#finalpoems / [?]

Be it enacted by the Legislature of Alabama, That any person wandering or strolling about in idleness, who is able to work, and has no property to support him; or any person leading an idle, immoral, profligate life, having no property to support him, and who is able to work and does not work; or any person able to work, having no property to support him, and who has no visible or known means of a fair, honest, and reputable livelihood: (the term ‘visible and known means of a fair, honest, and reputable livelihood’ above used shall be construed to mean reasonable, continuous employment, at some lawful occupation, for reason able compensation, or a fixed and regular income from property or other investment, which income is sufficient for the support and maintenance of such vagrant); or any person having a fixed abode, who has no property to support him, and who lives by stealing, trading or bartering stolen property; or any person who is a common drunkard, or a professional gambler, living in idleness; or any able bodied person who is found begging for a living, or who quits his house and leaves his wife and children without means of substance; or any person who is able to work, and who does not work but hires out his minor children and lives upon their wages; or any person over sixteen and under twenty-one years of age, able to work and who does not work, and has no property to support him and has not some known or visible means of a fair, honest, and reputable livelihood, and whose parents are unable to support him, and who is not in attendance upon some educational institute; or any person who is a prostitute or a keeper of a house of prostitution and who has no honest employment whereby to maintain herself, is hereby declared to be a vagrant and must on conviction be fined not more than five hundred ($500.00) dollars and may also be imprisoned in the county jail or sentenced to hard labor for the county for not more than six months. Provided, that it shall be a sufficient defense to the charge of vagrancy under any of the provisions of this act that the defendant has made bona fide efforts to obtain employment at reasonable prices for his labor, and has failed to obtain the same. The provisions of this act shall not apply to persons who are idle under strike orders or lockouts.¹

I always keep my new work ID above my state
ID in my wallet because my family has been work

in this state longer than we’ve been citizens
in this state. My body was work, was wealth; what is

my body doing if it isn’t breaking
earth or breaking itself for the state? What is my body doing outside

of a school or inside
of a parked car or passing

time in a park? If my body is not on
the clock, then my body is idle,

and idle hands are the devil,
and the devil must be chained

and sentenced to a lake of fire.
And the fire can be United

Steel. The fire can be Red
Mountain ore. The fire can be a River

Falls lumber camp. The fire can be a Belle
Ellen slope. But the fire always comes

after the chain. Black bodies can’t be free
in Alabama because black bodies

were never free in Alabama. Somebody has to pay
for me, and my new work ID says I can pay. And I’m happy to

say that I can pay for my mother
when she orders pizza on Thanksgiving eve.

The new job lets me pay. I interviewed for the job
on a Thursday, the fourth day of the work week.

Four is my lucky number.
I was born on the fourth

of the month, and I’m the fourth kid when god
knows my parents didn’t need a fourth kid. But

I interviewed for the new job on a Thursday
because Thursday was always my mother’s

day off, the day she didn’t belong to J.C. Penney.
She was with me, and we had outings,

and I didn’t have to wake up early to work the coal
out of my eye and get ready to go

to grandma’s house. I was free
to sit in the front seat of the Chevy Celebrity

and ask my mom dumb kid questions
like if she ever dreamed

of being anything when she grew up.
And, really, this new job, this new ID, and this

poem won’t stop one siren
or sentencing guideline. It’s all about me

buying my independence back from an Alabama
that swore I could afford to live

a free life if I was willing to
sweat enough. It’s all about me still trying

to pay off the debt I took on
to buy into that lie.

¹ Text taken from 1903 Alabama Vagrancy Law

Jason McCall holds an MFA from the University of Miami. His collections include Two-Face God; Dear Hero, (winner of the 2012 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize); Silver; I Can Explain; and Mother, Less Child (co-winner of the 2013 Paper Nautilus Vella Chapbook Prize). He and P.J. Williams are the editors of It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip-Hop. He is an Alabama native, and he currently teaches at the University of North Alabama.

#finalpoems / [?]

In the event that the cookout is cancelled

& so I tear me
from my own selfish grief;
soothe my anxiety into a poem
caulking my reassurance line by line.

I poem the way a     man
staring at a mountain’s horizon
from the base of his obsession
makes a keepsake of every foothold.

I poem the lung’s osmosis,
Abandoning my breath’s
.  dictation
. to the wind

I poem memories
of my baby brother at infancy,
place his quickening upturnt brow
onto earth’s decaying orbit
& monitor his reflected laugh in the moon’s glare.

