Ambiguous Loss

To be clear, this is my third eulogy, first time
Disputing a transaction, but G_____’s hidebehind,
As he called it, is among us here. Raised in the factory,
Its seasons turning pistons, it crawls the corridors
Gnawing men into money: casket light

As a debit card, remains so sparse they’d fit
Within a handshake. How I see it, what’s left
Of G_____ rests well within the public domain:
Counterfeits strangle this wreath: photos: mementos
Mŏro. Paraphernalia filling in the gaps. Mourning:

Pure pyramid scheme. Until it’s too much, and we gaze
Into our watermarked palms. Understand, tonight
It will redo us on top of our shadows. That’s its language;
A grind inarticulate, it manufactures like we pray:
Manu-, as in hands, the shadows they gesture. How

We bailed G_____’s fingers out of pauper’s jail,
Then glutted that hidebehind with flowers and photos
Until it grew too vague to describe from your pews,
Like hell squared or NASDAQ bleeding:
Consider this eulogy a harrowing, as in carrying home

On hooks, to be cleaned in the sink like a baby
Or a fresh catch. How police dragged its habitat
For a sample so small no God would bother suing us
For looping it, though all rights revert to Him
Upon publication. Omni-, as in ambi-, as in

-Dextrous, -guous, -valent. Consider the absent form
Credit, and learn the legalese to collect what’s yours. This,
To be clear, is my third eulogy, and those are often more
Arrogant: You’re all free to celebrate small blessings,
But I, steeped in bodiless breath, will be charging by the word.

*

Christopher Munde’s first poetry collection, Slippage (Tebot Bach, 2019), won the Patricia Bibby Award, and his poems have previously appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, The Literary Review, Massachusetts Review, Notre Dame Review, Third Coast, West Branch, and elsewhere.  He is a graduate of the University of Houston’s MFA program and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize.  Presently, he lives and teaches in western NY.

Fire poem

a dream is a door thru which the dead pass—

we’ve learned little from what ruptured in the rearview
what muscle memoriam lurks in the tongue to inflect the naming
of what we think is new, not borrowed, like earth
like time, like executions and their encores. i feared for my life
when i heard the lick of the flame, like a ruler against a palm but tenfold
and amplified, louder than the call to prayer
louder than the church bells—

the fire chewed up the same mountainside
it did a generation ago when futures melted down to history
and the stories hardened into spoons—

the arson incinerated the thicket and roasted the chickens and rose
to the town on top of the cliff but it never leapt six feet across the road—

still, my room where i lay my head—

where i strike my myrrh on the lip of a candle—

where i fan my hair’s lavender spray over a pillow as offering to the night—

it fills with smoke in the daylight
and somewhere, a crack—

a tree falling—

a door kicked in
by a combat boot.

*

Jess Rizkallah is a Lebanese-American writer and illustrator. Her book THE MAGIC MY BODY BECOMES was a finalist for The Believer Poetry Award and won the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize as awarded by the Radius of Arab-American Writers and University of Arkansas Press.

