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eddie bennett poetry october 2024

Given the history of the Black Being,

there is a need to address the pain off of which society has been feeding.

Its history is full of trauma, negation, and neglect.

This is the reason for its deep-rooted mental unrest.

The denial of its pain on the American terrain has further influenced its ability to remain sane.

Become sane?

Move further away from the insanity of a society that denies its humanity.

Its relationship with itself is managed by another.

This depraved entity turns it into the “other”.

It becomes inferiorized by that which deems itself superior.

Drafted into an existential war of contrition with the nature of its existence.

Falling on the butt of “upright” swords on society’s hegemonic floor.

Attempts at the corporeal obliteration of its ontological core.

The pretense it has been indoctrinated to hide behind diminishes its self-concept, further

denigrated in a society rife with moral contempt.

Unable to uproot its identity from the society that denies its murderous intent.

Given the history of the Black Being,

there is a need to address the pain off of which society has been feeding.

The healing that society has been denying that Black folk have been needing.

Begging and Pleading.

Kneeling and Bleeding.

The keys to behold their own cathartic realizations,

the achieved goal of accepting the gifts of their emotional reparations.

To be the redeemed of an earth that denigrated and sullied its ontological, epistemological, and metaphysical conceptualization.


Eddie Bennett is a transformative poet and writer. He is a Washington, DC native who enjoys writing poetry as a mental health practice for wellness and creative therapeutic expression. He also uses poetry as a way to advocate for others to begin to use different forms of creative expression for their own therapeutic benefits.

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jonathan “jcc” chan-choong poetry october 2024

Mixed race

Mixed face

Constant rejection, deflections

When I say my heritage


But I see everyone has a mixed taste

Fusion cuisine – ain’t that bitter and sweet

We like to have inclusion on our tongues

It’s easier to eat than make


As long as they care for a fraction, in a moment in time

They’ve done Diversity Inclusion Equity


Things must die before new beliefs are born

Yes, I’m Caribbean. Yes, there’s a story to tell. No, I don’t have to yell.


Just change the narrative.


We use new language, saying it’s inclusion.

We incorporate new nomenclature into the lexicon.


But ain’t that a funny word, nomenclature

Nomenclature

No men clature

No man’s culture


They barely believe us as their own

I guess unlearning and relearning is too much work

I ate curry with my hands last night

Food tastes sweeter off fingertips


Used chopsticks for dumplings the night before

And held my chopsticks from the top to live a long life


I dunk aniseed bread in pepper pot for christmas.


And I’ll eat pasta with a fork if I need a quick meal.


To be mixed isn’t fixed

I’m constantly learning what my ancestors did for me

The roots deep and twisted

This family tree in the amazon

Amidst colonial industrialization

Tall, strong, and why I breathe.


I am the stories I eat.


Jonathan “JCC” Chan-Choong is a Guyanese-Jamaican-Canadian poet and writer. Influenced by a multicultural/ multiracial background and ancestral stories, his work serves as a conduit towards self-understanding and identity. JCC is an active spoken word performer and workshop facilitator. He has been featured in publications, podcasts, and radio shows nationally and internationally. When not writing his own story, he’s helping socially driven organizations speak theirs as a copywriter. Find him on Instagram at @jayseesee.

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kevin irigoyen penatello poetry september 2024

I traced her chapped skin,

now blistered and bruised.

Waiting to be loved again,

for someone to peel back that withered layer.

Waiting for someone to look,

beneath the refuse and rust.


Like a prized fowl fit to roast,

stripped of her riches

and tied in economic despair,

but through unheeded calls

she is plucked and trussed.


The scars of planned failures

scratched deep into her flesh.

She is tired.

A once youthful Eden, now a graveyard.

No truer definition of a Boom and Bust.


Yet as another year passes,

and more of her structures falter,

we, her children, are being left without.

Ignoring her calls.

Blind to every flood and deadly gust.


Blind to what she really needs.

Clinging to a time long since passed.

Too consumed in self-pity to know,

that those who promised aid, never come,

are not benevolent and just.


She is lost, in part by a familiar hand.

More involved in her death, than we would like to admit.

Her memory washed away, right from beneath us.

Everything we had turned to dust. 


