Breast Meat

We do our best to stand out
as chickens. We cluck and we pluck and we pop
another egg. We paint it, try to make it
look new and exciting, but it leaks.

My sheets are stained with egg salad
singing a power ballad that stinks.
Powerball tickets saturate the ceiling.
All of them have lost the battle.

None of us will win because we’re too busy competing
in the latest match that boils down
to who can crack the most eggs,
who can sizzle the longest before we all break.

By Juliet Cook

Biography:

Juliet Cook is a grotesque glitter witch medusa hybrid brimming with black, grey, silver, purple, and dark red explosions. She is drawn to poetry, abstract visual art, and other forms of expression. Her poetry has appeared in a peculiar multitude of literary publications. You can find out more at www.JulietCook.weebly.com.

ambush of evening, solstice spilled on stone
without animal blood but other: our true names written
where river runs her blue arms through a velvet meadow

pale one, bending to waters, with a language of seeing &
silent woods, I am obscured by every beauty

you have never belonged

fleshed with the ordinary work of death,
irreducible in otherness

black violets, marsh-lily, open as many mouths in the
open chest of diligence

the day is feasting on the innocent, reeds of sun
bound in their song

familiar world, I do not know you

what does my mad heart dream of? my fingers,
stained with the tithe of violets

a dark sea spread with voyages, shy animals,
a garden where all love is,

far from me

with only dreams to feed the soul on,  I go,
through the dark wood,            wings waxen

time has no name for you, the words of otherworld
are written across your wolf-skin, intelligible

I seek you when darkness all falls           all

my spirit, like a woman silenced, slave to the moon’s
hooded grief, endless heavens wrought to flesh

with the scent of penance in the weeds, the wand of the master,
featherwork of redundancy

silver ships darn beneath a lightless noon, all that the soul remembers
I touch nothing, hold no one, wounded world, must I enter your chamber?

lilies in the field, your eyes are dim and burning, like the plains
the riders know by heart

tenderness, I seek you,     undress amongst the thrushes
the earth will not kneel, forgive

By Eleanor Gray

Biography:

Eleanor Gray is, well, the other co-founder of Figroot Press. She currently resides in California with her cat, PS4 and a very beloved collection of books. She graduated from Sacramento State University with a BA in English Literature and has been writing and reading religiously for as long as she can remember. It is hard to find an open and vibrant community of other writers; she wishes to attain and commit herself to a little world consisting of other passionate poets, artists, writers and readers. You can find her on Tumblr at: http://smakka–bagms.tumblr.com/

Dove and Menthol Pillows

You keep smokes in a soapbox. Past midnight
put a towel under the door and run warm water,
hold our cigarette up to the ceiling fan. Spit
and say the scent still sticks to the walls,
and ma doesn’t know, but she knows, you know?

Some nights you thunder like a storm
or stumble like a child.

You wonder aloud when the fuck you learned to sin
in stride. Chime it was sophomore year
you traded the Bible in your backpack for
a lighter in your pocket, you didn’t mind
aside from the youth group gossip.

Some nights you thunder like a storm.

You bristle no, that I don’t get it. That every boy
who’s laid in this bed has claimed common ground.
Flustered now, like there’s a line between us
in the ridges of the linen and the quiet
is crisp as shame.

Some nights you stumble like a child.

Dizzy off a trio of benzos though I pled, you press
all that is suppressed into shapes with soft edges.
Write wilderness, and wilderness, and love
‘til kingdom come, call it
modern gospel.

Some nights you stumble like a child
or rumble like a storm,

but in the mornings
you are unstrung out
and you, and
you are making toast,
singing in the slack.

By Timmy Chong

Biography:

Timmy Chong is an east coast millennial with an addictive personality. He’s the only frat boy who studies journalism and creative writing at the University of Maryland. His work has been featured with or is forthcoming in Drunk in a Midnight Choir, Atticus Review, New Pop Lit and Stylus.

Red

So the story always goes: little girl fluttering
through the woods. So the forest twists,
converges on her. So the wolf sluices onto her path,
warns her against idling, but her idle hands knit the
devil’s stockings. So she makes it to grandmother’s
house second, and when she does, sometimes,
she doesn’t make it out of there alive. But say the
little girl isn’t as little anymore. Say she’s no longer lost,
say the girl isn’t so much girl as she is bloody chrysalis
blooming. Say that there is no forest, say that it has
twisted into apartments stacked full of bodies enough
to goad her senses apart. Say that that this time, the
wolf is no longer a wolf but a man and it has brought
its pack. Say the lamp lights are only lit enough to show
their teeth. Say the little girl has strayed too far. Say to
the girl, be brave. Say you wish she were, even when
the city still diverges into paths of pins and needles and the
wolf asks to choose a path with her. That’s a constant.
But say there’s no difference in choosing a path this time,
even though you wish she didn’t have to choose to start.
But the wolf says choose anyways. Say her fingers
will not bleed when she picks the pins up. Say her wit is
enough to stave off the pack. Say that in this story
she is the forest converging on the wolf.
Say in this story, she makes it out alive.

By Stephanie Tom

Biography:

Stephanie Tom is a Chinese-American high school student living in New York. She is the managing editor of her school newspaper and an executive editor of her school literary magazine. Her writing has previously been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the American Association of Teachers of French, the National Society of High School Scholars, and the Save the Earth Poetry Contest. Her poetry has either appeared or is forthcoming in Rising Phoenix Review, the Blueshift Journal, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among other places.

