—Do you have a fear of losing people?

I once rustled moonlight underneath the blanket
and threatened to keep it. I unwrapped it slowly
like sand loosed by waves, a child with one present
come Christmas morning.

—Do you feel that being black makes you a target?

If shooting holes into darkness was not a sport,
then each glow, each bend and arc, each reach
and fiery flicker of stellar assortment would be a lie—

—Who did you vote for?

All I wanted were bodies back.

—Why do black people run from police?

The concrete is hot. These are new shoes.
As sons and daughters of Mercury, we are partial
to wind sprints, Julys and Junes.

—Slavery was such a long time ago. Why can’t you just get over it?

(Sisyphuses. Gluttons for punishment,
you’d joke.) Because some of us swam
to the sea’s depth, told us this secret:
(                                               )

—Michael Brown is in so many of your poems. Did you know him?

I often viewed the Arch’s bend over a small piece of St. Louis
like it owned the city. I, in my school bus, passed—never able
to connect both ends.

—Who is Icarus to you?

A canary on the heels of antelope. A Pegasus without wings.

—What have you learned from protest?

I’m in love with the sound of freedom, the way the top teeth
sink into the bottom lip, the way the tongue hovers in suspense,
before bouncing suddenly to the roof of a mouth
like a mallet striking a lever; the puck rising to toll the bell,
the last consonant ending in a kiss.
 
—What do you hope to accomplish by writing this poem?

I hope to release a hummingbird from the palm of my hand,
watch it fly off on little wings.

Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and San Bernardino, California, Chaun Ballard is an affiliate editor for Alaska Quarterly Review, a Callaloo fellow, and a graduate of the MFA Program at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. Chaun Ballard’s chapbook, Flight, is the winner of the 2018 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize and is published by Tupelo Press. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in ANMLY (FKA Drunken Boat), Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Chiron Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Frontier Poetry, International Poetry Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Rattle, and other literary magazines. His work has received nominations for both Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize.

Architectural Integrity

My floor could possibly be coming apart
but I’m hanging on for now
& for good reason

Catastrophe should only be used
as the name for a fragrance
that only exists in a fictional universe

One where a person starts every day
with a montage full of clues

I’ve spent the past week
trying to remember any particular moment
from my middle school existence

I’ve got nothing

except a general feeling
that my t-shirts were too big

& the thought that
I should’ve taken every opportunity
to garden with my grandma

Why would you say this is sad

Without anything to look forward to
the world isn’t affected much
It says right here this is blesséd

Aretha Franklin Has Died

Seems impossible
that anybody is able to think about anything else

But I’m being unreasonable
even about myself (eye-roll upon eye-roll)

That’s what the edges of memory are for
Covered in foam
Hoping to be jumped in
though prepared for the inevitable slip & fall

Glory be what makes us love the ground
as much as what floats above it

When I think of dying I think
about where I’d like to be forever

I’ll forgive you for guessing incorrectly

I’m dancing in the kitchen I’m making a meal
for a person I love a song is playing & what a song it is
Oh I wouldn’t mind being here for a long time

Dalton Day is the author of Exit, Pursued (Plays Inverse) and a preschool teacher. He lives in Atlanta, and can be found at tinyghosthands.com.

Up the stairs coiled around the hotel
my new friend Frank and I are
lamenting that there is no
gym after all—he lamenting—
I going along—at my door I half
stick the key in, he asks again about how
to iron his pants, I have these pants with
a crease—he uses his hand
to saw the air between us
So I’m kind of tired flash a smile, nod
jetlag ha-ha- but I can just tell you how
it’s really self-explanatory or youtube
is the best teacher on and on, until
ok good night and I go in
and make the curtains meet. 

Tomorrow he tells me he is on 9 p.m.
curfew for his first special-approved trip
from home, six weeks out from being
locked up, and when he first ate
strawberries after twenty years he cried.

In the night, beyond the curtains, he touches
all the things in his hotel room, cold
sink, coated hangers, blade of the blinds,
grabs his keys and hops in his rental, pulls
into the gas station. The moon wide-faced
in the sun-damaged sky, the smell of gas, vibrations
through his palms, his black footsteps inking the black
night, many directions pointing from him like arrows.

I wish I had been out there with him, and the night
opening, the taste of the strawberry, the feel of the mouth,
I could have offered more of what coming home had
to offer, I should have taken what the night
swallowed, cupped his heels in his inky footsteps.
Take the freedom, I’m here, look
around, night all around, for the taking.

You Li is a law student and poet who lives in New York. Her work has appeared in the Nassau Literary Review and Two Cities Review. She has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Real boy the love I have made to you is unremarkable,
as it should be in a perfect world, impossible to tell
where you end and I begin.

Real boy I have recessed in your nation,
your looted land, pronounced it dead,
& closed the borders I once bled for.

Real boy I dream of fist un-flung,
forever boy, I have wept on your behalf,
I have wept for the rifle that fires flowers.

I have wept for your father, his secret sorrow
I have wept for your god locked in a bottle
I have wept for the ghost you never knew.

Real boy what do you call a wolf without teeth?
a wolf without fur, exiled by bigger wolves,
a wolf greater than the lack of his parts.

What do you call the boy refracted? His salted sea,
his rivers Jordan, John, and Luke
he who must be touched to be known.

What do you call a cancer by any other creed, that
which consumes the flesh, consumes the need,
what do you call a boy by any other name?

Real boy I have missed you every morning,
your funeral of a face, your
box of shattered pearls, your

mourning for the sake of
all real boys.
No house worships you, no house builds itself.

Real boy I have prayed for your forgiveness,
I have prayed to change you,
I have divided art from artist, divided

truth and nature,
I am bruised blue and pink,
my stomach soured by the fruits of your labor.

Real boy I have been the kindling,
the kerosene, I have been the underbrush,
the evergreen, I have been the root of your disdain,

your soiled seed, Real boy I have taken you
as Hades took Persephone, made you queen
for sake of starving, made

your mother ill with worry, brought
you to the edge of ruin.
Real boy

I have imagined you in the mirror,
I have imagined our bodies intermixed.
I have disguised you

for fear of reckoning, quieted you
for fear of possibility.
I have made you the object

of my unrest. Real boy,
the boy of my invention, the boy
with ten fingers and ten toes,

always I will be here,
stirring the same pot, wearing the
same shoes, missing the same people.

And you will be here, too
regretting nothing, not even
the hair you grew. Fantastic boy,

with your edgeless axe, your petty thunder;
I hold your breath anchor heavy in my arms
and let the burden bring us under.

C.J. Strauss is a transgender writer and artist currently pursuing their BA in English at Barnard College. Their art and writing has been published both internationally and domestically by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, The Claremont Review, Vade Mecum Magazine, GREYstone Youth Litmag, Echoes Literary Magazine, The Free Library of the Internet Void, RATROCK Magazine, and the Barnard Bulletin. C.J. presently interns at the Poetry Society of New York and the Visible Poetry Project where their responsibilities include social media management and community engagement. They tweet @cjsxyz.