Poetry by Abdulbaseet Yusuff

BY ABDULBASEET YUSUFF

Aura

No being knows true silence

We are born sound conjurers

& even in death, we clasp

song religiously like heirloom

Sound is wave weaving chaos

on the body of air, ergo

every breath is subtle song

& an exudence of aura

With you, I interpret every aura:

in your laughter are flowers

bright yellow in bulbous bloom

& in your malice, a monophonic

music, an open wound as

hollow as hieroglyphs carved in

a cavern. I trace it tentative

with the finger of an archeologist

When your music starts to spike

on the electrocardiogram like

riot beside your supine body

I put pause to my breath

in reverence for your outro

When I heave, the flood breaks

the bank of my eye & I start a

soulful song for the departure

of the last wave washing the

residue of music off your throat

When it rains, it is not rain itself

that liquefies me into quietude;

it is the tenderness of the fluting wind

this melody is the madeleine that

exhumes the malady of grief. O wind,

away with you, sing me no more

Abdulbaseet Yusuff is a Nigerian writer. His works appear or are forthcoming in Brittle Paper, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, MoonPark Review, Kalahari Review, Burning House Press, Rising Phoenix Review, Memento: An Anthology of Contemporary Nigerian Poetry, and elsewhere. He's on Twitter: @bn_yusuff.

Summer Poetry: Courtney Cook

BY COURTNEY COOK

We Skipped Spring this Year

Suddenly, the blare of August, waves above 
the asphalt. There’s a ghost hanging around 
my bedroom leaving hair on my pillow. I notice: 
a second toothbrush beside the sink, fingerprint 
bruises on my thighs too big to be my own, 
a condom in the trash can. I can’t finish a cigarette,
try to pass them to no one but air. Where’s 
the other mouth? To erase a memory as it unfolds; 
to desire that. Isn’t it strange, the way the world 
continues to expand after an end?

Summer

Cicadas burst     under my bicycle tires       pressed   into stone
they scream     high-pitched        lobster boiling     they cover
the walkway       die      beside the orange blossoms       petal softness
an offering       buzzing        on the ground       like fighting brothers
their exoskeletons still      clinging      to bark    summer transparent 
sliding over the world     everything sticky and sweet          fleeting
the cicadas who emerged from hibernation        calculated        days to fuck
and gorge themselves       before   morning brisk      or     rubber
comes to kill them      to end something before it really began
a return to a world without them,             the waiting again.

Support Courtney Cook by donating via Venmo: @courtney-cook.

Courtney Cook is an MFA candidate at the University of California, Riverside, and a graduate of the University of Michigan. An essayist, poet, and illustrator, Courtney's work has been seen in The Rumpus, Hobart, Lunch Ticket, Split Lip Magazine, Wax Nine, and Maudlin House, among others. Her illustrated memoir, THE WAY SHE FEELS, is forthcoming from Tin House Books in summer 2021. When not creating, Courtney enjoys napping with her senior cat, Bertie. 

You’re Supposed to Drown Witches by Nikkin Rader

BY NIKKIN RADER

You’re supposed to drown witches

But sometimes their gramarye is too strong
or because they can fructify, you salt their roots
what spells can be mussitated or what cities can be clogged by a nimbus
or aura too bright, why birds ululate in the morning
A daymare rising to breeze as if summerfruit or floral berrying,
slicing thru even the gravid among us, incogitant in its mechanizing ruth
To suffer them a living is a damning offense, before a lashing at wooded phallus
forest infertile in their soil by fire
A terror on gender and sucking into vortex, its evil sighting,
to be marked by deviling mammary ridge
a press for paper to burn

---

Nikkin Rader has degrees in poetry, anthropology, philosophy, gender & sexuality studies, and other humanities and social science. Her works appear in Drunk Monkeys, Coalesce Zine, Perfectly Normal Magazine, the sad bitch chronicles, Silk + Smoke, Recenter Press, Occulum, Pussy Magic, and elsewhere. You can follow her twitter or insta @wecreeptoodeep

Wearing Sylvia Plath’s Lipstick

BY PATRICIA GRISAFI

The dutifully hip girl behind the register at the Chelsea Urban Outfitters was sporting a ravishing shade of reddish, hot pinkish lipstick. 

“That’s a great color,” I said. “Who makes it?” 

“It’s by Revlon. The color is called Cherries in the Snow. You really can’t forget that name, can you?” 