sad girl saturn return

i’ve lost my mind at swan after swan blooming
outside the window of the northeast regional. convinced myself
it meant i could control the sun and my menstrual cycle. but the mind
is not lost, it’s just replaced with meaning. the wasp burrowing into the fig
to lay her eggs. the brain an inverted flower waiting for pollination. we mistake
anything sweet for fruits. anything pretty for a miracle. blood is honey
and we hum ourselves to sleep about it *** then years later we’re like what
the fuck. that was crazy, i went crazy. one time a psychic said to me
do not be afraid to lose your mind, baby *** i’m afraid to lose a lot
of things because i’ve lost so much already, like my hair and various beads,
stones, tax forms, you, the will to 2 live laugh luv haha text it *** jk i lost cell signal
and you can lose my number *** i’m not mad at you i’m just really so bad
at texting back (and also i’m like dropping hints that i want you
to write me love letters.) i want you to write me love letters *** which before
the apocalypse, i would’ve expected this deep desire expressed to be my hubris but
turns out in america our love letters could save the u.s. postal system. one dollar for a stamp
another dollar to isr*el to bankroll the violent dispossession of indigenous palestinians
from their ancestral lands. he loves me he loves me not. that’s not romantic that’s a fact.
inevitable, but so is the fall of every empire. what’s romantic is the baby blue eyelid
of a mourning dove who doesn’t fly away when i lean close enough to identify
that its eyeball looks like a melting easter colored m&m i could just pluck
and pop right into my mouth. *** but i haven’t lost my mind again not yet. just
the meaning i once attached to these birds. or maybe not the meaning
but the excitement at the optimism of this meaning. actually, meanings are like birds
they roost then fly away after a season. next year they land somewhere else. closer
to the horizon of my awareness, a speck on the gradient atmosphere. an errant glitter fleck
on the left cheekbone— last night’s make-up alerting everyone in the dunkins
that i’m on a walk of no shame. the distant swan song still playing long after the swan
has died. like the light from a star which may or may not be dead. we are sadder
about stars than we are about birds even though every bird i’ve ever seen
before like three months ago is most likely dead. but still, something hatches
in my brain at the flutter of wings *** the avian connection to angels, to dinosaurs,
to prehistory and my chicken sandwich. *** meaning is the many winged henchman
of time. have i been repeating “meaning” too much ? no no. *** i have been invoking it.
there, fixed it. and now i’ve mentioned the poem inside the poem like a good little arab
who knows you’re always watching. this type of repetition and exposition: frowned upon
in mfa workshops. but mfa workshops are full of zionists and i am full of blood
and shit, which i hereby sever from the meaning of non-credibility, and tell it 2 you
objectively: i’ve finally started bleeding again. on the eclipse, actually, which
makes me nervous because i think we’re supposed to lay low and hydrate
on eclipses, and That’s IT. *** lest we fuck up our whole shit. if you’re related to me Stop Reading Here
no for real please stop i’m trying to be brave and honest in conversations around
my body. hot girl summer hot girl life yes i’m a year away from 30 and so far
have only merged with men on new moons, full moons, post tarot readings + joints—
most recently, an eclipse *** followed shortly by blood. i’m like jay-z on a loop
nervously watching the sky wishing on dead birds because i can’t see stars in boston.
except when i’m in jamaica pond staring at moonlit kneecaps i’d want to draw
but nothing else. so, too distracted to notice the stars unless they freckle skin
i’m too afraid to touch. when i described my first time to a friend, they said *** jess i think
you cast a spell on him, ha ha! *** no but say sike right now i secretly fear that perhaps
i did. you can’t accuse me of doing anything like that on purpose tho
because my purpose would never be anyone leaving. wow
i killed the vibe again. i lost the thread again i lost the love in lieu
of losing my mind. oh is that what the record-keeper meant?
oh so it was about love. whys everything about love
even when the house is on fire and we’re trapped inside.
the ocean i mean. the world i mean. my body i mean.
and me high up in my head looking down
at the scene. now he’s saying to me it’s okay, come
out, let go. you’re so hot.

*

Jess Rizkallah is a Lebanese-American writer and illustrator. Her book THE MAGIC MY BODY BECOMES was a finalist for The Believer Poetry Award and won the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize as awarded by the Radius of Arab-American Writers and University of Arkansas Press.

The Memoirist

The open road always begins somewhere else,
Not so open. The story begins with the absence
Of story, a recollection of childhood illness,
A room with the shades drawn, fever, adults
Whispering as they shut the door. The hero
Will cross deserts and picture-book mountain ranges,
Ride through the snow on horseback or sip
Small glasses of liqueur with a countess, will
Know just the right moment to lock eyes
And touch. When he returns home, he vows
To be discrete, but memoir abhors discretion,
Revels in climbing over rooftops like Giacomo
The Venetian, to escape and move on. He is
Five years old, and they wake him because
The doctor is here. The black bag yawns,
And a hand withdraws a hypodermic. There
Are pills and blood tests, bored aunts who read to him
From Charles and Mary Lamb, who fall asleep with
Their mouths open, heads dropping as they speak.
The memoirist sits in cafés drinking absinthe with his
Well-known friends. He doesn’t like the taste but won’t
Admit it. There’s a fly in the water pitcher, and the woman
Across the room refuses to notice him no matter how
Loudly he speaks. He tells a story about being robbed
In New York, his attacker running away. It seems
To him that no one is paying attention, or perhaps he’s
Told the story before. He can’t remember. Taxicabs
Turned off their lights and kept going. Byron swam
The Hellespont despite his club foot and had the bad
Luck to die from wounds in battle. The road
Isn’t as open as it appears. Cellini made art to earn
The pope’s forgiveness. The memoirist changes hotels.
That one was drafty. You could hear the water closet
Drip from down the hall. What forgiveness exists
For crimes that never happened? His memories
Are lies, mechanical inventions, automatons that
Dance or play cards. There was a gazebo, a wet cheek,
A kiss that flattered only the teller, not the tale,
The lips reluctant and closed. The automaton
Requires a wind-up, then begins to dance, shifting
Its metallic weight from one foot to the other.

