questions for babcia - Angela Armstrong
To Answer the Unanswerable - Sophia Craig
Jazz, Personified - Miriam Halim
Perm - Jordan Kalt
Yum Cha - Sydney Luk
Tin Hau (天后) Station - Sydney Luk
Central - Sydney Luk
Painting a Portrait of Marie - Valerie Massey
where I’ve never been - Sean Murley
I’ll say what I mean one day - Sean Murley
Lines for the New Fortune Cookies - Sean Murley
We Couldn’t Have Known But - Brooke Peterson
a brief meditation on impulse and the women who support me and the men who do not - Aluna Sedona
All That Lives Long - Jackson Spencer
MINDSCAPING - Jo Wallace
IN TERMS OF HEAT - Jo Wallace
Don’t Wake Me, I’m Dreaming - Anya Welborn
questions for babcia by Angela Armstrong
Momma told me you loved to cook pierogi
did your momma teach you like momma taught me?
did you lean over the counter and press until the dough was smooth
and your wrists ached?
did your momma give you a fork to crease the doughy edges?
did you linger near the stove to watch the water gurgle and pop?
Momma told me you didn’t have any shoes
no furry boots, shiny sneakers, or bright flip-flops
like I have
she said you walked for miles to school on calloused feet
did the other kids have shoes?
why did no one help?
Momma told me you walked alone through the forest
heard the booms like thunder crashing
felt the ground shake
felt your knees tremble
felt your freezing feet throb in thirty-nine
were you scared?
Momma told me you were smart like me
she said you stayed awake late reading
hunched over in the attic
only a flickering light of a candle to guide your eyes
did your eyes turn red?
did your momma ever catch you?
Momma told me you became a principal
I’m proud of you
you were brave, babcia
did you ever cry?
To Answer the Unanswerable by Sophia Craig
Wear your controversy, for my sake.
Some may not approve, but I’m here for you.
You may think this is selfish, that it’s all about me.
It kind of is. After all, you said you love me.
Siri, how do I stitch a body that I keep breaking?
She didn’t answer. So I asked mom, “What are boys?”
“Hypocrites, the lot of ’em.” Oh, I see.
We are tiptoeing towards transparency.
Hesitantly, though.
How silly of me to think that I could do this.
I’m a fixer, naturally. But
where is the procedure for this?
Google, how do I sew a heart I haven’t even touched?
My kisses heal, on instinct. But who taught me that?
Destroy them with kindness, they say.
Here lies your grave.
I’m not sure what flowers you prefer, so I left you emptyhanded.
You bite your nails. You want to touch with your fingertips first.
Dip them in the water, then. Enjoy the ripples of my face.
And envision your destroyer as she caresses your cold, cold hands.
Jazz, Personified by Miriam Halim
He will rarely knock. If he decides to his knuckles will bounce off the wood quickly. A skipping record. A
flick.
He will fidget on the other couch for four minutes before pacing.
You will notice that his bare feet stick to the hardwood
like smacking lips.
If you indulge him,
if you attend him,
his stare will spoon-feed you challenges:
Why do you sit on your feet so much, if every time
your leg fills up with metal beads?
Why did you use those books you haven’t read
to put under your tv to make it taller? Why did you
stop painting your toenails? Why did you so carefully pick apart that styrofoam cup with the water still inside?
If you don’t indulge him
he’ll take his aching needle fingers and work his way into your cupboards.
He will eat the one-third cup of raw pasta at the bottom of the box
and will crunch and hum until
he gets you to smile.
He will then lift up
the corner of the rug
with a flexed toe
and make a comment
about sun-bleaching.
As he studies your twitching fingers he’ll narrate aloud the cold war
between your ambition
and your hands.
His Irish exit will either
leave you with all four corners of both your feet pressed into the floor,
or leave you cursing and hobbling, unsticking a single rotini
from the bottom of your right foot.
You stretched like a leaf
that couldn’t tear
Carried a home, a neighborhood, a continent strapped all in chickenwire on your back Purple-headed death got your mother,
even your granddaughters before they’d sprung like constellations
But miraculous shamwow, you kept absorbing
You lifted me and yours
like a grim-faced whirlybird rising out of Katrina waters, speaking in and out of tongues
Surely you were Superman, Christ Almighty and Odin Allfather, female though you were
Why did you let them talk to you like hahaknowyourplace
then make their meals and tell me to act more like a boy?
