im light on top
of tall hills
im laughing at my own
hands o i am so fucked
up, hill with goldren rod
butt naked under neath
morning really soaked with
what i love of undying nd
god i am being laid out in flowers
im gonna die


​




the sonoran is screaming
i am slithering across the top of the bus
i smell blood







my heart
the gay mtn  of corn
we are looking @ how the tongue of
the plants and the animals
make us wet with the sun lite we are
on a mountain i am brushing the morning pearls from u wet haired animal :) sweet heart

The Kingdom of Touching 

Tonight, I will baptize you with my mouth.
Trace the velvet & sandpaper of your skin with my lips.

Dip into the honey bouquet of you.
Fill myself with your every flavor. 

Touch you and touch you and touch you and 
touch you and touch you until your sins 

and your ghosts have nowhere left to haunt. 
Tonight, let me relearn your ghosts.

Put on soft music. Light candles. 
Make fables of your scar maps. 

I know you split the skin
to make the body a mosaic of accidents.

All your ghosts know how to undress your sadness.
But when I undress you, I will fill myself with a bountiful harvest.

Ask me and I will slip
out of this body of lacework.

Worship you in the absence of breathing.
Belief in the absence of sky.

Say “yes, you are made for this sort of worship”. 
I stand in awe of such a blessing.

My knees know the carpet;
I know how to make you trumpet to falsetto.

Disappear into my negative spaces and make me again.
I know how to make archways of your spine. 

Knowing all fire comes from the root stem of ‘yes’ ‘again’ ‘please’ ‘more’,
My thighs, these hands, are a sugar to salvation.

What I want is to drink
the salt & wine from you.

I am a greedy heaven, 
hungry to make you a shivering night. 

Sing: make me beg
until I am as rough on the outside as I am within. 

Sing: god of gripped sheets 
of pissed, sleepless neighbors

of parting lips
of the curious tongue

of reckless fingers 
of bed legs giving way 

from the world we create 
and destroy and create

of love bites
of crescent moon nail marks. 

How you learn to twist and pull
unravel and partition me. 

How I have taught your hands to build 
me into a nation of hungry mouths 

until I am a pool of myself--
to make me speak in tongues.

Sing: everyone believes in God 30 seconds before they come
and you come with thighs full of offerings.

We are eternal this way: 
Listen to me, I am telling you a true thing.

Blessed be the seasons where your body 
rhymes with my body.  

This is the monument we will make of each other:
I followed your scar maps to a landscape of skin

How you live to touch my smoothest parts--
measure me by degrees of satin and sweat and desire.

Understanding sacred geometry and divinity make the same body.

God our bodies: 
what you will bear witness to on this eve,

how my lungs will scream your name like a land declaring independence. 
Nothing else matters. 

This is the kingdom of nipples 
The kingdom of teeth marks 

Kingdom of quivering thighs
Kingdom of earlobes
 
This is most important kingdom:
how we wrecked each other to magnificence. 







Esperanza

My grandmother has hands like regret. 
Like joy. 
Like a runaway. 
She was young like me, foolish like me. 
She could lift her hands & the wind bows,
shift her legs & a man’s knees would buckle.
Could turn him to a drought with a single glance. 
Part her lips and the congregation settled their spirits
as it curled & hushed into fire inside them. 
The story goes she would enter a room 
& they laid palm trees for her to walk on, 
coconut for her feet 
& her presence reminded men of their mortality. 
Until grandpa. 
Until he charmed the light out of her. 
Or beat it out. 
Turned her to a bruised horizon. 
Pressed the color out of her. 

I don’t know which part of the story is true, but
I know she passes through me every time the sun dies
& the night loosens its blue-black skin for stars. 







Ritual Switch

Instead it will be your swift backhand that undoes me,
brutal in its bursting, 
until the raised skin reaches for mercy
tomorrow you will motion
for the chancla when I get a wrong answer
on my math homework
the next day the choir in my flesh will stand,
each pore blooming with blood
when the extension cord meets me
this nerve to meet a god in the eye 
as though we are equal 
so you break the wooden spoon across my face
and this must be love, 
yes, because you bring me to the end of myself 
again & again
to save me from my foolishness, 
from the designated bullet   baton   pepper spray   curb stomp
which has promised 
its full force upon my skull
this family heirloom
is all you have to give
dear god
dear father-god
dear father,
if this is my inheritance 
pull each cry from me 
until I am ruined beyond wanting
until I am a proper disciple







Nyctophilia

          I.
The desert
               is a single held breath.
The nights here are so empty


I forget why I’m alive.

