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Deported – Alexandra Mayer

I heard bodies and sledge hammers slap the cold concrete

bodies climbed over each other

and bodies flooded out

to blue jeans and radio.

“Tear down this wall Gorbachev…

Freedom is the victor!”

 

And I wanted to run away too

to microwaves.
I was greedy.

 

Yesterday’s ghosts trashed our streets.

The old bakery crumbled under eulogies.

Bottles scattered the park, where my sister stole the lips of her first love
Life was decaying.

 

The woman offered me $500 a month

How could I have thought–

Her hands weren’t like ours.

They were soft and white.

Soon, mine would be too.

 

She told me I’d be a waitress.
He told me to bend over.

His eyes were cigarettes, put out on my thigh.

“This hurts!”

 

“What are you doing? I’m here to serve!”
“You’ll be serving alright.”

I wanted to die.

 

Months in peeling walls

staring down the balcony

while he clasps his meaty hands around my neck

and he shoves his gaunt fingers into my body

and he wants me to suck on his thumb.

 

My youngest client was 12

His father brought him.

My oldest was 82.

 

My body is the “unavoidable consequence of globalization.”
My body is the supply.

This is free trade. Unfettered capitalism.

I guess that makes me a business woman.

Not a victim– A business woman.

 

You can charge twice as much if you’re pregnant.

They like a nice glow

Hope makes a girl prettier, you know.

 

Months more in peeling walls

Thousands more hands

Sometimes sixty hands a day.

Staring down the balcony.

 

The man I was sold to ripped a hole in the mattress

shoved my stomach through

so their hands could be more comfortable.

 

It’s okay.

We’ll get out. We’ll get out.

I am not a victim.

We’ll get out.

I love you.

 

A man with cracked yellow hands started to pity me

It was his sixth visit when

he led me down the stairs and into the street.

It’d been two years since my feet touched the ground.

 

Three days later, falling into a hospital bed.

She’s more beautiful than the sun

dipping into the fields we toiled

than dirt stained sun dresses

than my sister’s laugh

than any young, and naive, and alive eyes I’d ever seen.
She’s beautiful and her hands are so small and so clean.

 

The man I was sold to hovers into the room

and over her.

I scream.

 

Two policemen rush in.

I recognize their hands

When they say to me:

 

“Get out you’re old

you’re minced meat.

We want a new body. Always a new body.

You can’t take her with you.
It’s the law.”

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Prose, Prosetry

You Called Me the Sun – Ivy Juniper Manchester

The world does not breathe until I do. 

I send out love like I know what I’m looking for but the plants and animals soak in the rays, never once wondering where the heat comes from never once feeling blessed but god isn’t it just so human to pretend? When it rains they beg me not to be sad and when it thunders they all run and hide. But when it doesn’t, and the sky stays clear, I don’t matter again. The curtains are pulled aside and thank god the people can continue their lives. All i want to do is love you but if i love you too much, you spite me for my warmth; when I give you space, you beg me to come back. 

Forgive my indiscretion but why do you keep saying it’s okay?

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Prosetry

Nevadian Botaty (The Ego) – Matt Grydzuk

The other day I started a small garden chiefly of plants I could use
Built from those one-dollar Target herb thingies and anyways
I thought to myself how interesting to have such a straight-forward existence
To be consumed, to only have purpose
Never filling in the blank spots never
Playing with narrative structure just
Existing in ground, as part of the earth, in part of something more amazing,
synthetically.

How interesting not to be multipurpose
And to consume chiefly; the product of progress amalgamated
To the point where it’s taboo
I think about these matters while doing simple things like watering basil
Like constructing culinary masterpieces
Perhaps wanting to exist and existing are two halves of the same maybe there is no purpose
But to be consumed by something we’d
Never see coming
And when a friend of a friend reminds me that we are all mortal
I start to think that maybe stagnating is congruent with plant life
Or plant food
I think about these things while watering basil.

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Poetry

Observatory – Haley Ingram

I love it here.
the view reminds me of life. 
The sky the way it paints over our hands and onto our skin,
The way the color doesn’t mix together as much as an artist would like it to.
The lead in our paints is heavier than we were ever capable of lifting, but it’s all we had.
It’s all we are fed. 
We closed our coffins with the nails we’re chewing on in hopes that
You need to be undead in order to make a move-
But I don’t want to kiss death anymore 
He leaves my body to rot 
My teeth hurt from grinding against him
He has violated
All of us. 
We are all iron cast replicas forged in the fires of our own hell. 
We paint our bodies with colors of the sky and call it identity. 
Nobody likes the night 
Everyone is afraid of the dark
Why am I afraid of the dark but find so much comfort in the makeup of hell?
We call ourselves artists, 
There is no artist.
There is only nature and our mimicry,
We feed on the idea of existing originality. 
Why don’t we open our coffins?
Let’s swallow our nails and puncture our throats
To allow the nervous words to spew into one another. 
Till death do us part-
He’s not getting between us. 
We are survivors in a world imprisoned by 
The impressionable weight of shackles
And strength to carry them. 
We are convicts in that we are happy together
So that cannot be. 
But in this moment. 
I love it here. 
The view reminds me of you. 
The way the sky paints itself and the willingness to relinquish power. 
The way I don’t want it to be easy to touch you 
The way no one can touch you.
Painting doesn’t make me an artist
But it makes you a masterpiece. 
I can lift you over my head 
And in this moment. 
Life is worth living.

