Every Night

Every night I carry the memories of
this place in my palms, caressing each of its
pages, one by one, to feel them,
maybe for the last time.

Here, one is never sure if he will see night
transform into morning, and morning
into another night, and night into another morning,
for many things are wrong in this place.

I remember that particular evening
you met your friend on one side of the road,
laughing, talking about girls and things you never had with him.
And when there were no more words, he left you with a goodbye.
You smiled as he sailed to the other side of the road.
There, he was circled and cut into unrecognizable limbs
by the herdsmen, like a badly done mosaic.
To you, the goodbye weren’t meant to be the last.

Most times you find a woman rushing
home so that night will not meet her.
Nights are deadly here, very cruel. And
when night meets her, you will find her with cloth
stuffed in her mouth to shut her up from screaming her pains,
or you will find her in the morning
with open thighs and drowned in the lagoon,
or you will find her un-whole:
which is to say some boys have unmade her,
deprived her of the strings that held her together,
or you will find her in pieces with missing parts.

When those with rainbow colours
embedded in their black skins speak out
because they’re tired of the anthology of loneliness
and sorrows of the shadows they read,
they are punctured with threats, stones, burning tires, jail terms
or even kidnapped: ask Romeo, ask Chibuihe, ask Arinze, ask Aghogho.

I am at the last page of memories of this place,
it heavies my palms, heart and head.
I fold it and return to my pillow in hope
that I will defeat the night and live on in this place,
burning incenses for it to someday become
a constellation of pacific shades.

By Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto

Biography:

He (@ChinuaEzenwa) is from Owerri-Nkworji in Nkwerre, Imo state, Nigeria and a lover of literature. He has won the Association Of Nigerian Author’s Literary Award for Mazariyya Ana Teen Poetry Prize, 2009; Speak to the Heart Inc. Poetry Competition, 2016. He became a runner-up in Etisalat Prize for Literature, Flash fiction, 2014 with I Saved My Marriage. Recently, he won the Castello di Duino Poesia Prize for an unpublished poem, 2018. And some of his works have appeared in Lunaris Review, AFREADA, Kalahari Review, Praxismagazine, The Rising Phoenix Review and Raffish Magazine.

Bad Indian

Bad Indian, not a speaker—who gives
a damn if they beat it out of my father
in residential boarding school? They say
“Pretendian” & an old man with creamed
blue eyes cackled after demanding my ancestry,

“Everyone’s a Cherokee.” I apologize

for green eyes, pale skin. It’s not enough
to soften cries of “Wana’be clan!
Elizabeth Warren all over
again.” Once an elder
vet spit on my wanting
cheekbones, my braids, that I didn’t know
Lakota. I did not choose my skin

or the trauma curdling rancid
through my blood. We are born into creation
disasters, settled war zones, armed
with chanced defenses so forgive me

that ivory is my weapon. Poachers try
& they show teeth, dressed
in polyester & crafted altruism
but I am fast & I remember. I’m kamama, you really
think you got us all? We still roam
our land, thirteen thousand years is a single heart
beat in the whole story. I am telling you, listen:

I am hungry, matriarch
made too young. My grief’s too big
to contain & like Damini I will starve
24 days to die from broken
chambers—and by god, how you will keen,
spill cracked-bone to your knees, pay
homage to my skeleton, to this bad Indian.

By Jessica C. Mehta

Biography:

Jessica (Tyner) Mehta is a poet and novelist, and member of the Cherokee Nation. Jessica is the author of ten books including the forthcoming Savagery, the forthcoming Drag Me Through the Mess, and the forthcoming Drag Me Through the Mess. Previous books include Constellations of My Body, Secret-Telling Bones, Orygun, What Makes an Always, and The Last Exotic Petting Zoo and The Wrong Kind of Indian. She’s been awarded numerous poet-in-residencies posts, including positions at Hosking Houses Trust and Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-Upon-Avon, England, Paris Lit Up in France, and the Acequia Madre House in Santa Fe, NM. Jessica is the recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund in Poetry. She is the owner of a multi-award winning writing services business, MehtaFor, and is the founder of the Get it Ohm! karma yoga movement. Visit Jessica’s author site at www.jessicatynermehta.com.

