NewPoetry

Gwen Benaway

he chastised me for
writing about cis girls,

his careful comments
nested in my poetry

like his dick nested
in the curve of my spine

when we lay on my bed,
his fingers in my hair

our breaths synchronized
to a double beat, dry lips

cracking as we talk about
the cis girls he fucks or

doesn’t fuck but wants to,
who think he’ll fuck them

but he won’t because he likes
lovers who don’t belong to him.

presuming our poetic foreplay,
how I fixed his line breaks

showed him how to write
a good fucking poem,

cleaned up his academic shit,
taught him to be honest

in his poetry about emotion,
his parents, and white male fragility.

his feedback to me, double edge
of “this is so beautiful!” heart emoji

laced with “you’re being unfair
to cis girls-they’re not monolithic”,

always their defender, the girls
he fucks are the girls he protects

except me, transsexual wannabe
is open season for double standards.

cis men assume they know everything
about cis girls as if cumming inside them

since adolescence equals knowing,
as if fucking is divination.

he fucked me like a duplicate cis girl doll,
a deficient copy without instructions,

pulled from the assembly line,
thrown out for missing parts.

he had to overcome his discomfort
by force, break me open by dark

while texting cis girls to hang out,
skype calls with ex cis lovers,

rearranging me in relation
to their primacy, a certain value

on my body naming me
as a trans girl more than

any function of biology, cis girls
shining in foil packets of desire

like vacuum pressed candy bars
in a vending machine at his school.

he made me lie for months
about our fucking to cis girls

watch them be loved in public,
in romantic dreams by starlight,

never knowing of me, what I stole
from them by nightfall, buried

his tongue in my milk skin,
drank his blue eyes whole.

he compared my breasts
to his cis girl lovers like

feeling oranges in a market,
appraising value by touch.

my sex noises, how I mewed
under him against them,

the high sounds they make
in the hollow of cis throats.

an entire ruler system
of trans on cis measurement,

an infinite and expanding way
to say I’m worth nothing.

the poetry finally broke me,
bent my resolve to leave,

even in the distilled wonder
of my mind, he brought cis girls

like a plague among the roses,
cis girls with their shit poetry

into the beautiful precision
of my poetic body, as if

cis girls belong everywhere
good and holy, and I,

the transsexual he fucked
when they weren’t looking,

was just a bitter aftertaste
in the roof of his mouth.

he washed me away
with cis girl bodies, rinsed

me from his cock
and moved on.

sometimes I stalk them
on social media, his cis girls

pretending to be cool
with stylized photographs

of mountain landscapes,
claiming creative vibes

basking in a soft privilege
imagining they’re powerful

when all they are is replicas,
unthinking in their performance.

it’s trannies like me that get
balled out for our femininity

then shamed by a cis boy
who tries to fuck us into death

for asking questions
or talking back.

sure, cis girls are just
as real as trans girls

filled with unique suffering
but they get some compensation

for their sex while trans girls
get murdered for ours

and I’m not allowed
to be bitter about it

but I am and maybe
it’s ok for me

to be something more
than a gender apology

wrapped in a pink ribbon
with bruises in my cunt

and his name burnt
on my body.

Aisha Sasha John

THE LIE YOU TOLD YOURSELF THE RELATIONSHIP REVEALING

YOUR CLOSED HEART’S SUFFERING

THE WIND YOU PUT IN OUR REST

A BEAUTIFUL DULL NAIL CLIPPER

BETWEEN HOW EASY AND GOOD IT IS

THAT’S WHY THERE IS A DOLPHIN ON YOUR KEYCHAIN

WHO LOOKS STUPID AND I LIKED THAT

A DOLPHIN WHO APPEARS TO BE LEARNING

CHANGING POSITIONS IN RELATION TO THE INFORMATION’S RECEPTION

UNCOMFORTABLE

RECOGNIZING A FEELING AS DISCOMFORT

THE EMOTIONAL INTENSITY OF DYSFUNCTION BULLYING THE AWKWARDNESS OF ACTUAL INTIMACY

WHO BELIEVES IN ARCHIMEDES?

