Milk Press Winter 2024

POETRY

VISUAL ART

 Dear Readers,

“Time is the wound,” offers Diannely Antigua in the opening poem “Stigmata,” a sentiment that reverberates across the works in this issue. Woundedness takes different forms here, some made by others, some self-directed, but always in conjunction with care. As many of these poets demonstrate, wounds are incisive—they dissect. Wounds allow us to open up conversations about mental health, ecocide, racism, and gun violence. A wound needs to be addressed before it is dressed, and these writers and artists achieve both, savoring moments of beauty with friends, family and lovers, offering a much needed salve. 

Each wound offers the possibility of healing, creativity, even change. Such are the collages of Sarah Esmi and Christopher Shreck, and the sutures of Gaby Lobato–disparate parts which make up a whole, ruptures which are made to mend. Time wounds us, but it also allows us to see things for what they were, what they are, and perhaps, even where we go from here.

As these poets have shown, wounds open our capacity for care and compassion, for the self and for others. These writers and artists ask who and how we love, what we stand to lose, and with time, what we could be. 

It’s difficult to imagine celebrating Valentine’s Day in the wake of the constant violence and hatred that seems to be the world’s present mode—an open wound endlessly being wounded, and the passage of time offers no respite. 

And yet, a wound reminds us that, in spite of or because of the pain, we live. And because we live, we must help. We must do our best. And that is something worth celebrating.

With love,
Natalee & Leon

HOW TO HELP

STIGMATA

I could declare myself a Lady Lazarus like Plath

or a Jesus resurrected from the tomb. I am 

the Easter miracle, indeed. There is no doubting

Thomas here—I could’ve punished myself

more. I could’ve surrendered. My life expected

to stop that summer—the long walks, 

not eating, taking new pills—I would stop

to smell the white blossoms on that tree 

next to the blue house, a smell to say 

I’d won today, a little battle of not 

slitting my wrist, a little battle of sitting 

on my hands instead. I circled the neighborhood,

watching the white families play outside

with their white children. I let myself sweat, 

fingers dripping with my inner salt. 

I wanted to prove to them I was sick, 

but I wasn’t lazy. It’s hard work being 

sick and harder getting better. At home, 

the grapes I shifted around the bowl received 

my most gentle hand. Time doesn’t heal 

all wounds. Time is the wound. Behind a rock, 

three days would drive anyone mad. I still

don’t know the name of that tree. 

NOTEBOOK FRAGMENTS

Fact: almost all hookups happen while watching The Office

Willingly? I’ve only made out with one dog

The universe brought us together on a summer night outside one of the shittiest bars known to man

Can I show you something? There’s no nudity in it

There are two wild turkeys in the Planet Fitness parking lot

The animal hospital is next to the roast beef sandwich shop

You’d think considering everything that happens at Hogwarts over the course of those seven years they would’ve closed the place down?

After he yelled in my face, he bought me a leather jacket, then a painting

Be grateful, get to know your ribcage

I used to call him beefcake

Fact: All honey has been in the belly of a bee

Fact: This time last year, I was masturbating while staying on an Amish farm

As naturally as he came into my thoughts

Like how a dark lord trapped in a freakin’ diary possesses a little girl, who then unleashes a deadly snake that roams the school through the plumbing and can kill anyone simply by looking directly into their eyes, not even after that?

That’s how unnaturally he will leave

L’s allergies: raw fruit, grass, trees, shellfish, peanuts

Do you know what it’s like to fuck a millionaire at midnight in his outdoor hot tub, moon peeking through the pergola?