You taught me to bend, give, and accept my blame and thanks for you
Lips locked by hidden sutures
where we should have both cut the strings
Now you must go, slip loose from their burdens and while away in an ecstatic
blossomcrackleshhh
Let’s drink tea,
Dad. I worry about your health. I do not think you could give me your kidney
like you promised.
If we were medieval, you’d have a forge working late nights early mornings stumbling to sleep in the afternoon
and it all looks so romantic
until the shadows of tree branches grow over your face and
we laugh
because we’re not medievalists and you’re just a man
downing coffee dregs.
Dad, you have depressed the couch. By which I mean to say, you have literally
left a depression in the couch.
You are the sleeping field mouse an artist wants to carve the likeness of into a hollow walnut.
By the time the kitchen exhaust fan is at work, maybe you are awake and driving
to the hardware store
and tonight, if I am the telescope, you are the ISS blowing past
me yelling “tally-ho”
saluting the stars with your cap but before the next galaxy, Dad,
let’s drink tea.
Tin Hau (天后) Station by Sydney Luk
I.
At night when I cannot sleep I have an urge
to climb up on the roof
and count the empty spaces between stars
they are always so far.
I wonder what time it
is in Hong Kong but realize that the sun is out,
nobody is watching the stars in Hong Kong with me.
II.
Once, many years ago
I stood admiring a happy yellow poster in the Hong Kong Metro
40 feet away from my parents when someone covered my eyes
I was too surprised to scream
and was left gaping when my uncle’s face appeared in my view
suddenly thankful I wasn’t being stolen away to the mainland.
III.
In bed, I looked up
at the ceiling imagining
a mirror out of which grows two women: one with monolids,
one with double
they look back at me, unamused. I cannot tell which one looks happier
to be living a 2-dimensional life.
IV.
When I sat in a cafeteria in the Midwest and carefully crushed four
small pearls of lychee between my molars for the first time in several years my friend asked how they tasted
so I told him they tasted like Hong Kong 12 years ago but he did not understand.
could use a new name.
People throw fire in Central drawing and re-drawing its streets’ lines which is only a little funny because of its
namesake. On the weekends Central is more diagonal than straight. The skyscrapers morph
into black-clad people, they may as well have been glass themselves. The harbor’s lights reflect
back purple and blue and green against hard plastic gas masks and from
somewhere above Central, some observer could be forgiven for mistaking them for short buildings.
Central is square blocks
and always has functioning traffic lights. at night, on weekends, Diagonal functions almost as well as Central does. The police
write their signs in English and Chinese (for the tourists, you know) “WARNING TEAR SMOKE”
You asked me to paint a picture of you, for you
because you want it
so you can hang it on the red wall of your bedroom, framed by all the pictures you’ve taken of yourself.
It hasn’t even been five minutes since we began but your eyes are already sharp.
You ask me why I have blue on my paintbrush
and I tell you it’s because of the way the light of the ceiling fan reflects off of the blue walls in your kitchen.
But you protest:
I don’t want to be blue. Blue is a sad color.
I want to be pink and rosy and soft.
So I clean my brush off
and I make you pink and rosy and soft.
I can remember the yellow walls of the bedroom I grew up in.
It was a muted yellow, like the color of sunshine on the savannah. I used to hate it. Not so much anymore,
but still, when I am painting you in hues of ochre,
I cannot help but to be reminded of the sunshine on the savannah and how your face reminds me so much of the face of a puma.
Soft movements and crisp eyes. Sitting silently under the tall grasses, ready to pounce.
I am the zebra and you are the puma, warming differently under the same sun. After I finish, you tell me
You can stick around a little bit longer.
No, thank you.
I have other portraits to paint.
where I've never been by Sean Murley
I know these fossils should be buried,
but the dinosaurs were only on the ground for a little bit.
Everything of mine can be buried.
I’d swallow the earth and all its famine to say hello. Don’t worry,
I can handle this earthquake underneath me next to you. Where’s the stage?
I’m only acting alone. Let’s pretend it’s the last day of summer
every day,
so we can talk about how the earth is just a peach pit, and we are solely fruit flies.
Let’s fly a bit longer, like vultures picking at the dry ground bones jut from.