Grandma is God’s breath sweeping around me. 
She is a bundle of unnamed stars, 
the ones that stitch themselves 
into a different beauty every night. 


          II.
This is how the desert settles: 
When the wind tires of turning 
sand grains for answers, 
the arid breath becomes a wave void of water.   
Sun crosses my window, 
marking the world for departure.
Trains drag their ankles full of rust. 
In evening’s breath:




Rest, the echo seems to say. But I can’t

so I step out of myself. 
In my dreams, Grandma comes for me.
She creeps along the walls.
Asks me to say her name but I have forgotten. 
Asks me for water, even though water cannot save her.
I am so thirsty where I am. 

She is buried in a village mom does not know the name of.
I tell mom demons come to my dreams 
wearing Grandma’s skin. 
Mom still sleeps with her Bible under her bed.
She doesn’t know how not to.


          III.
Train horns come through the open window 
singing my chest open.
Grandma’s spirit is cold air passing through me. 

She tells me she is buried in sky,
that stars are what happen when the dead refuse to let go of living.







Before: To Kingdom Come
    
don’t look me         in the eye         when I am talking to you    
       try me         one more time      don’t let him      I will give you something 
              to cry about   little shit        don’t let him         who the fuck  
do you think             you’re talking to       try me     don’t let him   
                         again      & watch me      don’t let him 
    don’t let him           slap the taste       from your mouth       little fuck 
        wanna keep crying       I’ll give you 
                       something  to cry about        I’ll break you 
don’t let him                  to kindling  
    I’ll send you back        don’t let him    to the shithole
                       you came from    carve your last will & testament
into the floorboard  don’t let him 
don’t let him             don’t let him            don’t let him        
     open all your eyes 
because              no god     will come       to deliver you  


baby, don’t let him chase your mind to the forest. 

I.S. Jones is a writer, educator, and hip-hop head hailing from Southern California. She is a 2015 fellow with The Watering Hole. I.S. is Blk & loud about it. Her work interrogates the spaces of race, love, the body, sexuality all while being a witness of life. 

She is the Assistant Editor at Chaparral, a literary magazine based in Southern California. Her works have appeared in The Harpoon Review, Fat City Review, Qua Magazine, The Blueshift Journal, SunDog Lit, Matador Review, anthologies, and other publications. She received her MFA from Hofstra University. I.S. is currently running for Poet Laureate of the Moon.  Find her on twitter @arurianshire.

Falling in Love 

A penguin’s love looks like a heart. It is the thinness of necks and beaks settling into each other, the silence of heads and bellies touching. This is the most delicate act you will find in a buried land. This act is the whole world rushing beneath their feet, the map of Antarctica printing itself on the inside of their skin, the negative of their silhouettes flashing in closed eyelids. A penguin’s love holds up the horizon when it’s mussed with snow. It lasts the length of a continent and back again, over and over. I cannot prepare you for the gravity you will feel, but I can tell you this: Touch your bellies together and lean your head in. It might be the closest you ever get to love. 







Long Love

Is nine months a lifetime to a penguin? This, the length of their monogamy, the longest love story Antarctica can bear. A marriage of journeys to and from the sea. Their vows: I promise to come back. I promise to recognize your voice again.  Ours: Cherish. From this day forward. Till death do us part. Penguin spouses leave marks of their travels in the snow with their bellies and claws, hoping that someone will remember. I walked those roads of ice to come back, not to you, but to myself, to the woman I saw in my dreams. As I went I dragged my rib bone on the continent for you, its end pockmarking the snow, a souvenir. Did you find this memory of me in your wandering? The penguin wife returns to the gift of her child, to the sound of love manufactured and sung just for her. I return, hoping for such a song, for the gift of being recognized. 







Death Love Song

My mother’s voice on the phone after my brother died was smoky thick and sweet with pain. I thought I felt the oceans that divided us shiver with sadness. Every atom bows to the sound of a mother’s love. The penguin stands behind her dead chick, head hung in front of her chest in defeat. She keens, commanding the ice to honor its victim. It is a sound that only a lossmother can hear; only they know the crush of sky collapsing into their bodies. There is no way around. You must keep walking this earth that took your children. Write your grief on the sky and wrap yourself in cold. Sing while you wait for the air to change. 