Start thinking about struts, alignments, and plugs

By bus, New York City is only 5 hours from here 

No worries! I spoke your name into the room and there you were

I want intimacy like knowing your next dentist appointment

Sometimes words are just pretty

Sometimes almonds, horsehair

I perform survivor for the funders

Got a covid test and a pregnancy test going all at once 

I’m their girl for the dying flowers

Say: profundamente

It’s October 10th at 12:30 PM

I make myself look alone so they find me at the bar—reading a book, sipping gin

A regulated nervous system is a sexy nervous system

Every Property Brothers episode where the worst thing that could happen happens 

The millionaire said he wanted to put a rich baby in me

So they took down a load bearing wall and put a support beam in the ceiling  

Maybe I’m the blonde girl I was drowning in my dream, her hands identical to mine 

I almost sucked your dick near a pile of manure

At the bar, the drunk girl asks what happened to you? and I say everything 

I held her head underwater

J’s allergies: grass, down, dust, cats, mango skin, detergents, sensitive to canned foods

After he yelled in my face, he bought me another leather jacket

I bet Jesus fucked 

The condoms come in from Amazon, so I distribute them to all my purses

Anxiety attack near the gemstones at the Museum of Natural History

Say: I lost you and I did not die

I am the girl who brings the sandwich and then floats in the background unnoticed 

I almost sucked your dick at the museum

Contact-free delivery means no one will see you again

Sensitive to “Life on Mars” and the smell of cooked meat on my sweater

On planes, I like to watch what other people are watching on their screens

Can I show you something? There’s no nudity in it

Objects in mirror are sadder than they appear

Fake Assassinated 

line like this recalls us

to surface: swallowed by

the compositional machine

drenched in civic sweat

dude across the bench

says he's a math person

who wasn't taught right

ok. it was weird to be

fake assassinated by a poet

at a place called bard

it was fake theater and

fake poetry and fake puppetry

and fake video game satire

and nothing – death was

nowhere and nowhere &

the toy rifle shot fast –

maybe that's what the goose

thinks being stuffed & 

petted at the same slime 

i was accused in a letter

disfigured as an email of 

conspiring with trans painters  

to create a new symbolism

really? at least grant me

the fake desire to reinvent

cubism or photorealism

or some other movement 

from the actual fucking

paleolithic century i was

supposedly born during

the unknown is not scary

mr. stranger. imagine

testing truths while pretending

getting a master's degree is

the equivalent of guernica

or being registered in the pose

of ordinary agony. dog dog

dog, why why why it was

amazing to see so many 

people fail to even give the

shrug. but that's cool. the

story's so modular & bonkers

it sounds fake itself on any

kind of repeat. in my auto

biography, which I will

never write, this will all

be outsourced as blame

to deep imagism's stylized

& resonant tribe of cloned

rabbits. you can look it up

as ol' case used to supposedly 

say. i have to do at least

five more things to this

poem: got stymied today

when asked if I felt 100

percent. 100 percent of

what? who cares that it 

makes breezes? this table 

turns out to be reserved

for an event. i should

have quit and left after

the fake shooting happened

but i had to introduce

the next poet. talk about

being overly professional

you can run in circles

as mode of performance

disguised as resistance

or you can join the track

team. i wonder bread

how jerome sala would

finish this poem. would 

he admit to having been co-

captain of the track team 

in high school, and then co-

chair of a so-called discipline

at graduate art school? unlike

everyone the world claims

to be exposing us to, i

think the future is terrific

just please put everything

in the wrong order. some

ones were sitting here

& one of the ones showed

a poem on the phone to

the other one & i only 

know this because the

other one said i like the

rhythm of the first stanza

but i don't like the second

stanza & so sitting here re-

reading a chapter on pablo

picasso never got called

an asshole's guernica i decided

to finally write underneath

the title fake assassinated.

fuck periods at the ends of 

lines. no one noticed. that's 

cooted griebe. i told myself 

i'd only go back to the bard 

place for 50k & an apology. 

turns out 5k and "help" 

was enough. please kill 

me again. love, anselm

Kit Fisto

sly smiling tentacle

headed jedi never

really got to say

anything. dude was

green. highly skilled

came from a planet

named glee anselm

i love kit fisto

i hate it when he dies

he goes out like a chump

Works from TEXT/OBJECT

Edith

And Lot's wife did look back....and I love her for that, because it was so human. - Kurt Vonnegut