FASTER AND TENDERERER AND STUFF

DO YOU BELIEVE PEOPLE? I DON’T

AND OBSERVE HOW THEIR BODIES REACT TO WHAT THEY’RE SAYING

HORSE TRUTH, TEETH

DONKEY TRUTH, SLOW

MALLARD DUCK

THE AGE IS IN YOUR HANDS

I DON’T WANT TO EAT A SPOONFUL OF CRUNCHY ORGANIC PEANUT BUTTER AGAIN

ICE CREAM

UNRIPE PLUM ANYWAY

LOGIC OF NAMING SOMETHING SOMETHING NEGATIVE

WHEN I USED TO SEE YOUR BIG-ASS HEAD ON COLLEGE STREET

I BELIEVE I THINK YOU ADDRESSED ME

I BELIEVE I THINK YOU THINK US INTERLOCUTABLE

LANGUAGE I BELIEVE I THINK YOU THINK WE SHARE

STANDING UP AND THEN SQUATTING

GUESS I’M IN LOVE WITH MY HOBBIES TIMES A FRILLION

I FIGURED OUT WHAT TO DO WITH EVENINGS EITHER SMOKE POT OR DON’T SMOKE POT

IS EVERYBODY LIKE ME UNACTUALIZED OR AM I THE ONLY ONE

IS EVERYONE LIKE ME LIKE IS EVERYONE LIKE BASICALLY ONE PERSON WITH DIFFERENT PARTS AND TIMES

IS THERE ONLY ONE PERSON TIMES VARIATION

FUCKING THE TIME AND TELLING

WARP AND HOW

WHEN YOU WHY

MACKDALICIOUS

IF ONLY IF ONLY IF…OK

David James Brock

I love the laser that kills the man in the first
minutes of the movie. I love the laser’s boom.

I love the elephant ivory grip of the laser held
at the cowboy’s thigh. He didn’t know he’d kill

The Fox today—with the laser—but there is
pink blood in the dirt of a Mexican cantina.

There is a laser in the backdrop of the sunset.
There is a blue eye taking aim from the back of the

laser’s barrel. The casings clunk on the horse
trough’s oak. A man’s skull is deleted over yonder,

and the undertaker titters. I love the rumoured
laser that shut down an animal phys exam in ‘99.

The laser that was sold for a tasty profit in the
pawn shop. We are on the hunt for lasers to kill

the ten best terror boys. Lasers that kill a reporter
and a cameraman live! That fit in the wide receiver’s

sweatpants pockets, that steal a Slim Jim or a pack
of darts, whisk apples from heads without singeing

single hairs. But then, I fired lasers at beer cans, begged
Pal to bury the photographic evidence. How murders

are covered up, let alone the death of a Coors can,
is an A&E nooner mystery. Come on, Pal. A laser in hand

will kill my rep. I feel no little pang of guilt when the
8-bit duck explodes, when Bambi’s mom dies, when

someone calls the knife a man’s way to bite it. A kid
gets shot and cooked through the throat in a movie and it’s

labeled a comedy. I can’t cry in the face of each laser
pointed directly at me. Psych! They ain’t pointed at me.

The laser is a God’s gift. So go on, give lasers to
teachers and students, priests and believers, sinners

and pilots, one secret passenger. The plane cruises
at 30,000 feet, no one aims up, and we sleep all right.

Liz Howard

The first person singular does not exist in the physical world,
it’s a ghost.
……………………-V. S. Ramachandran, New Scientist

A room with a view

summer holidays digressing

into the heartstrings of a bad faith

chorus. Along the balcony of our latter

days each subatomic thrum is a past

note there’s no coming back from.

