Wandering Land
by Josh Aaron Siegel
After Land by Agha Shahid Ali
There is no moon here since my father left across the sea. No light to guide me out of the valley when the others have shuffled away.
At night I push my ear to the wall so I can listen to the families that surround
me knees between my arms waiting for the sound.
Will the crowd hold their cries When
milk returns to this blessed land?
As my father says the lights of the old town streaking the whites of his eyes –When milk turns to yogurt there is no going back not even in dreams–
I go out past fields by stone roads where shepherds point to the sky as a greeting. I go to the hill that looks out over the water and trace my finger along the horizon line.
Each night I swear the line inches upwards. Maybe the water will take over the sky and surround the missing moon, surround the lights in my father’s eyes, surround me until we can’t see to see
At the moment the heart is drowned, Where does
the home live on, oh Promised Land?
–Not even in memory– says my father –can the home live on– because no matter where the bombs drop, no matter where fate points her wrinkled finger
We are all heading arms outstretched to a land where memory has no place but there’s no stopping the images from holding me in place,
the white capped men who sold candied dates, the cellphone sales woman who tried to move away but couldn’t
the girl who wore jeans
These wanderers pull my hands down connect my fingers to the pavement until I can no longer raise my arms
Another Communion
by Alejandro Villa Vasquez
I am in that stellar world again
surrounded by archangels, by sugar rivers.
My mother pink with pregnancy.
Where the world — oh, hug me — is
a tamarind as it never was.
Never not since my father was
Ha-mes, not Jaymez;
not since my mother’s manicure, little red mirrors
reflecting the American sun in the South.
Rose and robin’s egg melt like corn flour.
This ground sings.
Only the small strike of an accent
could speak our language as it was.
I spread to hug the belly of the mountainside.
The vision swift, impossible I admit.
Sleep fails and that world burst
loud as a belt on the leg.
The real, white sun rips me back
a child is being beaten —
I drink the vinegar of truth
like my First Communion,
while azure-pinched eyes watch:
what can you teach a body
by Raisa Tolchinsky
a bird caught in a stairway only knows how to fly upwards
even when the only way out is through the black iron bars
of the gate on the ground floor
still, we kept batting at it with a broom,
my brother and i, although
for many years i did not understand
there was nothing to do but wait.
the first day of track season
the coach scrubbed the starter pistol's
orange plastic parts: stirrup pin,
hammer,
plunger spring,
caliber
weighed each piece in his palm—
the gun is just as important as the running,
he said, the running is less important than knowing
when to run:
nose to asphalt on the track
my little ritual, imagining myself
fast-twitch wings.
when i heard the shot on howard st
when i saw the boy stumbling forward
from that blue square of sky i felt no fear
had already started running, had trained for this
without knowing it was what i had been training for,
no time to think
how this gun
had a bullet.
now i cannot stop thinking of how
i should have run towards him—
for months i have walked into red punches
thrown tires, whipped chains
preparing for 2 minutes
of stepping willingly
into the hardest part.
after my first fight, e. & i on the locker room floor.
i said, bring me back
from the dead.
bring me back.
& when the blue bruises appeared
on my back,
i could not trace their source.
what is the difference between hurt and hymn?
between praise and hunger?
how many days did we return home to find the bird
still in the stairwell,
mistaking windows for exits?
(sound of wings tapping glass)
the flying upwards is in their bones,
they will do it even if
it kills them
Play Therapy
by Meisha Rosenberg
“Sniper,” asserts my six-year-old son. His police survey the Lego family of the empty wooden doll house. Stand-ins for us mutely stub about: mother, father, son, and, playing the part of our German Shepherd mix, a Schleich replica. “Wait,” I say, “You can’t arrest someone if you don’t have a witness.” The therapist has told me to do this, to insert my comments, help my son learn other perspectives.
The wind outside pushes clouds, making their shadows fall on the doll house. “There must be some mistake,” I simper, not knowing any other voice for a mother, nor when I began filling and emptying cups, mornings all so early.
The police follow the two-inch Lego father, although there are no stairs for him, in his checkered red shirt, 3 o’clock shadow, no-knee legs that pop off. We follow, rising to the attic, where the officer scans us with his ultrasonic detector. “Drugs,” my officer-son concludes.
How does he already know?
How willingly we go into the Playmobil van, where I negotiate for our release. My talk of rights is not acknowledged by the spy, flamboyant in orange and white—the Lord of the disco with surveillance headgear—recruited to be taxi driver. After he drops us off, the police shoot him.
Our figures get home, feed the dog, and, collapsing on the floor, see there are no locks or latches and the wind and clouds pass through us.