What do you remember?

the stench of burning hair

a chlorine yellow haze

disobedience of the screen door

slam of my backward glance

Stand closer listen

to the rasp of my breath

as I become salt taste

the mineral of my fingertips

crystals sharp on your tongue

It’s not too late to turn back

watch me bid farewell

to my daughters

their bright bodies twisting

in the eucalyptus

I am here with the linens still damp

my palms frayed lace deadly

as an apricot kernel unblinking

as a lamp post

writing about you

with my eyelashes watching

as you disappear

across a blazing horizon

What do you remember?

 Rebecca Faulkner is a London-born poet based in Brooklyn. The author of Permit Me to Write My Own Ending, (Write Bloody Press, 2023) her work appears in New York Quarterly, Solstice Magazine, The Maine Review, CALYX Press, Berkeley Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is a 2023 poetry recipient of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women, the 2022 winner of Sand Hills Literary Magazine’s National Poetry Contest, and the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Prometheus Unbound Poetry Competition. Rebecca was a 2021 Poetry Fellow at the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. She holds a BA in English Literature & Theatre Studies from the University of Leeds, and a Ph.D. from the University of London. She is currently at work on her second collection of poetry, exploring female identity and artistic endeavor.

death of the fine-feathered-

we the fine-feathered-

dinosaurs who comet has come

straight down to blast 

in the very long jugular

as though cosmic consciously thought  

are heaping

the sky turns uterine 

the rain a kind of breeding 

with clear ends in sight 

terracotta waters so broad 

the breath is gone

vertebrae petrified 

because i am dead i cannot say

because i am dead i turn my head 

and see brother floating beside 

hands a strand of black hair 

a benevolence

jaw & hips broke open

Burning Again

In this basil
I am Judas—
don't mean to wake you
when I talk about you,
carsick by your side.
Last year, a single year. While night, while
my husband worried all for nothing,
you were there and drove
that winter—rigid, escalating to a streak.
Parked it beneath my horse-
print scarf
and their unfixed postures,
none of whom were just yet grief.
None I recognised
as manic. I bathed
in those days like a thrush in marbles.
Could not walk
up the stairs like that, recall the room
that had the basil, or where I'd left
what you would bring me, anyway—storch
of sadness. You occur to me like a clave
does to a clave. Is this question, or desire:
what heart will lisp through my hands—
whose face between these night-lose
thirds? Fake, but with such true intention.
Isn't that enough?
You have spooned me like a pear
in spring, haven’t you?—you have! If I had an ear
like a magpie in the mist
of my husband's mouth, I'd tell this London
artist that no one, up to this hour,
from the moment he had sketched me,
had called
me Jonah, Giona, or Jojo, when
it is, in fact, late, I am weary—August is over
and looking for me, all that dead
bread in the toaster is burning again.

Worry Barn

Slowly to my courage,
I climb the duckboards
like a deer into a late October
tree. Or a hand across the black
of an electric piano. Slouch
myself over a shrivelled pint.
Honey, the birds are building barns.
Honey, if I had nothing else,
I'd eat the grain from the paper
of the first year of our marriage.
I am always elsewhere when you call,
moving there, airy supplement for
airy supplement—I am cableless.
Walletless by the riverbank across you,
empty socks beneath the bed, and
I cannot what I cannot.
What if I did? Bring you coffee
tomorrow and all of our—
what if all of our
hydrangeas turned blue?

In tune with the trees’ fated shiver, get sad

and try again, coughing up nostalgic sands as brass

melodies imitate a barbed wire memorial for the rain

to polish at which point you ask for directions

get lost in a city’s identical awnings renting your brain.

