Poetry by Andi Talarico

BY ANDI TALARICO

After Sacrifice

Catholics believe in magic, which is to say 

Transubstantiation, which is really to say sleight 

of hand, which is to say we

Believe a miracle occurs each time the holy man, ordained, 

offers the water and the wine,

Just like that, from up their robes, they

Conjure the body, conjure the blood.

It is pivotal, the difference, the others who see mass as metaphor.

They are just pretending. It is enough to worship the idea.

But not us, see, watch the hands, use your nail,

scratch Papal and find pagan, 

boiling, just beneath,

Denied and demoted like a bastard born son.

But see how far we’ve come, 

Note we no longer need the offering 

of your firstborn to the fire

Don’t have to hurl your kin into the maw of a pit

Don’t have to cut from the finest of your harvest

Don’t have to let go your plumpest sow.

Here, we’re evolved now, humane, now, let 

this ministered man, 

holy enough to be above you,

let him make his magic happen, 

an alchemy of spirit to body

A glamour for the blind

We’ve made it for you.

A glamour so profound

Wreathed in the smoke of incense

Kept behind the altar

Beyond the pale

Between masses, babies, offered up.

We cry, bring us your youngest, your softest, 

all the sons and daughters of Abraham,

And here is the lamb, and here is the slaughter,

The hunger too great, the appetite laid bare.

The sin of lust made greater by the sin of

Looking-away, the sin of never-asking,

The sin of teaching our young that

Sacrifice is the greatest name for love

Because after all, after all,

This is my body, which is given up for you.

Andi Talarico is a Brooklyn-based writer, reader, and witch. She’s the former host of At the Inkwell NYC, an international reading series. She's taught poetry in classrooms as a rostered artist, been a coach and judge for Poetry Out Loud, and her work has been featured in Luna Luna magazine, The Poetry Project, Yes Poetry, Ritual Poetica, and more. Her work has also been published by PaperKite Press and SwanDive Publishing. When she’s not working with stationery company Baronfig, you can find her dishing on astrology and culture on her podcast Astrolushes, co-hosted with Lisa Marie Basile.

Summer Poem: Court Castaños

Magic Breathing

BY COURT CASTAÑOS

We didn’t have fireflies

flickering summer’s arrival song

in old jam and jelly jars, and I wish

I’d seen them rise from the tall grass

mistaken them for sprites, magic

breathing. We were washed

in the orange glow of the street

lights higher than we could ever imagine

climbing with our rough hands and

thick, summer feet. By June

you could crack an egg on the searing

tar of your road and watch it blossom

sunny side up until the slap

of burnt yolk sent you running

to the cool relief under

the maple tree, where the sun

couldn’t find you and the light

was mashed to cool green

like grass that’s been bruised

and tugged loose by dancing feet

in holy sprinkler water.

As a kid I could chant all

the priest’s calls and responses, sign

the cross over my small body and

say Grace five-times-fast,

but in the young nucleus of my soul

I knew the real power was in the count

to thirty on a moonless night while the

street exhales it’s last fiery breath.

My body in flight to the cavern

in the arms of my orange tree

where my heart would howl

in ecstasy as I praised the dim glow

of the street lights and the holy

sanctity of bare feet running

in a pack of wild kids, playing

hide and seek in the dark.

Donate: The poet requests that donations be sent to RAICE’s LEAF Fund. The LEAF fund ensures that children coming to this country can receive quality legal representation both in detention centers and once they are released. In 2018, our specially-trained team provided ongoing legal counsel to 400 children, and more than 4,500 children received training to help them understand their rights here in the United States. You can donate via this link.

Court Castaños has work currently published in The Nasiona and the San Joaquin Review. New poems forthcoming in Boudin, of The McNeese Review. Castaños grew up adventuring along the Kings River in the San Joaquin Valley and now resides in Santa Cruz, California.

Journaling The Body: Prompts for Chronic Illness

BY LISA MARIE BASILE

I live with #ankylosingspondylitis, so I live with daily pain and immobility. I’m also a patient advocate, so I realize how much of an emotional toll managing chronic illness — including dynamic disabilities, inflammatory diseases, or mental health issues — can take. Here are some of the journal prompts based I’ve been using in my journaling practice. I want you to know that you’re not alone.

There are SO many studies in clinical journals proving the beneficial psychological and even physiological effects of expressive writing. I’ve known writing has the capacity to change us since…forever, but science does offer some explanation. Our bodies change when we make space for our feelings.