I stopped by Duane Reade on the way home and picked up a tube, knowing full well that the lipstick would end up in the heart-shaped box in the closet where all my other lipsticks went to die. 

You know how some women wear lipstick every day as a matter of routine? They can apply a perfect lip while riding a bike, walking a tightrope, or herding ten unruly toddlers. I’m not talking about beige-y pinks or fleshy nudes, but serious, bright, punch-you-in-the-face colors. 

I’m not one of those women. 

Time and time again I’ve proven incompetent at the simple task of applying a lipstick that isn’t the color of my lip; usually, I look like someone’s grandmother in Fort Lauderdale on her fifth Valium and third Mai Tai. Still, every few months, I’ll give a new color a whirl only to frown in the mirror and return to my trusty mess-proof staple since the 90s: Clinique Black Honey. 

Would Cherries in the Snow convert me? 

I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and carefully drew on a bright, pinkish-red grin. Then I fussed a bit, cleaning up the lines with a Q-tip and some concealer. I cocked my head to the side, bared my teeth like a hyena. I imagined myself tooling around the East Village in white Birkenstocks and large black sunglasses, with a bouquet of bodega peonies in one hand and a coffee in the other. I’d give a breezy, hot pink smile and everyone would think I was quirky and chic. 

By the end of the week, Cherries in the Snow was in the heart-shaped graveyard of lipsticks past. 

The next time I heard of Cherries in the Snow was in a book. Pain, Parties, and Work by Elizabeth Winder details poet Sylvia Plath’s harrowing experience as a guest editor for Mademoiselle in the summer of 1953. Readers will recognize many of the events Plath writes about in The Bell Jar as based on the details of that summer: getting food poisoning, figuring out fashion, suffering from depression. 

There’s one mundane detail that Plath doesn’t include in The Bell Jar: her preferred lipstick: “She wore Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow lipstick on her very full lips,” Winder writers. 

I thought I knew an absurd amount about Sylvia Plath. As one of my earliest and long-standing loves, I’ve read and re-read her poems and fiction, written about her work in my Doctoral thesis, visited her homes in both Massachusetts and London, even touched her hair under the careful eyes of the curators at the Lilly Library, Bloomington. But I had missed this small, seemingly insignificant detail. 

Revlon has manufactured Cherries in the Snow for the past sixty two years; it’s known as one of their “classic” shades, along with another popular color, Fire and Ice. It’s a cult item, a relic from another era when most women wore lipstick faithfully (a fun but gross tidbit from Winder’s book: one 1950s survey revealed that 98 percent of women wore lipstick; 96 percent of women brushed their teeth). The color isn’t exactly the same as it was when Plath wore it because of changes in industry practice, but it’s pretty damn close. 

I scrambled for the heart-shaped lipstick box and sat cross-legged in front of it, fishing around for Cherries in the Snow. I held the shiny black tube in my hand like Indiana Jones held the idol in the beginning scenes of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The lipstick seemed different, changed. Imbued with special meaning. I swiped on a coat, this time imagining how Plath might have applied her makeup, what she might have thought as she looked back in the mirror. Did it change her mood, feel comforting, bestow power? 

People are interested in discovering the mundane habits of their favorite singers, actors, writers, and artists. They might even purchase a product based solely on a celebrity endorsement. I’ve always been interested in finding out what products my favorite dead icons used, as if I can access a part of their lost inner lives by slathering on Erno Laszlo’s Phormula 3-9 (one of Marilyn Monroe’s favorite creams) or spritzing myself with Fracas (Edie Sedgwick’s signature scent). Wearing Cherries in the Snow allowed me to experience a strange intimacy with a writer I admired, even more so than reading the very personal things Plath wrote about — including how satisfying scooping a pesky glob of snot from her nose feels. 

Ultimately, Cherries in the Snow did not become my lipstick, but I gained an appreciation for the shared ritual with and strange connection to Plath that it allowed me to experience. So many of the artists who have influenced our lives are gone; it feels comforting to find a bit of their essence in something as tangible as makeup. 

---

Patricia Grisafi is a New York City-based freelance writer, editor, and former college professor. She received her PhD in English Literature in 2016. She is currently an Associate Editor at Ravishly. Her work has appeared in Salon, Vice, Bitch, The Rumpus, Bustle, The Establishment, and elsewhere. Her short fiction is published in Tragedy Queens (Clash Books). She is passionate about pit bull rescue, cursed objects, and horror movies.