Then after that rain and the rain and rain with rain in it

raining the rain and the rain’s sibling the rain, I verify

my skin waiting for sheets of air or stale echoes,

the junctions the poem needed to free all threads

of resentment and desire. Time then held tight in the

shopping bags singing the future’s toothbrush into being

from muscles of commerce, the ghosts that wait along its river

aren’t even real, no time to stop and talk, this territory of bad still

sounds an empty room, air in the can, the clock the tree’s poetic

rot as a joke I don’t get, please tell it again.

Sit and think of violent movies your mother

would like, a rearranged scale to climb the blasted

scaffolding how voice folds and devours its tent

collapsing in rain and the mud groans ancient.

How you could just take it and reserve a table for poetry,

hold music on hold while the stroller wheel’s grocery

discovers nothing’s adjective nothing

facing down as dark water sunk the sensuous edges of a missile,

know that skin. Yeah, I still don’t want a country though

and its identities, its births breathing all documents

to hamburger horizons and national sunglasses

a slow limp across a parking lot as energy drinks

investigate the limb’s motion. Really, I’m a coupon

open book percentage on the picnic table

and the self-flagellating storms invent excuses

to mispronounce the applause across the river’s electrified

debris, that border will fuck with you, that muscle will be weak

about halfway across and then what, whose helicopter is that

blaring in the teeth’s imbalanced sleep when dawn’s rushes

come in the window they’re all left waiting for you, gardens

of violence beckon a summertime stroll, the blood visible

and then just a flower.

Iraq is for lovers (2003 remix)

W and his daddy issues ended two affairs
I enjoyed that winter the crows left
butterscotch wrappers and ribbed condoms
on my back stoop both officers used
to enter me
into a database
tracking men who told
when asked top or bottom
age weight race height build hung
algorithms and servers humming
deep in the mountains I cruised
before the internet acronyms fell
like Baghdad and my missionary
was accomplished by Sunday brunch

THe other cheek

My husbands Bo and Tom don’t see me
in the backyard. They’re busy
plating endive-bedded broccoli rabe
sprinkled with red pepper and something soyish
per the photos in our Loverboys group text.
Tom used to love us with buttered medium rares—
our Y2K riverfront condo era, Bo always shaking
vodka martinis opaque enough to hide
the future from our marathon-trained hearts.
Had you asked me to predict this
present domesticity, I would’ve
turned the other cheek—
as in my ass, lubed
and playing peekaboo
in the Pipeline’s crowded basement
as wild as the world that said I shouldn’t be
myself or marry a man, let alone two,
our guest fourth driving in tomorrow
for his monthly long weekend
of me watching, mostly.
They don’t see me
watching them swirl glasses of red wine,
delaying my reentry to the new queer geometry
of our house—I’m the oldest square
in our comfortable sphere and I wish
I were still a circle jerk superstar.
I wish we still lived in that condo
where the maintenance man serviced
residents in the freight elevator. I wish
they didn’t look so happy without me—
Tom kissing Bo after they toast
to what I’m not sure I want to
know anymore. Every Friday
it’s my turn to mow.

dreamt a color called harvest, i’m no longer hungry

all these aspen leaves burnt marigold.

the green of spruce a blush so blue

you’d call me greedy any day but this one,

which was heaven-sent if heaven were

a mirror & also horribly sad sometimes

& we named the space between trees

& she had horses, star-maned, tail held high.

i was higher than any home, un-hopeless

for six hours, drunk on gathering & grace.

mercy may have a hold on me, it was easy

to imagine. this could be like home.

gifted

you do not have to be good / at tests

to get someone to love you. see?

there’s always something left unsaid

& mostly it’s at present. watch me say:

i am not hungry.