Kevin Irigoyen Penatello was born on the island of Borikén (Puerto Rico). His work focuses on Indigeneity, masculinity, and identity in the LatinX community. His most recent piece, “Don Macho,” was published with Somos en Escrito Literary Magazine. You can find him on instagram at kevinirigoyenpenatello.

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regine jackson poetry september 2024

We stand in the shadows of silent expectations

Where the complex intersections of our identities

Is not enough to halt the deceiver lurking,

Trying to distort our clarity

Whispering all these shape-shifting falsehoods

About growing up in the hood

In the bounds of certain zip codes

Where the gag to our growth

Are street names and avenues

And you’re looked down upon

Even when people on the other side of the gate

Look just like you


Today, we have chosen visceral silence

And as we tiptoe to peer over the

Tops of your white picket fences

We choose to peel our ears back

To hear the world’s tiniest djembe

Playing just for us


We’ve done the same to our eyes

Your green grass just isn’t as lush anymore

And the veneer of your backyard

Has no way of burying our tenacity too deep


We can’t imagine how the earth aches underneath your feet

And how the blackened and caked nails of our

Ancestors gone to dust weep and

Sigh as you decry

A spoiled bloodline that didn’t have a chance

To rise to the same height as you did


The Great Deceiver has fractured the histories and culture

That weave our realities

But once we realize our neighbors are no kaleidoscope images

Disjointed from just poor choices and bad judgements


We can mirror our hopes and dreams

And maybe we can see each other without the cracks


Regine Jackson is a writer based in Springfield, Massachusetts, specializing in science fiction, horror, and fantasy short stories. She also explores themes of inner-city life, mental health, and womanhood through poetry and prose. In 2022, Jackson received the Straw Dogs Writers Guild Emerging Writer Fellowship, and her work has appeared in the 2024 Massachusetts Bards Anthology, Pán•o•ply, Gnashing Teeth Publishing, Red Rose Thorns Lit Mag, A Queen’s Narrative: Heavy is the Crown Anthology and the Reimagining New England Histories Project. For more details, visit reginejackson.com or @theflimsyquill on Instagram.

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Pauline peters poetry september 2024

i.

to the beautiful, flexible gods

amenable and fluid,

to all the gods warped and wefted

on a loom with common thread,

to the clay gods shaped and curved and smoothed,

holding the fullness of grain,

to all the cool gods of fresh running water.

to all the shining gods of lucent, precious stone,

to all the masks of gods danced barefoot in the dust,

to all the gods whose name means: “I am singing the river,”

to the gods of the long and sinuous song.

and always to the gods who look out from the center of your eyes,

and to all the shining gods of air and light and breath,

and then, at last, to the irresistible gods of stillness and silence and death


ii.

the old gods sleep beneath the earth, the very ground is their mantle.

yearly they rise, dream-thick, rubbing sleep from their far-seeing eyes.

they shake the heavy red clay out of their dark, kinked, hair,

wearing nothing but tangled red stories girded around their loins.

we approach them and lay down the sweet-smelling grass,

we offer trays of honey, sweet pomegranates, and wine.

they dine and then they listen, grim, with sympathetic ears –

there is so little time and soon they will slip beneath the earth again.

how do we offer up our prayers and fears?

how do we wear our sadness?

will we burn? and will the Earth?

will water rain down to save us?

is it too late? and is it too late?

is it now forever too late?


Headcount

I was not born, I was fashioned in a furnace by the hand of a smith.

I was beaten black, fire my cradle, the blazing foundry my home.

I was wrought with the strength of his muscled, ashen arm,

his forehead creased and sweat-drowned, me, the dark tool of his making.

Laminar and ductile I was shaped, pliable, easy to use.


But when worn out by his labours, the ironsmith sleeps abyssal,

my black-winged soul rises, tracing a pattern across the sky.


It touches down shadow-soft to peck at the night-wet grass,

foraging for ground news, of those lives still caught,

imprisoned and chained, tied to the heat of the forge,

and those fleeing with desperate breath, straining for winged flight.


Pauline Peters is a queer African-Canadian writer living in Toronto, the territory of Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. Her poems investigate themes of race, myth, ancestry, spirituality, and nature. Her aim is to create poems whose themes combine to create a holistic expression. Her work has been published in The Fiddlehead, PRISM international, Prairie Fire, The Malahat Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, The Salted Woman, was published in Britain by Hedgespoken Press. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has work forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry 2025.