*

George Franklin’s most recent poetry collections are Remote Cities (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions,
2023), and a dual-language collaboration with Colombian poet Ximena Gómez, Conversaciones
sobre agua/Conversations About Water (Katakana Editores, 2023). Individual publications
include: Solstice, Rattle, Matter, Cagibi, New York Quarterly, Sequestrum, Tar River Poetry, The
Threepenny Review, and The Ekphrastic Review. He practices law in Miami and teaches poetry
workshops in Florida prisons. Website: https://gsfranklin.com/

The Protagonist

In movies and novels, the protagonist turns the key
In the ignition, leaves entanglements in a lopsided
Rear-view mirror. He doesn’t bother to adjust it
Because what’s abandoned isn’t important. He passes
Prairies and mountains, coyotes crossing the highway at
Night, truck stops full of flannel shirts, caps, and bad coffee.
Stopped somewhere up ahead, Walt Whitman is waiting.
Jack Kerouac eats apple pie and vanilla ice cream on
A stool in a diner. Gary Snyder cooks stew in the desert.
The winter constellations are fireworks against a black sky.
But, it’s all wrong. Walt Whitman died in Camden
And Kerouac in Florida, surrounded by conservative
Magazines, beer cans, and bitterness. The road ends
Where it started, a cliché like a sour stomach. The protagonist
Ages badly. Whatever he thought he’d find, it wasn’t
Where he thought he’d find it. Arthritis invades his ankles
And his hands. He doesn’t draw the same breaths anymore.
Whitman was supposed to be waiting, but he never
Showed up. In New Orleans, in the morning, they’re washing
The sidewalk in front of the bars. The strippers have gone
Home to sleep. Trucks collect green bags of garbage on
Bourbon Street. It’s Sunday, and the Cathedral is open for
Business. In the park, the statue of Andrew Jackson
Continues to tell the same lie. Bukowski was thrown in
Jail in Texas. At the water’s stubborn edge in California,
The protagonist finds an absence he can’t talk about.
His thoughts sink in the waves, like sea glass or books
He won’t read again. At rush hour, the traffic slows
Without any obvious reason. He wants an ending that’s
A real ending, one where everything make sense.
Instead, there’s just traffic going nowhere.

*

George Franklin’s most recent poetry collections are Remote Cities (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions,
2023), and a dual-language collaboration with Colombian poet Ximena Gómez, Conversaciones
sobre agua/Conversations About Water (Katakana Editores, 2023). Individual publications
include: Solstice, Rattle, Matter, Cagibi, New York Quarterly, Sequestrum, Tar River Poetry, The
Threepenny Review, and The Ekphrastic Review. He practices law in Miami and teaches poetry
workshops in Florida prisons. Website: https://gsfranklin.com/

Affirmations for a Surge

After Leah Barclay’s ‘Migration Patterns: Saltwater’

The sound has a cataclysm to it
crackable & pert, blueberry or hazelnut
on a tongue, a sense organ itself bowl-steadied,
becoming acceptable. There is a coo or a crinkling;
a keen; a cooling tree canopy or river-shallow in which
we keep all our roundest mutterings cupped. We are rounding up;
the fright becoming a chain of recorded dusks & they go so well with the last
sun-dapplings reordering themselves on grey carpet; the Arctic storm
they say has been coming for days, smattered to us here
in surprising gusts. The end of the sound file is a gem
or a dwindling, seems to twirl.

***

Alicia Byrne Keane is a final year PhD student at Trinity College Dublin, having completed a MSt. in English Literature 1900-Present at Oxford. Alicia’s poetry has been published in The Moth, The Colorado Review, The Cardiff Review, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Banshee, Abridged, and Entropy, among others; the poem ‘surface audience’ has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Bud Dajo, 1906

I said to my son on our ascent,
the volcano is extinct –
we need no longer fear it.
Immediately he felt at ease.
He had faith in his mother’s word.
He trusted me to keep him safe.
We walked in the path of Allah,
and for that moment, the path
was an uphill climb.
We scaled the heart-crushing slope,
sometimes crawling on our bellies
to press against the steep angle.
I had to pause many times
to catch my breath.

