^{Fuck Principles.}

Loyalty.

Is the worst idea I’ve ever been proud of. Loyalty 

Is chink in every plate of my armor. I’d love to tell you

That’s worth it. 

I just can’t.

Less a choice, or a culture

more a force, like a thunderstorm

Like typhoon, like this sea 

will fucking swallow you

                   little tugboat.

                   So pray often. 

Because dead men tell no tales.

But if you’re anything like me,

And have not let a poor choice stop you yet,

Then pull up a stool.

Have a drink.

Take the pig sticker 

out of your rib cage,

And tell me a story.

---

^{Reality/Television}

Ya know, there are children who can’t laugh

In cities that don’t smile,

Dreaming of color beneath a black-white sky 

In the VHS static of their lives.

And i was taught how to splice tapes together,

Just so I could Wizard-Of-Oz myself into a chromaticast lifestyle.

But when I tried, that’s when I learned that 

                   Formatting

Is the careful art of building borders in an experience,

Just to walk people through its geography,

Call it a story,

And justify all the suffering you go through just to reach the end.

---

^{Abraham Ties Rebar}

This week, I am screaming the hymnal of a square spade and a gravel pile.

Because a man died, and everyone got tired of people like him dying

By people who wear spades on their chest torn from the shafts of gravediggers,

I scrape the ground. Rip the gravel

I am a shoveler of foundations. I move the stability,

Living in the contradictions, anger

Is an excellent fuel supply. ask my body.

see the ripples of slender meat

As they work, watch me, see the wet of my skin, the perspiration of it all,

The glistening image of my exhaustion pushed forward solely by my anger,

Burying 400 years of children in unmarked graves because

We don’t bury your kind on sacred land.

 Our kind is sacred. Not like the sacred

We desecrated, the type we don’t acknowledge.

 But the kind of holy-hallelujah-sacred that bolts your childhood out of its dreams like a spade

Sticking out of 75 yards of gravel,

 a promise, that you too will go below

If you don’t value the right interpretation of some guy named Abraham,

Who i have never met, but i am sure, knew the promise of a shovel,

Of work, tomorrow, and the fact that someone has to move the dirt

If they want to build something stable

---

^{Eight Am in C Minor.}

The only dance i fear

Is the one thousands do every morning.

Eight AM drenches us in a fog 

Of cigarette smoke,

Portland rain , and Tear stained fear game.

The air, tattooed with apologies. 

Fills with sleepy hordes.

They weave in and out of one another

In traffic like fingers between clasped hands

Asking “Please.”

We grip prayers 

between palm-sweated steering wheels.

Trust the sleep of a thousand cocked eyes,

Shoulders dropped under work weight,

All frayed and aching.

We’re all just getting by.

Passing from risk to risk.

Hoping we arrive safely

With punctual timing

To the places we don’t wanna be in.

---

For the young boy,
whose ice cream fell off the cone,
they bear down like a monsoon rain,
dribble effortlessly down smooth, frictionless cheeks.

All of them light as feathers.

For the single mother,
coming home to this crying boy,
they are boulders, caked into the cliffside,
infused with grease and sweat,
held back only by the knowledge of the damage they can do.

Tears are often compared to streams or rivers,
flowing from endless chasms of the soul,
Yet, perhaps, they are sourced from a finite ocean
that’s boiling away in step
with the candle of mortality.

Cuts and burns may tip the pot,
but scars increase the flame,
sparing only the salt and grime
until water turns to sludge,
and feathers stiffen into stone.

---

Adi Raturi is a recent high school graduate who has won numerous gold keys and a national medal for fiction in the Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards. He has also written an abstract for his own research which was selected for presentation at the International Developmental Pediatrics Association Congress. He currently runs Intangible Literary Magazine

---

^{Under the Sea}                                                                                                

I. 

