Masthead

Guest Editor-in-Chief
Faith-Marie McHenry

Editors-in-Chief
Leon Barros
Natalee Cruz

Editorial Directors
Stephanie Berger
Jackie Braje
Tova Greene

Readers & Editors
F.M Papaz
Lisette Boer
PSNY Interns

Editor’s Note

Dear Readers,

Despite the wave of neon green, club music, and “brat” hedonism that swept the summer of 2024, there is a poignancy at this time in history that one cannot deny. Grief for the lives lost in ongoing conflicts, an uncertainty that the rights and freedoms of all people will continue to exist, and the open wounds in our world that make it easy to feel helpless over what seems impossible to change.

Yet, there exists a paradox between the seeming stagnancy of our planet and how quickly tragedy comes and goes, our society ebbing and flowing at what feels like a more rapid pace than ever. Have we come to expect breaking news? Grown desensitized to death and violence as it finds a way to the screens we surround ourselves with on a nonstop basis?

Then, there is the art we make: those mirrors of words or paint or clay that reflect the profundity of the present we struggle to realize in the midst of it. A piece of something that strives to capture everything in a moment and throughout the years says: “I was here. I am still here.”

Our summer issue highlights those works of words and art that evoke this sense of everlastingness. In “Danez Smith’s ‘Don’t Call Us Dead’ Is My Favorite Book Of Poetry,” John White’s ode to Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till, Michael Brown, and Black men who we continue to grieve generationally captures these souls taken from the world too soon with “more light.” with “more life.” Reminding us that those we miss are more than gone. They live.

Marie Howe’s “What the Living Do,” tells us that this space of yearning between life and death is universal, and the pieces of art and poetry we have selected show a sliver of specificity within that universality. Lisa Delan’s “Dites-Moi” muses these lines: “I am afraid of what will escape / if I sing the final notes you sang / to me,” capturing the essence of grief's complexities.

“I am shocked every time / the world brings me to my knees.” The closing lines of Grace McGovern’s “Cicada Season” promise to strike a chord with anyone who has loved, lost, or longed to find a way of making the world a little better before leaving it. The collage of Courtney Seymour & Albert John Belmont ends on the opposing words that alternately make up all of human experience, “Finally,” and “again.” Robin Percyz puts forth a wake-up call to those who have tuned out the cries of injustice coming from all around us, those who “shake it off faster than excess salt.” 

Thank you to Leon, Natalee, and Fi for their stellar support, our team of summer interns, and every writer and artist who shared their work with us. Each piece reminds us time and again that, by the baring of our souls through creation, changing the world is a thing we can all do.

Warmly,
Faith-Marie McHenry
Editorial Lead Intern

HOW TO HELP

growing a mule deer

Something I’ve meant to do now that I’m alone.
Once I grew a horse from oak trees,

added the taste of escargot, shallot butter
and burgundy I fed him on the Rue de Rivoli

hoping my husband would put down his lug nuts
and tweeters, wonder why he hadn’t heard

my Appaloosa kicking the floorboards,
counting oats under our mahogany bed.

It could be the cold moon tonight that
draws you outside in your robe and overcoat,

mucking around for the tin Christmas tree bucket,
almost French. It is in this moon shaped bucket

that your mule deer will be grown, though
you have no idea how. Only that

it might be best to assemble him in the dark:
handfuls of nasturtium, twelve pounds endive,

brown mohair, standing water from the bird bath.
You pour a dead champagne and think how

childish it is growing a mule deer just because
nothing feeds you, nestles its animal content

against your skin. Why should you care anyway,
waiting for its struggling limbs, blueberry

lips coughing up night smoke. How will it recognize
the taste of your fingers, its own wick

of a body covered in ferns, how will it know
you’re not going to hurt it.