In the crater our crops thrived –
potatoes and rice, nourished by spring water.
We greeted each green growing thing
with the same joy we shared
with newcomers from Jolo.
We were only a few hundred
in the beginning, but by the end
we were a thousand,
our very own barangay
in the bowl of a dead volcano,
turning ourselves five times a day
toward the sunset ridge to say our prayers.

All of us, women and men alike,
were ready to fight and die for our faith.
We had large knives, short swords, spears,
and a few rifles. But our tiny cannons,
almost like toys on the crater’s edge,
were no match for the shelling that began.
The booming and shaking scared us as much
as a lava explosion, and our children began
to cry. I wished I could hold my six-year-old
in my lap, feel his heart like a hummingbird
against my chest, and tell him everything
would be all right.

But how could it have been,
when we were inside a crater,
and you fired at us from the rim?

You who had called us,
when your grand project started,
your little brown brothers. We all know
what happens to your little brown brothers.
Look at Wounded Knee. Look at Samar,
where your General Smith said
the more you kill and burn
the better it will please me.
We had already heard from the north
of your occupation, concentration camps,
water-torture, genocide, the order
to kill everyone over ten.
Predictably, that day in Bud Dajo,
when we were screaming inside
the crater and you were a battalion
of bayonets through and through us,
only six of us survived.

In a photograph of you
standing over our corpses,
– a woman’s exposed breast,
perhaps mine, in the center –
your faces are hard to read.
The image is too grainy and old
to show the stark contrast
between a troop of white men,
hands on hips, and a ditch of brown
Muslims, five layers of bodies deep,
your little brown brothers and sisters
in a crater we had made our home,
shot for refusing to submit to you.

My son was only six. I can’t
find him in the picture.

***

Cristina Legarda was born in the Philippines and spent her early childhood there before moving to Bethesda, Maryland. She is now a practicing physician in Boston. Her work has appeared in America magazine, The Dewdrop, FOLIO, Lucky Jefferson, HeartWood, The Good Life Review, Smartish Pace, and others.

LOUISIANA PURCHASE EXPOSITION, ST. LOUIS, 1904

You made us eat dog
so moms with giant feathers in their hats
could point to us and exclaim
to their astonished kids,
“Look at how these savages live!”
At the edge of our enclosure families
glanced at guidebooks you wrote
and whispered, wide-eyed,
Head hunters! – their mouths
agape with fascination.

Our forty-seven acre reservation
brought in more revenue than anything
else at the fair, even with all
the hot dogs and ice cream cones,
forty brands of ketchup on display,
ferris wheel, carousel, dirigible,
dinosaur bones, trains, and a funhouse
where fairgoers could visit “Hell.”
There was noise everywhere
from marching bands, barkers,
throngs of people. I missed
the highlands of Bontoc,
the mists and green slopes,
the quiet, and the scent of pine.

Two of us died on the way here,
frozen in the boxcar you failed to heat.
Some got beriberi, smallpox, pneumonia.
No one at the fairground asked if we were cold –
instead, they complained we were half-naked.
You people were so ill-at-ease
with your own bodies, so unlike us,
so afraid of your humanity.

You made us dance in our loincloths
several times a day and compete
in unfamiliar games we couldn’t help but lose.
Outwardly we smiled at you, but inside:
a swirling pool of shame, the surface
rippling with each stare, the depths
a dark and secret muck
embedding our despair.

You measured our skulls
to prove we were stupider.
I only learned later
you conspired to collect them
and take our brains after we died.
You knew, you anticipated,
that some of us would die,
and you felt entitled to dispose
of us as you wanted, without asking,
a femur here, a calvarium there.
Our bodies didn’t matter. You treated us
like dogs, consuming us, so even in death
I was still in a zoo, exposed,
my flesh boiled off and thrown away,
my skull indistinguishable on a shelf
with a thousand others, still subject
to scrutiny and gawking and judgment.

I want the last word.
I want my skull back.