When we hold our feelings in, it can devastate our bodies (cortisol build-up, for one, is a real issue) and our psyches. It is especially isolating to live with a chronic illness; suffering day to day without people truly understanding can take a toll on you. This can cause greater anxiety and stress which cyclically leads back into pain and worsening health. Your journal is a place for your truth. Take advantage of it. Let the shadows out and embrace joy, as well. It is not a solution nor a cure, but it is its own type of medicine.

Think of writing as one powerful tool in your self-care arsenal. It’s not a quick fix. It’s not a miracle — but it holds a mirror up to who we are, and can help us find autonomy in the experience. Follow my transformative writing page at RITUAL POETICA.

What if the earth is asking us to be still?

BY LISA MARIE BASILE

Tune in with me.

I think about the people who will populate our future, and I ask the sky what they will see, what they will be told — through our actions and words and hunger. Will we become their ancient gods, whose lessons are bleak and hellish? Will they see how hard many of us tried and how we hoped?

Will our mythos be of hyper-consumerism, racism, lovers who are not allowed to love, bodies put into categories, plastic, the poisoned fruit, the unbearable dullness of constant performance, the addiction to the avatar, the plutocracy, the oceans crying into themselves, the sound of the air cracking against the ozone? Will all of our wounds still be present?

When I think of the people of the ancient worlds — and their gods and their cultures and their arts — I wonder what they would have wanted us to know?

Did they hope to impart a message of beauty, art, and nature? Of storytelling and culture?

Did they think we would destroy one another and the earth they danced upon in worship?

What happens to everything when we sit in the sea? Do we become a primal beautiful thing?

There is a presence that is being asked of us. Do we hear its sound? Are we the people who tolerate abuse? Are we the zombies of decadence, the digital void that consumes and hungers through screens? What if we were embodied for a day? Would we hear the great chambers of our heart, and the hearts of strangers, and the vines and sea beings we came from?

There is a constant scrolling and feeding. And it’s because we are hurting. We are disconnected. We are oppressed. We are poor. We are sick. We are not seen by society. We feel lonely, a loneliness perpetuated by hyper-connection.

How else do we live without turning to the void, which provides us beautiful and loud things to buy and be and shape ourselves into?

How do we live without abusing our neighbor, without stomping on their chest?

What if we could remember ourselves? How miraculous we are? Would we remember to be generous, to heal, to say hello? What would it look like if we all stopped pushing for a moment? What if we let the wind move us?

Positano

I feel sometimes I am a ghost. Liminal, floating through the world, eating the world around me — media and fashion and ideas that are not my own, not aligned with my values or my traumas or my soul.

I am out of time with my own soul. I am in 2020, but my heart is in the ocean eternal. I want wind and shorelines. I want fairness and justice. I want to experience beauty without the billboards looming. I want to read a book in the sunlight, and see my neighbor have the same opportunity.

But my neighbors — and your neighbors — are dying, are being murdered, and our ecosystems are gasping in our wake.

La Masseria Farm Experience

There are days that are so beautiful, so soft and real, that I have hope. These are holy days.

In Campania Italy, I have a holy day. I sit in a small stone pool. I think of the drive through the mountains from Napoli, where Pompeii stands, its breath held, looming over its land. How it preserved the stories of its people. I think always of what is preserved, what is lost.

But in the little pool, I am alone. The bed and breakfast is quiet. Tourists are out at Capri or Amalfi, the staff are napping during siesta, making pesto, somewhere else paying bills, talking on phones. I hear the hum of a generator, street dogs barking, the starlings that fly over me back and forth, definitely flirting.

I whistle and they zip over my head. We are in conversation, I know it. The earth wants me to know it sees me, wants me to see it. I am here and nowhere else. I am completely alive. I am made for this moment; we all are.

And after the late dinners of fried fish, I walk back to my room, alone. I am greeted again by the tiny birds who flutter in and out of the domed entrance, cherubs painted across the ceiling. I think of time and nature, and its concurrent obliviousness and suffering. I think of my privilege, and what I can do to preserve these stunning things.

I think of my body withstanding 100-degree heat. How I talk to the creatures in some liminal language of love. I think of how we could all be good to one another, so good that we could all have holy days.

I think of my flesh as the wine of this land. I feel the Mediterranean and the Tyrrhenian Seas in the palms of my hands. I am so alive and grateful and awake at the altar of these moments I cry for the nostalgia that hasn’t come yet, that I know I will feel. That I do feel. I am both past and present. But mostly, I am now.

I walk up the road to a farm and am greeted by a family whose hands have nurtured and translated the earth for centuries. They climb the trees, show us the olives falling. We see the farm cats idle in their sunlight, their fur dotted in soil. They are languid in pleasure and warmth.

