I teach medieval literature and creative writing at a small liberal arts college in central Minnesota where I live with my husband and our two sons.

 

 

***

Artist, poet, and freelance writer, J.I. Kleinberg is a Pushcart nominee and winner of the 2016 Ken Warfel Fellowship. Her found poems have appeared in Diagram, Heavy Feather Review, Rise Up Review, The Tishman Review, Hedgerow, Otoliths, and elsewhere. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, and blogs most days at thepoetrydepartment.wordpress.com.

 

 

***

Artist, poet, and freelance writer, J.I. Kleinberg is a Pushcart nominee and winner of the 2016 Ken Warfel Fellowship. Her found poems have appeared in Diagram, Heavy Feather Review, Rise Up Review, The Tishman Review, Hedgerow, Otoliths, and elsewhere. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, and blogs most days at thepoetrydepartment.wordpress.com.

Remember when the census bureau called while you were away in New York and they asked what race you were?

********Yes. M said it was complicated.

Would you care to elaborate, please?

********M said it was complicated but they still persisted in asking what race I was.

Do you remember what she said? M told them you had a Spanish-sounding last name but that you weren’t Hispanic. M told them that you looked Asian but that you didn’t consider yourself Asian. M said that you acted white but that you weren’t white.

********Wait. I don’t act white. What does that even mean?

Anyway, M asked if they could put you down as OTHER. They refused to accept that as an answer. Remember what they finally agreed on?

********Race: CANADIAN

 

 

***

Greg Santos is the author of Blackbirds (Eyewear, 2018), Rabbit Punch! (DC Books, 2014) and The Emperor’s Sofa (DC Books, 2010). He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. He regularly works with at-risk communities and teaches at Montreal’s Thomas More Institute. He is the poetry editor of carte blanche.

Are you Cambodian.

********Yes… I mean I think so… It’s complicated…

So, were you born in Cambodia then?

********No. I was born in Montreal, Quebec.

Have you ever even been to Cambodia?

********No.

Then how can you consider yourself Cambodian?

********I didn’t always… But it is part of my heritage. My Mom was born in Spain. My
********Dad, in Portugal. They immigrated to Canada in the 60s. I’m Spanish and
********Portuguese. I have a Portuguese passport even. That is my heritage.

********I was born in Canada. I’m Canadian. That is my heritage.

********But I consider myself Cambodian now, too. Yes, that is my heritage.

How do you mean?

********My ancestors were Cambodian. I mean, I physically look Asian. My blood. It’s
********Khmer. Cambodian.

********I didn’t know until recently that there’s a word for this kind of thing.

********It’s called transracial adoption.

********According to Wikipedia, it refers to the act of placing a child of one racial or
********ethnic group with adoptive parents of another racial or ethnic group.

Most folks think you’re Filipino. Remember when someone put you on a Twitter-thread for Filipino writers?

********Yes, I guess I was honoured to be put on a list. Of course, I had to step in and tell
********everyone I’m not Filipino.

It’s the last name. Santos throws them off. SANTOS. It’s Portuguese, right?

********In my case it is. It comes from my father’s side. It is a common name in Portugal,
********Spain, Italy, and the Philippines.

Do you pronounce it SANTOSH?

********I prefer it pronounced like this: SAN-TOS. You pronounce the last part TOAST but
******** without the T at the end. SAN-TOAS(T).

********That’s how we’ve always pronounced it at home.

Honestly, this is confusing…

********One of my friend’s girlfriend is of Cambodian descent and when we first met,
********she told me I look like her father.

How did that make you feel.

********Good, actually! Being told I looked Cambodian was validating.

It’s like you are some kind of cultural mosaic or something…

 

***

Greg Santos is the author of Blackbirds (Eyewear, 2018), Rabbit Punch! (DC Books, 2014) and The Emperor’s Sofa (DC Books, 2010). He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. He regularly works with at-risk communities and teaches at Montreal’s Thomas More Institute. He is the poetry editor of carte blanche.

 

 

A) it’s actually not a fruit. It’s an inflorescence. Florets,
********bulbous stem. You get it. Ostiole. Seed and flower.

C) every species of Ficus has a specific wasp that fertilizes it.

D) the queen of the fig wasps, small enough to squeeze into it,
********enters the fig. She may snap her antennae. She may tear her wings.

F) Earlier, I said inflorescence and ostiole just to impress you.

G) Somewhere I read if the wasp fails to pollinate the fig, the tree
********has dropped it, killing the wasp eggs. But that can’t be true.

I) Tell me that’s not true. Who would be so cruel?

J) Born wingless, the male spends his life in a single fig. He
********knows to tunnel through darkness, for the queen, who
********leaves him, as she must, in exchange for light.

M) At the art exhibit. Your plate piled with figs, mixed
********nuts, soft cheeses. There was so much to love
********or nothing at all. You hadn’t decided. I hadn’t asked.

P) the queen sheds her pollen dust, dies in the fig’s chamber. It makes
********quick work of her, nourishing itself.