I’ve only ever broken my left arm
once, and that was a fluke. Never again will I let myself break like bread the last time Jesus was seen alive. Never
again will I be so alive.
I'll say what I mean one day by Sean Murley
“I’m an artist with a certain special something, and that something makes me really, really sad because of nothing.” — Hobo Johnson
Everything hurts beautifully sometimes
across from you, I’m confined solitarily
to this counter chair, shaking
‘til I fall onto the diner’s vinyl tile.
Let me draft my words to you on this napkin
for a moment before
my mind flies into the wind.
I can only wish for daydreams submerged
in amber and thoughts wading through water.
My silence is simply an echo
of the sounds I make on walks
in the emptiness of the nighttime.
Sidewalks house me
when all is silent in the neon darkness of the world.
To say something beautiful is once-in-a-lifetime
which is why I scribble on napkins
and wander hopelessly in the night
as the Earth shifts
beneath my feet.
I’m speechless
at the best part of this.
How to say, you remind me of a simpler
day when I’m still, sitting here.
Is it the light snow that shakes me
or the natural fallen twig I find I am.
I’ve been the ice on the road way too long.
Little truly needs to be said
but that I’m here right now
blending in with the flower wallpaper of this diner.
I haven’t lost my voice,
it’s just gone for the winter.
When these things happen, I know you’re just a complex human,
as am I. I remember:
You’re wide awake
early each morning under the stars.
I have no comment on
the passing comets we are.
I’ll take my sadness
on the side please.
Too many things, like you,
are too good for this small world.
It takes too long to fall asleep at night.
I just want to be wide awake.
We’ve all been a bit too busy to
stop and enjoy the drawings on the sidewalk.
Please fill in the blank when I’m fumbling for words like lightning.
Things work out eventually, hopefully.
Because all I want is
for you to be
in front of me
and for some happiness
in the middle of the street.
I’ll run one day, but let me sleep
for now, until I rise
grinning at my curtains
blocking the sun
from staring at me like someone I seem to know.
-after Frank O’Hara and James Masao Mitsui
You will lose your voice
and your most expensive ink pen.
The next bus you take will drive too far past your home.
At times, your silence seems strange, to friends.
What a thin slice
of watermelon, life is.
You should order the pancakes at any diner, unless you’re alone.
The next Magic-8 ball you shake will say maybe.
One day you will write your own fortune on a napkin.
The next person you see on a sidewalk with weeds will see you too and nod.
The next investment you make will be a pyramid scheme.
You will become a taxi driver
and the front seat of your mustard-colored car will always be empty.
No one in this room knows what to think of you.
We Couldn't Have Known But by Brooke Peterson
growing up as lonely small touched girls we learned the word for rape & thought it was synonymous with sex & no one taught us otherwise & the world made it seem like they love you only as hard as they hold you
down & the law of attraction is as follows: they are attracted to you so they take you and you take it & so we learned & we took turns & we still won’t talk about the ways we touched each other when we thought we were someone else’s
playground & recess the week after was silently spent walking the paths alone trying to find words for wanting in the concrete & we were scared of being lesbians and coming home to families who would rather us drown
in the fox river than do what we did & how we let ourselves do & we let everyone else fluff our pillows & fell asleep staring at the ceiling inches between us too small to know sex is meant to be talk before touch & rape is not touch
see even if it’s soft the contact is still impact & see we just wanted to be held like we were loved & shit that’s not it but on the bus in fifth grade Nick asked his friends which of us girls he would rape if he could & Mason picked me & he knew
where I lived no I mean he could see my bedroom window from the street as we drove past & I couldn’t shake that or sit still so I slinked against the window seat & let my head bang against the glass hard as how men are supposed to touch you right but
later he came to me & said don’t worry that doesn’t mean I want you it’s just an honest answer
a brief meditation on impulse and the women who support me and the men who do not by Aluna Sedona
an instinctual primal urge to bite crunch a shell i bit through it bit down through
until the crack
yolk pored through teeth poured through
broken shell i gasped surprised by the taste a raw egg stolen from the carton
when shafer wasn’t looking
this need to bite the egg i couldn’t explain it past i had to bite it something
in me needed to pierce the walls of a
spoiled chicken infant something in me knew it would be crunchy
the egg was so full whites and yellows
and clear goose glue goo ooze it slipped from my tongue slipped down the sink
where the boys told me to hover they didn’t want egg on the floor
as i sunk my teeth into cold calcium they were horrified and amused and confused and bemused
and enthused and scared
why do you want to bite this egg
you wouldn’t want to bite the egg if you didn’t talk about it so much
i can’t watch this
oh my god beth why
they threw around the term egg sucker while i continued to insist i only bit before the bite before the bite before the crunch i held to egg in my palm rolling it gentle and soft warming it
the fridge was chilling
my boy ben he said i couldn’t bite the egg
he said it would be a waste he brought up
Salmonella he said i would Hate the taste
i spoke to my poetry ladies
told them the delima of my egg biting desires
and they told me don’t let him hold you back
each one said i should do It
they told me do it
i knew then what i had to do
All That Lives Long by Jackson Spencer
When the ash was cast onto each of
my boots, I should have known.