I want to be where the mermaids are

down where it’s better, 

down where there’s harmony,

where they love all the species of the seas.

down where it’s better, 

down where sharks are sharks

and not men in suits disguising their lust for blood. 

down where it’s better, 

down where mankind’s iron fist

isn’t there to grip at the soil or my fragile heart.

II.

My youngest dog is

like Flounder, a loveable

goof following me,

warily wading 

behind me as I search for 

a scale-bottomed man,

a charming prince to

protect me from the monsters

that walk on this earth.

III.

Disney changed the ending.

In the original story, 

the mermaid realizes being human isn’t being happy

so she tosses herself, in human-form, off a ship –

in death trying to make her way back home,

diving into the stormy waters, dissolving to sea foam.

IV.

Did you know that Hans Christian Andersen

wrote The Little Mermaid as a love letter to another man?

Loving a man in the nineteenth century was like a fish loving a man.

It would never work.

Sometimes being a man loving another man feels like that in the twenty-first century too. 

---

^{The A-to-Z’s of Losing You}

Appetizers split at Applebee’s. 

Banana Everclear shots. 

Chipotle. 

Daytime drives. 

Evening snuggles. 

Fast Friday morning fucks. 

Grinding with some guy from Grindr. 

Heavenly, time-stands-still hugs. 

Ignoring each other’s faults and sometimes cries for help. 

Joking at funerals. 

Kisses galore. 

Laughing at comedy specials together. 

Moving apartments tests a relationship. 

Naps.

Open dialogue about open relationships. 

Picking stuck celery out of my teeth for me. 

Queer marches, queer votes, queer revolution. 

Reading each other’s lips, eyes, and poetry.

Sitting side by side when there are no words. 

Tucking you in when you are sick.

Unbuttoning, unzipping, undoing. 

Various artists on various mix tapes on various road trips.

Wet premium lubricant. 

X-rays, surgeries, and other hospital visits. 

Yellow dining room walls. 

Zzzs lost when we were up all night binge-watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

All these memories remain, leaving me feeling:

Ambivalent. 

Bitter.

Crippled. 

Damaged goods that can’t be returned. 

Earring missing its match. 

Fast Friday morning fucks ups. 

Grinding with some guy from Grindr. 

Health food can go to hell. 

Ice cream helps. 

Jumping thoughts. 

Kisses somehow remain on my lips. 

Lips yearning for your skin. 

Moving out is easier than moving on.  

Naps – lots of naps. 

Open heart, broken, but still open.

Picking up glass from broken picture frames.

Quiet cremation of old pictures. 

Reading your texts again way too many times.

Searching for clues, searching for answers.

Tucking a few memories in the bottom of a box.

Unraveling. 

Various artists sing sad songs to me.

Wet pillowcases from tears. 

X-rays can’t be done on broken hearts.

Yellow walls must be painted back to white before we get our deposit back. 

Zzzs lost when I lost you.

---

^{One Last Polka}

When I visit my great-grandma, 

she usually doesn’t know who I am.

Sometimes she thinks I am my uncle. 

Last week, she thought I was her brother.

Before that, she thought I was my father.

They say not to correct someone with dementia,

that destroying their delusion could lead to an episode.

So I smile and nod and play that part of whoever

she thinks I am on any given day.

I smile and nod as she asks me 

if I can absolve her of her sins.

I’m not sure if it’s because I’m wearing all black

but she thinks I am a priest today.

And though I am far from holy, 

I take her sins upon me and forgive her every transgression.

She beams like heaven is within her reach. 

I smile and nod as she asks my great-grandpa

why he left her here, why he hasn’t called,

why he hasn’t taken her out dancing.

She misses dancing.

So I pull up polka music on my iPhone

and dance with her in her wheel chair. 

She beams like heaven is in her eyes.

I lean in and whisper that I love her

after her spirit has left her body.

I wonder who she thought was holding her hand and saying goodbye.

Who did she think I was in that moment?

Did she know it was the real me

or did she just think I was a child who never came to visit?