PLUMS

Last night I took a chainsaw to the plum tree,
whacked branch from branch until two stumps

stood vacant against the house. It was twilight,
the dog gnawing the plum wood like a homeless

squirrel, my body slick as raunchy perfume, blight
of crisp leaves. The thing is dead I told myself

each homely twig refusing to explain, the fractured
kaput of old bone, but I heard the plums in their

little dreams, wearing sweaters in summer because
there was no hope. Don’t think of these things

anymore I tell them, even though I am uncertain
what the end means, only that I need to work harder

against memory, celebrate these haunted begonias,
starving limes, green ocean of lady fern still breathing.

i was expecting her to have made me happy

jfk, terminal 7

Each time a star explodes
the galaxy changes shape,
gas shocking the edges
into misbehaving.
I think of girls
collapsing in on themselves,
bumping in the bathroom, bursting
in the light.

The way the earth spins
a little hollower, the way parents
look at driveways and think
I wonder when she’ll be home.

I’m not saying girls are stars or
people mold to the gaps left over or
the air around you is exploding
into oxygen every minute or
even that you should listen
to astronomers. I just know now
even the biggest stars die, and —

and — the smallest ones steal
the shape of space.

canned fruit

i wanted no washed grass but the 
world’s largest sprinkler straddles 
over acreage no fresh fruit on your 
advice i bought canned pineapple

to keep from starving TSA took it
from my bottle-green suitcase 
so i took aurora borealis with 
open eyes this time but they said 

she was contraband they made 
her remove the rings from every 
starry finger and we are both free
as far as the fence but now i can’t 

look up lest i see ceiling fan after 
ceiling fan now i can’t look up or 
else it’s always sunset on some 
hillside where you stare at the 

curling paint while i read and 
reread one last page paragraph 
in last light i’m forever the last 
reader i last like canned fruit

invasion

i think i'll kill the summer day by day
i'll drag my feet through milk-
drowned flowers and write 
poetry with their damp 
excess on the floor
twirling my toes on 
kitchen tile swish (i will)
swish (not go) swish (away)

i’m building an armory in the broom 
closet i’m mixing propellants in the 
pantry i’m going to cover my bed-
room walls with blue drawings 
of every entryway exit and 
window of god’s house 
and when i leave this 
time if i leave this 
time i’m taking 
back my key

only our shadows know

five little essays:
window, door, vanilla, pan, pistol

Window
A woman hangs a damp towel on a hook. It’s the season when the sugar maple may be any maple. The cat, wrapped in a delicate handkerchief brought from Kyoto some odd weeks ago, is buried in its shade. The syncopated clouds move overhead. Smell of oranges. Girth of sunflower. Sanguine petal pushers.

Or rather, I was careless. A bottlecap in the pocket of my cut-offs. I called the sun this little thing. I noted its rotation around the earth. Pink, I said. Unravel.

Perhaps we need the mirage as surely as the mirage needs us. If isinglass is fish bladder; if eyedrops bourbon; if amorphous mesh; if lonely; if s p r a w l. If, then. Yes. If. Then. And on we go.

Door
The itinerary is attached to the refrigerator. A magnet in the shape of a pushpin. The woman strikes the sides of the coffee cup with a spoon as she stirs in honey brought from Boston. The honey was made by bees from another woman’s husband.

I took no thing personal that spring. I was hardly a person, after all. A penchant for bread and gold. I tried three-card poker. I trusted no one.

When mingled with a lubricant, steam becomes water. We measure our dreams with yardsticks and dollies. We are asked no questions; we tell no lies.

Vanilla
The bottle is dark and quite small and somewhere behind the old bay, the dried basil, the dish towel with the lemons brought from Mexico so long ago that the bringer has been forgotten. Ricochet of light on the countertop. Imitation.

Or, I was hungry. The scale. All morning, I made promises to myself that I would let myself grow hungrier still. The gnawing. The dog with her bone at my feet.

We mistake the ephemeral for the everlasting. We earn our rank then lose it. Toggle and ramble. Nothing held can be had.

Pan
A pan soaks in the sink. Squirt of blue soap. Unused blue sponge. Sky likely blue beyond but so many walls. Perpendicular, plastered. Rectangles cut into the walls and glass placed into the rectangles. But curtains.