Fullness of forest mushrooms

before rot sets in. The reward centre

of minor sins, post-present. A tender

pressure against the caul or thin

gauze of skin infinity filters though

and finds us human. Nothing but rain

for days my Id a sump pump so I’ll not

argue with this weather. I’m already lost

to the hard plumb of a liquid centre

a dead ringer for the first person singular

on my knees and partially dressed

as you’d have it but I’m outside of this

waiting for my arraignment

within expression while the lights

along my street are leaking beams

teething a sodium brace along the base

of my skull. Grave-to-cradle cap over

a brainstem I can’t slap for blooming

a draft I’d never have picked.

My wet cells kindling another

mirror the sense-presence of you

as in childhood false promises flew

like wind through poplars. Each leaf

a paper snap, a little skirt in the updraft.

The stars aren’t keeping track but I know

how to score this. I don’t forgive you

and you don’t need to be forgiven.

My mistrusted I velvet fastened

to whatever happens. Such is the feeling

as the moon rises perpendicular to my view

outside of time and half-bred consequence

you can’t send me back to my room.

Nyla Matuk

Dusk on wet birch, naked as early April,
lights an apse of chivalric Scotch pine.
We’re like anyone would be, in this situation,
the snacks attendant singing to make us forget: Shiiiiine
bright like a diaaaaamoooooond constellaaation!
and all we think on is a crucifix against mother-of-pearl.
At nearby St. Peter’s, children light

the fourth, dark purple candle
while white-tailed deer walk in a line.
Une histoire d’amouououououour….she continues, in a conniption
before the forest’s recrimination, both cancelling and preserving in time
a podcasted Rio Ancho flamenco that kills the hour like abstention
from the Blarney Stone, and helps stars twinkle
in spite of or ahead of, a great fright.

Sachiko Murakami

HONESTY
I try to sneak my god in, which obviously won’t work. She is not a sneaky god.

REGRET
My dead father acquires a god. The only evidence of their relationship is the backyard full of shit.

RESPONSIBILITY
I am to take out someone else’s god for a walk, and someone else’s child from school. I wander off on a journey, alone.

FEAR
On retreat in the country, the locals and their gods mock me and my god. We barricade ourselves against their threats.

RAGE
Near a sidewalk crowded with god walkers, I am stuck in a car with my angry, unleashed god.

LOVE
Some young gods fit in the palm of your hand. Some have definite heft. All are cared for by someone else.

INTELLIGENCE
My god is prone to attacking children. We walk with purpose into a schoolyard.

SHAME
I take my god to an improbable park. She finds the only mud puddle and rolls in it.

REDEMPTION
My dead god is waiting for me, near the pool.

Margaret McKeon

crow-cawing break of dawn’s fast
stir of wind on lake’s morning glass

exhale chimes stillness of leaves
first drop: pluck of rain or friendship

this thing broken and inbetween
but ….. live here

yes ….. here
in loon’s cracking night holler
before the hill-echo, the hum of your flight

and spider that one week
took residence in my rearview mirror

hurry, hide, I’d say
I need highway speeds on this highway

yes, new webs of silk strung from her spinnerets
yes ….. here

here, where whale is air and water
and puffin returns shoreside to nest

what rest …… oh
in the between of our gendered world
but
…………………. here

……….. the airbreath edge
of living/death
of energy and matter, live here

Sadie McCarney

I’m waiting on the voice of the alien God in
a spit-white motel north of Eden, NS. Can
you hear the wicker-work chairs that chatter
outside the rain? I can. Motley murmur.
Motley money. When I left I took $833.65

exactly. Exactly half left my wife and kids.
They’re no more mine in this spindly existence.
The alien God told me to leave them. He said,
“Wait for me in Eden,” He said, “Hate all
those who do not love me.” The Gideon Bible

in my motel nightstand says something like that
in red, only Bibles are biased and were redacted
mid-60s and the truth lives only in tastebuds,
in sounds. I’ve heard the aliens whisper for years,
in the deep roots of weeds dug up in summer,

in black ice seasoned with road salt and lime,
and in this rain that communes with the wicker
and the birdshit-baked birdbath it’s slowly filling.
And in every love song, every old sitcom. First
they told me through Dick Van Dyke that clocks

