Yes, Poetry

[yespoetry]

A Playlist for Spring

Spring is a time of renewal and rebirth - so perhaps it’s time to start getting back in the swing of projects, passions and ideas. Here is a playlist to help get back in the groove:

[yespoetry]

CJ Southworth: January 2021 Poet of the Month

The Cellist

 He didn’t tell me he hated his birth name

until after I had introduced him

to almost everyone I knew.

My mother calls me Christian, he grimaced

at what I thought was adult propriety.

My name is Chris.

 He picked his words out as carefully

as he plucked the notes in pizzicato

from his tall cello,

afraid the last fragments of his German enunciation

would somehow slip into his voice,

that someone would recognize he wasn’t as American

as his baseball caps

and GAP cargo shorts.

 I was never allowed to hear his mother’s voice.

 He smiled crookedly

when I told him he looked like the quiet one

from the Pet Shop Boys—

the one I thought was hot—

and thanked me in that dismissive way

that people use when they don’t agree with you

but have been taught that a rebuked compliment

is impolite.

 He only played his cello when he needed to practice

or when he was on stage with the orchestra,

even though I begged him to strike those notes for me,

the long, slow ones

with the bow drawn evenly, sweetly

that would always make me burst into tears.

 It wasn’t just that I wanted him to know

that he could make me feel something—

it’s that I wanted to think those notes

were an extension of what he felt too,

the sweet, sad sigh at the heart of me

finally meeting its kindred.

 But there was always more to life than me,

and I tried to find my own way too,

but every man who broke my heart

sent me back to him again—

his long arms,

his body radiant heat beneath the covers,

always willing to wipe my eyes

even when he caused the tears.

 When I knew I would never be enough for him—

that he would always want someone new,

someone more,

that he could not stop at plus one

or equals two—

I gave up

and let him have whoever he wanted.

 He messages me sometimes,

says it’s hard to be almost fifty,

that no one wants him anymore,

and I won’t say the words that press to come out,

even though I still want him,

because I was never comfortable

being one of three or four,

not knowing who the others were.

 I close my eyes sometimes,

picture him lonely in his living room,

cello held tightly between his knees,

the bow drawing out the low, long notes,

my eyes feeling moist.

CJ Southworth has won both the Allen Ginsberg Award and the SUNY Chancellors Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities.  His poems have appeared in Assaracus, Main Street Rag, The Paterson Literary Review and many other journals.  He has also published fiction in Glitterwolf, Jonathan, and Belle Ombre.  He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Jefferson in upstate New York.

[yespoetry]

Zohra Zafar: Erase It

My Father’s Daughter

my sisters love to compare me to my father as if I was born this way, as if he didn’t mould me from blood-soaked clay, drilled a hole into my skull while singing ballads of day-time paranoia, music that swam past the watchful guard of my eardrum, settling deep within subterranean night terrors. as though he had passed on his briefcase of deoxyribonucleic secrets, carried by men in trench coats to ensure similar levels of uncontrollable purple rage, the kind that makes you gnash your teeth together and bursts through your chest to suffocate your nearest acquaintance to death. as if I’d signed a contract with the big guy in the sky to give me more than his crooked nose and widow’s peak. as if I wouldn’t unravel my own strings to undo the damage he’d done to the patchwork of my being. as if I could sit in front of the nice lady in the Institute of Clinical Psychology and tell her I’m going crazy and I know exactly why but to admit that would be to admit I am a victim and to admit that would be to admit I couldn’t prevent my own death. my sisters love to compare me to my father as if I was born this way, as if I wouldn’t erase it from my memory given the first chance to do so.  

Zohra Zafar hails from the southeast region of Pakistan where she is currently on a gap year. She is interested in sexology and contributing to spreading sex education in an abstinence-only culture. When she isn't reading science fiction and erotica, she finds interactive ways to share her knowledge of the human body through social media. The poet has previously had her work published by Santa Clara Review and Marble Poetry magazines. 

[yespoetry]

Music Friyay: Holy Motors, Des’ree, Cornelia Murr

By Joanna C. Valente

Here’s some music, new and old, you should listen to and check out:

Holy Motors - “Endless Night”

The band released two songs as a single recently, and they’re the dreamy, breathless night drive sounds I’ve longed for.

Des’ree - Supernatural

Des’ree’s 1998 album is a gem that shouldn’t be forgotten. “I’m Kissing You” is an amazing love song I don’t tire of.

