Many Houses

I will lie and say I do not remember it all –
the creek-bed behind my grandmother’s home,
the fragile sight of deer on the road,
their legs moving like ice across water,
the way I would stretch my palms out wide
and try to cover the sun, lying there in the grass,
a thing waiting to be buried.
I am a child marching towards death,
Lot’s wife the moment before the turn.
I do not dream about it, but if I did
I would be placed right in center of it all
made soft by time and age,
and there would be no horsemen,
no hand broached down from the sky
only the second before the deer was there
and the moment after it had gone,
unharmed, into some part of the world I could not see.
The door will open on its own, a screen blown in
by a summer storm, and I will be able to feel it
thick against my skin – every contact, every mark of pain,
like a hand passing through water
until she turns around to see me,
and it will all disappear, washed down current
carried away into some greater flood.

By Oona Mackinnon-Hoban

Oona Mackinnon-Hoban is a senior at Barnard College, graduating this spring with a degree in English. She was born and raised in Portland, Maine and now lives in New York City.

Car Music
After Hanif Abdurraqib

____settle into the cheap, aging leather seats of your silver Toyota
Let our bodies simmer in July heat
I am drowning
In sweat and so are you and so are
The children selling hot and bitter lemonade that costs too much
On a run-down street we pass by
We over the radio as usual
I want jazz
Jazz like Gillespie or Ella or
Chick Corea and his keyboard
Jazz like the songs my mother plays while she drinks
In sunlight on lazy Sunday mornings
As the curtains flutter to the dawning beat of a new day
____you don’t
You want to ____about
White nets and scorching pavement and burnt rubber
And how “Michael Jordan definitely pushed off” Bryon Russell
God referees should learn to do their damn jobs
I am listening to the poor engine along
While the air conditioner groans and heaves
____approaches its final hour
God knows it’s too hot to be driving around in this oven
Talking about nothing
I stare out the window and want to____
Because I am lost in the sky’s cerulean blue
And I worry I’ll never find myself again
I imagine it’d be nice to have wings right now
Until I watch as a flock of black birds drops to the earth
And pity them, their frail frames no match for this enduring sun
Presently, you are upset I said I don’t know
Anything about basketball
But you don’t know anything about____
Maybe that____a good thing
Maybe I am happy I don’t know anything about basketball
I know the empty air is____heavy so
I turn on the crackling radio
And you roll your eyes and keep on driving and don’t say
Anything
Even though the music is too____

*we argue and

talk and
mumble and
cry because silence is
too loud

*The quote in this piece is from the title of the poem It Is Maybe Time to Admit That Michael Jordan Definitely Pushed Off by Hanif Abdurraqib.

By Marissa Michel

Biography:

Marissa Michel is a second generation American of Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage. She served as the 2020 Prince George’s County Youth Poet Laureate. In 2020 she received multiple national gold medals for poetry in the Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards, and an American Voice nomination. She was also the recipient of the 2020 Diaz-Mattison Poetry Prize. Her newest works can be found in the Scholastic Arts and Writing Online Gallery, Love Letters To the Mothers and Fathers of the African Diaspora, and the Bridgewater International Poetry Festival. More information about her can be found on www.marissamichel.com

nonna

there, lassù
your orthogonal confessional, a pharmacy 7 storeys high
ti intravedo in the margin of your mornings
discarnate, immovable in the Cimmerian window
watering your gerani, gladioli. your fingers fulgurated
vibrating, fondling the ringlets of light: sub-errant guardo, non guardo

above your nest yes, the sky
buries its head vergognoso yes, ungracious
passeri averting both eyes, yes, at your
importunate, murmured canzonette. the faint
concert you sing, just before your perennial
babelic request: lo stoa aspettann, lo sto aspettan.
the pious infanticide

aspetti, aspetti. aspetti cristo, aspetto lui, aspetti as the unmendable thought unstitches
its threads on your skin–like sanguine branches denuded, bent to recline on your prostrate limbs che paiono di neve

guardo, how the corrupted azure pries, contrite
into your days in the nubècola. hears your encrusted
heresies at night, the static silence of your
phone. the inexistent admonitions of sound, one of the
calls you negotiate with christ, from the seed
who has forsaken you, without a word

mentre imbrunisce di già, il ricordo
where you mirror yourself, sola

By Erika Spadavecchia

Biography:

She is currently based in Rome, where she teaches, writes and lives with her fish. She recently obtained an MPhil in Criticism and Culture from the University of Cambridge.

Rambo

Rambo walks me through the path, his ear
tilted toward the sky. He listens
for bullets, cigarette rolled under tongue,
sweat stinging his eyes. He rips apart
the jungle, swatting flies and chopping
tree trunks. The jungle cracks, he says aloud –
“We have to go home now,
mama will worry.”

Rami flies through the path, the air
is filled with dust. Shib shib
grating against gravel, he runs
home. Umm Rami will be cooking
makluba or warak ‘einab. And Rami,
her eldest at seven, will be sent out
with shekels to buy khubz. “Ya walad!”
she yells, “put that dirty plastic thing down!”

Still, Rami and I will chase down the sun,
shekels sweating in his palm as we
make our way to the store.
‘Ammo Yazan will be there, smelling
of salt and cigar smoke. He will smile
when Rami pretends to gun him down –
“Little Rambo, we should tell Arafat
about you. Maybe then we’d win the war.”

But no one will tell Arafat and we won’t
win the wars. Rami will buy the khubz
every week. And every week he will take
me slung across his chest like a badge.
Umm Rami will still be cooking
mlukhiyya or beitinjan, even as planes
crowd the sky overhead. Even as soldiers
pockmark the street with spit.

After years, Rami will grow and
leave me for a new gun of steel. They will
not call him Rambo, and he will not wear
shib shib while he targets soldiers’ backs.
The new gun will be slung across his chest
a badge, a family crest – a marker that reads,
“shoot here.”

By Fatima Sausan Masoud

Biography:

A Palestinian-American born in the southwest, Fatima Sausan Masoud (she/her) holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. She lives in El Paso and teaches First Year Composition and Elementary Arabic at the same university. She finds time to write in the in-between spaces when her kids are asleep. Find her on Instagram (@applewhiskey).