Carmen Sandiego Reacts to the Travel Ban by Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad

BY MEHRNOOSH TORBATNEJAD

Carmen Sandiego Reacts to the Travel Ban

No different than how she has always traveled,
knows to make a human less human

you call them by a thing that doesn't exist, so
she’s never in a space long enough to be deemed alien;

makes a game from the escape—
the elegant taunting of claiming your city her name

though elsewhere she was born; a turf intruder
with no passport, why apply for one if possession

only calcifies borders, if papers are the breadcrumb
trail always to capture; so instead she enters with the tip

of her color shadow, loots your country of everything
she doesn’t need; see, this is not about thievery,

this is the joy of reclaiming, the thrill of ripping smiles
from paintings, pocketing the heat from flames,

keys and music notes, what good is a native’s job
when you can take the recipes and controls;

you would think she, like the rest, was a holy grail,
the way patrollers lust after her with handcuffs and rope

when she retreats, off to Afghanistan or Iran, Mexico
and Morocco; tell me which one of you would even

reach for a map if it weren’t to chase her,
which one of you would mark a globe if not for the names

of do-not-fly lists; she knew long ago the rights
you inscribed do not include her, that immunity

is a delusion, so she alters her tone when you tap
her telephones, and gloats elusive when she doesn’t sound

metal detectors; so, call her villain, call her enemy
when this body is the one you cannot occupy;

call her criminal, call her spy, call her mastermind
when she outwits your agencies, and know

we are willing to forgive her felonies, knowing
what you call illegal is the act of fleeing an oppressor,

knowing what you call most wanted
is a pseudonym for unwanted;

so, a runaway sneering at despots for hobby
is the reprisal the rest of us have waited for,

so we marvel at the abduction of headwaters,
let her take the rivers, the ceilings and columns,

let her steal everything beneath the wide brim
of what was taken and renamed;

we pardon her; we know what it’s like
to hide but leave a trickling trace of what’s been sown,

we know the blood that she bleeds, she makes sure
to wear visible neck to toe like a trench coat

---

Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad was born and raised in New York. Her poetry has appeared in The Missing Slate, Passages North, HEArt Journal Online, Pinch Journal, and is forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly. She is the poetry editor for Noble / Gas Qtrly, and a Best of the Net, Pushchart Prize, and Best New Poets nominee. She currently lives in New York where she practices matrimonial law.

Poetry by Valorie K. Ruiz

BY VALORIE K. RUIZ

Tracing the Path of the Moon

An owl’s wingspan can stretch up to five feet.
When I see the streak of tierra
over the park across the street
at just past midnight
I don’t question it.

But as the minutes
slide into grains of sand
and the cigarette caves to ash
I begin to wonder.
Maybe I’m reading too much
in the shadows between the trees
maybe age is stealing sight from my eyes
maybe it’s all tricks played by amber lights.

The cigarette tames me, keeping me outdoors long
enough for the shadow to return.
A five-foot-wide paint stroke along the sky
traces circles over my head.

When I hear the final hoot as the owl
dances beneath a hidden moon
I laugh.
There’s no need to question.
This message clear as the constellations I craft stories for.
All of these obsidian glimpsed futures are waiting
for nothing more than the illusion of time to bring them full circle.

Fluorescence

Your eyelids flicker and I watch you lift, drift
on a sea carved by the corners of your mind.

The hum of your breath buzzes into a lantern,
a lit firefly flashing it’s gleam

against your parted smile. These new moon nights
I’m tempted to trap the floating radiance

in a jar carved from lightning by pixie hands. I think,
perhaps I could drape it around my neck, wear your fire

as a beam to navigate my way across thunderclap waves:
a storm raging nowhere but the waters

of my own mind. Instead I’m locked in the charm of its hover.
I’d much rather trace the spirals of your floating Sun.

Watch the firefly that needs no external light.


