ISSUE III: how we consume ourselves
photos by valerie j. bower & poems by N8NOFACE
Collages by James Diaz
poems by Desire’ Jackson-Crosby
mother, to unearth
I swaddle the girl
underneath the
earth blanket
she’s hungry
so I pull the word from
my throat
crying
to time
like music
to bury to bury
to bury I
sing
Itinerary:
so much blue
I think
I’ll swim in it
the easiest way
would be to
disappear
so I’ll start there
and take a wandering look at
the vastness of
the body
I want to give my skin to the arms of this blue
but I’m afraid to drown
des
pite the knowledge
that bodies
float
poems by Joe Nasta
Lace Curtains
I always return here with my body or my mind, to the empty place
between here and there, then and now, us and everyone else.
I would tell you where but I have no words or coordinates, no face.
I always return here with my body. Send my mind to the empty place.
When there is almost nothing left I wrap my favorite parts in lace.
My armpits, inner thighs, left ankle. I cannot save all of myself.
I must return here with my body or my mind, to the empty place.
Velvet Robe
Lay my body like stone
tile. This is my palace!
I desecrate the walls
with ugly
screech
echoes.
Good.
The doors burst
open, my mouth
widened pink
ohs. He
moans
indul-
gently.
My eyelids squint
violet, prove him
wrong. What a
good show
we put on!
What a
good
host I am. What a
good body: firm
rugged
sharp
glass
laid
gently
on the shelves
of my ribs. Bat
wings, bones
& my teeth
bared. I
say
good boy.
I say it gently. Please
Come inside. I made
myself long hallway
& velvet.
I’ll make
myself
a man.
poem by Ra Ebrahim
short story by Justin Taylor
What Lover Dreams of Nightmares
I am in his arms as we drift off to sleep.
I slip out of his grasp, landing on the hard ground. The walls dissolve around me, there is
something coming. I can feel it.
I run.
The grounds around me change, streets where we would walk, the woods behind his
parent’s house, the picnic spot in the park all bleeding together. I run but I can’t seem to escape the feeling these moments. The ground shifts beneath me, the steady stone giving way to sand and suddenly I’m falling.
I reach out, my fingers finding rope, and I begin to climb. There’s nobody but me, I’m
climbing up, slowly, fruitlessly. The rope reaches up further than I can see. My fingers begin to ache, my hands burn as I pull myself up the taught rope. The fight that I won’t win, the battle that will never end.
A crack.
And the rope’s tension is lost.
I am falling again, my hands reaching out grasping at nothing.
I feel him against me once more. I was falling but now I am here, with his arms around
me. It’s my bedroom, but it’s foreign to me. Where once it felt like sanctuary its somehow turned on me.
The walls stare at me, accusing me. Posters and pictures blaming me for our ruin.
They begin to shrink around me, closing in. A grinding of walls turning to rubble.
Everything I once loved beginning to crush me.
I close my eyes. I hold my breath. I open my eyes. I am in the water.
It’s dragging me down, my lungs on fire.
I try to swim up but keep drowning deeper and deeper.
I can’t keep holding this in. I have to release it.
The breath escapes my lungs, and I am on a bridge. Two rivers stream below me, one of
gold the other of glittering rubies. Snow falls lightly around me, suffocating the world.
Suffocating me. I stare at the rivers beneath me, both leading to areas unknown.
The soundless scene around me envelopes me, the cold nothingness of it all burrowing
deep in my bones.
I know I can’t stay here; the cold is too much, but nothing in me will go back.
I stand above two rivers and let myself fall.
And I am in his arms again, in their too tight embrace.
art by Josephine Close
poem by Bright Aboagye
Gut
Children drown here
Adults drown here
Life — pause!
poem by DW Baker
self portrait [blind faith] by a.d.
poem by Eric Subpar
from the reeds to thee
ever since she almost died
in the neighbor’s pool
when she was eight
she believed
god resided in her head.
after the boy in gym called her
pussylips when her shorts
shifted during stretches
he and yes god was a he
would pop his head out the porthole
and whisper into her ear
that the boy’s parents
would kill each other soon
and the boy would end up a cocksucker for pay.
she’d wondered what a cocksucker was
and he told her the worst kind of scum.
she turned 16 and he had grown more quiet
until he vanished all together
and she missed him, but replaced his voice
with blissful steps toward some cosmic center
she would press the finger and thumb of one hand
into her eye sockets long enough to evoke stars
divined by a chaotic cold
damp and scented of pine trees
and she’d almost see his face
amid this oort cloud of wholesale possibility
but it disappears as the colors
recede
he returned on her wedding night
but his voice had changed from
harshened coal to low viscous amber
he was the new testament and he talked
exclusively of love
of the lions irrevocably tamed by lambs,
sugar water and toothpaste
before bed.
art by Mark M. Mellon
poems by M.P. Powers
the night distorted
waking up in the middle of the night
trudging to the toilet
standing over it
palm pressed against the wall
aim-toward-bowl
finish up
on the way back to bed
you stop at the window gaze
at the tall dark trees swaying
against the sky
frightening trees
noble trees
trees with their colors stripped
and the wind in them
3 a.m.
and the wind and the trees bring all your guilt
and misery back
but distorted amplified
you remember someone you neglected
someone’s pain
someone who left some beastly scar on you
they are all there
in the trees in the middle of the night
nodding, whispering
monstrous.
you climb back in bed pull the covers up
cover your face with a pillow
as if that will make it
go away.
anima
she’d turn up just enough
that you couldn’t forget
she existed
and disappear
as quickly as she came
then you’d go looking for her
in the forest along the river in bombed-out
industrial areas abandoned old insane
asylums you’d look nearly everywhere
for her and just when you were
about to give up you’d see her
elegant silhouette vanishing
in a door at the end of a long marble hallway
or she’d become the taste
of wild strawberries or a bird half-hidden
on a topmost bough
and just like that she’d be gone again
and you’d be left again
to your longing
and phantasms and vagaries or whatever
inwardly crushes
you every day knowing
but never truly knowing
it’s futile
because she’s been with you all along.
poem by Kenneth Goodman
Odessa 1920
My grandma got out of Odessa
hiding in the hay—
of a wagon into which
soldiers stabbed
pitchforks in—
again & again…
when I sneezed in September
she told me with a grin:
“That’s why you have hay fever,
from the fear I felt when they—
stuck pitchforks in the hay.”
resurrectionmag.com 