On Half Moon Beach
by Joey Gould
I will love you again
dear me you stumbler
you swimmer you walking
past the boy calling your name hey
I will write of calling you will
right the need to be called of the need
of that need someone loved your love
but not you can I ask you
not to feel like you always have to ask
having circled yourself too long looking
down a pile of lanky sticks auguring
every time you butterflied a dead breast
looking in the fridge for out-of-codes
instead of lunch auguring sour
spoilage circling against your own
call song dear heart I don’t want you
to be sad anymore I wish
you’ll be happy you survived
listen: try to swallow
a compliment don’t take it
to the windshield unfortunate
cicada catch it keep those words
in a jar on the stand where you lay
your wallet bring it to the beach
take off your shirt go wading
with it introduce it to your sadness
so they can be friends
Two Collages by Joan Hall
Parroquian Dream 25
Parroquian Dream 20
To see more of Joan’s work, visit her website here:
Earth Time
by Shuyi Yin
The gaze of the moan birds flare
through shadows of godless moonlight.
A tortoise carrying his black and yellow shell
hears the summon from the sea waves
and crawls slowly across the midsummer
grass with its one thousand years'
practice of asceticism.
A cliff awaits.
Drops of lavender oil
trickle down into the sea, as it stretches
of canvas, unbreathable.
Underneath lives a jellyfish called Lonesome Tom.
He has no eyes, no ears, mouth, heart or brain.
No bones, no spine. He never feels lonely.
Yesterday, he paved his floors with gold
and drank a bottle of vodka,
then went to a funeral of red sea urchins
like the one two hundred years ago—
Koi Hanako's.
She once had a room carpeted
with screaming light.
An owl picks up salt and stone from the seabed,
pecks a robin’s eggs, enters the bellies of the ducks,
digs deep into the marrow of the dragonfly.
Two Poems by Miranda Dennis
Too Many Boys in the Basement
One is enough, and anyway, they’re men.
Kudzu not lichen. Lichen not human.
Human not tulips. Tulips not loam.
To be only loam, to be ready at the touch
for one replication of the universe.
A lightbulb to resemble the daylight,
the daylight eager to erase the night,
night to settle, sure of itself, as a man
in the yard grabs dog by the collar,
drags dog to the ground. Dog of highest
heaven, I’d rather elevate the dog.
Fall Off the Bone
That’s what the roast is supposed to do, so it does.
Oh that I were as well-behaved.
*
If you pray to the bone will you learn
what the bone knows? Or will
you just be the letterhead
on naked paper? Will you
finetune your cuticles
to catch degree by degree
the shift in wind? How will
the spirit sing in your heavy
heart? How will the garden
untended make song
out of streelights?
How low does an alley go
before it meets the sea again?
What is the railroad’s rattle doing
to one loose bulb?
*
Your body is wrong. Your body is wrong as a machine full of lead. Your body doesn’t know
itself. Your knee turns out. Think of your body as a landmine. Think of your body as knotted
garden hose. How could God live in your palm? How, when clenching in your sleep? How, when
you slap an alarm to wake yourself up? If your body knew itself, you’d be up to feed the
chickens before dawn. You’d be someone’s pastoral landscape, wrought in oils so thick you can
taste it, taste the river shuddering through fertile soil. You’d be the sunset at a woman’s back as
she calls to her children, somewhere out of frame, who are skinny with summer, a Catherine
wheel of knees.
American Daughter
by Daliah Angelique
I want my covered wagon
I want my prairie isolation
I want to raise the church that will spit me out
I want my dysentery quick and neat
I want my accidental hemlock, come back feeding
the fever with the same clenched jaw
I want my parochial folkways
I want my shotgun shell penitence
I want my shimmering plague of locusts
I want my tired womb folded in the hope chest
I want a testament to my suffering that is promptly paved over and
I want my mother’s trauma sold to me as Tradition, a mandatory aching,
this Next Frontier of the same failed crops,
things stole not conquered,
Sabotage packaged as hope
Indicative Material for Projection Images & Public Poetry
by Derya Dilara
To learn more about Derya and see more of their video projects in motion, visit: https://ddaglobe.com/
Untitled
by Chen Chen
The rain wants to ask me
about its sun-piercing mind—
I know.
I know this, even today
on Governors Island where even the trees’
questions are a form of heat
and I want to put on this glittery mask
as though it were a wearable mist
machine, and in fact there is a mist
machine, just a couple feet away,
but clearly that is too far
from the pores of my forehead
in which the rain, yes, is asking,
And you here? Are you the tree
I want to fall onto? To nourish?
And the pores of my forehead keep replying,
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
This poem is an excerpt from the first Milk Happening Zine, a product of the inaugural Milk Press Happening.