I lose myself in the lemon trees, smell their peels; I am blessed. I step into the cool room where they keep the jugs of Montepulciano and cured meats. A cry in ecstasy is somewhere within me.

After a long day of pasta made by hand and more wine and strangers inviting me to their table and then limoncello, I walk home to my room. I am drunk on the connection. I film the walk, then stop. I do not want to capture everything; some things just exist between me and the earth. I won’t share.

La Masseria Farm Experience

My room is called Parthenope. It is etched into the wooden door. When I open the door, that is the threshold, the portal. Parthenope is a siren who lives on the coast of Naples. I imagine her body clinging to the continental shelf, her hair entwined in shell. They say she threw herself into the sea when she couldn’t please Odysseus with her siren song. Or maybe a centaur fell in love with Parthenope, only to enrage Jupiter, who turned her into Naples. The centaur became Vesuvius, and now they are forever linked — by both love and rage. Is that not humanity?

She became Naples. She became forever. Her essence is water, is earth, is the mythology of what happens when people are cruel and jealous and oppressive. Is this the message the sirens are singing? To be tolerant? To normalize cruelty? To fill the void with empty media, with images without stories?

Lubra Casa

There is always something that could destroy us, could rid us of this existence. A virus, a volcano, our own hands.

We are temporary, so quick and light and flimsy. We are but a stitch of fabric. A dream within a dream of that fabric. And yet. Here we are, becoming the ancients, carving out a way toward the future. We visit volcanos. We mythologize the earth. We drink wine and capture beauty. But then we turn our backs — on the proverbial garden, on one another, on our own bodies.

What if the earth is asking us to be better? To be still? What pose would we hold? What shape could let all the light in?

LISA MARIE BASILE is the founding creative director of Luna Luna Magazine, a popular magazine & digital community focused on literature, magical living, and identity. She is the author of several books of poetry, as well as Light Magic for Dark Times, a modern collection of inspired rituals and daily practices, as well as The Magical Writing Grimoire: Use the Word as Your Wand for Magic, Manifestation & Ritual. She's written for or been featured in The New York Times, Refinery 29, Self, Chakrubs, Marie Claire, Narratively, Catapult, Sabat Magazine, Bust, HelloGiggles, Best American Experimental Writing, Best American Poetry, Grimoire Magazine, and more. She's an editor at the poetry site Little Infinite as well as the co-host of Astrolushes, a podcast that conversationally explores astrology, ritual, pop culture, and literature. Lisa Marie has taught writing and ritual workshops at HausWitch in Salem, MA, Manhattanville College, and Pace University. She is also a chronic illness advocate, keeping columns at several chronic illness patient websites. She earned a Masters's degree in Writing from The New School and studied literature and psychology as an undergraduate at Pace University. You can follow her at @lisamariebasile and @Ritual_Poetica.

Body on Pause: Miscarrying During A Pandemic

BY PATRICIA GRISAFI

I decide Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters will be the soundtrack to this miscarriage. As I get my things together—mask, extra mask, gloves, bottle of hand sanitizer, plastic baggie stuffed with wipes—I wonder if my album choice is cliché. Almost every critic has loved Fetch the Bolt Cutters, gushing about how it feels made for a quarantine.

The procedure to remove the dead fetus from my body is supposed to be about ten minutes long. I get on the M15 bus after a fifteen-minute walk and survey the passengers sitting quiet and masked in their seats like a de Chirico painting. Then I make a playlist called “Miscarriage.” The songs are “Newspaper,” “Under the Table,” and “For Her,” all songs about patriarchal abuse and trauma.

This is my fourth miscarriage—sixth if you count chemical pregnancies, which the doctors do—but I’ve never had a vacuum aspiration before. All my procedures have been D&Cs under sedation. However, with New York City hospitals full of COVID-19 patients, my best bet is an in-office procedure. I am disappointed I won’t be knocked out.

In the waiting room, three heavily pregnant women fuss with their phones. I think of my two-year-old son at home, getting ready for nap-time. My husband sends me updates on the situation: “he’s chattering too much,” “oh, he’s quiet now.” I miss my husband’s presence in that room, thinking of past surgeries when I emerged from sedation with a newly hollowed uterus to his embrace. But he’s not allowed to be here—patients must come alone. No husband and toddler in tow during quarantine.

I miss so many things, frivolous things. Sharing a morning muffin with my son at the dog park. Sipping margaritas with a chili salt rim on an outside patio. Wandering into Rite Aid for no reason. Perusing the shelves at the local bookstore with a cup of coffee. Family walks that don’t feel limned with disquiet.