Cornelia Murr - Lake Tear of the Clouds

Murr’s 2018 album is a new favorite of mine. Tender, sweet, and vulnerable, these songs have a lot to say.

[yespoetry]

Macaulay Glynn: Trying to Escape My Body

Safe

Have you ever noticed how “Therapist” is spelled “The Rapist,” Theresa asks, grinning, while she moves a red crayon idly over the edges of a paper flower. Elizabeth is on so many benzos she nods off over the common room table. We all make jokes about the ping-pong ball being a privilege, we must be trusted not to try to swallow it. At fifteen, I was in the hospital twice before I learned to stop trying to escape my body. I met Samantha, the first girl I had to force myself to stop staring at, not completely understanding why her fuchsia hair, the way she walked made my palms sweat. Another patient told me Kiki, thirteen, 6’1 and two hundred fifteen pounds, has been here for six months after pushing her pregnant mother down the stairs. We spend all day journaling with markers and shuffling to group therapy in sweatpants without drawstrings and we laugh often, make each other cards, fight for an extra two minutes at the single phone outside the nurse’s station Sandy laid prostrate in the road after her mother found her in bed with her stepbrother I try to imagine how the asphalt must have felt on her back, as the night shift nurse, the nice one, makes her rounds a car’s headlights are approaching, no, just the hourly flashlight, keeping us safe.

Supermarket

What I miss the most about being in a long-term relationship isn’t the regular sex or the road trips not the parties with friends nor the movie dates but the grocery shopping. Lover, I long for nothing more than the mundane ritual, the time spent in aisles, the planning of meals and lists and budgets the warm routine of comfort food, or your apprehension at my constant desire to master some kind of dish involving spaghetti squash a vegetable you have deemed worth my abandoning. Baby, tonight I want to celebrate your favorite brand of peanut butter.  After three years together our positions are predictable— I prefer to be the one to push the cart. I like when you place your hand over mine on the handle, reach past me to place bread in my basket, remember sugar for your grapefruit and add it to the list. Once in a while, darting out for something forgotten, we still come together at the checkout lane, you, breathless, holding flowers.

Macaulay Glynn is pursuing a Ph.D. in English Rhetoric and Creative Writing at Binghamton University. She directs the Literati reading series, and serves as director of the Binghamton Poetry Project, an ongoing community-based workshop program through the Binghamton Center for Writers.

[yespoetry]

Caolan Madden: Counterfactual

FRIGID BITCH

Uhhh I prefer sex-negative feminist?

The guy who scoffed it’s easy to be bisexual if you have zero sex drive

The idea I had of a kiss when I had never been kissed, the idea of like a fountain/and like a field of flowers/and like/settling your heels and shoulderblades into the floor/the idea of surface tension

My dad’s friend Phil, when I was fourteen, in the car, I can’t remember the joke. I watched my lipsticked disapproving mouth in the rearview mirror

I asked J, do you think I’d be a slut if I had the chance. J said, I think slutty from the waist up

They must be picking up on something

Kaleidoscope of hormones, the strangest flowers, double blooms, inversions, every time you shake the cylinder, recombinant, call them frostflowers, those blue crystals, snowflakes. Call it clinical. What burst into bloom when I stopped/when I started. My soul is spiraling in frozen fractals all around. How hot are yours? Your orange lilies, orange blossoms, you blushing brides, my bad science: Schrödinger’s sex drive, we can’t know until we take each other’s temperature, but. Killing frost. Check the evidence of architecture: have you ever put your fist through the wall? Wallflower, wallpaper, stay in bed, diagnose yourself, try to raise your core temperature

At the conference I found myself making small talk about Taylor Swift, how the best thing about her is that all the boys complain that she only wants to kiss. She buys all those houses for kissing in, overlooking the sea.

Cold shower, dead drop. Your heart beating, the only heat signature for fathoms.