I poem my mom into everything
that gives my pen pulse,
& she writes herself
a nurturing constant
into the meter of my life.

My sister poems herself
as confidant to whom
the apocalypse shivers at;
our conjoined laugh is stitched
at the nervous system, disorienting
the melancholy in each stanza.

I poem my fathers,
chronicle their insistence
in eroding flint from my forehead
through their wellsprings of wisdom.
Pen the jagged softening into fluidity.

I poem the Messiah,
testify of each day’s taste,
swoon at the sugar
& sift, through the bitter, acidity
of meals mistakenly consumed.

I poem my eroding flesh,
dismissing the tendered gall
& repent, sacrificing the days
not consumed with love’s burning bush.

I poem cousins
in trips to the convenience store
and Pepsi’s
bought with my aunt’s money.

I poem Chicago
& all the days spent separate
from family I don’t see enough.

But I poem the reunions
especially snug into the paper,
stuffing the margins
with the branches in the family tree
until the leaves tug
tighter at my roots.

& so I poem, my family first
& foremost, because if it ends
they were all that was left
for me.

& in the event
the screen fades to black
before the film finishes

I braid the BBQ scent
into the credits without charring flesh,
I stencil the sway of hips
massaging stiffness from the air
all along the cardboard cover

& in this ending scene
we all outlive the bullet
or the cancer,
or the divorce

& the only moral
is shared laughs,
the game of spades,
or the well-licked spoon wet with cake batter

the coffin saved for all my pretense.

In this renege of an apocalypse
bury me in creation’s breath
as it caresses the mountain peak
and let the Creator breathe again

Terrance Brown: 23 by way of St. Louis Missouri, previously published in Bellerive’s Sonder, wusgoodblack.com, issue 3 of Bad Jacket, poetrypotion.com & the site BrooklynButtah.com. A pacifist deciphering the mathematics of a war time society. Bred from scribbles on the tabletops in your local schoolery.

#finalpoems / [?]

if it ends tomorrow, i die the luckiest person who ever lived

i own a body that is mine
and when i breathe
each unguaranteed piece of air,
i breathe every lung
that came before me

i live with a human
i love voraciously,
wake to her hot face
and kiss her like a dog
laps its silver water bowl

in the classroom,
i teach my throat to clamping,
parade in rampant gesticulation;
when i am angry,
my wrath’s a monarch,
when i’m happy,
the light from my teeth
burns little holes
in their foreheads

nights, i slit my eyes open
and words spill black ink
on a computer screen;
sometimes i hate the words
and sometimes
they’re fatty and excellent
as prime rib,
but i always have them

i eat good meals, two-a-day,
gathered from a supermarket;
i haven’t wanted in years

i live in a warm place,
drink good beer,
make coffee so strong
it should be illegal,
when i cry i know a storm’s
passing through me,
when it storms i know
the mud will smell
of frog-catching season

who could say anyone’s
ever had more?
i go to sleep
in night’s star-fat silence.

Brendan Walsh has lived and taught in South Korea, Laos, and South Florida. His work appears in Glass Poetry, Indianapolis Review, Wisconsin Review, Mudfish, Lines + Stars, and other journals. He is the author of Make Anything Whole (Five Oaks Press), Go (Aldrich Press) and Buddha vs. Bonobo (Sutra Press). He’s online at www.brendanwalshpoetry.com.

#finalpoems / [?]

Summer Storm

The air is thick with angry heat.

A clap of thunder shakes my body into a frenzied madness.

I am sliced by a thin silver blade of lightning.

I stretch out my arms.

The sky opens.

The lighting slices through me.

Slash after slash,
Piercing my flesh.

Red raindrops collect on my skin
until puddles of bright red collect at my feet.

The rain slows.

The sky is stitched by a layer of humidity.

The sun carves a path through the clouds,

burning the raw flesh of each lightning strike
etched onto my skin.

The air is still thick.

It is not angry

But another storm will come.

April Bandy-Taylor holds a MA degree in Counseling and an MEd in Physical Education/Exercise Science. Her greatest passions include poetry, Broadway musicals, and animal rights. Her writing has been featured on CharlestonPoets.com. She currently resides in Charleston, SC with her wife, 3 rescue dogs and one rowdy chinchilla.

#finalpoems / [?]

The Defeat Of Melancholia

This beach, the end of everything,
here, as Melancholia and Earth collide.
Your doomed body a new world;
all things possible now,

now, time truly nothing—
if seconds only remain
why measure them so short?
if soon we cease, what use
in cursing cessation?

