Cover art by Dawson Stout.

Masthead

Editors-in-Chief: Leon Barros and Natalee Cruz

Editorial Directors: Stephanie Berger, Jackie Braje, and Tova Greene

Readers & Editors: Lisette Boer, Fi Makris, and Faith-Marie McHenry

 

Editor’s Note

Dear Readers,

Recently, someone was walking along the Oregon coast when, in the distance, they spotted an unidentified black mass on the shore. As they got closer, they came to realize it was a carcass. Strewn upon the sand laid a lone angler fish, her football-shaped body blackened from decay, a dried bulb hanging from her forehead. Scientists say this discovery is only the thirty-sixth of its kind; a deep-sea rarity, dredged from the ocean’s depths, a sight witnessed by only a few.

The sight elicits grotesque fascination coupled with melancholy, a visceral reminder of our loneliness and animal mortality. In the issue ahead, animals run wild. Both observed and embodied, some are friendly, some fearful, some feral—some dead. From Indovina’s lovin’ bear to Abigail Swoboda’s thrashing eels, creatures abound, evoking a primal state and offering us an experience different from our own. 

These days, living can feel like an exposed nerve, an animal body that cannot distinguish between itself and the world around it. Certainly, now, we feel this more than ever. As the indescribable violence in Rafah, Sudan, and the Congo and against citizens in Haiti and Uyghur Muslims in China rages on, the pleas for a ceasefire and humane resolution remain unheard. As Bazeed in “Palestinians, Balletic” demonstrates, it’s all too easy to fall into this quiet horror of erasure. 

So, what are we left with, and what comes next? Thinking about the angler fish, left on that shore to the caprice of the elements, it is human instinct to be repelled. Yet one also realizes the angler fish did not appear out of nowhere. 3,000 feet below sea level, the angler fish lived in a thriving world, full of its kin and other deep-sea creatures, all trying to live with each other, from birth to death, to survive.

Our contributors remind us that it has always been we who come together to stave off this existence’s cruelty, through family, community, and even through art. As protests around the world continue to show, there will always be people who will defend the right to live, and to fight for a better future, even as some continue to deny it to others. Throughout the issue, these artists speak both to and think of other people, wondering how our animal bodies, in our encounter with the other, can be a source of terror and joy, of violence and love. For all our faults, the problem is the solution: each other.

Perhaps that angler fish can teach us something too about the unknown, that there are worlds and even futures beyond our comprehension, beyond our ability to imagine. In the final lines of “Abecedarian On Surviving | Apocalypse,” Kindall Gant writes, yesterday is today refracted | in the nightmare of yesteryear / zeitgeist of an era we dream real | tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. Even that angler fish, 3000 miles above, ended up arriving at a strange new shore.

Warmly,
Natalee & Leon
Editors-in-Chief

 

In This Issue

 

Bazeed

 

Bazeed is a multi–award winning Egyptian immigrant, poet, playwright, spoken word artist, stage actor, performance artist, and cook, living in Brooklyn. An alliteration-leaning writer of prose, poetry, plays, and pantry lists, their work across genres has been published in print and online, and their plays performed on both sides of the Atlantic. To procrastinate from facing the blank page, Bazeed curates and runs a monthly(ish) salon and open mic in Brooklyn, and is a slow student of Arabic music.

 

Work

Palestinians, Balletic

Explanatory Note:

This poem is an erasure from a Washington Post article dated May 13th, 2022, with the headline: “Massive crowds, police beatings as journalist’s funeral is held in Jerusalem,” detailing the descent of armed Israeli police in riot gear, beating Palestinian mourners and pallbearers carrying reporter Shireen Abu Akleh’s coffin to its final resting place. Abu Akleh had been shot while wearing a clearly marked press vest and helmet, in a precision shot just above her eat, where the helmet didn’t cover. 