​

for burial

memory is sticky juice, sweet
only when drinking

your face a cellphone
i’d like to smash

juice or light,
i swear the darkness is darkening

ice crystals / lunar halo
refracting and reflecting

that one face you made
the sound

tomorrow’s new moon
catches a blue shadow
i am confused,
still
think of you

waning
waning
waning







pink flamingo tuxedo 

bad men 
dream 

dated 
Facebook photos

GUAC TALK: 
my sweater smells

white wine & hot dogs
diet goals

only humans
grow smaller

you've been 
warned

water
out of reach 

i called my mother
to officiate the wedding

my favorite part
was petting the black cat


​

Although I know that silence is the future of
all days I still like to observe beautiful things
like this right now on the street:
orange hot sun above the painted
clouds –
some day we’ll sing the song of salvation,
some day we’ll be shrouded in ashes;
I will count the time that’s left for me ‘till
this moment of the day breaks in hundredths
of a second,
and I will throw my hat in the air
to greet the arriving autumn.
Today…
             But tomorrow the sky will be empty.

All the birds had flown to nowhere.


​

i message Nurul
“did you hear about the great barrier reef?”
“yeah, it’s fucked.”
               we continue talking about inane things
               it’s easier than talking about a lack
               of oxygen or the whiteness of reef
on our postcards in seventy plus years.

i want to hide Nurul from cities that
are cold & find
                              a house that is full of colors & full
               of us drinking wine (red),
               even at two in the afternoon

watching daytime television as our skins
slowly age.


​

Erin Taylor has a lot of emotions. They make up the chapbook OOOO (Bottlecap Press 2016). Her emotions have appeared recently in Potluck Mag, Inferior Planets, Wu-Wei Fashion Mag, + others. They're forthcoming in numerous publications & always at amarettoandslayin.tumblr.com

BELOVED HERO CHEATS DEATH

in second grade, a substitute teacher
from Wisconsin taught my class,
she said
    most of the towns in Wisconsin
    are spread out, unlike here

this shocked me
because I thought all cities
were clustered together, like    
there’s Seattle, and there’s suburbs,
and that’s all the world is

in second grade, I was in Seattle
with my dad and I asked him
    why do they put all the cool stuff
    in Seattle if no one lives here?
and he told me a lot of people live there
I thought people just lived
in suburbs and commuted to Seattle

you know those bumps circling
nipples, on the areola?
I learned they’re called Montgomery Glands
they are a beautiful and erotic part of boobs
but I found them more erotic
when I thought they were nameless

I imagine that prescription bottles
are orange for the same reason
that the national color
of the Netherlands is orange
but their flag is red white and blue

when I was young,
and would close my eyes to sleep
I’d imagine I was floating in a void
it would feel scary, but calming
and the air would feel like the edge
of a hardback book when the binding frayed

in my dream, I’d stand on a train platform
in the middle of the void, until
I felt too scared and woke up
I hadn’t slept feeling like that
since I was a little boy at a resort
in Mexico, but I slept like that
on the night you left

on the night you left,
after I worked at the calendar store,
we drove to the Taco Bell on Burnside
then drove back to your empty apartment,
which echoed like a church, or cave

from your window
I saw a red sign
that said ‘Montgomery Park’
and a blue sign
that said ‘Volvo’

looking at the city felt like a movie,
where Americans go to Tokyo
and impose their feelings
on the contrast of city lights
and the sky’s lack of light,
and the way light and no light
blur together






​
christmas lights

I want to watch Dragon Ball Z with you
you’re in Washington with me
but you’re in Seattle and I’m in Auburn
you’re in a motel and I’m on Kirk’s back patio
and I don’t know even if you like Dragon Ball Z

spaces feel different when the spaces
are related to other space in a new way
like when I stopped by 7-Eleven
on the way home from working
at the carnival, I saw it as an island
in darkness and I didn’t know
Dairy Queen was across the street

but then I learned that behind that Dairy Queen
is what would become your house
and that 7-Eleven became part of the fabric
of something much bigger

I imagine you went to a Chinese garden,
I see you behind a tea house and pond
you are standing perfect and perfectly still,

I want to see you under
the Christmas lights above my bed,
that make your stomach skin look blue--
every color of light is within those Christmas lights,
so why does your skin only reflect blue?







hot tub

I remember at one of Jack’s big house parties,
not long before college,
I crawled into the hot tub in my underwear
four people joined me, including
Dwight and Danielle—they were dating at the time
we talked about the future and high school

we climbed on to the trampoline
and we laid flat on our backs
in the young, breezy, summer,
night air like a heated swimming pool