Remedy for Codepency

/the first time i orgasmed/ with you my stained glass eyes shattered/ beneath your sol-bright gaze/ breaking me into a puddle/ of mosaic geometrics unable to be puzzle-pieced/ back into the mural i resiliently crafted/ i spilled honey/ luring the residents of the anthill beyond the swell of your home/ begging the Mother Queen with her millions of eggs/ to gift me her unborn/ swallowing their potential/ anendorfic treatment to remove this lovesickness/ this oxytocin bond/ sometimes too much/

Primitive Wings

The dragonfly enters my room
Glass wings prism moonlight
Across my eyes and I’m shifting between
Recognition and the unknown of his flutter

The dragonfly whispers orders to remain still
He is the snake doctor who’ll stitch together
My endings to each new beginning
I am a rag muñeca waiting to be quilted together

The dragonfly is holed away in my mind
Lodged in the corners where he breathes
Fires to keep himself warm
Where he lives still—
Flapping memories into blank pages

---

Valorie K. Ruiz is a Xicana writer fascinated by language and the magic it evokes. She currently

lives in San Diego, and she is assistant flash fiction editor for Homology Lit.

Favorites of 2016: Poetry, Lit Journals, Magazines & More

BY LISA MARIE BASILE

There is no real way to round up all the amazing work that has been birthed in 2016. There is too much good, too much power, too much beauty. Instead, here are the books and publications I have come back to time and again this year.

Favorite poetry collections:

Night — Etel Adnan  

Chelate — Jay Besemer

The Performance of Becoming Human — Daniel Borzutzky

Flowers Among the Carrion — James Pate

My country, tonight — Josué Guébo

Take This Stallion by Anaïs Duplan

When the Ghosts Come Ashore — Jacqui Germain

Andes — by Tomaž Šalamun, trans. Jeffrey Young & Katarina Vladimirov Young

Six — Julie Marie Wade

Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

The Hermit — Lucy Ives

Sad Girl Poems — Christopher Soto

Favorite literary presses, journals and publishers:

The Atlas Review

Tarpaulin Sky

Sibling Rivalry

Timeless, Infinite Light

Black Ocean

Lit Hub

Volume 1 Brooklyn

Witch Craft Magazine

Electric Lit

Switchback Books

Favorite reads:

The Establishment

Slutist

Ultra Culture

Broadly

Autostraddle

A Woman’s Thing

WEIRD SISTER

The Offing

Witch Craft Magazine

Queen Mob’s Teahouse

Quail Bell Magazine

Sabat Magazine

Bloodmilk Jewelry

Feminine Inquiry

For Harriet

St. Sucia

The Numinous

Dirge Magazine

Lumen Magazine

Blavity

Berfrois

Favorite magical reading twitter accounts:

@AstroPoets

@guerrillafem 

@cultofweird

@DeathSalon

@deadmaidens

@mask_mag

@TheSilentMother

---

Lisa Marie Basile is the founding editor-in-chief of Luna Luna Magazine and moderator of its digital community. Her work has appeared in The Establishment, Bustle, Bust, Hello Giggles, Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping, and The Huffington Post, among other sites.  She is also the author of three poetry collections, including Apocryphal from Noctuary Press. She holds an MFA from The New School. @lisamariebasile

5 Books of Poetry I'm Loving Right Now

BY LISA MARIE BASILE

I don't read lots of books quickly. I hate to admit that. I should read more – and faster. I really should. But when I do read, I read books over and over and over and I really ingest them. I try to let them inhabit me. Here are a few I've read over and over the past few weeks. Please do read them, buy them, support their authors and review them, too, if you wish. 

Zoe Dzunko's Selfless (TAR Chapbook Series / Atlas Review)

I'd read Dzunko's poetry before in an issue of Pith, so when I got my hands on Selfless, I had expected that same bodily rush – explosive and uncomfortable, like a reader-cheerleader who is on the sidelines of darkness. There is a lot of body – and bodylessness and body trauma – in this book. I think her voice is strong as fuck, even in those moments when weakness is drawn up and offered as matter-of-factly as-anything: "The time you fucked / my face it felt like a feather." All of the book's power just grows and grows, and there are some dozens and dozens of crushing lines throughout – too many for me to quote here. Go read it.

I have somewhere to be
in the future – it is a shape I drew
in the dirt, ten backyards ago.

•

No violets
to shrink into — I am laying a body

out for the bees, but they never land
when you want them this much.

---

Jay Besemer's Chelate (Brooklyn Arts Press)

Chelate is killing me. I want to understand the poet, soothe the poet, make a space for the poet in my heart and take in some of his pain. Besemer writes of gender transition in such a cutting, confrontational, active way, and you can feel it. 

The writer explores the undoing and re-creation of body, and while some of that is very painful, to me this book is made of strength, autonomy and reconciliation. This is an engine of a book – every single piece leads you further and further into this form-bending holy land of self.