The word “balletic,” ending this piece, meaning related to or characteristic of ballet, was captured in screen shot for this erasure, but has since been corrected to “ballistic” at the link, though with no mention of the revision history in the article itself.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/13/shireen-abu-akleh-al-jazeera-israel-jenin/


Michelle Bitting was short-listed for the 2023 CRAFT Character Sketch Challenge, the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the 2021 Coniston and 2020 Reed Magazine Edwin Markham Prizes. She won Quarter After Eight’s Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest and was a finalist for the Ruminate Magazine, Sonora Review and New Millennium Flash Prose contests. She is the author of five poetry collections: Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural C & R Press De Novo First Book Award; Notes to the Beloved; The Couple Who Fell to Earth; Broken Kingdom, winner of the Catamaran Poetry Prize; and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press), winner of the Wilder Prize and recently named one of Kirkus Reviews’2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist (C & R Press) is forthcoming in 2024. Recent poetry appears on The Slowdown and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Bitting holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University, Oregon, and a PhD in Mythological Studies, emphasis Poetry and Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is writing a novel centered around Los Angeles and her great grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.

Michelle Bitting

Work

  • Stork bite, angel kiss, salmon patch
    of blush epidermis, pink palm print
    pressed to the back of your head
    & hidden until you merged
    with the light outside my insides,
    summer flooding the hospital room
    in the city of Saint Monica, patron
    of mothers & famous for cheering
    son Augustine along his fraught
    illustrious path & isn’t the world
    just like that? Mothers versus Death
    since forever as we’ve followed it
    in history books & life
    & certainly since you arrived
    on this planet so breathtakingly
    artful in its design on evils
    & delights, on miracles & mayhem
    & shame on us & on me
    forgetting your skull cap’s masterpiece,
    the field of Rorschach strawberry
    where I’d plant my lips so often,
    letting your follicle fragrance
    fill me, a grace-given thing,
    this infant essence, fecund
    & flesh-scented, the bread
    of stars if they could exhale
    like animals, like the breath
    of heaven, really, then the unseen
    illness, the taking of pictures,
    the requisite shearing of locks
    grown long in your young
    adulthood—I saw it—the good
    friends flying in with their weed
    & spirits, their laughter
    & raucous playlists, the ceremony
    of love your goofy lot performed,
    first braiding then snipping
    then shaving your head to its
    nubby minimum so the chemo
    could not get there first,
    that fucking devil we’d bless
    & curse as it snaked its orange
    burn around your body
    in the coming weeks & months
    & how the shearing brought the mark
    into view, the rouge kiss of a long-lost
    lover peeking through your homemade
    beanie knit by a family friend
    from the church we don’t visit
    anymore, not even on holidays
    or to pray in pews under stained glass,
    those ocular openings in the Neo-Gothic
    vein since medieval Chartres
    where divinity streams through—Oh,
    you brave & worthy knight,
    your body a cathedral, your bones,
    holy relics humming the hymns
    of coming health & weren’t we
    the ones back when, always first
    to the healing rail, our heads bowed
    to receive the woo-woo spirit
    where most were too proud
    or embarrassed to kneel or believe
    but we knew that the things worth
    knowing are not the things we know
    & when God is gone it means
    church is everywhere & water
    might turn to wine & stones to gold
    & the greatest moment in the service
    was when everything stopped
    & the veil of words dropped
    like a curtain of hair falling
    & the people turned to touch
    each other, saying Peace be with you
    & Also with you, their trembling
    hands a little like newborn
    roses opening to morning
    after the shadow of night has passed


Eleonor Botoman

Eleonor Botoman is a Romanian-American writer and cultural worker based in Brooklyn. Her poetry and criticism has appeared in the Long Now Foundation, C Magazine, BlackFlash Magazine, The Mantle, and The Sunlight Press among others. When they're not researching the impacts of climate change on museums or experimenting with perfumery, you can find them curating multimedia wonders for their newsletter, Screenshot Reliquary and on Instagram and Twitter. You may find more at her website.

Work

  • Have you ever met girls made of antler velvet?
    They are snow, they are yellowing
    broth, hot throats strained by cold air.
    Laughter soaked through boiled bones all
    mountain sounds with joints that never thaw.

    These girls are flowers drying on the windowsill,
    sliced open bellies hanging in a small house soaked in salt.
    The calcium white of dowry lace, the strength of
    blankets locked inside a wooden box.

    When you press your face into her hair you smell smoke,
    animals skinned for drum membranes, a rooster spasming
    above the the slosh of blood in the bowl and your grandmother
    drawing a small knife across the crumpled neck with leather palms.
    You watch, containing your breath between the gaps in the fence.