COUNTERFACTUAL

those days when gentlemen used their own thoughts as evidence, experimented on their brains by thinking, then wrote a treatise and kids still have to read those and write papers about them: this table here and smack it the color blue is a quality but not I can hold the color blue in my mind separate from or like my friend’s husband who used to stop breathing until he had visions Is that different? It’s in the tradition

I use my body to feel the history of sexuality & you use your mind & we talk about it the physical revulsion, the revulsion that’s protecting something I love to theorize about my body as a microcosm in the absence of medical knowledge or supervision its millions of stars bearing debris from real stars If I had really been straight I would have felt but on the other hand if I had settled down in Providence feels very much like if I had slept with this guy junior year if I had married. but also if I had a bike & waited tables if I had been blonde. The stars in my body reveal that high-school boys are decorative, or grace, or power. If you had seen me first wanting to be looked at, against cobblestones Desire is different, weirder, declares my body, a coming-closer, or a shudder thirty-six hours later, then years later, in the park where no one actually would have wanted to lose her virginity at twilight in a linen dress

  QUIETING MUSE

I shall never get out of this said Plath in plaster, a yellow rose in a stiff white vase. But I think you don’t miss her ’til she’s gone: at eighteen, sweating in my dorm, I scribbled doppelganger elegies, remembering our doubled bones, our doubled fat bright in the cauldron of a summer-long half-nelson. Sister soup, I wrote, the only sisterless girl on my floor. I must have meant it. I must have missed her. When her shape filled up with flecks of talk, like tin confetti, high and thin and cold, her opposite. There was an absence. Who was she? What was she for? Reading my diaries? Listening behind me on the sidewalk. De Beauvoir said that Diderot said you all die at fifteen and I really felt it then at seventeen The one who died. I only know her from that doppelganger poem and from the caught breath at the double, at the hinge, the horn, the heroine in someone else’s. Even the tumor with its eyeballs. Even Emily-in-the-glass. Wallpaper. Why say divided. Why not doubled, why not luxury. She has her nails done in some strip mall in the South. She waits ’til I'm alone again. Some weekend. Some other life. She’ll stir a little, say hello. I'm not afraid.

from Dazzling Dresses: A Princess Activity Book

Uriel at Yale 1

In Physics for Poets, Ursula twirling her ankle-socked foot leaned over the aisle and murmured about the Velvet Underground and sucked her pencil expectantly. O how the auditorium filled up at that very moment, and the glittering ink spilled out of Uriel’s pen nib! Under the ground the velvet corridors were plush with newts and stalactites like staghorn sumac (another class she took with Ursula was “Local Flora.”) Under the water Uriel’s sisters embroidered their names on the delicate edges of manta rays; in her dorm room she lifted them from Fed Ex boxes, stroked their velvet coats absently, bent over a villanelle. The refrain was, “If you had seen my face above a wave”; her word processor had shorted out when she spilled a cup of beer on it one Friday early in the term, so now she wrote in longhand. Outside the second spring-term snow was falling.

MOTHERGLUT

It’s all coming back to me like I whistled and those rats came running white foaming pattering their backs undulating screaming stat screaming code white

I gained all those pounds on purpose I poured them on me like milk I put them in a jar and weighed them on a scale and stood beneath the scale and POURED

Until I was the white queen of fat Umbrella of leaf-lard Rat-queen redolent of lard Pelt of a thousand rats yawning Wicked stepmother luxuriously padded with the milk of with the blood of virgins

O medical establishment we are sorry to have been so sedentary We are sorry about our bad memories I am sorry that I poured the leaf lard on my memory I am sorry that I do nothing nothing nothing but make this enormous baby to fill up my hungry cradle Sorry the baby’s made of a thousand fat rats teeming over the ward and swallowing the tinies Sorry about its thousand mouths full of seed pearls Sorry that I forgot and made a blowjob baby out of swallowing If you could just lie down and do it the normal way just remember to just lie down             but also do some light cardio swimming for example, maybe some journaling

If there were more poems more dissertation more candies there would be less baby there would be less marvelous mantle creamtop mantle, glorious mantle, gluttonous mantle

I veiled the two of us               the thousand-and-one-of-us in my supreme gorgeous idleness

These poems originally appeared in our ebook The Queer Body.

Caolan Madden holds an MFA from Johns Hopkins and a PhD in English literature from Rutgers. Her poems have appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review, Bone Bouquet, Black Warrior Review, Posit, Anthropoid, Split Lip, and Supplement. Her chapbook VAST NECROHOL was published last spring by Hyacinth Girl Press; as a member of the feminist poetry collective (G)IRL, she’s also a co-author of the collaborative chapbook GIRL TALK TRIPTYCH (dancing girl press, 2016).

[yespoetry]

Music Friyay: The Walker Brothers, Khruangbin, Shye Ben Tzur

By Joanna C. Valente

Here’s some music, new and old, you should listen to and check out:

The Walker Brothers - Nite Flight

Who doesn’t need a little more Scott Walker / Walker Brothers in your life? This 1978 album never gets old.