The procedure will happen while I am laying down, my feet in the stirrups. Later, a lab will test the “materials of conception” from this pregnancy for chromosomal abnormalities. I won’t have to see what comes out of me—not like there will be much at eight weeks. “Embryonic demise” probably occurred at around week six or seven after the grim ultrasound when the doctor reported a feeble heartbeat and a too-tiny fetal measurement. I’ve been fixating on the fetus slowly dying inside me and then on my body as harbor for its corpse.

How can you not think about death during a pandemic? Since the day our family began sheltering in place, I had been carrying the small hope of that baby. On March 7th, I was inseminated in one of the anonymous rooms at Weil Cornell, my husband holding my hand as they threaded the catheter in. Afterwards, he played a heavy metal version of “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher” on his phone, and we laughed.

My first son was conceived this way—with the help of science after infertility flooded my body with doubt about my ability to have children. I dutifully went every other day to have my blood taken and my vagina probed. Between my first struggle to keep a pregnancy viable and all the subsequent losses, I found myself thinking about my uselessness as a woman in a world without medical intervention.

“In ancient Sicily, they’d have thrown me in the prickly pear bushes, maybe burned me. Maybe I’d be the village witch, like Strega Nona—except hated,” I had said, thinking about how much family meant to my genealogical constitution. A woman who couldn’t have children was a problem. A curse. She had done something to deserve infertility. Send her away.

My paternal grandmother did not want biological children, so deep was her fear of dying during childbirth. She even found a child to adopt in New Paltz, where my grandfather and she had a one room cabin for summers. My grandfather wanted his own child, and I imagine him saying no to the adoption and then forcing himself inside her and making my father.

This is not history, not fact. It’s my brain winding around the possible ways my family made a family. My grandmother didn’t have her only child until after eleven years of marriage—unusual for Italian Catholics during the 1930s. My mother tried to get pregnant for eleven years, submitting to every experimental procedure in the ‘70s and ‘80s until I was born—also an only child.

When my mother and I fight now, I think about what she put her body through for the slim chance of a child. Is reproductive trauma something the women in my family share, a story they’ve only been able to tell through their live births, a story otherwise hidden in the deepest parts of their selves? What kind of woman volunteers her body for this kind of repeat torture?

I’m ushered into the procedure room. The doctor gives me a Motrin. I’ve brought my own Klonopin because I’ve been on them forever. I wonder if I should take two instead of one. I take one.

The moment my feet hit the stirrups, I press “play.”

“Are you okay,” the doctor asks me.

“Yes,” I say, because I am a good patient but also because I know this must happen.

The doctor and her assistant try to shove metal accoutrements into my vagina with delicacy. It’s never pleasant, the speculum. Then there are the tubes. Then there is the anesthetic, which makes me feel high and chatty for about three minutes. I want to babble on and on about my child, to remind them I’m a mother and not a collection of losses.

Fiona Apple’s frenetic warble pierces me as they start the procedure. I try to focus on that voice, a voice that arches and peaks and trembles and breaks. A voice that is fragile but strong.

As the pain begins, so does “For Her,” and I think about the man who pinned me down and came on my face while I screamed and cried. I can’t help it. This asshole hops onto my nerves at unexpected times. I dig my nails into the fleshy cradle of my hands as Fiona sings, “Good morning, good morning, you raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in.”

The doctor finishes up. She’s been telling me all along how good I am doing.

“Rest for as long as you want,” she says as the last instrument is removed.

I haven’t shut off the playlist. Liz Phair’s “Fuck and Run” randomly comes on, and I feel like laughing and crying at the same time.

It takes twenty minutes to hail a cab. Finally, one stops. It is a van with a plexiglass barrier window, and I feel grateful. I open the window with my gloved hand. They’re garden gloves, the kind I use to repot the easy plants I keep killing in my apartment. I hear the whipping of wind on the FDR, the thrum of pavement under the wheels.

My son is asleep when I quietly step into the apartment. My husband holds me tightly.

“I’m so tired,” I tell him, like a child who wants to be taken care of. “Can you tuck me into bed?”  

Whenever I have a miscarriage, I feel like a failure. The eggs too old? The lining of my uterus not thick enough? The questions are endless. The disappointment hangs like a heavy curtain.

During a pandemic, it’s worse. There’s an irritating urgency and a paralyzing fear about when we can start to try and expand our family again. The fertility clinic will eventually reopen, but when will the world? When will it be safe to travel for blood-taking and hormone-monitoring? For poached eggs and harissa? For play dates and bang trims?

In the meantime, I make cocktails with lemon and whiskey. I draw owls for my son. I shave my armpits but not my legs. I stare out the window. When my husband and I begin work, I put on Peppa Pig and plop my child into his high chair.