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cynthia robinson young poetry august 2024

The house on Tennessee Avenue,

like that one up on Beulah,

was gone in less than 30 minutes,

even though it had weathered


every storm in Chattanooga

for at least one hundred years.

The frame resisted the heat,

outliving the rooms that lay


charred and smoldering inside.


Green moss ignores

the No Trespassing sign, repainting the siding,

and the trees continue to deposit leaves into the awning,

no hands in autumn to remove them now.

A maple tree still guards and shades the house,


even with some limbs missing

from the fire that disabled it

the first time this house burned.

 buds bursting defiantly through what remains,


lush leaves growing, growing.

A sign says Condemned,

but memories are still dwelling there–

the stench from a white hood

and sheet robe, once a dingy white, now


 burned black

 in the bottom of the Tennessee family’s cedar chest.

A sign says Do Not Enter

yet it does not stop the ancient spirits,


whispered intentions to burn crosses and men


as religious sport-

plans drifting up and down

the splintered staircase on sun rays

filtering through the missing roof.


Add it to another chapter of darkness

and retribution perhaps?  in Chattanooga

Add it to the history of the neighborhood

Underneath the shadow of Lookout Mountain,

named

St. Elmo.


And Bobby’s Barbershop Didn’t Make It

Bobby’s Barbershop chairs are lined up

 in the junkyard.

It is their cemetery, and this is

 their gravesite.

At certain times at night, you can catch

a glimpse of chairs revolving,

as if Bobby and the other barbers are standing behind them,

discussing The Man with invisible clients, asking

If Covid was a conspiracy to take away

all they had,

all they were.


Dreams are in this junkyard–

The American Dream, A Dream Deferred, all

of what Bobby once believed would create

happiness, would take him on a vision journey

to that road not taken,

the road he took…


and now it’s come to this.


The tickets out of wherever that pit

the dreamers tried to escape from,

are now torn and scattered all over,

tornadoes cannot even lift and take

Over the rainbow.

Ticketed dreams lie in their own graveyard,

fading and indiscernible

under overcast skies.


Cynthia Robinson Young is the author of the chapbooks Reflections of a Feral Mother (2024) and Migration (2018). The latter was named Finalist in the 2019 Georgia Author of the Year Awards. Her work has appeared in journals and magazines including The Amistad, Rigorous, Poetry South, The Writer’s Chronicle, and in the anthology, Dreams for a Broken World (Essential Dreams Press, 2022). A native of Newark, New Jersey, she lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Cynthia is currently working on a novel. You can find her at cynthiarobinsonyoung.com and on Facebook.

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pleasant nneoma stephen poetry august 2024

On this lowly night,

in the middle of the earth,

the cold wind howls,

and the pale-ish moon eavesdrops as

the mother of my great, great grandmother holds

a conversation with me.

Soul to soul we rapport,

shedding flesh and puffing blood.

“The ol’ days,” she begins,


“I was a dog licking sand

and eating maggots wherever I saw.

I bore in tens and tens

and rubbed my face with 

the blood of my uterus

when my pups became merchandise.”


I puff blood into the air.

We growl and laugh.


She continues,


“Wasn’t I a good mooing cow

who milked and milked

and turned blood cream

when her breasts sagged and bruised?

I became beef before long.

Sweet, sweet beef

butchered unevenly, and dispersed abroad.

I bet the earth had a good meal.”


We growl maniacally, puffing and splintering,

whimpering and whining.

I see her soul stand up, dust her feet

and walk a distance.

She takes a quick look back at

my black bones shattered on the surface.

And in admiration, she mutters,

“Don’t you look so much like me?”


Pleasant Nneoma Stephen is a poet, student, and writing coach. She is an ardent lover of doodles, rainfall, and African mythology. Pleasant is a Gold Award recipient of the Senior Category of the Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition 2023. Her work, “Body of the Moon,” is forthcoming in Literary Forest Magazine.

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gloria d. gonsalves poetry august 2024

She made a regal entrance to their summit and instructed

they could keep the stolen artefacts, they’re world materials;

they could keep her dead children erased from their dirty files,

but she wanted back her children who were being ill-treated.