---

---

“Well I’m goin’ down to Florida
Get some sand in my shoes”
“Orange Blossom Special,” Ervine T. Rouse

We loaded the army green 

Pinto wagon 

& headed south 

for the land of orange blossoms 

& coconut palms. 

We saw Rock City 

& the birth place of Davy Crockett, 

but our mission 

was to find the warmth of the sun 

on the white sunshine shores 

of the white sunshine state. 

In Fort Myers 

we ate burgers and watched 

Cary Grant catch a fish 

with his bare hands,

but he never gave it a half-nelson. 

He never attempted a suplex 

on that South Pacific island. 

After Cheerios

& hard-boiled eggs, 

we passed through

Bonita Springs, Naples, 

Marco Junction in search of 

pastel landscapes

 & Art Deco beaches. 

We never heard the whistle 

of that train from New York City. 

We never saw that cocaine sunrise 

over the cocaine sands of Miami.

East of Ochopee 

we got lost in Big Cypress. 

Driving those muddy two-tracks 

& the reed ensconced paths 

of the ancient Seminole Nation, 

our ancient Pinto 

was axle-deep in turtles, 

snail kites, marsh rabbits.

Asking directions 

at a gas station, 

we drank Dr. Peppers 

& sampled the local jerky, 

but out back was something special. 

I was seven years old, 

too young to be wandering alone 

in the black water swamps, 

but I wandered alone 

& found the soul of old Florida. 

As the river is the heart 

of the land pumping life-blood 

water through arteries 

of peninsular wet-lands, 

the soul of a state 

is hidden in

its tourist traps. 

He never heard the whistle 

Of that train for New York City

He never saw that golden sunrise

Over his ancestral sands of Miami

Behind that gas station, 

a grizzled man with 

grizzled teeth

waited to put on his show. 

Three generations of that 

Osceola family 

paid their bills 

& paid their dues 

in the arena of the alligator. 

The arena of the prehistoric beast. 

The trick is to fight a big one: 

the muscle mass makes them 

slower and less flexible. 

Before De Soto, before Ponce de Leon,

his family were royalty: 

kings, queens, princes. 

I watched the Duke of Chokoloskee, 

with his scars and filth, roll a gator, 

catch a tooth in his forearm, 

and pin it for a ten count. 

We got back in the old Pinto 

& headed further down 

The Tamiami Trail 

as the arterial swamp pumped us 

towards the shore.

---

^{Only You Know}

Stuck on the shoulder

but it feels like the edge of a knife

Cut to the right and your ninety years older

Swerve to the left and feels like the end of your life

It’s just like they always say

You can’t take it with you when you die or drive away

What would it have been like 

if you were too dead to stay?

Only you know

Only you had the nerves of a feather

Waiting all night 

just to pull it all together

Howled at the shame

Watched purple turn to yellow

Cradled your namesakes

like a cellist holds a cello

It was all over by morning light

Took what you could carry

Brought a gun to gunfight

Off like a bullet, crossed the Colorado prairie

Lodged yourself deep in a cottonwood tree

Made out like a bandit 

And they coulda sworn you planned it

askin’ what it’s like just to be so free

Your cottonwood tree twists 

like a vein across the plains

You release your fists

where you strained against your chains

Now you’re asking what took you so

long to admit it

Sittin’ with your feet up on the gas firepit

Only you know

---

_{In Memory of a Daycare Lady} 

Celery peanut butter raisin boats

floating on a round tray in the late spring morning sunlight.

A dozen hands anchored by just six words:

You touch it, you eat it.

What do you say?
You say ¡Gracias!

We slept 

in galley coat closets at naptime

after Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street aired on the wall-mounted box television set.

We threw 

crabapples over her fence 

and we got in trouble when 

we ate 

wild dandelion buds 

if she left us unsupervised for too long in the backyard playground.

Tia Carmen taught us everything we needed to know in life

before we turned five.

