Kamakhya

To Amruta Patil, for coincidences

Spiral roads take you up
An occulted hill
The glacial river flows by,
Your spiralling eyes
Are full of green water,
You breathe
A vertiginous air,
Trees laden with monkeys
Greet you anciently,
You hear bells
Tolling against bad spirits
Sinisterly pious –
Welcoming scared gods,
Priests, sheep
Vie for attention,
Flowers are food, mantras
Money,
You remove your shoes
Walk on old stones
They erase your presence
You are footsteps
With eyes of forgetting,
Divinities on walls
Pose – to stall your path
Tempt you,
Their bodies, counsels
On stone –
Telling you, go break
The stones in your body
Become body
Spread your organs,
Branch out like flowers
Flower, branch,
Go, turn into verbs
Look, beside you
Goats are slaughtered
They wait, then –
Executed by a syllable
Their blood
Is our feast, we feast
On death,
Our mother bleeds –
To birth us,
Blood is birth, death
Regeneration
Kamakhya,
Dark spring,
Invites us below –
We go with careful steps
Where it bleeds
Water,
Blood is water,
On our forehead of water
A mark of blood,
It marks our fate,
Fate, marked by return
To roots
Of vanished, deserted
Homes,
Where we were born,
Will never die,
We die elsewhere,
Without roots
We are homeless figs
In the pyre,
In a fit you see –
Temple walls
Hoisted by pigeons,
Why do birds
Die clinging to walls,
What attracts
Feathers to stones,
No one knows
Inside the garbhagriha
Dark rumbles,
You go inside your head
Deeper, down,
Walled by fear, desire,
Touch the yoni
Waiting since ages
To remind you
Where you come from,
Kamakhya,
The orifice of origins,
Performs a ritual
Of blood’s regenerative
Cycles,
Man sacrifices his animal –
For he lacks the blood
Of a woman,
Goats are muted spectators
Of self-annihilation
Or of delirium,
Of what man cannot hold –
In Kamakhya,
Stones bleed myths

By Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee

Biography:

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is a poet, writer, translator and political science scholar. His poems have appeared in The London Magazine, New Welsh Review, The Fortnightly Review, Elohi Gadugi Journal, Mudlark, Metamorphoses, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Postcolonialist, George Szirtes’ Blog, The Missing Slate, The Indian Quarterly, The Little Magazine, and Coldnoon. His first collection of poetry, Ghalib’s Tomb and Other Poems (2013), was published by The London Magazine. He is currently Adjunct Professor in the School of Culture and Creative Expressions at Ambedkar University, New Delhi.

My Khala is an Honest Woman

Being an educator is in her blood.
Her school was rechristened after Khaula
so she would live thirteen-hundred-and-
fifty times more after she left us.

My khala put half of her life teaching girls in a village
till it stood eighty thousand square feet off the earth,
unhinged from all the revolutions she started.

She made history in the quietest of places
for the brightest minds to shine colors
while she handed them a glass bottle.

She made the news once, when her school
was renovated after thirty years of its standing
but I pray–

I pray for the day I turn the news on
and don’t see human natural disasters
disguised as reporters.

Those fifteen minutes of fame not once asked for,
not once appealed,
tore down her hammock-dreams
off her whitewashed walls,

spit in her new cooler-filters,

questioned whether her nurturing was enough
for these “village girls”–

my khala is an honest woman.

“Our kids have ambition. I dare you to find
a private school that can breed our discipline,
our morals. We sit on carpets and partitioned halls taken for a library.
I dare you to teach your star-children
humility sitting on a cushioned chair.

Our girls are equal.
Our girls are learning.
Our girls
deserve better

so thank you for stopping by.”

My khala is a grateful woman;
not one story can ever do that justice.

By Orooj-e-Zafar

Biography:

Orooj-e-Zafar writes to ventilate and is confident only in her ability to try. She lives in Islamabad, Pakistan, studying to become a doctor on the side but focused on being a spoken word poet. Most recently, she was a runner-up in the Pakistan Poetry Slam 2016 and is a poetry reader at cahoodaloodaling. She can be found at:http://facebook.com/oroojezafarwrites