The quill, dripping deep black,
intent with the ink of the
Everywhere Spirit
In the penmanship of one who
fills in the blanks before
the words are spoken:
All that lives long
are the earth and
the stars.
Though we may be of the same
charm, the same strange
dust, I must recall my
own realization that
I am but little more
than quantized
quarks
I’ve come to know my respective rosette
which renders me repugnant, wretched
reduces me simply to a fool, with
locomotive eyes that despise
my likeness, assuming some
guise in odd, outward,
ostentatious
places
How could any two truly argue about
who cares more about the other?
The question – for me – has
now become something
entirely different:
Do I really need
you, or do I
just think
I do?
I am denoting my old thoughts as cerebral artifacts—
an attempt to make them feel more noteworthy
in the landscape
of my consciousness, because it matters what we name things. my name is a lie I tell people
to catch their attention, and my smile is a promise
I’m trying very hard to keep. I try not to sweat on strangers
when I shake their hands.
I find myself always hurrying to catch things
when I drop them, as if
I could break the fall of a pencil or a toothpaste tube. I feel as useful as sunscreen on an overcast day
from the inside of a windowless
basement. I feel as useful as an umbrella during
a category four hurricane. The people I love most are always loitering
on the brimming city block of my brain and making
their appearances in my best ideas. I am trying
to learn myself. Another purple night, I reach for a star
in the empty air above my face, (of course) my hand always comes back to me empty.
Another yellow morning, I coast the tip of my finger across the shore of my scalp,
a migraine there (of course). Who are we but a field full of all of our thoughts? I am
growing a garden. I am attempting to unearth truth in the soil.
IN TERMS OF HEAT by Jo Wallace
one day, someone else can be your protagonist as long as i am mentioned
somewhere in your footnotes. what i mean is
try remembering me.
it might seem easier than breaths, than bike rides, right now
but you should know
i am a nothing— a sweet one. floating southwest toward your sun-swallowed equator
so that I can catch the rays of your smile, let them scintillate in my vision cast them into a black sky
and watch them become the stars. collect them all again
to fill my pillowcase
in the hopes that i will dream you more vividly tonight.
i feel sometimes like we must exist outside of time—
but how can you exist
outside of something that doesn’t exist? what i mean is
i want all of my seconds with you and some firsts,
and a footnote.
Don't Wake Me. I'm Dreaming by Anya Welborn
I had a dream one night that we were trees— pushing up through the dark earth,
reaching toward the sun, our arms out stretched.
I woke up to the feeling of sunburned cheeks
and a stray leaf still tangled in my hair.
You told me once that the sky is all around us—
pulled up close under our chins
like a baby blue bedsheet, billowing about as if hung out to dry on the wind.
You said if I spread my fingers I might feel the soft cotton air brushing past.
I thought I loved you then.
I used to tell you about the time I tiptoed out unto the horizon— about how I let the lilac haze surround me like stardust as I
clung on to the edge of the world.
You laughed at the way I spread my arms against the breeze
like I was flying,
but I swear I could feel my feet lift off the ground.
How much simpler the world was when we still wished on fireflies
flickering through the night like loose embers, when we still set dandelion dreams drifting out over a sea of green grass,
when we still believed in the weightlessness of words, of whispered secrets wandering between us.
There was magic in me then— before my brain
cracked open, before the light spilled out.