    I have seen girls made of beast hours.
    Under nights that half-whimper out in blued
    sputters of campfire, boney fingers pull the furs closer.
    Somewhere, there are teeth snapping at the church door

    You are supposed to name your daughters after saints
    but these are women born with rifles tied to their spines.
    Snow-clots between the toes, these girls are a hound pack
    of fever, wombed in the stories of ancient things, mouths so
    argent-heavy lapping at your eyes like sparks from striked iron.

    You are the beast she would like to cut open, to
    crawl inside and occupy the shelter of your organs.
    In my dreams, Winter is a hungry sister.
    Jaws slick as honey, fastened around the kiss of your throat.


Ana Maria Caballero is a poet and artist whose work explores how biology delimits societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil off romanticized motherhood and questioning notions that package sacrifice as a virtue. She's the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Beverly International Prize, Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize, a Future Art Writers Award and a Sevens Foundation Grant. In 2024, she became the first living poet to sell a poem at Sotheby’s and has sold the first digital poem via live auction in Spain. Her Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net-nominated work has been published extensively and exhibited as fine art at museums and leading international venues, such as the Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia, bitforms, Office Impart, Poetry Society of America, Gazelli Art House, New World Center and Times Square. The author of six books, she's also a founder of digital poetry gallery theVERSEverse.

Ana Maria Caballero

 

Work

  • The method of delivery defines

    the type of mammal we, they, you,

    are. The category of creature I am.

     

    They are monotreme, they who are reptilian,

    birdlike in their method of birth. A cracked

    white shell announces their first day.

     

    Monotremes possess cloacas. One canal

    to expel excrement, urine, and the egg

    that descends from within to remain without.

     

    You are marsupial, you who clamber

    undeveloped into your momma’s pocket.

    Out of differentiated birth canal you arrive

     

    to climb incomplete into her warm pelted

    pouch. No one blames you

    for this extra time inside.

     

    I who am placental—food and waste

    conveyed via same-serving, cloaca-like rope.

    Then, cord sliced, tied: belly button bulge.

     

    Initially conjoined, I was cut free upon first breath

    alive. An entire lifetime spent nursing

    such self-determining slice.

 

“entropy,” 2023.


Stephanie Cochrane

 

Stephanie Cochrane resides in Brooklyn,NY. She works as a floral designer and creates handmade collage art in her spare time. Crafted mainly from discarded books and junk mail, her work explores the complexities of modern relationships.

Work

Online Dating Profiles


Ayling Zulema Dominguez is a poet, mixed media artist, and arts educator with roots in Puebla, México (Nahua) and República Dominicana. Grounded in anticolonial poetics, their writing asks who we are at our most free, exploring the subversions and imaginings needed in order to arrive there. Ayling believes in poetry as dutiful liberation practice, writing against colonialism and toward new worlds of community care, ever-healing lineages, and land returns.

Work

  • Nude and wet as I’ll ever be without fear of harm,

    the steam envelops me. A soggy cocoon

    of transient remedy. A more regulated drowning

    until my breath returns, having ricocheted off the mold.

    The curtain sweats out a desire sticky and lingering

    as the craving your lovelessness affords.

    I am trying to love the way you’ve made me

    have to love myself. Permission

    with no promise of return.

    I open the faucet of us and nothing rushes out.

    Mothering is slippery, I know. Lots of need

    for grabbing on. For doing as you must.

    You recount stories of your own many avoidances.

    How you knew to do as told without question. Meaning

    all the questions got jammed down from your slightly parted lips

    to whatever organ holds the most hesitance

    to your bloodstream. Hatching within me.

    Now all I have are questions. My insides never dared

    imagine being supple and uncalloused. So I gather myself

    beneath a constrained downpour in hopes of dissolving,

    imperceptibly. In hopes of seeing

    what the drain has to offer me. I’d like to believe

    there is a sewer for all the lamentations we’ve sloughed off

    in anguished showers. A holding place prior to treatment.

    Trouble with that is, all water gets recycled. Incessant

    is sorrow. Foolish to think we can wade in the same waters

    without repercussion, awaiting salvation.