GRAND THEFT (AFTER FALL OUT BOY)

where is your boy tonight? i hope / he is a gentleman.
maybe he won’t find out / what i know–
pete wentz writes songs about teenage girls when he is twenty-seven
when i am a teenager, there is a man who spreads me like
a sheet-music cold-read / fumbled awkward under
the pair of tight shorts i always wore because
i thought they made me look older
but i am still a teenager and he still
holds me the way a thief holds
contraband / too fast-grab to be legal
/ so pete wentz writes a song about fucking a teenager /
and this man writes a poem about my ears, or my nail-beds, or
some other part of me he becomes the first to find
/ and pete wentz writes another song about fucking a teenager /
then breaks a cradle in front of patrick stump and patrick
looks at the splinters in pete’s hands and says “i will find
a melody for this” /  and i am at a fall out boy
concert with my friends singing along to what i think
is a song about the duality of emotion or the
fragility of time / but every song
i grew into myself loving is written about
a twenty-something fucking a teenager /
so every twenty-something dude in this mosh pit
is  is screaming the phrase
“god-complex” / “teenage-vow” /
building a word-church of young-girls every
time they thrust something stained at
the stage / so they are just doing what pete wentz
made a billion dollars doing // stealing // by
fucking a teenager so loud
a generation of other teenagers knew the
sound her headboard made and nothing else /
and i am lucky because the man who wrote about me
is not famous / did not play a thousand sold-out shows
where he told  the version of the story where
i was a bitch and left / not the version where i
changed my mind / and i am listening to a fall out boy song
and it sounds like just another song but it is /
actually a song about / a mother learning
what the worst is / the act of being fucked
when you are not old enough to be beautiful / the act of
being so beautiful men will tell you how criminal
you make them / the crime of once being a teenager and
how fucked up it is that someone will probably call me a bitch /
for not letting patrick answer pete with “nothing”
when pete asks him “what have i broken?” /
how there is a teenaged girl who
is not a teenager anymore who i hope still wants
to be beautiful in someone’s backseat /
how sometimes i walk past the walls he stained me up
against / wake up the next morning to find–
where is that girl tonight? you know / you’re not a gentleman.
you hope we won’t find out / what you’ve done–

This performance was filmed at the Last Chance Slam by Slamfind.

By Linette Reeman

Biography:

Linette Reeman (they/them pronouns) is a poet from the Jersey Shore who is currently pursuing a B.A. in history from Rowan University. Linette has represented Loser Slam (Red Bank, NJ) at multiple national and regional slams and this is their second year representing Rowan at the college national slam (CUPSI). They have featured at the Philadelphia Fuze Slam and for D.C. Trans Power, have been published by places like Words Dance and Voicemail Poems, and probably want to high five you.

The Girl who Cried God

1. You said your favorite game was
Playing God, so I let my body
Be Eden, my vagina the Tree of Knowledge.
“Ruin will happen here,” you said.
You eat the fruit.

2. You love creation and claiming
What does not belong to you.
You Christopher Columbus down the
Shores of my body searching
For India, but instead fall asleep
In the bend of my arm
Regaining your strength for the
Pillage that will turn me carcass.

3. You entered my castle and
Renamed it crack house,
Picked a mattress in the corner
And made your bed.
My body stinks of frankincense,
Formaldehyde, and myrrh.

4. Our love is a miscarriage of
Still-born words. We stopped
Trying to imitate Gods after
The maggots came and went,
The garden desolate.

5. I wrap my body around the world
Until calloused hands palm Judea.
How many times can I ask
Forgiveness for the same sin?
I say it again: forgive me Father,
I know of what I do.
I Lazarus,
I smolder,
Ignite, then
Lazarus.
I say it again.

By Kylee Bagley

Biography:

My name is Kylee Bagley. I am a 21 year old student who will receive her AA in Journalism in May 2016 and will be moving on to Rutgers-Camden majoring in English in the fall. I have previously been published by Lips Magazine, IthacaLit, and Poetry Quarterly. I view life as a poem in hopes to appreciate it more fervently and aim to show it through my work.

A Discovery of Bones (alternately, The Inventor)

It began softly. She draped herself over them,
matchsticks of perfect wedding white,
and they counted her breaths, the first
and the next and the next and the next.
The whole, in truth, seemed less
than the sum of the moving parts.
Anatomy, mechanics, science, magic
—all cognates. All whispered secrets
under skin. But then she got up
and in that instant, I could’ve mistaken her
for a sonnet to a thunderstorm, a song that races
the lightning to the ground. Years later they ask me

“how did you do it?” (and I have no answer.)

She told me a secret once. It went something like
calcium and loneliness can bond, can make
the strongest substance we inherit
from biology and blood. That day I watched
but did not touch. I saw but did not speak.
I swear she wasn’t so tall at first. I swear
I stayed removed. No one will believe me,
but I didn’t forge her ligaments.
I swear I swear I swear.
No one will believe me, but here it is.
Her rise was of her own making. She lifted
her own skeleton off the ground.
No one will believe me, but what? But nothing.
I swear I only taught her how to stand.

By Christina Im

Biography:

Christina Im is fifteen years old and attends high school in Portland, Oregon. Her fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Rose Red Review, Words Dance, Strange Horizons, and The Adroit Journal, among others. In addition, her work has been recognized by Hollins University and the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.