Sylvia

I held hands with your ghost
all through my seventeen,
guided by your words, a balm to my corroded soul

Take me through the crushing tides of seventeen
A deep and sumptuous thing, this cake you fed me
Normally I would spit it back out—

the sugared decadence of a thousand years
of patriarchy. But Anne said, They took you from me
With all the bells ringing

By Kimia Madani

Biography:

By day, Kimia Madani is a writer based in San Francisco, California. By night, she dreams of chasing the silvery cloud banks that hang above her favorite city and spinning in long, unhurried circles on the moon. She believes in writing to escape, define, and reinvent the exhilarating design of her own world. Also in the power of green hair and holographic shoes. The Luminary: A Collection of Poems is her first book.

Market Street

At Powell and Market
the street is littered
with sleeping bags
and mud-encrusted bodies.

Tongues speak in circles,
attempt to intercept
the desperate, corporate race,
that happens with extra fervor
on a rainy day.

A bony hand emerges
from its rain-soaked wrapper,
reaches out toward
the rush-hour parade
of hammer heels marking time
on slick pavement.

A man with one leg
has taken off his prosthesis
and is using it
to collect coins.

He looks up at me,
our eyes meet briefly
as he lights a cigarette.

I turn away
and one brief spark of light
flickers and dies
on the wet wind.

His body flattens,
back up against the store window,
his hollow leg
fills up with rain.

By Joan Annsfire

Biography:

Joan Annsfire lives is a retired librarian who lives in Berkeley California and writes poetry, memoir, and non-fiction. Her poetry chapbook, “Distant Music” was published by Headmistress Press. Her poetry has appeared most recently in the anthology “Older Queer Women: the Intimacy of Survival,” Lambert and Einstein and “9/11: The Fall of American Democracy, Casey Lawrence. The Times They Were A- Changing, Women Remember the 60’s and 70’s,” Farrell, Meyers and Starfire. “The Queer Collection,” “99 Poems for the 99 Percent,” “Milk and Honey, a Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry” and “The Other side of the Postcard among others as well as online and in literary journals including, Counterpunch’s Poet’s Basement, Lavender Review, Sinister Wisdom, The 13th Moon, Bridges, The Evergreen Chronicles, OccuPoetry, The SoMa Literary Review and The Harrington Lesbian Literary Quarterly. Her stories have appeared in “Identity Envy,” Readtheselips, Aunt Lute Press blog about the seventies, “Uprooted, an Anthology on Gender and Illness,”and Harrington Lesbian Literary Quarterly, and the just published anthology, “Dispatches From Lesbian America,” edited by Smith, Berber and Capone.

Heart of a Little Brown Girl// Safety Container (Anxiety Pt.II)

It starts with children running circles around the koi pond. old man back bent so close his nose touches ground. sandalwood incense wafting around sun spot skin. Cleansing. Fire red momiji leaves, five point stars, tornado in the wind. Lay themselves bare on a thousand red domino gates etched with names of men and women who believe in
faith. winding in and out. peaks of sunlight let the world inside. sutra hums ring to taiko beat. child asks mother about the other side of our prayers. how? invisible gods hold 5 yen coins in their hands. “universal
language” mother remarks with a pat on daughters head. i
sit on top of a well. hands resting on thighs.
tappers.
breathing
levels.

birds land on my arms.
butterflies thread my hair, black
beady eyes mistaking me for tree.

Rooted.

Softer
than the echo of water lapping on stone,
birds sing-psalm,
someone is calling my name.

Oide

Please come home.

By Autumn Smith

Biography:

A Cleveland bred poet, Autumn focused on the rhythm and conveying her ideas through image and senses in her poems. Originally a spoken word poet, she participated in the Brave New Voices competition in 2011, ran a spoken word club and poetry workshops throughout college, and is now a contributing editor for Barnhouse Journal. Through exploration of race, mental illness, and humanity, she delves deeper into her own existence. Her main inspirations are Andrea Gibson, Anis Mojgani, and Naomi Shihad Nye.

Gaps

Your baby teeth
and the baby teeth of all ten
of your siblings were not
included in what
you could carry

when stripped down
to two bags each.
Books and photographs
letters and childhood treasures
were also left behind.

Top teeth were buried in fields
became city streets
(for the older boys)
became suburban wastelands
(for the younger kids).