Khruangbin - Mordechai

The band just released a new album, and it’s a perfect sou psychedelic world. It transports you to another place and time entirely, and is perfect for reflective calm.

Shye Ben Tzur - Shoshan

Tzur’s 2010 album is a gift. As an Israeli musician who lives in India and Israel and composes qawwalis, instrumental and devotional music in Hebrew, Urdu and Hindi, as well as combining Sufi devotional music with western elements. His music itself is transformative, and his 2010 album isn’t to be forgotten.

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Joseph Tirella: Behind the Trees

Newport, Mid-November, 2014

“Not a single leaf that ever falls from a tree is ever out of place.”

                                                —Gary Snyder

The mansions here all have hard names: The Breakers and Rough Point, that’s where Doris Duke killed, accidentally of course, Eduardo J. Tirella, an interior designer—no relation, thank you very much—some have soft, names like The Elms—right across from where we stayed—all curated palaces, shrouded in another era, locked on their gilded estates like caged beasts so we—the common folk—could peek at them, oohing and aahing—How magnificent! How elegant!—at the pleasure-domes built with the knotty hands and raw knuckles of workers who had to pee behind the trees while no one looked, and spoke with accents of foreign geographies; who carved and chiseled the styles of the Continent into the walls, the floors, the ceilings of the mansions where the soft-handed souls lived—ya got soft hands from counting money all ya life!—there amid the ivory china, in the pantry of museum pieces and crystal sconces embedded in the walls of painted platinum—yes, platinum, I kid you not—while the others lived on the outskirts of a city where the money is older and harder than the trees’ knobbed roots, wide as elephant toes, that sprout from the fascist, orderly lawns, littered by the mid-November leaves in all their imperfect, chaotic, democratic glory.

Joseph Tirella the author of The New York Times Best Seller, Tomorrow-Land: The 1964-65 World's Fair and the Transformation of America (Lyon's Press; 2014). A graduate of CCNY's MFA program, his nonfiction has been published in Slate, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Vibe, among other places. His poetry and fiction been published in Yes Poetry, Barzakh, Newtown Literary and Promethean.

[yespoetry]

Christina Rosso: Our Shared Grave

The Wives’ Grave

The first was easiest.

Or so he tells me, his eyes cast to the floor.

Threads of rope scratch against my bound wrists. I rub the butt of my palms against it.

“The second put up more of a fight. She was messier,” he says.

“The third, I’d learned to be discreet. She never suspected. She begged for her life; that twinge in my chest was a surprise.”

“Guilt,” I say.

He rubs the space between his eyebrows with the back of his thumb. Sweat glistens at his temple.

My skin is raw against the rope. My restraints won’t budge.

“Now the fourth,” he starts.

“Me,” I say. I sound petulant, like a child. “How can you do this to me?”

“I gave you the test and curiosity got the best of you.” Finally, he looks at me. “I wanted you to be different.”

I swallow acidic saliva, feeling it travel down my throat. I know my husband means it. My palms are clammy and pebbled with perspiration. He takes a step towards me, his eyes locked on mine. The knife gleams silver-white in the fluorescent lighting. I imagine the blood of the wives before me, thick and dark like the air before a storm. He kneels until we’re eye-to-eye. My husband presses the blade to my throat. My breath halts against its coolness.

I know I’m going to die.

I wonder if blood magic is real and if it will bond us. I wonder if together we’ll rise, his four wives, against him from our shared grave.

Lake Paramour

We met at the lake’s edge, where the loosestrife bloomed magenta. On my knees, I studied the water lilies floating just out of arm’s reach. He knelt beside me and said, “Look. The flowers are about to open.” My skin blistered in goose-pimples. I nodded. There was no reason to fear a stranger here. I didn’t own this land. I didn’t own anything.

“They only open in the morning or at night. Do you know why?” I shook my head. “To attract pollinators,” he said.

I felt his breath on my neck as we watched the flowers open, revealing pink insides.

Each morning, we found one another there, our breaths halted in anticipation of the water lilies’ blooms. Sometimes we had a picnic afterward, where we would take turns pointing out deer and rabbits and chipmunks. It seemed he had endless knowledge about wildlife and beasts.