No space for half voices,
time and terra firma break
like ocean; we cry out
a final big bang, molecules
in fusion, an ecstatic combustion.

Raging within our skins,
shuddering with the ground, with life,
a great high humming
we’ve found, finally,
at the end of age.

The wave approaches.
Light divides before us.
You hold it and me,
pieces of the same, all;
and then
all break apart, your heart generous
unto the last,
too ferocious
for even the cosmos to devour.

Aaron Glover is the Co-Executive Director of The Writer’s Garret, a nonprofit literary organization in Dallas, TX. His first chapbook Bio Logic (INF Press) was published in 2017. His works appear in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Illya’s Honey, the Red River Review, Chicon Street Poets, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in acting from the University of Houston, and was on faculty in the Department of Performance Studies at Texas A&M University.

#finalpoems / [?]

SOMETHING LIKE THIS

If you were to bury your gaze
deep in the streets of my eyes,
you will see an entire episode
of a stench calamity.
.
Like photographs
of a fatherless boy
who ties the sun
around his neck
while searching the smell
of his murdered father
on his mother’s crinkled skin.
.
See,
there is a way
fire burns in my body.
Sometimes I blend water and dust
before shoving them down my throat,
for they hold
shadows of my brothers
who went and never came back
to tell tales of how the city glitters
when the rich sit on the laps
of the poor.
.
Something like this,
is what happens in my village
when a girl is forced to build
a shrine between her legs.
‘Cause her body
is said to be a temple
if she perches on its flesh;
the weight of men
who wander around with bags of lust.
.
Something like this,
is what swallowed mother
before she turned
into a dirge
I pierced on my right ear.
‘Cause every melody grasped,
Is sign of hope－
The sun will one day
rise in my village.

Chanda Chongo is a 20-year-old writer and poet hailing from Zambia’s tourist capital Livingstone, in the central part of Africa.
Some of his works have appeared on Youth Shades magazine, Lunaris Review, FunDza and other social media platforms. His recently started out a blog, and you can see more of his works on afrocabin.wordpress.com

#finalpoems / [?]

For women whose bodies are bags of grief

And when he promised to be your shelter
You forgot that a basin is no home for the
Depth of an ocean.

And when you find a woman
Whose body is a bag of grief
Sit her down and show her
how you carry your scars
Like beautiful birthmarks
And then tell her
How the sun walks out
Of the day without apology.
Tell her how love heals itself.
And in her core, she is love
Breathing healing.

Ogunkoya Samuel is a physiotherapy student in Nigeria. His poems have been published in Kalahari Review, AfricanWriter and Best New African poets anthology 2017.

#finalpoems / [?]

Science Fiction

the artists refused the commission/ love me/ they needed space/ the artists/ love me/ the safe word/ the soldiers/ commissioned/ to throw a huge/ parade/ the artists closed their eyes/ it was a sign/ the town was quiet/ in an alternate universe/ they are cutting off the hair of the dead/ lithe and hushed/ isn’t it romantic/ love me/ when something happens/ proselytize/ lady fingers/ liberty they love/ me on demolition day/ the artists were forecasting the trajectories/ of airplanes and buses prepared to crash/ everyone wants answers/ the soldiers split stems with spit/ find me underneath/ a smooth mahogany desk/ eating lead/ an act of contrition/ etched into the back of everyone’s neck/ it is hard to love yourself

Julianne Neely is an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where she received the Truman Capote Fellowship and was awarded the 2017 John Logan Poetry Prize. Her writing has been published in The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Hobart, LEVELER, Pacifica Literary Review, New Orleans Review, and more. Her chapbook ‘The Body Beside Herself’ is forthcoming from Slope Editions in February 2018.

#finalpoems / [?]

It is in my nature to want things I cannot have, to have things I do not want.

Who were you before you were memories steeping in cortical networks begging not to be fed?

In this poem,
my body is not an apology.
In this poem,
I’m my saving grace.
In this poem,
I am done pouring myself out,
by which I mean:
I am pouring myself in.

Frances Ann is a 21-year-old poet who can be found @flils on Instagram.

#finalpoems / [?]

Continuation

The earth was always
made to spit us back out
send us to dust
where we came from
the waves we once surfed
to engulf us
the fires we held in hand
to burn us
in short destructive manner
we found time to
fall in love look
to the future
hold on tight to worries
that never mattered
objects that will too
turn to ash
along with us
erased
new
canvas.