But my professional life suffers for the love of being around my son. I stop to pet him, fetch more goldfish crackers, kiss his head. And then I want to sleep, like the protagonist of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Sleep right through the plague, sleep through the fear, sleep through future fertility treatments. Wake up like Giambattista’s Basile’s Italian Sleeping Beauty, a surprise baby suckling at her breast. Forget that Prince Charming raped and impregnated her while she was unconscious.

Pregnancy destabilizes your sense of self. It changes you. In some cases, fetal DNA remains in our bodies long after a child is born. This phenomenon is called microchimerism after the mythological creature composed of many parts, usually depicted as a lion with the head of a goat and a tail trailing off to a snake’s head. If a pregnant woman is not a chimera, I don’t know what is.

When I was younger and learned about viruses for the first time in science class, I was terrified. There is still something about a virus that frightens me. I’ve had the chicken pox, I’ve had the flu. The first time I had a wart on my finger, I cried for days. The idea that viruses never really leave, that they exist inside of us in various states of dormancy or activity forever, made me afraid of my body’s uncontrollability.

I think about bodies constantly now—permeable, malleable, capable at times and utterly useless at others. Sacks heaving in and out. A contemptible, fickle uterus. Contracting or relaxing the pelvis as fetal tissue is aspirated. Mouths releasing clouds of germs. The touch of my child’s hand as I guide him on makeshift Pikler triangle made from the side of his crib propped up against the couch because we can’t go to the playground anymore.

“Mommy, hold hand, please,” he says extending his chubby little paw, attempting to make his way down the ladder.

“I’ve got you,” I say.

We soldier on.

The last song on Fetch the Bolt Cutters is called “On I Go.” With its repetitive lyrics about repetition set against atonal cacophony, it feels like a woman scraping at the walls of her mind, her body, the apartment she’s trapped in while a pandemic rages outside.

"On I go, not toward or away

Up until now it was day, next day

Up until now in a rush to prove

But now I only move to move.”

It’s not a pleasant listen. Maybe it feels too sharp right now, prodding at a wound. But I understand what’s at stake, the overwhelming desperation to have agency over life only to find the attempt futile and give up. Or perhaps it’s a kind of triumph—reclaiming the conditions of one’s journey.

The day after my procedure, I walk gingerly between the bedroom to lay down in silence and the living room to lay down in chaos. This is the choice I can make. There is no real movement, no escape except for short, nerve-wracking walks on the East River that are actually practices in weaving and swerving. Time feels suspended—our family on pause. My body on pause. My life on pause.

Right now, I only move to move.

Patricia Grisafi, Ph.D., is a freelance writer and editor. She writes about mental health, popular culture, film and literature, gender, and parenting. Her work has been featured in The Guardian, LARB, Salon, VICE, Bustle, Catapult, Narratively, The Rumpus, Bitch, SELF, Ravishly, Luna Luna, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City with her husband, son, and two rescued pit bulls. She is passionate about horror movies and animal rescue.

Poetry by Lauren Saxon

BY LAUREN SAXON

22

after Fatima Asghar’s Partition

I am 22 & have not been hugged in a long time.

I am considering the English language—

how it gave us both the word hug & the word embrace. 

do not mistake them for one.

            I love her. I love her.

                    I will always be this way.

my mother, I fear, will not attend my wedding.

my father is selling the house—

it was to be kept for legitimate grandchildren only.

I am no stranger to my parent’s arms.

I still call my father’s cologne, home.

I am proud to have my mother’s smile.

still 

       my parents hug 

       only the parts of me that they can embrace.

I am certain my body would feel differently.

I am 22 & have not been hugged in a long time.

I watch my parents greet me from a distance.

it is clear that they have missed me. 

when my mother wraps her arms around me,

I cannot feel them.

I am standing behind myself,

     keeping two white gowns from touching the ground.

when my father wraps his arms around me,

he does so on borrowed land.

it is possible to be hugged & not embraced.

the proof is right here in my breath.

I will always be this way.

SUPPORT LAUREN SAXON BY DONATING VIA VENMO: @Lsax_235

Lauren Saxon is a 22 year old poet and mechanical engineer from Cincinnati Ohio. She attends Vanderbilt University, and relies on poetry when elections, church shootings, and police brutality leaves her speechless. Lauren's work is featured or forthcoming in Flypaper Magazine, Empty Mirror, Homology Lit, Nimrod International Journal and more. She is on staff at Gigantic Sequins, Assistant Editor of Glass: A Journal of Poetry and spends way too much time on twitter (@Lsax_235).

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.