One morning, after the water lilies opened, he pressed his lips to mine, peeling them back with his tongue. Two weeks later, he asked me to be his bride. I said yes, my cheeks flushed with love and the blazing sun. He grinned, revealing all of his teeth. On the patchwork quilt we used for picnics, he climbed onto me. My body turned to ice. “We can’t,” I said. “Not until we’re married.”

“You are mine,” he said before his teeth met my thigh. I cried out, certain he’d stop. My paramour who loved wildlife and beasts wouldn’t hurt me. Oh, but how wrong I was. His lips didn’t brush mine as he peeled back my petals. I bloomed under him, blood staining the quilt, as the birds chirped in the trees and the loosestrife whistled in the summer breeze.

When he looked into my eyes, I could see it. I was just something to climb. My paramour had built a bridge out of me.

 Flower Box

On a Monday, my husband comes home with supplies. From the bed of his truck, he unloads a plethora of wood--redwood, cedar, douglas fir. He chatters their names and properties to me. It is as though new life has been breathed into him. It is the first time he’s seemed happy since B.

On a Wednesday, I wake to the percussion of hammering. I lean in the back doorway of the house, my hand a visor to shield my eyes from the early morning sun. He had told me what he planned to build. But it had seemed so imaginary, like everything since B.

On a Friday, he plants a completed flower box in front of my scrambled eggs and coffee. I nod at it, try and fail at a closed-mouth grin. I’m not sure the muscles in my face remember how to do that. Can you forget how to smile? My husband beams at me, all teeth, and I want to return his joy, but there is no warmth in my chest. Only caverns and echoes.

On a Sunday, he calls me outside. Voila, he says, his arms waving in a great flourish. He thinks he’s a great showman. Nothing seems great or even good to me anymore, so I simply nod. He has filled his first planter--made from cedar--with an array of colorful flowers. Geraniums that remind me of red lollipops, cotton candy pink petunias, grape-colored zinnias. He is the Willy Wonka of flowers, it seems, a caricature of himself. With my tongue, I form the words, It looks nice, honey. I shape the syllables two, three times before venturing to speak. My husband needs a win and I want to give him that.

But then I see the white chrysanthemums slipped in among the candy flowers. For Bethany, he says, seeing I’ve noticed. They were her favorite, he continues.

Her syrupy voice calls me, saying, Look, Mommy. Look at me! Her head thrown back in laughter as she swings on the monkey bars, in defiance of gravity, in the unwavering belief that she, at age seven, was invincible. The cavities in my chest throb, the stalactites tremble in their plots.

I work to form the words, my tongue folding and bobbing in my mouth. I know my husband built this flower box in honor of B, in what he thought to be a nice gesture. I try to tell him, It looks nice, honey, or Thank you, but when I look at the cedar box with the candy flowers all I can see is a coffin, another coffin for B.

You can also listen to Christina Rosso read these stories below:

Christina Rosso lives and writes in South Philadelphia with her rescue pup, Atticus Finch, and bearded husband, Alex. Together they run an independent bookstore and event space called A Novel Idea on Passyunk. Her debut collection SHE IS A BEAST (APEP Publications) was released in May 2020. Her writing has been featured in FIVE:2:ONE Magazine, Digging Through the Fat, Ellipsis Zine, and more. Visit http://christina-rosso.com or find her on Twitter @Rosso_Christina.

[yespoetry]

Emily Okamoto-Green: August 2020 Poet of the Month

XV. THE DEVIL  

I’ll tell you the truth is I jumped in front of that police cruiser on purpose perhaps I only meant to ask for directions                  today’s doctor is over an hour late but some of the girls have sworn he’s pretty so who’s really counting?                               I’m reading Martha Stewart’s Living in a room with no windows just desperate for advice on curtain hanging and                              I’m sorry— I can’t help myself

I’ll tell any visitors they took every sharp I had but my daddy’s wit and you see my daddy used to have a laugh like mine— a little bitter but warm enough to keep through winter                 and his granddaddy was the proud son of a traveling preacher man                 but my daddy’s daddy cultivated a laugh so cold his wife hid all the knives and grandmomma says

I’m supposed to be counting my blessings because I’m young and single and only ever been abused by myself  and I can’t tell if that’s supposed to be funny                                     the poor nurse couldn’t find a vein again this morning                          my arm thin brimstone he turns over in his hands and they can’t expect to make me bleed any more than I could myself but don’t worry I’m in on the joke

the joke goes how many family members had to off themselves before the doctors call it a “blood born” illness?

