29.2 - Summer/Fall 2017

In this issue

• The 2016 Gulf Coast Prize in Translation

  My sadness, that wet brown box moaning against the wall; gum of rain and dead trees, that bitch lost in a jungle of smoke, that yellow scrap of old news.

• Roundtable: Trans and Genderqueer Poetics

  This is a roundtable on trans and genderqueer poetics curated by Ching-In Chen in conversation with Ryka Aoki, Kai M. Green, L.G. Parker, and Trish Salah. In this discussion, the writers also address …

• Dan Graham--Design for Showing Rock Videos (2014)

  Rock music, better known as Rock and Roll, from its genesis in the 1950s to the present, has remained a dynamic cultural force. For many throughout world history, Dan Graham included, music holds …

• How Can We Remember the Trailblazing Electronic Music Composer, Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016)

  No matter what you’re doing—intently reading this piece, scrolling through the journal or flipping between tabs on a web browser, eating, talking to a friend, sitting, walking, …

• Cherokee Hogscape

  Pops wd say, hogs’ll knock you down and chaw yr eyeballs out of the socket. I seen ‘em. Pops collected slops from the poolroom café making you carry plastic buckets – don’t slop yr …

• Late Leeks

  Linda arrives with the leeks to end all leeks, direct from her garden, practically hydroponic, flawless, already creamy, pale

• Two Poems: I Said Goodbye and Vegetable Stand

  I said goodbye and went to live among the lettuces with those sheets the nightgown isn’t worth it soft coarse the lettuce tender fresh it’s a home ideal for summertime clear green with …

• Matroyshka Memories

  Once, at a bus stop in Kaliningrad around rush hour, I found myself in line behind a group of Russians ready to climb an already-full bus, to head hither or thither. A one-legged older man, in a long …

• Selections from Does grass sweat: Translations of an insignificant Japanese poet by Jee Leong Koh (2016), with commentary by Sam Fujimoto-Mayer (2066)

  A dropped napkin It is impossible to speak of the history dabs at the corner of the Japanese haiku in America and of the field not speak of the history of the Japanese people in America. And it …

• Obey Orchestral Orgasm

  Oedipus orgasm obligatory orgasm Ocean orgasm omnipotent orgasm Orpheus orgasm oxygen orphan Ornament overkill oyster Origin outerspace origin outlier origin Overseas origin …

• Serving God, Meat, and Intercourse in an Amish Diner

  Ziggy Stardust and Southern Boogie dominated the FM airwaves the era I lived on greasy tacos from Jack-In-The-Box, ditched high school cap and gown for the beach, wrote poetry and drank vodka-laced …

• Mutant

  Coaxing a fruit fly larva from its vial with a sterile brush, I think of that self-portrait in which you hover between woman and man, of the paintbrush stroking you as it rendered you: ashen …

• Half Dark

  It's half dark/and we're up too late in the interest of picking/the still-tender/yellow crookneck squash and blue lake beans/before they get fat and woody/and blueberries still a/violent red-purple …

• Blues and the Archives of the Revolution

  “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to …

• Key to the Fresh Water Fishes of Maryland

  A. We get off the bus, our tracksuit bottoms Swickswickswicking down the hill to the boathouse where freshwater fish float in basins of ice and formaldehyde, waiting to be identified. The …

• XIV

  As if you fit on the crest on the peak on obverse of the bone I try to capture your body your mountain, your reverse.

• A Family

  Curtis Smith watched from across the street as the boy argued with Lena Johnson in front of the movie theater. She had probably bought tickets for the wrong movie. Or maybe Andre didn’t want to see …

• That I say Nationalism is a Tote Bag and I Carry it with Me is Neither a Hyperbole

  nor a trend. Not that my scaphoid will fracture or my fame will be down in the drainage otherwise, but receipts are calm territories. No refund guarantee. Sometimes I find myself huddling in the …

• The Man on the Moon

  Shannon Ratliff is an essayist living in Texas. Her work is forthcoming in Seneca Review and Hotel Amerika .

• Masha Eventually

  At first, I couldn’t decide if I should call the bear it or if I should call the bear him. At first, this distinction was important to me, and because it was a problem I could solve entirely …

• Turnbuckle

  C. McAllister Williams wrote Neon Augury (Fact-Simile Editions, 2011) and WILLIAM SHATNER (alice blue books, 2010). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Sonora Review, ILK, …

• Candy

  His name was burden. He said he was looking for his drone. He invited them down the alley, tried to bait them with sugar, technology.