I think I’d thought that lying a paperback on my thighs and taking a photograph might translate to a hotel on the banks of a river in a town I could not pronounce.

Perhaps desire is illusory. We want and want until we no longer want nor are no longer wanted. Certainly it is arbitrary. The swinging cable of a crane. A little before noon.

Pistol
A pearl-handled pistol in a grandmother’s glovebox. A handbag lined with fabric on which the shape of roses have been pressed by a machine. Long ago. So had. Heat. Heather in a field. Lavender.

I’ve lived long enough that my virginity has become a small percentage of my existence. A dust of opium on the eyelids. Cherry lipsmacker. Some July.

So often we’re disarmed. No. Not often enough are we disarmed. Too few pivots in the meadow.

Exposure

here’s a tongue I never really let out
except for icy showers after bad sunburns
skin blistered lip-pink as my mom rubs
aloe vera down my spine my body a flute
made of bones soft stomach melodies
that wrap around me tight as a string bikini
stinging with saltwater every stretch mark
crying for the arms of a faded beach towel
shame a knot caught in my hairbrush
pain a pleasure as I cool myself
skin dripping like raspberry gelato
I lick the spoon until it sparkles

DITES-MOI

I sing softly as I caress your hair,
which has grown improbably
long and white—
talisman strands of silk. Later
I will find them on your
sweaters as I fold them into
bags. Under your sink as I box
your toiletries. On my nightclothes.
My slippers.

Your lips are so dry.
I fill the morphine dropper
again and coax out little pearls of
water. The hospice nurses
are at a scarce pandemic distance—
but I am here, fumbling with
this smattering of palliative
gems they left before receding
into frozen Facetimes. You
hold my eyes as you bite down
on the dropper. It takes me days
to realize your gaze was a caress.

You carry me cupped against you.
It would have been the apartment
in East Brunswick I know only
from faded photos, before we
moved to Highland Park. The
vibration of your voice stills me
against your chest as you pace the
length of the house, humming the
lullaby from South Pacific, soft
against my fontanelle.

Your fulgent eyes—sun
through a stained glass saint—
are fixed. I trace the path with
my own eyes and see only
the half-cracked door. I think that
mom must be ready for you now.
I cannot see her, but your eyes rest
there. Where I think she is.

I am afraid of what will escape
if I sing the final notes you sang
to me, trilling on vous m’aimez—
I love you. There is only the bus
down the street, the drip
in the bathroom sink, Rosie's
paw pads tapping the wood floor.
I cannot exhale.

it’s fantastic

how to start a fire

By all means, bring up my mother
Fail to take out the trash of our lives
Tell me how you’d like me to [eat / sleep / speak / breathe]
Say you wish I looked more like [celebrity / celebrity / celebrity]
and would be more [adjective / superlative adjective / unattainable adjective]
Whisper [vulgarity / her name / nothing] in my ear at night
Don’t answer when I [call / text / email]
Say you’re not big on [phone calls / talking / communication]
Tell me you’re [busy / hungry / tired]
Leave [dinner / gifts / doctor’s appointments] to me
Fawn over [that actress / our neighbor / your office wife]
Tell the [dog / your mother / the kids] you love them but not me
Ask me, Do you really want [seconds / a career / children]
Walk ahead of me in the [city / crowd / woods]
There it is: a [flame / fire / conflagration]

shore

The town towed the raft away today,
swimmers left bereft
as if the sun, too, were on the hitch.
On the faded fence
keys freed from pockets
sunbathe, swimsuits drip dry,
towels drape like napping flags—
all the bodies you love at rest
kissed clean by saltwater memories,
everything damp in a way
you didn’t know joy could be,
crashing your coast in gentle waves,
shorebirds singing about it to the tune
of I've been trying to tell you.

horrible stinky place

Off-white street milk
pools next to steaming trash

and collabs with fruity pebble
urine smell. Certainly, somewhere,

there are feces. The mess
people make of themselves,

the ooze we leave
in all this wanting.