Emily Okamoto-Green is a current MFA Candidate in Poetry at George Mason University, where she received her undergraduate degree in English.

Her love of language has been a part of her story since she was born in Japan in 1996 to a Japanese mother and American father. Balancing these two cultures and family history features in much of her work, but her interest in her family history became more necessary as she began struggling with mental illness. After a suicide attempt, she agrees to treatment in a psychiatric ward and it's only then that she learns there is a history in her family of depression, anxiety, self-medication, and suicide. Through engaging with the tarot and the conversational mode, she enters a larger poetic discussion about family, mental illness, hope and hopelessness, and the human desire to know what's coming next. 

She currently works as Program Assistant for The Alan Cheuse International Writers Center, and Editorial Assistant for Poetry Daily. Her accolades include winner of the 2015 Virginia Downs Poetry Award, winner of the 2017 Joseph Lohman III Poetry Prize, and the inaugural winner of the Berkey Essay Contest.

[yespoetry]

Your August 2020 Horoscope Is Here (With Poetry Recs!)

By Joanna C. Valente

It’s Leo season, which means everything is going to feel grandiose and intensely energetic. August 3 is the full moon in creative Aquarius, carving out a path forward through our mind and soul. This month will renew your confidence (thanks to Mercury) and self-love. It’s time to stop doubting and time to start doing. We only live once, after all, so why waste this one amazing life?

Because of Venus’ conjunction with Cancer on August 7, it’s a time to communicate with the people we love. Thankfully, all of the tensions from the last month, as well as the unrest and tumult from everything going on around us, will ease. This doesn’t mean all of our problems are solved, but we’re finding it easier to speak honestly, and are prioritizing the steps needed to maintain this level of deep communication. Love takes work to maintain, don’t forget.

On August 22, the Sun enters the picture, allowing us to think of ways to turn the small details into the big picture incrementally over time. We all have dreams, it’s just about finding the right the path getting there. Nothing is ever truly stagnant, even when we achieve the things we want.

LEO

While this is your month, and you do love to be the center of attention, it might actually be better to be more subdued. It’s time to refocus on your career and discover ways to have a sustainable life and live intentionally. Considering it’s a sensitive time for money, be mindful of bragging.

Poetry rec: Anuel Rodriguez

VIRGO

Work is bustling for you this month, so make sure to get lots of rest so you can be the best version of you. Don’t forget to surprise your loved ones either. Remind them of how much you appreciate them.

Poetry rec: Maura Lee Bee

LIBRA

How can you control your reactions more and surrender to what you can’t control? It’s hard when our lives and plans are disrupted, but don’t make this harder for yourself either.

Poetry rec: Rosalie Morales Kearns

SCORPIO

Embrace your sensitive and nurturing side this month with those around you. Think of little ways you can brighten someone’s day and make someone feel special.

Poetry rec: Ethan Milner

SAGITTARIUS 

This is a lucky month for you, love and work wise. It seems like your hard work is going to get a lot of attention, which is a good thing, but prepare yourself emotionally. When it comes to your loved ones, be present, honest, and sweet.

Poetry rec: Yoshika Wason

CAPRICORN

Find little and easy ways to treat yourself, like dressing up, going on walks, listening to music, carving out time to watch a movie, scheduling special phone dates, and taking advantage of small pleasures - rather than focusing on what you don’t have.

Poetry rec: Matt McKinzie

AQUARIUS

This isn’t a bad time to take a breather and let yourself just be. Don’t feel like you always need to be productive or “on.” Take breaks from social media, work, and just be yourself without the need to “perform.”

Poetry rec: H.E. Fisher

PISCES

It’s time to redo your resume, organize your life, and reach out to people professionally. Changes are abound, even if it’s just in smaller ways to find more passive income.

Poetry rec: Katherine Fallon

ARIES

Allow yourself to be challenged and go beyond your comfort level this month. What does that mean? It means reach out to someone you’ve been crushing on for awhile, go jogging, try a new recipe. It can be small things.

Poetry rec: Liz Axelrod

TAURUS

Organize! Whether you need to go through your closet, clean up your kitchen, buy better home work supplies, or just move around your furniture, it’s time. The way you live affects your mood, and you deserve a space that you love.

Poetry rec: Jackie Sizemore

GEMINI

Get out more. You’ve withdrawn a bit from your friendships out of anxiety, fear, and depression. That’s okay, and any true friend understands, but don’t self-isolate.