Bottom teeth were tossed
onto rooftops, shards of bone
bleached by the sun
may still linger on
somewhere above 39th Street.

Long after tongues
and tiny fingers worried and pried
where blood trickled
until tooth wriggled loose
part pain, part magic

and new teeth grew in.
So by the time you left
people barely remembered
the phantom spaces
a family left behind.

By Noriko Nakada

Biography:

Noriko Nakada writes, blogs, tweets, parents, and teaches middle school in Los Angeles. She is committed to writing thought-provoking creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry.

The Rose

I heard my sister sing
before I knew her, years
before we met. Picking through old
cassettes in the front room, the scent
of mold and sweat, my father’s beautiful
handwriting soared like wings
across yellowed masking tape. I didn’t know
an Angela, but I knew
her voice like my own. Smoky
and anxiously wild. For three hours I listened
to her urge “The Rose” into untamed
blossom. My mother stumbled
upon me in tears, destroyed the tape
and slapped my head. I’d be grown
before I held her, heard
her sing again. Now, gone, my memory
replays her voice in my mind, grainy
and clicking like tired tapes do.

By Jessica C. Mehta

Biography:

Jessica (Tyner) Mehta is a poet and novelist, and member of the Cherokee Nation. Jessica is the author of ten books including the forthcoming Savagery, the forthcoming Drag Me Through the Mess, and the forthcoming Drag Me Through the Mess. Previous books include Constellations of My Body, Secret-Telling Bones, Orygun, What Makes an Always, and The Last Exotic Petting Zoo and The Wrong Kind of Indian. She’s been awarded numerous poet-in-residencies posts, including positions at Hosking Houses Trust and Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-Upon-Avon, England, Paris Lit Up in France, and the Acequia Madre House in Santa Fe, NM. Jessica is the recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund in Poetry. She is the owner of a multi-award winning writing services business, MehtaFor, and is the founder of the Get it Ohm! karma yoga movement. Visit Jessica’s author site at www.jessicatynermehta.com.

The Rickshaw Puller of Calcutta

Sunset was never his home
He lives in his two hands
Two feet.

The wooden vehicle is his soul
Its handles whip the thick dust
In arteries of New Market
Flushing streamers of Christmas trees and soft jingles
On silver screen of New Empire Cinema Hall.

His skin and bones were shown there once
In Do Beegha Zameen.

It doesn’t matter to me
How he maps his two yards
Everyday
Paddling through Monsoon gurgles
Of Ripon Street, Burra Bazaar
Past a fat cussing woman who tosses
A five rupee coin in the gutter of his soul
The stink is of a green chilli, a tiny onion
A handful of sattu.

He kneads the maps of villages in Bihar,
And cements the cracks
In his face
Silent. Neutral. Unmoved.
The haze of too-green trees tires him
The flush of red on Calcutta Corporation buildings
Leaks from his feet.

He runs, streets flash past his blood
Tea-shops zoom in with their china
A masthead flattens his picture
Muddled, wrinkled.

His face was always a lantern for lonesome passengers.

They bury his story in two inches column
The dawn wakes up to the lost song
Of a brass bell in bony palms
Now pinned to cold stars
Dripping on a Wasim Kapoor canvas.

Do Beegha Zameen – A famous Bollywood movie on sad plight of rickshaw pullers
Sattu – Dry, roasted, powdered grams that serve as meal for the poor in India
Wasim Kapoor – A famous artist of Calcutta who painted a series of works on rickshaw wallahs

By Saima Afreen

Biography:

Saima Afreen is an award-winning poet who also moonlights as a journalist with The New Indian Express. Her poems have appeared in several national and international journals like Indian Literature, HCE Review, The Bellingham Review, The Stillwater Review, The McNeese Review, The Nassau Review, The Oklahoma Review, Staghill Literary Journal, The Notre Dame Review, Honest Ulsterman, and Existere among others. She has been part of literary festivals and platforms such as Sahitya Akademi Poets’ Meet, Goa Arts and Literary Festival, TEDx VNR-VJIET, Prakriti Poetry Festival, Betty June Silconas Poetry Festival (New Jersey) and Helsinki Poetry Jam. She was awarded Villa Sarkia Writers Residency (Finland) for autumn 2017 where she completed the manuscript of her debut poetry book ‘Sin of Semantics and Other Poems’.