Kirk played his guitar laying down
we looked at space,
and talked to each other without
ever looking away from that canopy
that looked like negative exposures
of a stucco ceiling, and the whole time
you kept chain smoking on the back porch







Charlemagne

I’m sitting in the Portland airport baggage claim
while you take your shoes off
I took a photo of all 8 pages
of the letter I wrote to you
and I’m waiting until I think you are sitting
in airplane Terminal C, reading it
so I can read it on my phone
while you read the real thing

Michael snapchatted me a video
of his Shiba Inu dancing
our Lyft driver was named Goran,
he escaped the Bosnian Genocide
at age 15, he tells me the beaches
in Croatia are beautiful, I’ll probably never know

we went to that new pizza place
down the street from your old house,
across the street from 7-Eleven,
I called it your last supper
and you cried a little and I did too

the pizza place is space themed,
seems to be meant for kids
I got a pizza with kalamata olives
and artichoke hearts, you got
a pizza with bacon

I tell you that the proletariat uprising
will come on the populist, salt-of-the-earth
ethos of pizza cut in squares

you ask me if I still will go to China
while we drink coffee in the airport
and I say yes but I don’t know when
I remember a couple weeks ago
I asked if you’d ever been to Montreal
you told me no, but it’s a common destination
in New Hampshire, you tell me to visit
and we can go to Montreal this summer
and it sounds beautiful but I can’t

you lay on your side in my bed like a body
of water, with your arms crossing your chest,
and someday I will be walking in
a back alley in Shanghai and see
a blonde woman outside 7-Eleven
and remember you







Kaliningrad

I wonder why you hear ‘French’
and think about impressionism
I wonder why you hear ‘German’
and think about expressionism
I think about how I studied German
and forgot most of it

I wonder if how we look is a symbol
of who we are as people
we both wear glasses, which seems
to signify something more
than bad eyesight

and you always look like you’re smiling
in a way that if someone else
made that face, they’d look smug

and your hair is longer than mine
and probably will always be
no matter how much you cut it







Algona

the wedding is at the house
I’d drive to after track practice,
the house she grew up in,
where we’d play Beetle Adventure Racing

the first time I went
to Sarah’s house, I’d never taken that left
in front of the SuperMall before,
I didn’t know there was a town there,
that I imagine exists as a self-sustained world
built just for you, with a Dairy Queen
and library

those summer nights we’d go to the park
across the street from Robyn’s house
and push each other on the tire swing

and after things changed,
I was still friends with your sister
I would swoop her in my truck
and I would see you standing
and watching

Christian Patterson was born in Auburn, WA in 1991

eMote
 
Trespass badlands where
nothing grows. No one knows what’s inanimate 
behind arid bandana tatters so hide hackled eyes
& down in aspirational melancholy.
Righteous cabals might smite, tweet &
retweet your anonymous
falters. Make pleasant
face & yet
credentialize. No, we’ve never met. But
we have,
several times, & I
submit to porting system
solace. Please allow me to stiltwalk
marshes rumored once fertile. Grant me
courage to crawl & demand audience
with the committee, ask politely
for any audience at all.






 
eMote
 
A good citizen selects Vend.
 
Never shakes or shoves under glass partition.
 
No mere crevice, this clearly is crevasse
into which you’ve been randomed. Parthenogenesis
exoduses our hinters on top of Etsy vendors
too verbose for peak evening
circumlocating :
 
certainly their pleasures might’ve been
cabana wear but then the engine saw fit to evolve moths.
 





 
 eMote
 
Every epoch posits its own decision tree : two moons, three
breasts projected repulsion armor
when recharge rate’s too low.
 
The power of pit sweat compels gravity wells
so try not to cause
or dust up.
 
Lie back & think of wind farms where Sims
heavy pet. Let their 8-bits
ancest
 
too
lugubrious for
full meta YouTube walkthroughs.
 
 





eMote
 
Post-empire, pre-fallout &
each utopia craptastic in its own way.
 
A guy named Jason handles content migration.
 