She wore a kaftan of rich brown and carried all her rivers in it:

Nile, Niger, Zambezi, Limpopo, Congo, Orange, Senegal,

Ubangi, Kasai, Shebelle, and their budding younger siblings.

When she walked, the river waves flanked her like warriors,

clearing the path for her determined feet to tread like a lioness.

The battalions of the big five flew above her as air guardians.

It was her savanna and no one had the rights to her children.

They adjourned in closed sessions to discuss her demands.

Her children held little value to them except as cheap labor.

Letting them go would impact their economy and global status.

They did not see it coming—her calling in the godparents:

Indian Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean Sea, and Red Sea.

They towered above the convention halls and rooms, ready to

sink any suggestions of takeovers, collaborations, or charities.

None of them understood the lessons she gifted on adaptability.

None of them understood the pain she endured to instill pride.

None of them had the right to imprison her children with wealth.

None of them had the right to strip away the nobility of her children.

She stood tall and adamant, bearing an insignia of rare Tanzanite,

and commanded her children to walk proudly to the front door.

They came from all the concealed crooks of suffering and indignity.

She stretched her kaftan of all the rivers and led them all out.

Her big five battalions—lions, leopards, elephants, African buffalo,

and rhinoceroses—roared above to ensure safe passage home.

The oceans sailed them back to the wealth of their African roots.

Today, no land dares offend or take her natural wealth for granted.

They no longer hold summits or video conferences to pressure her.

They no longer offer bribes for her fall or assume she is corrupted.

They no longer attempt to bend her will with economic sanctions.

Her children are re-learning pride and dignity of being Alkebulans.


Author’s note: According to the Alkebulan history of Africa, the indigenous name of Africa before it was colonized is Alkebulan, which means the Garden of Eden or the Cradle of Mankind.


Gloria D. Gonsalves is a poet, author of children’s books, and illustrator. Her poems appear in Brittle Paper, Galway Review, Eclectica, The Mantelpiece, Consilience, Collateral, Kalahari Review, Tiny Seed, and other literary magazines, journals, and anthologies in Africa, Europe, and the USA. Besides writing, she founded WoChiPoDa.com, an initiative to instill the love of poetry in children. Born and raised in Tanzania, she lives in Germany and occasionally in Tanzania. You can find her on her website at gloria-gonsalves.com, on Medium at gdgonsalves, on Goodreads at gloriadgonsalves, and on instagram at gdgonsalves.

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jaime jacques poetry august 2024

She sweeps around the mat.

I contort my body.

Should I move?

No, no te preocupes m’ija, estás bien.


I thought this poem was about privilege.

Then I showed it to a friend.

Get over yourself,  she said.

You deliver mail for a living.


The teacher on my yoga app says 

Come into chair pose. 

Call in something that you need.


I call in what I always call in: money. 

I don’t want to go back to the high vis vest,

tiny mail slots snapping frozen fingers,

supervisors in the depot saying

Let me see the treads on your shoes. 


Be open to abundance, the teacher coos.  

Complaining about capitalism feels so on trend.

We make jokes about our stolen lives,

waiting for the jobs we hate to be done by AI.

The problem is none of it is very funny.


One day while folding sheets into hard creases

Maria told me she used to sell tamales in the street. 

This work is a little better than that, she concedes.

At least she doesn’t have to get up at 4 in the morning.


You are the co-creator of your life.   

Here, surrounded by flowers and fruit

I move back into downward dog and

congratulate myself on this chapter. 

What I sacrifice for the freedom to travel:

pension, health plan, a living wage.

I’m considered casual.

Maria is called informal. 

We both know what we really are: disposable.


I roll up the mat.


Maria sweeps where I was,

leaving the ground immaculate.


Trust that whatever you need is coming to you.


The Organic Cotton Shop in Tepoztlan

A handsome man enters & declares

he needs TOW-ELS, wraps his

arms around himself,

drawing out the vowels.


His rocket pop blue eyes

land on mine: What’s your name? 

smiles like he’s just given me a gift.

Couldn’t wait to tell me his: Lucky.


Your parents called you that?

Me, taking the bait.

Well, Lucky is my last name, he says.

Still cool, I say.

Actually, it’s Lecky, he insists on telling me. 

First name is Steve.


Leaning against the towels now, he 

resumes the train wreck of disclosure, 

tells me he’s from Edmonton.