R) I read somewhere that figs are an aphrodisiac, because of the death inside. If
********so, Black Mission, Sierra, Calimyrna, King… should I go on?

T) The strangler fig begins as a seed but grows to hollow its host tree. The wood
********useless. It’s trunk often gnarled, knotted.

V) Before we left the exhibit. Your pockets stuffed. So many figs.

W) For some reason, I thought of the biblical garden, in which no figs grew.

X) The gallery lights dimmed. Softly, in the background, Clair De Lune played.
********You know, Oceans 11? The Bellagio fountains? After Danny steals away with Tess?

Z) In the beginning, was the fig. You fed it to me. And it was good.

 

***

Nathan McClain is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017), a recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. His poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in New York Times Magazine, upstreet, The Rumpus, Poem-a-Day, and Verse Daily. He teaches at Hampshire College.

I was about to…Rigoberto¹
López Pérez, serene, takes a seat
right next to me. I glimpse from the
corner of my eye that he is being followed.
The empty notebook he carries tells me that he waits
–for something worth the wait. Which is also clear from the linen
suit, the perfect English tie knot, the first communion shoes. I accept
that my turn to ask has come. An unsuspected calm makes us company.
I talk to him about Charlotte, about Cesar’s own child, about Sasha
Ulianov. What have they said to you? How many times can
one die in the same manner? There is a breath of fever in
the air, and the line between land and sea becomes less
blurry. The tide rises and ebbs, rises and ebbs and
rises until it turns into a spear; then, it punctures
the horizon from end to end. A shadow who
was staring down backs off; she has seen
something. In front of us the ocean is
parted; a golden canal, and a
sealed door, deep in the
background, a carmine
doorknob exploding
silently, a lone,
expansive,
slow,
flash.

 

[1] A poet, artist and composer. He assassinated Anastasio Somoza García, the longtime dictator of Nicaragua

***

Francisco Larios, writer and translator, has published three full poetry collections in Spanish: Cada Sol Repetido, (“Every returning sun”), Anamá Press, Managua, Nicaragua, November, 2010, La Isla de Whitman, (“Whitman’s Island”), Buenos Aires Poetry, Argentina, 2015, Sobre la vida breve de cualquier paraíso (“About the fleeting life of any paradise”), 400 Elefantes, Nicaragua, 2017.  A bilingual collection: The Net in Sight/La red ante los ojos, Rascacielos, Quito, Ecuador, 2015. A bilingual plaquette: Astronomía de un sueño/Astronomy of a Dream, Carmina in minima, Barcelona, 2013.  His translations have been published in Modern Poetry in Translation and other literary journals.  Selected and translated into Spanish Los hijos de Whitman – Poesía norteamericana en el siglo XXI (“Whitman’s Children—U.S. Poetry in the XXIst Century), Valparaíso, México, 2017, a sample of 109 contemporary poets.  Writes political essays and opinions in news media and on his own blog [“Ciudadano X”].  His poetry has appeared in numerous digital and print magazines around the world, and has been translated into Italian, Greek, Romanian, Estonian, and Arabic.

Zealous acolytes of twisted right angles. Bright-eyed

Young Republicans in brown-shirt fashion, disavowing

xenophobic motivation while marching side by side

with white nationalists and Oath Keepers into the booths.

Vacant young app addicts, doddering octogenarians, and that

uncle you thought you knew. Maybe your spouse, your child.

Three Percenters with one finger on a trigger and another

selecting a name that sounds like hump, dump, bump stock,

Rumpelstiltskin. End time eschatologists with full magazines.

Quick-change artists like Chris Christie and Nikki Haley.

Professional polluters, paramilitary police, Pompeo, Pruitt.

Obtuse advocates of abstinence, incel advocates of sexual assault,

nativist advocates for twelve million deportations.

Michael the Black Man and other candidates for radical

lobotomy. Chickens and foxes in the same damned barnyard.

Kanye, I suppose. And Cheney. And David Duke.

Judeo-Christian Zionists, evangelical Southern Baptists, and

initiates of the New Appalachian Cult of Resurrected Coal.

Heirs of McCarthy and Wallace and Thurmond,

ghosts of my father and his last Jim Crow generation.

Family men with cunt on their lips at the country club

every Sunday afternoon, looking for a bitch to trump.

(Did you know that forty-one percent of them—

cited in one poll, anyway—said they would support

bombing Agrabah, fictional home of Disney’s darkish Aladdin?)

All 62,984,828 of them casting their voices into the void.

 

***

Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008), Millennial Teeth (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), and two chapbooks from Unicorn Press: The Use of the World (2013) and Of Air and Earth (2019). His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, The Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review, The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and a previous issue of Matter, among other journals and anthologies. He teaches at Coastal Carolina University.

 

***

Karyna McGlynn is the author of Hothouse (Sarabande 2017), The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution (Willow Springs 2016), and I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande 2009).  She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Christian Brothers University in Memphis.