I won’t tell the other poets
our secret, dear city,

that there is no greater
meaning to your splendid filth,

that your constellation of garbage
is neither metaphor nor badge.

We are obsessive, gross animals.
Oh metal sister,

oh steeled flaw,
you are our gilded proof.

And now, look!

There is one friend
on either arm, former

roommates and current confidants
hold plastic cases of dunkable cookies.

The pizza slice drips
peppered gold past my

sun brushed mouth. I’m here
in you, a city so nice

they named it twice
and claimed it “empire.”

The only city with a
capital “T” in its “The”

because you are,
cliche as it may be to say,

Thee City. Horrible, stinky,
shit stain you are.

I sacrifice to you
my heart and all

my sneakers. May I always
feed at your table

and sleep by your
sleepless clock. You

remind me who I am
with your glass buildings

lost in a violet sky. Two
boys, perhaps not for long,

sit at the bar. They
share mozzarella sticks,

they talk about fear.
They call a cab and ride that

yellow chariot into a chorus of
a thousand, lonely nights.

pigeons

A storefront across the
street is closing down,
some inconsequential
British retailer.
They left a lot of trash on
the cobblestone:
a shipping box,
an empty Softsoap®
refill carton, neon
slips of paper, etcetera.

The sun starts setting on the trash, and I wonder:
if you sliced New York open like a pomegranate,
would you see all the clustered discards,
bags, bottles, and broken
parts of people? Their bones
ground up and spread into fragments,
their dreams rusted like gears,
their hair like malnourished violin strings.

Here lies the species where they stood:
their shambling arms and silly wishes
and footprints on the moon.
They woke to reach and slept to wake again.
They marked their days with wanting,
and oh, poor things,
look where it got them.

sedimental tonguedness

Switchback

My happy poem

library poems

for justy on june 13, 2024  

It’s okay to accept going bald
Hacking up extraterrestrial pollen
You hate how much i love smoking
The miracle is interior and
The world changes accordingly
I’m mainly just an unpleasant person
With a monthly stipend
Compulsive orality infinite skin folds
A lot of good if stopped depending on
Vagaries of individual attitude and persuasion
Space fucks up the decorator-architects
I’d rather you steal than ask
I’d rather you cheat and still love me

for jonathan on june 15, 2023

did you know lizards can do immaculate conception?
meanwhile I wake up in the morning feeling bad
shirt sticks to armpits cuz wore it yesterday
everyone needs Spinozist Wallace and Grommet pants machine
lizard parthenogenesis is nice actually because no males
I’m squatting in the negative space created by Wallace’s teeth marks in the moon cheese
still jealous of Descartes-level ego
while I self-fertilize, roast pineal glands, sell off ballooning value of our IN-vironments,
jinx remaining mojo with goth font and dresses with consciousness,
when I get into my emails I’m easier to deal with
today’s nothing
the late 90s were the heyday of pierced genitalia

for morgan on september 9, 2022

I don’t know how I feel about this shirt
that which is called safety can also be called servitude
how honest should we be when we say which bed we want
even if we theoretically believe in revenge now not capable bc tired
crush oriented ontology
don’t answer yr texts keep having vibes 
fuck poems i just want to get back to krumping 

 
for yagiz on July 1, 2024

the rat in my head goes way back with the angel of history
morally bereft but shamanistically upstanding
like Marcuse said:
 “haven’t been up to much lately
state-sponsored personality splinter,
Aaliyah forever”
post-solstice brat hagiography finally waning
100 Lasik eye surgeons inside the Dakota
the world trade center should have been a laundromat
I joined the band even though no pants
Let’s take this show on the road
b/c i subletted my life
I’m big and I’m ready

for sean bonney on august 6, 2022

exile from the self a psychogeographic experience
listening to the dead again
on a sweat-ribbed couch in at least three haircuts
just because we’re dead (they say)
doesn’t mean we are exempt from class struggle

catch-phrases used to smooth mercuric love into information
in the field of delicious craters
we are fed to institutions

there was a sideshow in bay ridge today
my mom taught me how to cheat on my taxes
israelis killed 43 probably more in gaza
palestinians mass amputated Tamworth weapons factor

milk’s symbolic value    geopolitical consternation
burn the floating empathy dock to stop profit’s afterlives