Amanda Kusek is a writer living in New York City with her neurotic Jack Russell Terrier, Ajax. Her poetry and essays have been published in Entropy Mag’s Enclave, Anti-Heroin Chic, Blotterature and Niche. She was a featured poet at the Westmoreland Arts & Heritage Festival. She maintains her own blog at CheapCourage.com and runs Anon Magazine’s advice column, Thrive.

#finalpoems / [?]

Unique at Heart

My mind can be a sordid place, filled with shadow and sin;
My thoughts a twisted mass of dark, black and terrible within.
Sometimes I wish it was not so;
Pray it change by tide and flow.

I want to hide it, to keep the black unseen;
I wear a mask, to cover all that is unclean.
Which one would you like to see? I have so many to choose from,
So many faces to offer the eyes as they gaze and come.

I do not feel like having the corners of my lips turn up so easily,
To have my eyes crinkle and alight so endearingly;
Perhaps they might shine and shimmer,
Threaten to spill as my strength grows thinner.

I do not want the outside to come in, the stranger to witness,
All that I am, the core of myself, the truth in the stillness.
I am left alone, amidst all company,
I am apart, surrounded by all the somebodies.

Fiona Jenkins is a recent graduate of the Creative Writing MA programme at Oxford Brookes University. She also has a BA in Classical Studies from Concordia University. She has previous publications in poetry and short-fiction, and has a novel in development. Born in Canada, she grew up in Montreal, Quebec with her family where the lush and natural landscape inspired her to write from an early age. She is currently at work completing her first prose manuscript.

#finalpoems / [?]

Too Late To Cry

The wind of the Nigerian soul is wayward,
Birthing charlatans, and mercurial thieves,
That neither bode well for you and me, and our tomorrow

They never ponder into the future,
But hustle to outrun a plan that has yet to conceive
They are ‘neither visionaries, nor utopian dreamers,’
But unwavering preachers of extravagance, and ‘the expense of being poor’

The resulting thunder strikes,
Breaking protests of freedom,
and the overrun of political ‘long-throats’ with their timeless ‘change.’
The Power Elite is for the nonce, disenfranchised,
Until He, who suddenly thinks his shine has come, dies.
The poison, dripping from his drunken lips, dries.

The wind of the Nigerian soul is solid gold,
It cannot be mined with absolute integrity or common sense,
But a conniving of a new ostentation,
Sprawling from cathedrals of assorted analytics, and serial media advertising

The wind of the Nigerian soul,
Is a lure to dance, and jive, till death!
Who is the future to question our mature degeneration?

ABOUT THE POEM
Nigeria’s leadership is widely perceived as one that’s motivated by greed and corruption, and is never trusted. Be it leadership at political, social or religious levels, none can be trusted any longer. Unfortunately, this crop of persons strives to justify their love of the people. But for the masses, these leaders are the heart of the country’s challenges or decay. This poem examines the peculiar leadership identified here as the Nigerian soul, and its corrupting influence.

Adeiza Atureta currently lives in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city. His poems have appeared in Camouflage:  Best of Contemporary Writing from Nigeria; Black Communion: Poems of The New African Poets; A Feast For The Mind; Temptation, and Shout It Out! Poems Against Domestic Violence. He has also published a short story in Write For Light: A Collection of True Stories and Poems about Finding Light in the Darkness. He is a member of Nigerian Institute of Public Relations.

#finalpoems / [?]

NATURA. CIÒ CHE STA PER NASCERE.

Ho incontrato uomini di un villaggio nascosto
uomini dallo sguardo primitivo
dalle movenze primordiali, dal riflesso tardivo
che sanno del bosco cose che io non conosco

che siedono per ore sul muschio
a cinguettare come uccelli, a interpretare la natura.
Si posano farfalle sui loro occhi. Alberi, foglie li abbracciano.
Il loro sguardo non è temuto dai pesci.

I loro aculei non hanno lenza, non hanno ami.
Le radici sono i loro piedi che si nutrono delle storie di ieri.
Le loro spoglie asciugate dal vento sono attaccate al presente
alla pietra che è sorretta dal mondo e non dal cemento.

NATURE. THE SOON-TO-BE BORN

I came across men from a hidden village,
men with primitive gazes,
primordial movements, a careful intuition,
who know things about the forest I’ve never heard of,

who sit for hours on the moss
chirping like birds, unraveling nature.
Butterflies rest on their eyes. Trees, leaves embrace them.
Fish don’t fear their stare—

no lines or hooks on the end of their spears.
Their feet are roots, fed by stories of the past.
Their skins, dried in the breeze, cling to the present
to stones that rise from earth and not cement.