The book also makes excellent use of colons (something you'll notice first), which are hard to use successfully when the poet isn't sure of why they are using them. They seem obvious here, though – they are pushing this massive engine of change and becoming forward; they are the symbol of change. Obsessed. 

erasing one file : that's not what we're doing here /
: erasure is not the right word : recognition is the/
analogous process : my today & my tomorrow/
recognize yesterday but do not attempt to obscure/
it
 

---

Locally Made Panties by Arielle Greenberg (Ricochet Editions)

So this book is sitting on my counter one day – I'd ripped open the packing and left it there to be read later. I'm always rushing. And then later that night I come home, and see the cover staring up at me – this 1970s babe pulling her undies up tight around her body. It's raunchy – for sure – but really, it's just powerful. Because the body is always so shamed. God forbid you see a little camel toe! God forbid a woman show her body in a way that we are taught to objectify and sexualize? I like that this book says, "Hi. This vagina and this proud lady showing her vag is totally on this book cover. So take that." Also, the back cover boasts blurbs by Cheryl Strayed and Kate Durbin, a fully little pairing that I'm intrigued by. (I love Kate Durbin). 

This whole thing is about being a woman, a mother, a consumer, a human, a writer, an observer – all while having a body, and having clothes, and watching other bodies and others' behaviors. It is about what our clothes really mean and what we really mean when we talk about clothing. 

At first, being that I'm such a bratty little Wednesday Addams about everything, I wasn't sure where this would fit for me. I was (admittedly) thrown off by the idea of poetry encountering clothing or fashion. But it was so much more than that, and I was wrong for making that snap decision. 

This book is an interesting, honest recollection (or diary) of being alive and being a woman. She deftly deals with issues of shopping guilt, poet outfits, her body, ethical clothes, weight gain and shopping with friends who tell you that you look good but are fibbing. All the things we can all relate to. 

And then there is a poet who has worn the same
Adorable 1940s print day dresses and cat's eye
glasses every day, every time I've seen her, for the
decade that I've known her. It is her Look.

I often think about how I would like to have a Look.

•

If I lose forty pounds altogether it will be a fucking
miracle and that would be my Goal Weight, my weight
of all weights, and I would think that everything I put
on looked fabulous on me.

A Goal Weight is really a completely ridiculous
construct.

---

Fire in the Sky by E. Kristin Anderson (Grey Book Press)

I actually loved this book so much I blurbed it, and so with that I present you my blurb:

These clever erasure poems strain the blood of Lana Del Rey (a pure blend of sex, kitsch & American Dream) into something Del Rey herself would likely read while dozing, or smoking, on an Italian shore. The work here speaks to poetry's most addictive power: aesthetic overdose in the form of language. There's so much to indulge in here, so much to consume, like a woman drunk on the lure of a bad, bad man. I got the impression that the writer is a real Lana Del Rey fan, the kind that sees past LDR's obvious tropes and vice-riddled repetitions - and sees, instead, the heart of who we are as people; in love , on fire, sad, lost and obsessive. That's really what this is about, not a regurgitation. I found myself wanting to pull the words out and arrange them before me, all covered in sea salt and flower petals and lipstick.

Don’t make the girl dark. No butterflies. Bats come sing
drinkin’ like memory, sad mountain paradise. But life? 
Want that vitamin crazy hard, radio queens and rain.

You raised chasers; I want the close cry. 
Lick them like a national party, know my every worth. 
I’ll die now, in my party bikini, honey true, the shameless way.

---

Anaïs Duplan's Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press)

This book is a force. I mean, a force.

It's bold, brazen, experimental in form and loud in language. But for all of that – it's attacking quality – it remains soft and vulnerable. It is hooves and also fur, and they are synced in constant movement.

I am so in love with the way Duplan writes her interior world. She says things in a way that makes you think she's telling a secret to a best friend. But also that she will write it on a wall in the public park because who cares what you think? 

The language is precise; her line-breaks are thoughtful and exact, and her dedication to exploring form feels natural; it doesn't feel like a poet-checklist of "and now I tried this," which, let's be honest, is a thing.

This book – I read it twice. Each time I thought I am so glad this exists. I love Anaïs Duplan's work, and I think everyone should read it. 

I become my mother and father. I don
their postures, I posture, "Where-"
have they gone and how I stop them
from devouring me." 

•

You and I are filthy but it is
our filth. Look how quick the clouds
when you expect bad news. Here is
a telegram I have never received:
Please. Hold out hope. The best
is nowhere in sight.