are all useless, so I threw out my watch. Then
it was running them little errands, turn left at
this fork, shave in that pattern. They lent some
togetherness sense to my life. A diagram through.
Patter goes the rain. I thought it would just be

benign little mutters, but then their God with a voice
like a cannon tells me to leave Maureen and my kids
or he will burn down the house with me in it. I could
tell it was Dick Van Dyke again, but through some
kind of amplifier the aliens made to make me know

reason. Reasons why, reason raisin. I sit here
and shrivel, wait for further instructions. This
motel and the corner mom & pop where I buy
my canned ham are the only sanctified spots still
left. My damned money dwindles. I, too, am left.

Nikki Reimer

it’s easy to remain safe on the streets
if you employ intelligent posture
walk with confidence lead with your jaw

whiteout can be used
when something is wrong

constantly scan but don’t be obvious

parked cardinals, daughter-in-law unlit corpses are
planetariums you should avoid
when you’re out alone

always make eye contact
make occasional eye
contact make fleeting eye contact
do not under any circumstances
make eye contact

even if it’s a quick jazz
keep your keys ready
hold on to them inside your pocket

then, bring them out:
your hands should rest lightly in your pockets

think: bitch
think: bitch, please

Jacob McArthur Mooney
after Max Ritvo

My therapist is French Canadian
with long, fuzzy ears.

He tucks his toes beneath his bum
while I weep inside his weeping room.

The no-pills practitioner
is your best, most boring friend.

The selfless associate
who helps you paint your picture frames

but later compares your taste in movies
to his daughter’s

and you realize you never knew
he had any kids.

~

Come to me as a neutered purebred
and I’ll walk you to the park in search of squirrels.

Come to me as a surgeon
and I will flop down defeated in your driveway.

Come to me as a child
and I will teach you to read.

Come as a republic
and I will seek your sanctuary.

And on like this.
Until we have exhausted our supplies,

passing off the task
of protector and protected. Interpreter and page.

Like partners in a drawing class.
Salsa dancers.

And every time you die,
or I die,

I will leave you one hundred
dollars on your desk.

Robert Priest

Some hearts are made
to be broken
like a bicycle helmet
that cracks on impact
instead of your head.

These are safety hearts
They can just split or
balloon out
and push you back
whole and away from the impact.
They take the blow.
They’re passion fuses
that pop in overload.

When your heart breaks
remember you have been saved.
When you’re up against a post
pounding with your fist “no no no”
remember you’ve been blown off a terrible course.

The guard rail has kept you back
from the abyss of deeper and deeper.
Be aware something got hit hard for you.
Your safety heart
took the big dark weight of loss
and shunted it to the other side.

When you’re bucking in the bed
biting the sheets
trying to keep that strangled scream in
remember

this is missing a calamity
this is what it’s like to get away.

Matthew Tierney

Weird. Friday to Sunday my
thoughts unwind in alphabetical order.
Monday on, it’s the reverse.

Black black. Blacker
than a stock ticker in October.
The totalled U-Haul, opposite lane,
deployed driver’s side airbag
like a used condom
dangled so you can size up the cum.

I keep having this dream.
My twin stabs me with a compass.
‘The circle jerk is complete,’ he seethes,
tragically misreading Nietzsche.

Brute fact: humanism will find a way
to fuck up a surprise party.

Like gold to airy thinness beat,
John Doe is done.
Collision was fatal, says CP24.
This week’s unofficial Wheel of Fortune:
BACON BEAR COTTAGE FOREST PINE PUCK.

Dina Del Bucchia

She is perfect. Reflexes like a cheetah when you call or ask or don’t say anything. She favourites all your less than stellar tweets. She watches sports with a quiet reverence and only speaks about the game when she has something truly great to say, or to agree with you or when spoken to. She eats hot dogs and hamburgers, dozens of them, thousands of them, and gains no weight, no she loses weight, no she floats away like a kite you thought was really cool in 1992. She is making progress on dinner and also she makes beer fly out of her vagina and then with sex magic it’s lubed up for you to fuck her. She is perfect. She is funny, talks about farts, but doesn’t fart like a real person, perfumed air drifts out on a blue cloud, not a pink cloud because you hate pink and she is perfect.