Fanon says in the inverted nonbeing corners of the city
you can still hear the skeletons scream
as they tell each other about their bad days

for rachel pearl stuart on february 24, 2022

the trick is to have 2-3 bodies
so they’ll really bring home the cash
and you can slime into the gutter
wearing hotel sex, tin foil hat, futureless buildings
just let me be in the snot village (peripatetic school)
I milked the big park buildings for 20 vials of jonathan lethem’s blood
history vertigo won’t stop licking my table, jonathan
modernity’s obsession with salvation has really wreaked havoc on the public bath
my bed arranged for paying customers
books on the bedside table are moist
we learned how to cry again when we finally stopped reading

Rodeo

Saludos Desde Florida (w. Laura Camila Medina)

8th grade planner

Cicada season

My hair formed a knot
that August, a hardened husk
at the nape of my neck. My mother
had to hack and cut at its center

in the outdoor shower.
As I cried, I wondered, how
did it form? Each day, another strand
must’ve wound around itself. I never know

what creature I'm feeding
until its maw is already agape.
Something like sensing
the coming rain in your bones.

I lack that gene. I am shocked every time
the world brings me to my knees.

Girl Play (w. "los mannequins" by Stacie Bird)

Their conversation felt real: females on the edge. A rooftop patio. Words listing. Girl talk. The heat too much for clothes. Nude. In sharp daylight. The shadows gave them away. Casually, bodies-to-banister: one sat, ankles crossed, dangling, arms draped over the rail – the other: her tummy pressed to it. Their complexions oiled. With a sheen. High at the top. A building painted so true it toyed. With leaning. Indistinguishable into sky. No, no. No bleeding blood, the two decided. Letting limbs. And torsos turn plastic. Complimenting each other’s. Ever-glowing— Restraint. Tongues hardening in mouths. The naked heat. Too much for— Instead, decorations. The little voices inside. Draping paper banners down the scene. Cutouts. Flowing dry. Her lips too unsure now, despite. Messy questions. Her lover began modeling mannequin hands, an empty. Leaving only: the banners pattering. Red flags, frantic. Flip-flapping. For the children to refuse. Playacting. These dolls.

vein

Psychedelic Apocalypse

Step over the ant

The morning news is a funeral,
daily dose of death to eat
side of bacon. Wash it down with

blood. That mercurial aftertaste lays dead
on the tongue, a belch of
how can this be happening over there?

Yet we shake it off faster than excess salt,
we lick our plates,
we carry on.

We are a country of stairs
each step forgetting the one below
so long as we move
up
up
up

I get off the train at Penn Station and climb
concrete flights of apathy,
greeted by a corpse coma-

tose at the tip top.
He is horizontal as a coffin
pants dangling from hook hips.

The wild stampede marches over
him, like an ant on the curb
chasing the dangling meat,

to tear into
prime rib and forget
it once had a mother.

This city stores terror
up the arteries of its avenues.
These people have climbed

the tallest towers
and watched them crumble
to dust, whispering feathers

of a fallen bird.