Blocked docks mean no SodaStream & roving
protests until conjunct ups the necks’ anatomical
dung wattage so sorry
 
notsorry for pressing X before
full system restore.
 





 
 eMote
 
Creep bandit encampment while missions trigger
their revision bullets, warnings sniped  
 
& targeting thusly. Opt-out carnage
gnarls our fossils
 
from under Theta Class blackboard collapse,
chaperones’ clove smoke
 
a many-tentacled venom
tip pilloried on
 
the outskirts. When you’re threadbare &
discurricular, what’s left but to loot conference room Sun Chips &
 
Snapple, monetize expired bodega NyQuil
despite a tattered diplomas from Brown?


​

Chris McCreary is the author of four books of poems, the most recent of which is [ neüro / mäntic ] (Furniture Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Elderly and Lungfull! and online at Philadelphia Review of Books. For more than a decade, he co-edited ixnay press with Jenn McCreary, who forges ahead as the press's lone editor.

He is more than what I made of him

I tried putting him in a box
To define his boundaries. 
I put him in a story that
Didn’t end well. I tied a ribbon
Around his heart and it broke free.
Left alone, I completed his details.

I tried making him Satan and savior.
He fell short of both.
I saw him as a tarnished penny then a diamond being shaved.
I tried clothing him in deceit, 
But that suit was ill fit.
I tried coloring him with puce and pewter. 
He remained radiant.

I then deconstructed his ingredients like a recipe:
Two-cups father, one-cup grandfather, 
Dash each of brother, son.

Finally, I understood…
He is more than what I made of him.

I tried to weigh him down, to keep him for myself.
Holding on didn’t work, so I released,
Then learned -- His haiku is a love song 
His short story a novella and his narrative contains
Plotlines I couldn’t foresee. 

I recognize Namaste in his eyes.







“Time Will Tell”
                  Sept. 16, 2015

On the eve of my 59th birthday
I find your song. Heard in the background
Of a Subaru commercial. Who knew?

Through a gritty urban
Window, I watch September cry. 
Summer and winter jostling again,
In their yearly death-match.
Just like salmon swimming upstream, summer’s death toll is nigh
Still, it struggles against the inevitable.

I feel like that salmon, swimming always swimming
Towards time that shifts its shape
From moments that last eons
To eons seemingly over before they begin.
I battle between youth and years
The place where napping is more fulfilling than fitness,
Where strings are no longer taut.
The precarious place before you crest that hill.

Why, then, do I race through events like gusts slicing grass, when
I want to hold those moments like heirloom seeds?
There is no turning back, no recapturing moments 
Now called history. Still,
I steal awkward glances in the rear-view -- at
Memories only as fresh as the last time I uprooted them.

We’re already kicking at our own dust, with a fate 
We will never be privy to. Time is a thief, 
She will make a host of us all… 
Fickle bitch.


​

We, Our Perishable Food

The first summer I lived in Iowa it was so hot I fantasized about climbing into the refrigerator.  
So much corn dried up and died.  Two years later, I was listening to a radio station in Indiana called Korn!  It was the first time I had ever heard someone with a New Zealand accent sing along to country music.  When we got off the highway for dinner, our waitress confused vegetarian with lesbian.  We counted water towers on the drive back to Iowa City.  If you put a physicist and a biologist in a car together for nine hours, then they will find something to quantify.  For the first time, I’m not summering in the midwest.  Now does not one sick hen sound like one second?  Book alive like a bird, they had to kill five million chickens on a farm in north western Iowa because of bird flu.  These hens are little more than one percent of the nation’s egg layers, yet there may consequences the Iowa Poultry Association Executive Director said.  Which came first the chicken or the egg?

Which came first the ribosome or the protein?  
​





Something wilder than Iowa

​                would be a tall experiment.        You are on a pear.        We, our perishable food, refrigerators white, like eggshells protect.        After the ford model T was introduced, refrigerators cost more than cars for many years.        On machines and pollution, think of the air, think of the increasing concentration of carbon monoxide before the two-way catalytic converters created carbon dioxide.        A refrigerator is not a Faraday cage, but a microwave is.        Physical chemists accidentally melted chocolate bars with microwaves in the laboratory.        Books taste like chicken: bone white, fat light, muscle is surprising me.        To sing the incubator more effective for bacterial growth, because those plasmids slow them down.        The rhyme, the White was laboratory and mentor, and the white refrigerator.        The experiment time, I’m not falling and fully grown yet planning.        Please said.  

Julia Rose Lewis is poet in residence of the archeology department University of Wales Trinity St David.   She lives on Nantucket Island and is a member of the Moors Poetry Collective.  Her poems have appeared in their anthologies, Firefly, 3am Magazine, and Backlash.