Lucky’s building a cabin on the mountain.

He does peyote, lives off of crypto.

His visa’s about to run out.  

He’s not worried though.

He’s got a guy. 


He flashes his expensive smile 

at the woman working, 

says he’ll take four blankets 

and four pillows with the towels.

I mean, it’s so cheap, right? 

I’m still debating a 10-dollar vest.


Listen, he says, 

I’m not a new-age type of guy.

I’ve spent time in the jungle of India. 

Did you ever wonder why 

some of the poorest people are the happiest? 


I tell Lucky I need to get going. 

I hope he doesn’t ask to connect online,

but I guess he won’t. 

That would ruin the illusion. 

He’s already on shaky ground. 

Steve Lecky from Edmonton. 

I leave without buying the vest, 

exchange a glance with the woman

behind the shop desk—we both know

I’m not the type of tourist Mexico wants.

I don’t buy organic cotton towels and 

I would never pay someone to renew

my visa. I would get on a bus and go

to Guatemala to do it— like any other

broke person with their given name would. 


Jaime Jacques (she/her) currently lives in the ancestral and unceded territory of Mi’kma’ki, where she delivers mail, sometimes writes poems, and always drinks too much coffee. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Rogue Agent, Variant Lit, Birdcoat Quarterly and others. Her reporting can be found on NPR , Salon, and Lonely Planet among others. She is the daughter of an Indian immigrant and has always felt most at home in the tropics. She has a deep and abiding love for Central America, where she lived for several years working as a travel writer while binge eating mangoes.

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joanne godley poetry july 2024

“How fearful they must be

That they shoot you children”

                       Sarafina, funeral song lyrics


let’s take the word 

scream


scream, screamed,

have screamed,

were screaming,

will scream,

are screaming,

be screamed

as in scream

me a nightmare


as in Soweto, South Africa

in the mid-nineteen seventies

when apartheid reigned king

and a simple scream

travelled


screams of 20000 parents

waded through blood fields

to collect

fallen book bags

and blood-drenched

bones

of children

mowed like errant

turf-grass


screams hallowed the gut

like an elevator in free-fall


in Sesotho hoeletsa:  scream

in Zulu ukuthethisa:  scream

in Xhosa memeza:  scream


the screams

tsunamied

clamored witness

echoed screeches


the entomology

of scream       fuses

Middle Dutch scremen ( yell, shout)


and Old Norse skræma (“to terrify; scare”)


as in Dutch schremen (“to shout; yell; cry”)

as in Dutch schreien (“to cry; weep”)


a persistent sound


as in Michael Brown  (18)  friend-walking                                                

as in Tamir Rice  (12)  toy gun-park-playing                                              

as in Ma’Khia Bryant  (16 ) woman–altercating                                                  

as in Adam Toledo   (13) police-complying

as in Daunte White   (20) girlfriend-driving

as in Breonna Taylor (26) bed-sleeping

as in Atitiana Jefferson (28) house-chilling

as in Stephon Clark (22) grandma’s backyard-standing

as in Botham Jean (26) sofa-ice-cream-eating                                               

as in Janisha Fonville (22) home-chilling

as in Gabriella Navarez (22) driving


as in


To My Formerly-Enslaved Great-grandmother, Missouri, Who, Once Freed, Would Not Speak

Ancestors.com

Ancestors don’t come

To the page

Are missing


Am haunted 

By the idea fact

My ancestors were numbers 

On a page

Not people


Portrayed lazy despite pyramids 

Despite the sphinx

And the White House    still white

Black   but invisible 

Black   come silent

Nameless

Silenced

Tongues meaty blue- red organs 

Twisted muted

Tongues never tried


Missouri is her given name

Miss her I

Missing ri  we

A missing people

Missouri 

Name her

Ma misery   I’ve named

This big black-boned woman 

Great grandma  

Missing but conjure-able

Through memories         imagined


   Not being      

                people


Her Silence as stunned

Her Silence as dunned

Her Silence as horror

Her Silence as deference

Her Silence as reverence

Her Silence as speech-free

Her Silence as shame


Here hear    we give back 

Your tongue  Missouri

To tell us   Tell us

What was it like?