***

Cristina Legarda was born in the Philippines and spent her early childhood there before moving to Bethesda, Maryland. She is now a practicing physician in Boston. Her work has appeared in America magazine, The Dewdrop, FOLIO, Lucky Jefferson, HeartWood, The Good Life Review, Smartish Pace, and others.

Pacification, 1901

On Immaculate Conception Day
just in time to ruin Christmas
came the order to move
to “zones of protection”
– a disingenuous phrase.

You asked us to fetch petrol, then
doused our homes and burned them down.
Our paper faroles, already hanging,
quickly flared amid the flames.
Our desecrated memories
the color of ash.

Near the concentration camp
a blister on my heel burst open
and for a moment the pain was gone
but a minute later, excruciating hurt
even worse than before, as with each step
my shoes rubbed raw the broken surface.

The crowding was an abomination –
30,000 where only 3000 should have been.
We were packed together so close
in our living spaces that I could count
the goose bumps on my neighbor’s skin
when he took ill with fever and chills,
his pallet drenched
with a sick-smelling sweat.

Within six months the parish burial records
in Batangas and Lipa more than doubled
from the camps, where cholera and measles
festered. Everyone had diarrhea, and if
we weren’t vomiting from disease
we were throwing up from the stench

and filth in which we lived.
How I longed for clean water
to wash with and drink.
I would have asked for a jug
if I could have been sure
you wouldn’t, out of habit,
hold me down at each extremity
to force the water down my throat.

***

Cristina Legarda was born in the Philippines and spent her early childhood there before moving to Bethesda, Maryland. She is now a practicing physician in Boston. Her work has appeared in America magazine, The Dewdrop, FOLIO, Lucky Jefferson, HeartWood, The Good Life Review, Smartish Pace, and others.

Days of Protest

We will smash the world
Wildly
We will thunder…

Roses and dreams
Debased by poets
Will unfurl…
— The 150, 000, 000, Mayakovski.

We will not disappear.
like her birth name
like his dead letters
buried inside a sheaf
after a flash rain…

We will not disappear.

**

Death yawns stately.
Death conjoins us.
— whether we make music
noise, love, or bourgeoisie war.
Free assembly and funeral
rites, these days, symbiotic, interchangeable.

Siren sounds. We will not disappear

**

xxxxx we proceed like marionettes
carried along on one string
crowds of selfsame mouths
our tongues chant now in unison
the pitch like a cracked accordion
then canticle is cant
and cry.

xxxxxxxxxxx and the dead also
They will not disappear.

**

Death conjoins us. The streets
indigenously compel us
whether we lay down
and recharge
screaming at planned events
protests marches
and vigils
have become
intermarried, like a sexual transgression

Death conjoins us

**

Death pulls back the curtain.

Public war,
like private mourning,
pulls back the curtain.
An old law is a heavy sigh.
Its retellings, latchkey shibboleth xxxx blood nurses grief,
grief nurses war,

and what else is changed to soldiers and mourners?

**

We wear hoodies and chains
— hoodies, sneakers, jerseys, chains;
lining the streets carrying placards,
banners
and loudspeakers
amplifying x Trayvon xx Breonna
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx EricGarnerFreddieGreyPhilandoCastle
xx like aggravated parlor ghosts
And sound systems reify the abstractions:
let the crowds inspire regardless
belief in eternal succession…

**

– then we seize the streets.

then we seize the streets at noon and night
but dispassionately challenge
standard badges of the numinous state;
officers in bright-dark svelte glasses breaking
past the front lines berate us.

The blue lines aggress.

– but we seize the streets at night

***

We amplify. We reify.

xxxx — we amplify using cost efficient
instruments of bulbs, amps, wattage;
cackle and hum breaks daylight monotony
then we seize the streets at noon and night
like visionary candlewicks afloat on
sea and surge. But the sea will never

xxxxx swallow the candles: burning brightly!

***

And amplify. And reify
flesh of my physical atrophy
death’s indigenous people
shortchanged before destruction…
who will not disappear
like her birth name
like his dead letters
after a flash rain…

 

*****

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is the 2021-2023 Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico. His 2017 chapbook, Life’s Prisoners, received the Turtle Island Quarterly chapbook prize. His full-length collection is Psalms at the Present Time, published in 2021 by Flowstone Press. Wellington has dedicated his Poet Laureate term to highlighting poetry dealing with oppression, cultural division , and historical trauma. The poem ” Days of Protest” is a tribute to the Black Lives Matter movement.