They’ve cried never forget
as they forget their way
up
up
up

all the wars have ended

Look beyond as far as you can see—
the wars have ended. No more
blood spatter. A large man plays piano
in the street, with whatever's left
of his inside that listens to river's hymn—
sweeter than ever before. The fervor's gone.
And lightning's a mere sheet of heat.
One thousand rafts and rowboats have come to shore.
Five hundred horses nicker
in sun drenched fields near shredded fences.
Women rock and sing themselves to sleep.
But the children
have no hands or fingers.
The children have no mouths or teeth.

i am not asleep

Cento After Arecelis Girmay

and I wish I could remember what we did with our faces.
The weather of the house, dressed in sparrows
and daylight. Sunlight falling over us.
The sixteen stars keeping time. Your heart, a fist
of windows and church-bells. Obscene, the beauty.
Then, the wind came down—it had ten hands.
The rain fell down. I flew into it
from the diving board. You stood in the doorway.
Like a lighthouse. Back then, I wanted to stand
and hallelujah. But all night the rain.
So we praised the deep, dark machine. The clamor
of planets. Swing black night in the glow
of the quiet work—now, a set of arms. Now
a membrane of music. And the fog moved in like a wolf.

OPHELIA I

Absurdia IV

wAnderer II

A Haiku Diary of a Karmic Interstellar Traveler

Run

Danez Smith's ‘Don't Call Us Dead’ Is My Favorite Book Of Poetry

it's like trayvon suddenly reappearing in amber light, telling emmett i got this while waving him away, further into the remains of the day. candy sweet with non-hooded eyes, this trayvon here would be full of memory and motion and quite willing to explain a few things. primary amongst them being a black boy’s imagination having the tendency to lash not out but in, all while having to linger, type livid, on his own tongue. livid due to imagination being a boxed in ring where said black boy is from, and his screams are loud enough to unearth floyd patterson given the black sonny liston-size fist of a white world feverishly pressed into his lungs. thus, he may or may not breathe so easily running to freedom, but certainly never to glory. given that, we should all be on the lookout for the black boy with the monumental exit but no origin story.

mike bring your big ass ova’ here and say something to these people ‘cause they getting on my nerves! a once sweet but now bitter trayvon would probably yell to mike. mike, brown and buoyant as ever, pluperfect in a place between dreams. and under a cinematic moon whose beams wrangle the tides of a merciless sea mike, with balls of light for eyes, would probably speak on how the blue-eyed, brick and mortar of sunlight is oppressively blinding. and when a big black boy such as himself is unable to see, he collides with the world. his legacy, a primal scream of a searchlight perpetually searching for what his old life before his new life was meant to unfurl.

and with a merciful tongue that can seductively shape silence to fit what dead black boys with balls of light for eyes can actually grow to be, big mike has grown that much bigger since his death and in doing so, i can see him having promised trayvon to leave a trail of breadcrumbs for the next dead, growing black boy leading from before before to before after. from everything to everything else. from exile to eden. from hemlock to honey. from lion’s mouth to self-recovery. from standing stone to unwithered becoming. from lovelorn to brightwarm. from scratched ceiling to sky. from impulse to grace. from open wound to open space. from not having to having a face with the audacity to actually require, not less, but more light. the audacity of dead black boys who actually require more life.

What The Music Said

I call this one stirring the risotto, this one tapping the pencil when nervous which is different from tapping the pencil when focused. Here where we run my mother’s pearl necklace across the surface of the drum it sounds as if I might be dragging a large chain, next I try it with an actual chain. These shells pulled from a faraway ocean somehow sound like rain. Or the shaking of a cereal box. This is the soundtrack of the movie I want my life to be—everything in concert with everything else and building to something larger and grand even as it’s impossible to know what. Here where I play the drums with a handheld straw broom, it’s possible I swiped it from my wife, my husband, from our kitchen, from the pantry where we keep the canned peaches. Everything marches forward one beat at a time. One step one foot in front of another. Blow into this hollow tube, see what kind of sound it makes. See? I can feel the arch in your eyebrow. And so it goes, even when you’re playing on a plastic bag, or fluting your half empty beer, this is the conversation we hold between our rivers.

Baby Boy Blastocyst

For Elijah

Presently you’re
not much more than
a clot or clump

a small gathering around
a hollow center
holding court

and every so
often dividing a new
cell’s elbow to rub against

and thus the circle
grows—abuzz
as at an impossibly good party

with no pretense
everyone’s nucleus
beautiful and equally exposed

at the collar bone
of your mother’s
mitochondrial necklace