Poetry rec: Jody Chan

CANCER

Be vulnerable. While you always feel vulnerable, you don’t necessarily let your guard down around others, whether in conversation, work, or the creative projects you do.

Poetry rec: Michael McKeown Bondhus

Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. They are the author of Sirs & Madams, The Gods Are Dead, Marys of the Sea, Sexting Ghosts, Xenos, No(body), #Survivor, (forthcoming, The Operating System), and is the editor of A Shadow Map: Writing by Survivors of Sexual Assault. They received their MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Joanna is the founder of Yes Poetry and the senior managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine. Some of their writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Them, Brooklyn Magazine, BUST, and elsewhere. Joanna also leads workshops at Brooklyn Poets. joannavalente.com / Twitter: @joannasaid / IG: joannacvalente / FB: joannacvalente

[yespoetry]

Music Friyay: Susumu Yokota, Ural Thomas and the Pain, Orville Peck

By Joanna C. Valente

Here’s some music, new and old, you should listen to and check out:

Susumu Yokota - Symbol

Yokota’s 2004 album is otherworldly and gorgeous, almost like sounds of an alternate universe you wish you lived in, but sometimes can at least visit. Yokota masterfully mixed electronic and ethereal ambient.

Ural Thomas and the Pain - The Right Time

Thomas is probably one of the best musicians you’ll hear, and perhaps one you’ve never heard of with a career spanning several decades. This album, released in 2018, showcases so much heart and genius.

Orville Peck - “Smalltown Boy”

Peck recently covered the 80s classic by Bronski Beat in a fun, refreshing way. Worth checking out.

[yespoetry]

Daniel Beaudoin: Tower of Babel

Daniel Beaudoin is a professor, writer and artist working out of Israel. He hopes one day to finally figure out what essence of it all is. What matters. Until then, he hopes to continue to hear the laughter of his children and eat apple crumble with loads of whipped cream. Really.

[yespoetry]

Maura Lee Bee: The Batteries Are Probably Dying

Mango Wedge

 My older brother moved north. When my family visits their house, we joke that Vermont’s Hispanic population goes up five percent. We play the music a little too loud, my cousin dancing bachata with the baby. Mi Mama is cooking empanadas, beef and cheese wafting. Papa snakes an olive out of the thin jar with his cinnamon finger. Dad is playing charades with his brothers. They shout: Hutia! Mike Piazza! Al Pacino! My niece shakes her hips early, lips curled in a soft grin, her delicate ponytail swinging in a teal scrunchie. She runs into the kitchen to reorganize the sauces. With her fierce hands she lines them up on the floor, cool air of the fridge whispering. My Aunt Vanessa takes a half moon of mango off a plate. It drips juice at the center of the table. She tells me that when she was pregnant, she loved to eat the fruit with salt. She doesn’t anymore because her husband says it makes her look bloated. She forgets about her favorite thing, asks me when I’m going to have a baby. My niece sits next to me and sighs. She brings her bottle to her mouth, removes one more piece of the bagels from back home, and looks up at me, consumed.

my niece with a camera in her hands

 she holds the plastic square between her palms and asks me how it works. i struggle to tell her how my mother, mud caked on her knees, took photos of trees and gravestones when she was just older than her. there’s a history here—instructions from her aunt on focus, slides in a box from the attic, her father’s lenses dusted and snapped into place.

these apertures are open wounds. saw army baseball in Okinawa. composed portraits of women laughing alone, or together. saw the tribute from liberty park, my arms dangling over a railing, twin lights growing purpler. these images blown up for no one, except one time, on a jumbo-tron. how do I begin to tell her about developing film in the bathtub? how my sister would right the strips as they dangled from the shower rod. I’ve forgotten the words for developer and fixer. 

all she knows is portrait mode. not yet does she know the ache of a jammed advance. or a broken spool. of a body knocked to the ground without apology. she doesn’t know how dreams fade. how we remaster them years later, scanned to a screen with a little touch of color. she only knows the world in black and white—but maybe that monochrome is just the beginning.

the batteries are probably dying, or the memory card is full. these things feel impossible. i tell her  to look. through the viewfinder. to hit the shutter. she does this and runs off, delighted. i watch her hop through the kitchen, smiling, pretending to capture real moments all over.