 

The Lazarus Inside

just tryna’ rise
from a gone body
in a casket made of mahogany future
and media tarnished gold gleaming
forgotten names.
remember we bodies
sold for a dream
we bodies fetishes
rise to their mouths—
everybody
just tryna’ rise
from their tongues
a taste, decadence
chocolate, and brwn,
dark and cranberry
see copy; lick its lips
pronounce it power.
swallow. us
just tryna’ rise
crucifixion mistakes
thorns in my wrist
say don’t wear heart
on your sleeves,
here it is wide open nailed
to wood of my secrets
I am Judas too, promises
always on the verge of
betrayal god I repent.
just tryna’ rise
from 3- day old
mental illness addiction, sickness
Easter beckoning on that good Friday
when trauma came
and I carried her on my back
hunched into the weight of grief.
why I’m just tryna’
rise, why we still
fighting to, trying to
from the sorrow of this brown gown
be resurrected from the world body
that cannot carry my hearts throne.

By Lydia Flores

Biography:

Lydia Flores is a writer and photographer from Harlem, New York.
Her work has been featured in Deaf Poets Society, Downtown Brooklyn, Visceral Brooklyn, Crab Fat Magazine, and several others. Find her at inlightofmysoul.com or @_fearlessocity

GHOST OF APARTHEID VISITS AGAIN

Her cold hand on my shoulder
reminds me of Christmas morning in Soweto,
like the ocean pulling the surfer deep into its belly
she pulls me close to her perfumed breath
which I must not inhale or suck in, or be hung

by the statute that calls black love evil.

But she is the city built on shooting stars
& I am the wing she weaved to fly
when there was no more moonlight.

Like the railroads lined across from where
people welcome death with palm wine,
my white lover drinks my heart out speedily

caring less about the clock that no longer ticks
slowly for me; even my wild dream could not roam free
it laid awake at the doorstep of her tongue
as if the very earth into which we soak our pubescent feet
would be too scared to soon scream “stop” in

both our ears. My eyes locked under a pair of sunglasses

to prevent a people holding the truncheon up to the sky
from seeing the tears of “I’m ready to die” welling up
soon would close to the closing hymn of her goodbyes.

By Bola Opaleke

Biography:

Bola is a Nigerian-Canadian poet residing in Winnipeg, MB. His poems have appeared or forthcoming in a few poetry magazines like Rattle, Cleaver, One, The Nottingham Review, The Puritan, The Literary Review of Canada, Sierra Nevada Review, Dissident Voice, Poetry Quarterly, The Indianapolis Review, Miracle E-Zine, Poetry Pacific, Drunk Monkeys, League of Canadian Poets (Poetry Month 2013), St. Peters College(University of Saskatchewan) Anthology (Society 2013 Vol. 10), Pastiche Magazine, and others. He holds a degree in City Planning.

With What Light There Is Left, You & I Make More

my mother watched us hold hands
& didn’t have shit to say about it.
maybe it is because i never told her your name
maybe
you & i just didn’t have the time to defend
what there was no room to define;
not when the sky was foaming red at the mouth for blood, insatiably crazed by
a hunger only known to boys who steal
without their hands. yet we stole this,
this us
right out of the corners of their greedy mouths
ripping their teeth from the roots and watching them
starve.

a starved body, excommunicating a sustenance
not under its jurisdiction becomes
a crystal in death, refracting our kisses into rainbows
for us to dance to. and this
we call justice. call death making moonlight,
a holy and gay reverie.

it was this knowledge that lead me
to rob you of your apprehension, while
our new sky held us with light and
god seemed to say,
“what touch have i ever forbidden in times like this?”

maybe we were back in the park, a flower tucked behind each ear & a question
caught between each tooth;
“what are we going to tell people this is?”
maybe we were in my bed, toying with the idea
of conception, knowing full well this kind of
boogie and rug-cut makes no kind of flesh mistakes,
save for an inexplicable stain and a dawn’s harsh
rebuke cast upon our shimmering, almost ashamed
faces

mama told me love would be like this;
a pile of vengeful books on my chest,
your hair fanned out on our dusty marble
floor,
& my desperate fingers everywhere i
can touch in the last couple seconds
before this world is eclipsed by its
own thirst for a clear breath.

then there is darkness. the kind you
& i are so used to, we could call it home.
plant flowers in it & breathe deeper than
the driest, angriest canyons.

you
& i know blood. we know rainbows. we know closets & secrets
yet
what, under this new disco ball sky
flecked
with the sugared skeletons of every
hollow voice that uttered “dyke” as we walked past,
is there left to shed like a grandmother’s
old coat? what tradition, between this
new landscape we roam, is there no room to
maintain?

what are we now? one?
the rulers of a new world
that has only retained our clasped hands
in all its old languages?

free?

By Khalypso

Biography:

Khalypso is an 18 year old poet and actress born in Berkeley, CA and currently residing in Elk Grove. She is the Social Media Manager of Black Napkin Press and Poetry Editor of Cerurove Magazine as well as Culaccino Magazine. Her work centers primarily around charting the complicated existence of being colored and woman and alive—a metaphysical dilemma she wishes she could conquer and whose defeat she would whisper the secrets of into Ntozake Shange’s ear. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming in The Columbia Review, Crab Fat Magazine, Vending Machine Press, and Black Napkin Press. She will rep South Sac ’til her dying days and lives for black celebrities dragging the Kardashians for filth.