Fight fair, using only your words.

A big heart

that broke long before it stopped beating.

A water lung

that remembered Hawaii

the way no one should have to remember Hawaii.

After everything, everyone

misses the daycare lady 

in the North End corner casa,

whose casa was your casa. 

---

^{Pandemic Scorecard}

Give yourself 20 points if you are in the habit of adopting a “Word of the Year” to live by, and the word for 2020 was Enoughness.

Give yourself 10 points for spending the first month sheltering-in-place frantically working thirteen-hour days on the twin bed in the guest room, only for someone high up, who is not your boss, to tell you that it isn’t enough. 

Deduct 3 points if you take responsibility for a friend’s actions based on a colossal misunderstanding, and then you find out the hard way that half of your friend group – people you cherished and expected to be in your life forever – was never your friends to begin with, and never will be. If you became so distraught you vomited on yourself, add 15 points. Tack on 1000 points for seeking grief counseling from a therapist online who lets you text her between virtual sessions. 

Add 8 points to your score if you try to stay six feet away from everyone at the grocery store while realizing that anyone who can scoop you up in all your despair lives entire states away or halfway around the world, and you might never see them again. Add 4 points for staring at the food in your cart and realizing you don’t want to live long enough to eat all of it, but you’ve already touched everything so you can’t put it back. Give yourself 12 points if you snivel your way through the checkout lane but the cashier doesn’t even register your tears, and she acts like you’re not even the first person to cry on her shift today.

Give yourself 5 points if you feel hopeless and consider calling a suicide hotline on your birthday, but you won’t tell your therapist about it for a whole month because you were doing so well, and you don’t want to disappoint her, too. 

Subtract 7 points if you lose your appetite so entirely that your doctor threatens you with a medical diet and she orders a bone density scan. You’re not even forty. 

Add 11 points if your low-life neighbor down in #202 starts dating an even lower-life and lets him move out of his car and into her condo. She runs outside fully naked to fight with him in the parking lot during a snowstorm. He threatens to slit your throat and bash your face in, and he tells you to “fuck off and buy a house” if you don’t like it, so you fuck all the way off and hire a realtor. Add 13 points if you are outbid on the perfect home, thrice. 

Include an additional 50 points if your husband’s company lays him off.

Deduct 100 points if you suffer a psychotic break stemming from a panic attack, and you bruise your brain with abusive thoughts, and hurt someone you really care about with your words. 

Did you watch your teenage stomping grounds in the Santa Cruz mountains burn from afar, and your mom and lifelong friends were evacuated, and then you tasted the delicate ash days later? 90 points. 

Give yourself 30 points when you watch your favorite hiking trails and parts of Rocky Mountain National Park blacken and belch toxic smoke.

Did you lose your religion along the way? Give yourself 85 points.

In the restructure, is your boss defending your role to his bosses, and no one’s role is safe? 110 points.

Add 35 points for taking a long, cold autumn hike and coming down the mountain to order your first hamburger in ten years at your local watering hole. You worry that you’ll disappoint people who abstain from red meat if they ever find out. You worry that you’ll disappoint anyone abstaining from indoor dining during a pandemic if they ever find out. Give yourself 70 points for saying, “Fuck that,” and eat the hamburger anyway. Subtract 4 points if you worry you’ll disappoint someone for using the F-word. 

Begin tallying up your points and realize that, if the highest score wins, maybe this isn’t a game you want to play after all. 

But that hamburger with ketchup, pickles, and no onions sure was satisfying. And, for now, that will have to be enough. 

---

*

the darkness was such 

i hadn’t even noticed 

the lillies had bloomed 

^{Mother Kali}

I wanted to love my daughter in the way of a sweet

Madonna, my Moonchild nature well-suited caregiver.

She came to us fierce, furious, spitting spice and salt,

refusing my breast, reaching for him through night feedings..