WHEN THE VOICE CUTS OUT

THESE MORAL CURRENTS CUT

Half my bad childhood racial memories happened

at middle-school dances. The blond boy who snatched

the fresh Malcolm X hat off my head, threw it down

into a dancefloor mess of fruit punch & gritty footprints,

& told me you’re not black—stop pretending. (Entire careers

made of upholding that line when we refuse to run patrol

for them.) At another dance, I was ringed by leering

white faces that belted out, It don’t matter if you’re black

or white. I wasn’t sure what those faces meant, but I knew

they meant to hurt. I’ve never held that lyric against Michael

Jackson. I do find, though, listening to his old albums,

those Jackson 5 records with cuts like “Never Can Say

Goodbye,” has gotten hard. These days I know how that story

ends: the descent into dysmorphic madness, the predatory

doors bolted and shut behind boys, one stolen childhood

thieving another. My better angels think it’s wrong

to separate the art from the artist. I hated learning

Pound in school when we all knew he was a Fascist

& anti-Semite. He should have stayed locked

in the gorilla cage of his hate. But then I admit Miles Davis

has lodged brass notes irrevocably under my fifth rib,

and some of those notes he bent while blacking & bluing

Cicely Tyson. (Cicely goddamn Tyson . . .) & on the night MJ

died, I danced to his music in a circle of dancers until my shirt

was sweat-stuck to my chest, until I stank with grief.

I didn’t know then all that disgusts me now —the doors,

the boys—but the hard truth is: if the King of Pop died today,

I don’t think I could stop myself from letting hips sway

to music that, especially in the writhing all-night body rock

of a house party but even in my mother’s halting soprano,

pushes past joy to abandon. These moral currents cut the other

way too: the blond boy who snatched the “X” hat off my head,

when a young man, walked into a gas-station store to find a woman

being beaten by her boyfriend, & when the blond boy went to stop

him, the boyfriend ignited a lighter & touched it to the boy’s shirt,

which burned until it curled into a sneer & then stuck to his white skin.

Tape Transfers (selected)

Conversations with Myself

From Above

Acrylic on Canvas Pair, 12x36"

The Distance Between [Us]

Acrylic on Canvas, 36x48"

Serenity and Isolation

Acrylic on Canvas Pair, 12x36"

to my [ ] anxiety my natural state 

to my loving feelings lay your red 

hand on me as i go you scorch  

my tongue on the way back  

down my throat. my burning feelings 

you leave  

you leave 

an aftertaste like salt after sweat. i wince  

at the affection i crave. i hold the [ ] feelings  

for you in. 

  does a gorge 

echo if the [ ]  

leave an echo if the empty 

leave an echo if the empty  

leave an echo if the soft part of a rock 

is the only place  

that feels its ? i don’t know how to tell love 

from [ ] after the first night you fall  

asleep holding me i don’t fall asleep 

  i don’t fall [ ] 

i lay my hand on yours you twitch 

my fingertips burn in the morning we are the same but 

i feel [ ] different  

to my wanting feelings if i press my palm 

on this hollowed 

feeling , on your hand, can it fill me 

will these [ ] feelings learn to feed me enough? even if i don’t

know how to open up for love can i find [ ] 

  can i find 

a way to receive it just enough a way in  

in case of emergency  

do not break glass shell that holds me in 

to my empty [ ]  

to my empty feelings if i swallow a marble  

will the glass make a sound against  

the gorge of my gut

gorge [ ] my gut 

will i burn 

if i fill my mouth with memories 

with [ ] 

will i lay into love later will i learn to love you out loud eventually  

do i have [ ] 

 do i have to melt 

my shell to let these burning feelings in 

  to let 

[

Displacement

South:
weight, action, extreme, following

North * + West *
toiling, disclosing, flooding (salvation) harvesting, words, stimulating

East *
Issuing, thunder, stirring up, pivoting

They have no idea where you came from–
* The Three-Year-Old Pu Yi Became China's Last Emperor. Invaders came
RIVERTOWN
* The Japanese bombed Rivertown in 1939. Mom was born in a cave
RIVERTOWN
* The World Continued in Manmade Revolutions... Wars of Words & Dust
RIVERTOWN