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Poetry

p r i d e

By A. H. Jerriod Avant

Give me memories as

slow to leave as snails.

In foreign and perhaps

fragile years I’ll still be able

Fuh Da Summa

By A. H. Jerriod Avant

I’m docked at a lake that

the people don’t attend.

Machete on my hip to

make a devil cough up

He, Pronoun

By Tina Chang

Everywhere I look I see him,
I have a right to fear for him,

though I have no right to claim his color.
His blackness is his to own and what will

my mouth say of that sweetness.

Creation Myth

By Tina Chang

I’m without body but forming in the latticework

of blood cell and fret. Each threat pulls me upward

tempting and building me until my spine lifts into a column,

Pediophobia

By Daniella Toosie-Watson

10.

Dad, you look like a doll
I wouldn’t want to play with, boxed
in your casket. The mortician
tried to paint you pretty.
I wanted to be pretty, too, but mom says
makeup is inappropriate for funerals.

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Dad Says Being Gay Is Like Kissing Your Mother, then Prays

By Daniella Toosie-Watson

Mount Vernon, NY, summer 2001

Sitting on the concrete steps in the back of my grandma’s house,
our dad shows us how to burn paper
with a magnifying glass. Says people kill ants this way,
how cruel it is. It was true: the magnifying glass’s gaze

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Birth of the Cool

By Alan Michael Parker

It must be so hard to be Miles Davis

and a ghost, and to sit in my kitchen

as I squeal along on a dime-store horn

What Good Is Life Without Painting

By Alan Michael Parker

I was participating fully in Life,

or so my calendar said,

when I had the spiritually extravagant

gift of being heart-struck,

standing before a painting.

Poem

By Alan Michael Parker

1. Dad, Don’t Be That Guy

2. Dad, Quoting the Wikipedia Isn’t Gospel

3. Dad, I’m Going to Take Those Away

4. Dad, I Warned You

The Microeconomics of Love

By Alan Michael Parker

I put a poem

in your backup jewelry box,

the one you keep

at the bottom of the taxes from 2003

in order to foil the inevitable burglars,

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