(translated from italian by Todd Portnowitz)

Massimo D’Arcangelo (1982) is an italian ecopoet and lives in Siena, Italy. He is the author of poetry books: ‘Il battito dello scorpione. Ecopoesie.’ (Sacco Editore, Roma 2012) and ‘Intatto. Intact. Ecopoesia. Ecopoetry’ (La Vita Felice, Milano 2017) co-authored with Anne Elvey and Helen Moore. His poems have been published in ‘Novecento non più. Verso il Realismo Terminale’ (La Vita Felice, Milano 2016), a milestone anthology about Terminal Realism which includes poems from authors belonging to this trend as outlined by Guido Oldani.
His works have been published widely in national and international journals, art catalogues (‘Paesaggi Inquieti’ by Mario Giammarinaro) and collective works on ecology. He represents Italy in the Bolivian project ‘Poesía en acción’, and his ecopoems have been translated into Spanish and collected in the volume ‘Dando voz, al que no tiene’ (J. Barriga Nava, Bolivia 2016).

#finalpoems / [?]

if you ever write about me
do me a solid
nd have the fucking guts
to put my name in it

we exchange messages for months
but it still felt like
you wouldn’t even look at me

Amy Anne is a bisexual anarcho feminist who isn’t even fucking with you.
She’s only online to announce publication: @amyamyanneanne

#finalpoems / [?]

reassemble

the most i can offer her is my broke down heart
it’s burnt to a damn crisp
there’s pieces of it all over my hands
since she set it on fire again
without a second thought
yet i’m still here
waiting on her to come back around
as if she is an afternoon bus loop
the same bus that runs me over
yet i reassemble my bones and run back into her arms
singing praise into her mouth
handling her with care like she’s fine china
meanwhile she never offers the same
she drops me off in the middle of nowhere
then comes back weeks or months later
with the same excuses like:
i needed time or i needed space
a classic excuse is how i’ve broken her heart
too many times to count
which has lead me to realize
that we are just two lovers that
equally destroy/build up one another

Vanessa Maki is a queer person of color who writes mostly poetry and fan fiction. She’s forthcoming in Faded Out. You can find her poetry blog on tumblr: wordslikewolvesteeth.

#finalpoems / [?]

A Hazy Account of Days Gone By

I was doing the math the other day
and it dawned on me

I’ve gone half my life without you
millions of seconds

half as many minutes
too many hours

numbers falling from a grid
down a chute, way out into the ether

most days are without incident
like clockwork

and the thing about clocks
with their Mechanical hands and relentless tick tock

they stop for no one or nothing
so I keep moving

without hesitation or second guessing
for to linger in thought would mean getting lost in the visceral

and I ain’t got time for that
so I keep moving

but every now and then
before the light of day

and the sound of running water
and small footsteps takes hold

I allow myself to stick around
where memories of you roam free in my foggy head

all fragmented and messy
disjointed
bits and pieces of a hazy childhood coming into view

you see, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen your face
and I’m having trouble remembering you

backseat leather
baby blue mats

seatbelt not required
I don’t drive on freeways

your short pixie cut
the color of Thrifty’s ice cream

with lips to match
reminiscent of LA sunsets

and courtesy of Maybelline
your eyes in plain sight

one eye on the road
one eye on us

it’s only when I shut out the noise
can I see you, ma

Damned those spots!
you counted and tried getting rid of

I notice now on my aging hands
and I, unlike you, don’t want to see them go

if it means letting you go
five spots on my left, a dozen on my right

it’s only when I smell las empanadas
can I feel you, ma

squeezing. pinching. and twisting
my soft and fleshy ears between your seemingly infinite fingers

funny how my own, covered in creases
dusted in specks

find their way to my children
without hesitation or second guessing

I keep photos of you
a dusty stack of paper

in no particular order

All fragmented, messy
Disjointed
Bits and pieces of a life no longer beating
Yet in these hands
There is still life

Gaby Herrera Stern is a bay area writer with a west coast sensibility and somewhat healthy obsession with the 80s. She creates content for clients in the arts and culinary industries and specializes in telling meaningful stories about culture and lifestyle. When she isn’t writing about the arts, Latinx issues, or the 80s, you’ll find her reading post war love stories, binging on anything David Lynch, and avoiding karl the fog at all costs. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two children. Twitter: @gabyhstern