Jeff Latosik

It was a new challenge about the place
one thing ended and another began.
In the stands we watched and then
rained tall cans down from the blue
as if forever was just a vendor.

It was about a line in the sand
somebody had up and called blue ribbon.
A supposed given that was more a command
so there was a tribunal and then a long deliberation.
There was a common conclusion once.

Then a bunch of crummy pamphlets.
It was a beaut in one kind of way.
A territorial dispute of whether the fence-post
was foul or fair in a deafening boo.
It was everything peer-reviewed

up in the air set to blaring country
music and each citizen elbow deep
in their data plan and their to-dos.
It was waiting. It was hard.
It was discovering that our camera-flipped

phones when turned to each other
created a kind of infinity mirror
making the whole scene more fun house
than a place you’d ever want to keep score
of anything true. It was a hunch that reality,

never more tricky, kept moving quietly
in and out of view as if on one of those terrible
hot dog carousels. It was being so lost
in the inside baseball and the legalese
we couldn’t tell the storms from the breeze

and couldn’t freeze the bobbleheads
some other team, and then our team,
were becoming. Man, it was really bumming
me out. I was in the nosebleeds
wondering if I might just up and blow away.

I was watching all of us hovering there.
It was all hovering. A kind of slow flash
and it moved like knees do when the jury,
the crew chief, the judge, the worry of doctors
and the sea of committees are taking their sweet time.

It was arguing about that initial challenge
or at what point the call had been made.
No tape on that, though. All the times
I gave up on the last one I came back less afraid.

Andrew Neilson

He showed me then the seafood in his fridge,
shelled and unshelled, all the slices and slabs,
the fretwork, bagged in cellophane, which
he boasted was eked from Iberian crab.
I watched as he took to the kitchen sink
something filleted, scaled and slickened pink.

This was her father—the girl I was with—
bearded, still thick with his Porto accent,
a man transplanted, given where they lived,
in a concrete block, on a council rent;
here, in the Broadwater Farm Estate,
where ‘60s Brutalism waxes late.

We were far from young love, but friends of a friend—
me and the girl, not her widowed father—
and life was still stuck in the shallow end:
being cold, as I was, under the collar
and new to more than this callous city
where I’d pitched up, searching for truth and beauty.

Of which I knew nothing. Nothing I’d read
readied me for that keyless afternoon
we sat on the landing, waiting for her dad
to wheeze up the stairwell and let us in.
Days after, I saw the splay of her hand
an inch from mine, as if printed on sand.

Nathaniel G. Moore

I remember now, instances ago

near the fabulous false decorative tree,

as she shredded the buttered toast

in a fit against her soft lips,

and when closed, these lips formed

a temporary pink rose

and her nipples slept well

under incandescent gown,

which by now phantoms

on a floor somewhere,

beneath all my derangement.

The outlaw garment, once removed,

revealed a suggestive corporeal estate

as if she was preparing to feed

in a maternal role pantomiming

a dirty balance of sustenance and eros

now my inadequacy rises

now my duress circulates

and the potion of hope vanishes

the vanity of defeat and predictive flaws

self-propel: I am the designer,

but cannot feel the plan

for all I feel is love.

Canisia Lubrin

for Bianca Spence

Let me see you
leave with your
posture of stones.
Or pray, if you must, to your lit
from both ends artillery
where the world is reduced
to the height of your nose.
Best yet: is grazed on the boundary of your toes.
Your local memory, your pause, cannot suddenly sag my syllables,
or whatever you trip upon outside
myself being invaded–but no–
who reduced you to the work
of a tilted head, and respite, pardon my flare, stretching the lips, polite?

But uncertain as what borrows now, as always, the dread mock of beauty fusing mindlessly, the morse-code to the hieroglyph, the telegraph to the Braille, the dying serif to the pixelated phrase,
throw the uproar the swallowed whole, the history as font.