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Poetry

Capgras Delusions and You (The Body) – Matt Grydzuk

Degauss the stars like cathode ray tubes using only your hands

The body first thinks explicitly in omens, or foretelling the end of things

Sleep less than intended; corporeality was tailor-made for you.


The body is just a suggestion, though, like the outline of existing

Akin to the stars lacking crystal clear imagery yet making shapes

Yet causing images in the night

And I sat and watched them unfold, shaking mildly, how beautiful.


How beautiful, the suggestion of form;

The existence of existence

Like wisps of stardust off the tips of your fingers and the rest of your outline

You are a degaussed constellation.


How beautiful the burning sensation; the smell

How beautiful destroying the innards

Like dying stars or a comet moving faster and then it’s gone

Creating outlines creating memories making

Sentences with your movements but no words.


How beautiful linguistics; complete sentences with two independent clauses

Intertwined to make the sun rise.

Watch it leave you like blood from the mouth, like stardust from the nose and eyes.

All other things beautiful like the suggestion of an outline; like actually falling asleep.


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Poetry

The Positivity in Glass Jars – Brooke Safferman

Four jars made of glass, lined up on my window sill

The mint green, 

the pale rose, 

the totally clear, 

the almost-purple.

The way the light shines through them makes me giggle

Sort of like the way your smile shines through my emotional walls of glass

Once so strong, now I’m so fragile

Your delicate touch could crush me with too much force(accidentally)

“Stay positive”, they say

So I draw on a smile with my lipstick tube but

Before I leave my room to enter the world

I pause to look at the positivity in glass jars.

 

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Poetry

Meta-cognition explained in Lithuanian (The Head) – Matt Grydzuk

The head

Chiefly, where pre-calculus goes to die.

And truthfully I don’t know much else about it, but I do know,

Or remember, that my mother told me always to be grateful

For what you have.

And I can’t say I was

Because so many self-inflicted head traumas starts to pile up when nothing

You do is perfect and you have to blame SOMEONE and

Knowledge of chlorophyll is always dying and you’ve never had a green thumb

Next thing I know my head is a graveyard and sometimes I kick over eternal lights to watch

The information flowing out like candle wax like

This is grey matter flowing through eye sockets like this

Is the way they wanted you to be when they called you stupid

Like you can live up to one thing if you just try hard enough

And when it hardens; becomes crystalline

If you hurled it at a man how far would he go

I still haven’t forgotten Newton’s second law or anything about Schroedinger

But what does that even matter

The Head

Chiefly, a device to move the body.

To tell it what to do.

But for every move this way and that there’s an eyelid twitch or a muscle spasm

Bartering, the product of battery indentured to the head my body is never my own but

I wouldn’t know

I’m sorry.


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Poetry

Maple Key – Harika Kottakota 

My magnum opus was a maple key, 
Imprinted pond ripples in amber  

A hundred journals worth of sins 
Rimmed it with azure  

My maple key rode majestically 
Upon the southern breeze

Tornado in the Church bell and 
Flames around the riverbend 

Devout insomniac, I stalked
My maple key barefoot into 

Jasper mornings–too ethereal, 
too intricate for untrained eyes   

I watched its azure streak lotus 
By lotus, but never land 

Without a star’s conception
In sync, that’s right–never in jest  
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Poetry

I Reside Explicitly on Jackson Square – Matt Grydzuk

In the seventh grade I didn’t know I could like boys yet.

So when everyone else started dating

I spent my time idly liking this girl.

I asked her to dance once.

She was much taller than me and this altercation

dangled the notion of beauty overhead in every way like shitty dime store streamers scotch taped around the sistine chapel.

I stared into her eyes as the night fell apart and I was petrified to marble

Because there was pity in their dark recesses and in contrast

I was like

A monumental statue

Designed to fill

the negative space

in the worst possible way.

For the first time I felt ugly.


You never get called fat to your face anymore

it’s just particles of pollution

like acid rain eroding a statue.

So I am less afraid of being fat and more paranoid

because you cannot dodge glances and you cannot dodge concrete floors and statues don’t float

Thus I am not afraid of swimming, but I am afraid of the social implications of swimming pools.


What happened

To the era where “skinny” and “beautiful” were not synonyms

Where people like me were dashing and handsome and

Were depicted as

Grand marble statues that

reached up toward the sky in an air of grandeur

People have always implied

That I should take up less space but there is nothing authentic about me that

is not large and loud and in your face.

My body is no temple

It is a cathedral

Much too large for its initial purpose but it occupies the space it is given and it

extends infinitely toward the sky and

when people gaze upon it they are in awe of its beauty within and without

it occupies

the space

it

is

given.

I am constructed from stained glass and concrete and the bottoms of empty cartons of ice cream.

I don’t know what it’s like to not be fat.

But I do know what it’s like to be beautiful.


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