She loves too hard, my mirror child, knows

her soul is her own. Motherhood has made me Monster.

Obstacles will be torched.

Cities will bow down. My daughter’s spirit,

a bonfire I dance around, shaking the heads

of those who would do her harm.

---

^{Factory Men}

Men wear their factory blue,

an aphrodisiac. They smell of sweat,

work, a grimy smell like oil. 

Skin, factory-pale. Hands whittled 

from repetition. Callouses rub my thighs.

They have rhythm, fire in their eyes,

space all day to remember last night’s tousle

amidst damp sheets.

Something to look forward to, break up 

monotony of workdays. Like cold beer 

after a long shift. My lips, her lips, some kiss—

like weekend shots of whiskey.

Like the dancer at the bar slides 

her body against uniform-pant zippers.

Brimming with lust, pent up, flashing a wad

of twenties, running a hand down

skin tight parameters of crimson-clad hips. 

Some women throw themselves at factory men. 

Men with steady incomes, pension, men who deftly use 

their hands. Workingmen fit to burst

with need for something sensual, 

a red dress filled to the brim.

My family has the luck of a penniless black cat at a high-stakes casino.

When I was twelve, my mother, my father, and my older brother Jeffrey took a vacation to Hawaii. Jeffrey went surfing in the deep, blue ocean while I stayed ashore and observed jittery sand crabs as they popped in and out of the warm sand. I’ll never get the screams out of my head that I heard before I gazed out and saw the top of Jeffrey’s  head and flailing arms sink into the water and never come back. When the paramedics recovered his body, his legs were painted with jellyfish stings.

After my brother was gone, my dog Sylvia became my only friend. She slept soundly by my feet every single night, licked my face in the morning, and longingly waited by the front door each day for me to come home from my soul-crushing days of high school. One day, when I was walking her around the neighborhood, she chased a squirrel into a colorful flower bed and ate a chunk from a Lily of the Valley. She never did come back from that, and I still haven’t decided where to put her ashes.

I truly admired the sun for a good portion of my existence. The sun makes the days brighter. The sun brings colors to life. The sun helps vegetables and fruits grow into their most nourishing forms. The sun also took my mother away. I still can’t comprehend how one tiny, unassuming mole could completely rob someone of their smile. 

My father had a midlife crisis before he hit midlife, and I didn’t blame him. I just wish his parachute would’ve worked properly when he went skydiving over the Poconos Mountains. People at his funeral would say “At least he died doing something he loved,” and I would think to myself, that makes it even worse. 

As for me, these days, I attempt to surround myself with the ugly things instead of the beautiful things. I just always worry that I’ll never be able to figure out the difference between them.

---

^{POPOL VUH}

The children held a competition,

building snowmen. It was an all-day

affair, bundled munchkins with

red cheeks and furrowed brows

scampering from yard to yard like

little Giacometti gods at work on

the Art of Man. In the end, there

was no one to judge who won,

nor guidelines to rate the melting

men, and the children had to content

themselves on the joy of pure creation

---

^{WE’RE ADULTS NOW, RIGHT?}

Sal texted me the other morning to talk about

David Foster Wallace and Peaches the pit bull

and let me know his boss was listening

to the Grateful Dead as he pulled into the parking lot,

though I believe what he really wanted me to know

is that he isn’t mad at me for my sudden inability

to attend his wedding in Dallas on Pi Day

after I was the only friend from New Jersey

who said Yes like Molly Bloom.

Which is a relief:

I wouldn’t want my last memory of Sal

to be bug-eyed in his underwear at 6am,

searching for his glasses on a table littered

with cans and roaches,

plastic cups, his beard sparkling with cocaine

as sallow dawn crooned over Atlantic City like vomit

and tugboats fixed underwater waste lines in a bay

full of bodies and condoms and tears of regret

and seagulls mocked Day’s realization

with a portentous cacophony that signaled

this is how it’s going to be from here on out,

adults at last.

---