Ayling Zulema Dominguez


Ally Eden

Ally Eden (she/they) is an emerging queer poet and currently serves as Poet Laureate of Fort Collins, Colorado. Ally’s work is vibrant, unabashedly poignant, and rooted in love for community. In her approach to art as a practice, she strives to curate participatory experiences that offer everyone a seat at the table. Ally co-founded the Gulo Gulo Poetry Collective, runs a bimonthly peer-critique group, The Rabbit Hutch, and facilitates collaborations and workshops for musicians, immigrants and refugees, incarcerated writers, fellow writers, queer youth, and the community at-large. An English/Spanish interpreter by trade, her role as a linguist parallels her poetic ethos—bridging difference by way of words. Ally Eden’s work has been featured in The Imaginables, Nudie Magazine, Scrapped Magazine, and “Songs of Revolution” by Sunday Mornings at the River.

Work

  • that summer ash ruined
    the whole damn sky yellow-bellied
    marmots near exterminated & the mountain
    lions kept alive on kibble & water
    we left outside for them hundreds no
    thousands were evacuated we stayed
    in cities blanketed overnight
    we were dusting earth from our cars
    we were worried about people
    we breathed whatever fresh air
    we could find we could have
    saved some for later but
    thank god the fire
    died & we got
    we were
    busy

  • ALL THIS LIFE PEARLS ON A STRING
    the bone-stacked oak a body balancing as an eyelash flutters the planet shakes uncontrollably animals, we believe the quiet miracle of burning stars is the big picture like snow trees & rivers & all things fall back to earth vanish or weary & at our feet disappear but what if in the soft storm of years you flurry out of reach ghost me what if when you die i feel it God & everything the taxonomy of holiness: is just this how glorious fleeting & how brutal

  • kids line up at the door

    pushing, press against each other’s bodies

    until the line is hush, arms. quiet by their own bodies

    they wait to be released. on the playground

    the play, don’t they? wearing bare a patch of

    dirt in the field of green. might-as-well-be-lava

    and if they want to be someone

    they make-believe, don’t they? and if they vacillate

    they are told over & over who to be until

    someone yells “shooter” & everyone plays at dying

    except the kid accept the kid

    who has worn the grass

    so thin just by standing there as if they

    as if living mattered


Kindall Gant (she/they) is a Black femme interdisciplinary poet and New Orleans native based in Brooklyn. She experiments with visual storytelling as liberation through themes of home, heritage and history, bringing poems into conversation with expressive forms like film, visual art, music and photography. They have received support from Cave Canem, the Poetry Foundation, MASS MoCA, the Saltonstall Foundation, the Watering Hole, Studio Museum in Harlem and Ma's House among other arts institutions. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and appears or is forthcoming in Torch, the What a Time to Be Alive zine carried at the Hopscotch Reading Room in Berlin, the 1619 Speaks anthology published by the Sims Library of Poetry, Brooklyn Poets, Obsidian, and Polemical Zine. Find more of their work at kindallgant.com.

Work

Kindall Gant

  • — after Sun Ra's Space is the Place


    aliens exist but i’m still alive | in amerikkka

    backdrop blue | lives protected more than black

    colonization the root of climate change | chronic

    deforestation | murder purposely mistaken for death

    everyday | another unnecessary angel’s eulogy

    for what | seems like will but won’t be forever

    generations of grief | seeking god in the genocide

    hardened whelmed over by the absence | human

    impatience a constant for change | the future imagined

    juxtaposing an unnameable | into existing justice

    kaleidoscoping science fiction into reality | karmic

    light travels us through | years of life-saving liturgies

    myth transforms into historical record | missions manifest

    new worlds | stardust made non-monolithic niggas name

    oppressed folks | their overseers reaped for oblivion

    peeled from what was made into what will be | re-write present

    quilt belief into the broader tapestry | resurrect it queer

    revolution for the masses | a collective re-remembering

    subverting middle passage | slave ship turned spacecraft

    the instrument prototyping tenderness | isotope teleportation

    ultraviolent for the massas who don’t make it | to utopia

    virtuosic transitions to an envisioned elsewhere | liminal visions

    wage war against erasure | from memory wading in water

    xenial alchemy | ancestral end of awaiting a xenagogy

    yesterday is today refracted | in the nightmare of yesteryear

    zeitgeist of an era we dream real | tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet


Heather Gluck

 

Heather Gluck is a poet from New York. She received her MFA from Columbia University. Her poetry has appeared in Anthropocene, Palette Poetry, and Anti-Heroin Chic, among other publications. She is the managing editor of Epiphany and the poetry editor of West Trade Review. See more of her work at heathergluck.com.

 

Work

hagsploitation