Maura Lee Bee is a queer, LatinX writer based out of New York City. She has previously been published in Autostraddle, Bad Pony, and Ghost City Press. Her first book, “Peter & the Concrete Jungle” was published in 2017. When she isn’t busy dismantling an otherwise oppressive system, she enjoys reading books, baking pies, and meeting new dogs.

[yespoetry]

Rosalie Morales Kearns: One Night You Sleep

Time Between

 The matchhead strikes

and the icon lamp glows.

The bell sounds a note

and then the next.

The finger grips the trigger

and the bullet flies.

 It’s the time between.

Plenty of time.

 One day you feast, the next

you go without.

One night you sleep by a warm fire,

another on a cold prison floor.

One day you see strange markings

on paper, and one day

they form words.

 You have known respect, unearned,

and scorn, also unearned.

You turned liar,

and the lies turned true.

 Soldiers arrive and

you lay down your books.

Take your pick:

gallows, cross.

 Next time, you tell yourself.

Time enough.

Rosalie Morales Kearns, a writer of Puerto Rican and Pennsylvania Dutch descent, is the author of the novel Kingdom of Women (Jaded Ibis, 2017) and founder of the feminist publishing house Shade Mountain Press. Her poems have been published in the Nasty Women Poets anthology, and in Luna Luna, Literary Hatchet, Danse Macabre, and other journals.

[yespoetry]

Matt McKinzie: Queer Dream Triptych

QUEER DREAM TRIPTYCH

 i. reckoning

as nightmares softened

over smooth sheetrock

smirched with the scents of

salty snogs and ravenous breath

and tremors shooting through tailbones

and tangled bedsheets

soaked in sweat

but in a fortnight

soaked again

too, the tears of young men

sudden, infantile

crying out to their mothers

and a quiet, merciful God

 ii. resurrection

in claggy winter window glass

and sterile clinic needle pokes

and Patti Smith’s Ghost Dance

            we shall live again, we shall live...again

and Kate Bush, whirring through a forest

dewy with spring, bright in her red dress

stretches of highway cracked in winter steel

sun shattering smokestacks

apartments in Boston backroads

daylight through construction slats, rising, rising

with the taste of unbrushed teeth

Dad always wanted a son, and I don’t fit the bill

but at least I made it out alive

 iii. redemption

slipping into fissures

body out of hellfire

he who spent August skating through mist on

an imagined winter’s lake

but in winter, I keep warm

even with the season blue, in Vashti Bunyan’s lemon voice

for bed sheets keep me hot and dry

and sun comes in through plexi windows

unfettered by death

with a brain as clear as ice, and not as cold

and a yearning for love, without pain of hunger

I am okay

I am okay

THE BOY FROM TEXAS

 Born with the sun in Leo

where tumbleweeds tumbled in a tumbling town

a tumbled marriage

tumbling down a desert hill

respirating in newspaper ink

‘fore boarding the greyhound

northbound

where water sprung

from rusty backyard hoses

and catfish ran hot and fast in woodland streams

and spoiled fruits landed in frail boy arms

up in arms

with the pop of a pistol

in gentle cow hide, a scorched microcosm

of the homestead

steady, now, with his sweat and tears, until

northbound, again

with a cooler sun, chaos in equal measure

measuring the glass shards

at the pop of a beer bottle

on parking lot pavement

and post-grad desires pervading

waxy red skies

lighting up Ma

in her American flag sandals

still trudging down an uncertain road

Matt McKinzie is a Boston-based filmmaker, screenwriter, essayist, photographer, performer, and poet. His work has been showcased in several galleries, collectives, and publications, including the Film-Makers' Cooperative of New York (as Matt Thomas), Studio 550 of Cambridge, Hygienic Art, and POPMATTERS, a Chicago-based magazine of international cultural criticism, where he contributes as a staff writer. He currently works as the Editorial Director of EM Magazine.

[yespoetry]

Music Friyay: Julia Jacklin, Sufjan Stevens, Roberta Flack

By Joanna C. Valente

Here’s some music, new and old, you should listen to and check out:

Julia Jacklin - Crushing

Jacklin’s 2019 album is gorgeous and deceptively simple - and will bring you on a journey.

Sufjan Stevens - America

Stevens released two songs recently, and they are both absolutely jaw-dropping. “America” is a must-listen for everyone.

Roberta Flack - Quiet Fire

Flack’s 1971 album is truly unforgettable. Every song is a gift.