Tell me how to be funny. Tell me how I haven’t tried.
Lend me your gaze.
Let me sign, stupidly, your name:

Lisa Young Kutsukake

Finally, something humiliating.
Below the cut steel stare of fluorescents
Lit in the commotion of the present:
I am a cobweb that caught an aging
Fingernail in the dining room cupboard,
Bland paint chip fallen off the bed’s frail leg,
Iron-stained panty clung to a clothes peg.
Neglect—to disavow, turn from, abhor.

Stubbornly posed before men’s scrutiny,
Our palimpsest-inked pages glow, one makes
Another. “Tabula rasa. The lot.”
Words fail to write actions; shrewd entropy
Blots Reason, favours twittering Rapture—
Who claims to say who is real and who’s not?

Gregory Betts

From nothing, a bird watches a man walk into a room. From nothing, a woman is telling a story. There is a murder. She stops speaking. He sits down. A woman walks into the room. A bird flies into the room. The bird is black. The man is black. The woman sits down. The crow is telling a story. It walks into the centre of the circle. Everybody stops talking. The wings of the woman fold behind her back. She is wearing jeans with holes that resemble black holes or night. Two crows fly out in the shape of a butterfly or a depressed penis or a man picking up a stone. Nothing is said. The man throws the stone and it kills him. The crow hovers over the body. The woman stands up and walks out of the room. Her wings unfold and she begins telling a story. Outside of the room is the room full of men and women and birds listening to her story. A woman knocks over a glass of black ink. It is now nighttime. Nobody continues to talk about the murder. Crows fly through the sky above you. They are women. Black women. They plot themselves. The man advances to inspect the hole where the crows fly into the room. He reaches his hand into the night and is bitten. The woman pushes him and together they fall. A stone flies past them, knocking two birds out of the sky. As they fall, their feathers peel from their wings. The feathers are black. You can only imagine how they float in the open space of night, beside the black hole from which they came, falling onto the stone face of Silence. The man sits down and stops talking. A woman walks into the room like a hole in a conversation. Silence breaks.

There is a wire that loops around the room. It is listening for any sign of Silence. Imperceptibly, it connects everything in the room to everything else in the room. The wire is black and casts a long shadow over everything it touches in the room, which is everything. Nothing stirs in the shadows. It might be the source of blackness. It might have caused the hole, or it connects one hole to another hole. The holes are lonely, long for another moment in the perfect quiet. From nothing, the birds that perch on this dark wire tell stories to the people, each word another thread that ties them to the room. The room itself is reeling from the murder.

Stephanie Bolster

It was practical, the elevated rails to bring the goods right
to the factories, the freight of meat, the turkeys packed and hacked
free of their heads. A few feathers stuck. It stayed
until the last train ran and after. Birds on their way
from roof to roof sat a while and shat
a small meadow up there, seeds, blooms, cast-off
stuff. Trash some wandered under and others looked
down on and a few scaled for trysts or views
of fireworks. Seedier and seedier, best done
away with. But a couple of guys saw
it made space where space was lacking, imagined
summer backs flat against a patch of grass, up at gull-
level. Did what it took (committees, etcetera) and there
it is still, planted with much of the stuff
that set up shop itself, but done with vistas
where someone wanted: 10^th Avenue a scene
through glass (an amphitheatre to sit and watch
the traffic pass) or a wall of coloured glass
against which dancers dance or a stall sells
lattes and biscotti. At the end, it ends. There used to be more
but the eyesore side said no so that part had to go. Who says
they can’t go back, ship in bits of defunct track
(who takes Amtrak?) and set them up and roll out lawn. Imagine
all Manhattan bound by that ribbon? In a century or two
it’ll have gone the way of whatever else, the ostrich
say or cell phones, the hotel that straddled it parting
its legs over a void where rusted metal was. The decent scrap
long since turned to toys or parts of houses propped by brick
walls of what were factories. The Hudson still at it.