Joanne Godley lives in Mexico City. She is a physician, writer, poet, and a Pacific University MFA student. She is a Meter Keeper in the Poetry Witch Community and an Anaphora Arts fellow in both poetry and fiction. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in the Bellevue Literary Review, Mantis, Light, FIYAH, Pratik, and Account, among others. She was twice nominated for a Pushcart prize. Her prose has been published in the Massachusetts Review, the Kenyon Review online, Juked, Memoir, and others. Her second poetry chapbook, Doc.X, was recently published by Black Sunflowers Press. You can find her at Joannegodley.com, on IG at indigonerd, and on X at DrJoanneGodley.

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caroline d. Le Guin poetry July 2024

Polished grains, seed pearls

opalescent white against

my white palm. Winnowed,

milled, pounded—husk

and bran and germ all

rubbed away—seeds denatured

ungermed to starch not seed

to feed and feed and feed.


“Cherokee blood” family would say,

marking my uncle’s rich and easy tan,

my grandfather’s broad face—

we descendants of

the rice people of the south,

the lowlands, the sea islands,

people of Savannah, Charleston.


Carolina Gold:  If I take

this rice into my belly

will I taste in the passage

over lips, tongue, back of teeth

the dry bitter remnants,

the dark parts, the bran, the germ—

what was milled and polished white

into what was to be forgotten?


I turn each mouthful on my tongue

before swallowing , hoping

to taste some sign of heritage

to name and to know the

power of pain my ancestors

held in white hands–power to consume

land, labor, the ancient knowledge

of the first rice people

people of Senegambia their knowledge

of the planting and flooding,

the winnowing, the pounding,

the baskets and the boards,

the soil and the sweat—everything

that was taken I seek to take

into my body and the salt of grief

salt of blood salt of the wide Atlantic

to eat, swallow, trying to remember all

that I have never known,

the dark germ, the winnowed husk


let it nourish the hidden germ

the dark seed once denatured,

polished to whiteness

and forgetting. Let each grain

teach my tongue to speak

this rift of history to speak

the debt of blood of gold to speak

to the broken kinship  

among the people of rice.


Caroline D. Le Guin taught English at Portland Community College until retiring a few years ago. She now writes and tends a small farm on the traditional ancestral lands of the Molalla, Clackamas Chinook, and Kalapuya peoples in the North Willamette Valley of Oregon. 

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Beth Brown Preston poetry June 2024

You sat with brushes in hand and the light flowing above and below,

a prayer like paper. The light illumined all our sacred trees.

Somehow, we forgot all our raucous and joyous past love

when I asked you to listen for the screen door’s slam

and the call to supper as I brought you the evening meal.


And then there was that folio of your recent sketches:

so many similar dark faces filled with joy.


Then I gazed at the rich, brown texture of a watercolor on the page,

a man’s tortured face, his beard, his tough glowing bronze skin.

You said it was a portrait of your brother,

who died overseas during a rain of fire in the Viet Nam war.


And you put down your brushes to confess

we are going to start life all over again 

without waging the private wars that keep us together.


You painted your dead brother’s face

against a background of blue.


Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist with two collections of poetry from the Broadside Lotus Press and two chapbooks of poetry, including OXYGEN II (Moonstone Press, 2022). She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program at Goddard College. She has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania; and, a Bread Loaf Scholar. Her work has been recognized by the Hudson Valley Writers Center, the Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute, The Writer’s Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Her poetry and reviews have been published in numerous literary and scholarly journals.

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dana francisco miranda poetry may 2024

for Gaza

1.

my eyes 

              two dead seas

witness 

              daily slaughter


—the butcher’s feast,

the reaper’s bounty—


witness 

—the healer’s gauze,

the morphine’s mercy—


              Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! 

              don’t    you know? 


Gallant says human 

animals 

do not need      when

              corralled or culled.


life does not      need life.


beyond rations 

                or rationality, 

this is the desert 

where   insurgent winds

choke   on phosphorous

               where   open 

                             mouths 

                             have 

              stitched tongues. 


2.  

so, give me your 

              list of banned words


intifada – nakba – ya’aburnee.


              i will give you a list

of the dead—olive        trees

ripped from     root, sunbirds

plucked             from sky.      i 

will lay a tatreez of   martyrs

at your feet. i will craft lianas

from              amputated limbs

so even        Death can carry 

Palestine like a germinating

seed.      i will turn my distilled 

                tears          into bullets,

i will turn my          complacency 

              into a thing thrown,

i will turn the world

upside-down, 

              until all saplings 

              are replanted    as limbs 

                             returned. 