• Sedentism

  That their hair was that flat black painted on the inside of a mirror—that’s what I remember most about those boys. And that their eyes were always turned down. You could never see their color, …

• Bars of Blue

  Hand-me-down blue, that's our kind of blue--sailed, revolutioned, majestied--hand-me-down-blue, that's our royal high-ness. This, our hot-stepping constellation of ringed colonies

• Louisiana Disaster Recovery 3.0

  Roll up your sleeves. wade on into the floodwater

• Another Poem Beginning with a Bullet

  My aunt is still alive—let us begin there instead— and I step off the 34 Montclair into a breezequelled dusk. Thanksgiving eve. It takes twenty of my strides, or ten seconds, for the bus engine …

• Hijo, please

  Get Celli. Tell her to gather enough change to buy some apples. Make sure they are green. I want the sourness to overwhelm mi lengua like the weight of el sol on naked naked skin.

• Eight Bites

  As they put me to sleep, my mouth fills with the dust of the moon. I expect to choke on the silt but instead it slides in and out, and in and out, and I am, impossibly, breathing. I have dreamt …

• All of the Plant is Edible

  I watch the stars hide behind each other and it’s another beautiful/ day of sin in the world.

• Whistle While You Work: An Interview with Liz McCarthy

  For the past two years, artist Liz McCarthy has been making whistles from clay, hosting “hangouts” during which people are invited to play with them, and freely distributing them to participants. …

• Marigold, Horses, & a Diamond: Jill Magid's The Proposal

  In a minimal black ring box with white interior cushions rests a 2-carat blue diamond set on a silver band. The ring’s simple form doubles in a mirror positioned within the lid of the box, and the …

• Two Poems: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and In Translation

  I. no, because I am afraid to die, it does not matter what I become.

• Two Poems: On Conversion Therapy, and On Prep and On Prayer

  grandpa’s initial response upon learning i was queer was to look to history for all the ways he could fix me :

• To Know a Thing

  Let me tell you about the atomic tangerine/aquamarine cerulean/magenta mantis shrimp.

• There is No Such Thing as Confession in Latinx Poetry

  1.During the Mexican Revolution I set up a lawn chair at the bank of the Rio Bravo and watched men kill other men. Near me a woman passed around a bottle of champagne, so I had a glass.

• Apologia

  “I just can’t get down with all the self-flagellation,” I tell my partner, Chris, who’s been Catholic his whole life—previously in religion, now in countenance. It’s the first Friday of …

• Dear X

  Sometimes when I wake up & my body does not follow, I imagine it is busy lying beside you on the hillside above the McDonough baseball field, where the sounds from the interstate fill the empty …

• Slacklines

  I like your stomach hair, I told him, and he frowned down at me, confused, curious. Then he smiled, a slack-jawed smile. I braided them, the hairs, wild wiry things, pale like the goose-necked lamp …

• i rather talk slick about that slum king fixin' this door than dat cop use my black ass for target practice

  my ob/gyn office keep a cop in its arms / like i don’t know how to walk with my insides scared already / like my womb don’t shake when my period late / like my period ain’t ever late in the …

• Two Poems: Night Ghazal and The Blood

  She had the blood, too. Bathtubs filled to enameled lip and her body pouring. As a girl, I thought being a woman meant your life spilling from you like a cup of juice you kept knocking over. I was …

• 2016 Barthelme Prize Honorable Mention: Fall from Grace

  The first one, a visitor from out of town, slipped on a mossy rock and fell 10,000 feet into the gorge’s open mouth. Then Marcy Eldritch, a week from her thirteenth birthday, leaned too far out a …

• 2016 Barthelme Prize Honorable Mention: A Peck of Beets

  My second husband once walked into the house by the lake, carrying a very large basket of beets. They were freshly picked, dusty with dirt. I said, What is that. He said, These are beets. I said, Why …

• 2016 Barthelme Prize Winner: Going North

  It’s following us, pull over, my husband says, to which I say, It’s dark, to which he says, Please, Ellie, let’s not fight over this one, and so I pull to the side of the road. Lo and behold, …

• Editors' Note

  If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred. -Walt Whitman