[creative nonfiction] I wanted to follow my brothers and sisters through. I did not mean to walk into the glass door beside the open one. My body, though slight, could not slip between its molecules; I shattered that crystal barrier. I created the shards that brought the pain and the blood drops and the shame. […]
I Wasn’t One (Inspired by Yehuda Amichai) I wasn’t one of the stolen. I wasn’t one of the many million who had once only known the sweetness of the sea. I wasn’t confused cargo stacked like the bricks of Babel in the belly of a wooden beast. I wasn’t shackled to my skin, forgotten in […]
[fiction] Cheryl’s bones cracked as she leaned back into her chair, the bent wood snapping and sagging under worrisome weight. John hadn’t come up the back stairs yet, leaning himself on the peeling, metal railing as he dragged his lumbering feet. She had listened for those familiar footsteps, straining her good ear in the direction […]
Whispered messages dissolve in rivers of attention and glances A long sigh exhales through the valley to Kaipara-moana Molecules of sound emanate from luminous branches A syntax of yellow leaves on black trees Filaments of falling marked by fluid silvery drops Accurate shapes, incarnate wairua exclamations Hallucinations of glamorous echoing veils Silky clay nostalgias, transgressions […]
After the hairstylist finished shearing away my hair, I remember examining the glossy brown strands scattered around me. It had once been part of me and now no longer was. How easily I had been able to renounce it. I wish I could renounce my skin and thoughts and self as easily as I had renounced my hair; but no, I am forever doomed to live in this cage of bone and flesh.
Ashaki Jackson began her career as a social psychologist and program evaluator before focusing on the craft of poetry. Ms. Jackson was a Cave Canem fellow and a poetry activist. She also cofounded Women Who Submit, an organization that helps women with the submission of their literary work to bring about more gender balance in […]
[translated poetry] First Afternoons in Lesbos Remember those afternoons in November. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The rain would make the patio a cloister, and the smell of the earth would reach the window from which we leaned. It was then that the house was our refuge, the island where we made our hands mature, our bodies barely debuted. […]
[translated poetry] Rhapsody on Stench Don’t stay at cheap hotels—just don’t, he said prostitutes that knock on doors at midnight, just like disposable containers containing disposable sex disposable toilet paper and paper cups, rusty faucets manageresses who apply too much fake perfume even the artificial lighting and white bed sheets all have stench for forty […]
because you were never more than hands to boil the deer skulls, a tongue to lick the blood that dried between the creases of his knuckles. Just bones to grip and flesh to fuck on whiskey nights when his apartment stank of you. Only a bale of wheat left out in late November frost. You […]
[translated poetry] V Fresheur and life “Same current, waters always new” The voice runs over the waters ++++++++++speeches crossed from god to god +++++sorcerous heritage, seaswells burgeoning +++++with careful lightness ++++++++++same as +++++same as grass crown, thatch, lalang; water crystalline, upslope downslope harmony, +++++++++++++++that the spirits’ good humor won’t cloud. Begone-become, begone as foam +++++++++++++++leaving […]
[translated poetry] * This is how, oh so quietly, with their eyes closed, babies are dropped into the world. Like grains of rain, in the dark, from the palm of a giant hand into tubes, into a spider’s tent, a cold apple. The world is quiet, in the transparent beehive cells the babies slumber, estranged […]
—for James Fuson (20 Years Reflections of an Empty Sky, Soft Sculpture Press, 2014) from a prison cell window seven inches of rectangular blue sometimes gray or black, but no stars the spotlights too glaring once a month the setting moon before dawn he stares pencil moves—tiny scratching of the mouse’s scurrying feet in the […]
I wear my purple suit to testify against my father. Deep-hued and simply tailored, it masks my insecurities, costumes me in a longed-for confidence that I hope will belie my fear. I resist smoothing the brushed-gold buttons on the jacket, avoid fingering the garment’s knotted rayon slubs. Instead I worry the flat gold pendant around […]
5:02 p.m. Looking out the window you wouldn’t know Chicago is disintegrating. Cotton-candy skies swirl across the horizon. I sip cold coffee on the thirty-sixth floor of an office building. Bean-flavored liquid, the consistency of cough syrup, slides down my throat. Too much sugar. In this moment, I pretend everything is normal. People scurry from […]
[translated fiction] “The wolf tone is a musical paradox. An atonality we suffer in the name of harmony.” One of the trees has bloomed early. In the park in front of the conservatory. Dabs of pink along a dark core. What are they called? Cherry blossoms, you’d say. You’re all grown up now. Later I […]
This is the tree I had my first kiss—it was like a viewing, gory and wet. Classmates in almond branches, watching the wreck. Doing nothing to feign casualty. This is the water tower I’ve told you of many times. Yes, it was the drinking supply I swam in, naked. Yes. I got a thrill, at […]
[translated fiction] The first thing he recognized were José Luis’s mannerisms. He remembered the way he’d sit on the bench and chew the little pink eraser on his pencil. Maybe if he tried hard enough he’d be able to remember every part of the school: the sticky hallways, the fossilized gum stuck under the long […]
[translated fiction] Class struggles had been replaced by racial animosity, which was being replaced by an unprecedented form of resentment, primitive, unclassifiable, unstructured, and all-encompassing. People hated people all day, every day. Days of wrath, days of tremendous anger, and every evening he had to convince these embittered adults to buy a contraption they had […]
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