3.  

but if    you do not cease the fires, 

do not ask         smoke for balance. 

life cannot        home in death 

                           or occupation. 


              night is meant to be filled 

              with       dark delirium


              —the dreams of children,

              the impolite 

                            hopes of ghosts—


it is not             meant 

                           to be carcass. 

thus, let us 

              invent new ways to blush. 

let us 

              make bullhorns of our 

              dusted anger

                              until we exhume 

                              new futures. 

              let us 

              be shameless. 


Dana Francisco Miranda is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His research is in political philosophy, Africana philosophy, and psychosocial studies. His current book manuscript, The Coloniality of Happiness, investigates the philosophical significance of suicide, depression, and wellbeing for members of the African Diaspora. His most recent work has been published in Creolizing Hannah Arendt, The Movement for Black Lives: Philosophical Perspectives, Journal of World Philosophies, EntreLetras, Journal of Global Ethics, Disegno: The Quarterly Journal of Design, and The APA Blog: Black Issues in Philosophy. Find him on Twitter at @DanaFMiranda.

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chinemerem prince nwankwo poetry may 2024

for girls frail & brittle.  for body crossed

with a disheveled spirit. & everything in

the     name of gender distill

salvation. how much illumine a reflection?

there’s a sag  story  in shattered glasses.

every ample breast hangs as a pendant

of grief. of past merge from                    jarring

voices. of future that splits in shards.

of many solitary night that craves

the gift of death.

my poem gradient to a girl. don’t

know if that                   counts. & each hour

past

flesh & blood  she loses identity.

it hurts to rove into strange waters.

but girls sail

broken                      in agitated waves.

what depiction are we? maybe a girl with

the shadow of a damsel. mother

says we’re feminine ‘cause our legs opens.

 & we immerse  a cycle of  ritual:

       splitting & opening. [daughters of Eve].


Chinemerem Prince Nwankwo, SWAN IV, is an Igbo apprentice poet and essayist who’s currently a final year student of the Department of History and International Studies, University of Uyo, Nigeria. Chinemerem is poetry editor at The Cloudscent Journal and an assistant poetry editor at Arkore Arts. He tweets at @CPNwankwo.

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Cheryl Atim Alexander poetry May 2024

Dearest, Lilith. Israel is carpet bombing Rafah, Gaza—right NOW.

Shh…I’m watching the Superbowl.

     But, Lilith. More than 1.7 million Palestinians are in Rafah, Gaza—right NOW.

Shh…I’m watching the Superbowl.

     But, Lilith. The Prime Minister said Rafah was a safe space for the displaced—

Shh…I’m watching the Superbowl.

     But, Lilith. I am watching newborns and toddlers with their legs blown off in real time.

Shh…I’m watching the Superbowl.

     But, Lilith—see these images teeming with terrorized children hanging from the rafters.

Shh…I’m watching the Superbowl.

     But, Lilith.  Babies are being wrapped into the tiniest bags.

Shh…I’m watching the Superbowl.

     But, Lilith. Mothers and Fathers are weeping            wailing in desperation          trying to find safe passage for their babies.

Shh…I’m watching the Superbowl.

     But, Lilith. Multiple families are being decimated by Israel as we speak.

Shh…I’m watching the Superbowl.

     Oh, Lilith. A little girl called Hind Rajab is starving to death among her decomposing relatives        and those who set out to save her are scorched alive    and strewn into smithereens.

Shh…I’m watching the Superbowl.

     My Dearest Lilith. The world has tipped over onto its head and I am          afraid. Enough is enough                       and I am too weary                      to whisper      

          “No more?”

Shush now. Please! The President is tweeting.


Cheryl Atim Alexander is an Afro Greek woman who was born into a family of readers and writers. Her writing emanates from a plethora of life-affirming experiences and serves to inspire anyone who may have misplaced their voice. A tireless writer, she has been published in Wilderness House Literary Review, Written Tales Magazine, Moon Shadow Sanctuary Press, and Kalahari Review. Cheryl was recently nominated for Best of the Net 2024.