Look, people just go missing here
what could be more female than that,
to go missing with no one to claim you
were ever there.

To speak a woman’s existence
demands her existence.
Does she exist if

there is no blood
no virginity tests
no orbital wounds
ashed over.

What can be more violent than never knowing
in which way the bodies were taken.
Does she exist if all that’s left

are her shoes
some heartache
the memory that

I’ve never walked a street alone
forgetting who I am but goddamn
I’ll fake my safety til they believe it too.

Until trust is not just family.
Life is lived above ground.
Love can be in color.

We are the missing, forced
disappearances are causality if you’re cruel,
are oxymoron if you still have a sense of humor.

What is the function of femininity except survive in danger?

My female body is for their violence on the daily.
who has our bravery
plucked out of soft palms.

If we rain it down on them
do we become the bloody invisible
drenched in it to live?

Maybe. Let’s live

before they bring the dying for us
with a silencing and our soldered off parts
they keep in trophy closets.

Nour Kamel is perfectly lit and writes things from Cairo, Egypt. Kamel writes about identity, language, sexuality, queerness, gender, oppression, femininity, trauma, family, lineage, globalisation, loss and food. Their chapbook Noon is part of the New-Generation African Poets series and their writing appears or is forthcoming in Asameena, Anomaly, Rusted Radishes, Khabar Keslan, and Sukoon.

Why the questions? Me alone? You, always wherever you are when you reach me? Where I been all this time? Guessing when you might get here? How this not about arriving? How this not about where I been? Why I’m always tryna’ to start something? Why ain’t you? Ain’t there enough blood? Flowers? Ain’t you bored? You ever been to a bodega or a river? You always find what you need don’t you? You ever wondered what you look like in someone else’s eyes? No? Yea, you never been to a river right? Figures, hold up, you got my father’s bones to show me? Disappoint me like my father huh? You good at being here ain’t you? Ain’t none of this rhetorical, you gonna think about this right? I been thinking about you this whole time, ain’t you know, between funerals and a funeral where you find me? Like belief systems? Nah, more like parents?                                    

All I know is

                                                                 I been thinking about

                                                                                                                      You ever wondered if the moon just wanna be left alone? Just in the dark? Where ain’t no fathers to resent or mothers to worry about or brothers to want to cry in the arms of on the other side of the country which might as well be the world since your passport gonna expire without another stamp after the one you got to push your Abuela Ana’s casket in a niche on top of your Abuelo’s? Nah? Me neither, but that moon though? There gotta be flowers there right? Right?

Gabriel Ramirez is a Queer Afro-Latinx poet and teaching artist. Gabriel has received fellowships from Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Watering Hole, The Conversation Literary Arts Festival, CantoMundo and a participant in the Callaloo Writers Workshops. You can find his work in publications like Winter Tangerine, The Volta, Drunk in a Midnight Choir, VINYL, as well as Bettering American Poetry Anthology (Bettering Books 2017) What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Northwestern University Press 2019) and is forthcoming in The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT (Haymarket Press 2020). Learn more about Gabriel through his website RamirezPoet.com.

Seal stretched and
baking like river rocks
we
took to the day like
drinking
the wise fruits of
our elders,
stone bramble, black
currant, goose
berry,
little white flowers
spread across
your tongue,
sweat of their
backs
running down

your

chin.

You ask me to take the Christ costume
out of the closet. It’s been a year

since your consciousness went
missing—stunned out of you

into the road: collision of machine & boy,
no pulse in your wrists, your ghost

gasping. Crash doesn’t capture it: your halo
ringing as it bounced from gutter

to sidewalk, singing down concrete
end over end. I wonder, did you throw

your shoulder against your eyelids, wanting
to burst through those last slits

of light? Your recollection of this
is dead, as is the seven days

after. Yes, the neuro-surgeons were pleased
when you answered: your name, the year, but didn’t

know your whereabouts. You told us in nature, lying
hazily in chirping forest, or at a tattoo parlor

getting ink on your abdomen: the half-arch
of a rainbow. Sometimes, you’d remember

you’re in the neuro ICU & we’d
celebrate. Funny—the detachment of body

& brain. I smile when I see the party photos
you post online: you, dressed as Christ,

thorny crown, death metal makeup,
bottle of Hennessey in your hand.

This poem previously appeared in Tinderbox.

I was never taught to grieve unwanted attachments.
What do you do when your body becomes distant?
Therapists tell me it’s only a side-effect of trauma —
craving constriction & feeling every breath I take.

Love is not the same thing as becoming distant.
It is not a band-aid for fleshly problems. Surgeons
tell me I need a diagnosis for actions I take
to turn into someone I recognize in mirrors.

I lie my chance of sensation in the hands of a surgeon;
tell him the measurements of my lifelong problems.
Flesh lies to my face, even after I clean my mirror
& look at augmented-me for the last time.

To be alive is to be scarred & riddled with problems.
To be dead is to give up ideas for birth. Google says
that every cell in my body has a finite span of time
except the mind; I’ll always grieve unwanted attachments.

KB is a Black queer nonbinary poet, editor & postsecondary ed professional currently based in Austin, TX. They have received fellowship invitations from the Vermont Studio Center, Lambda Literary, and elsewhere. Their poetry appears in The Cincinnati Review, The Matador Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Shade Journal, and other pretty places. If you got this far, see them talk sweetness, poetry & other nonhuman things on twitter, instagram, or facebook. They think all your dreams are possible.

what is the color of wholeness, maybe indigo maybe marigold maybe forest green,
surveyed the highest brow and instead learned how to say sorry, learned that the center of
everything isn’t too far from the rim, maybe mama’s amens ain’t conjecture after all
after all, there are holy places everywhere that crowded bus, that spice aisle, that bedroom
at half-light, how else can I explain

at the end, we’re all just complicated
shapes trying to untangle each other, trying to stay
stay warm, dip our feet in wading water, hold
hold someone barehanded and—
perhaps I should just speak for myself

perhaps in a past life, I went to heaven but today I’m twerking
to Sufjan in the living room and my neighbor is chanting yas lawd
yas and the shining in her mouth feels like it’s pure enough
for any interpretation of God, feels like a prayer
and an answer amen amen

i moved into a new house yesterday
i took the biggest room
i woke up this afternoon and
wandered a dollar general
drinking espresso

i went to look at the paperbacks
but it was actually things that
had been seen on TV

i wanted the dish soap
that washes ducks,
so i got it

i asked the man behind the counter
for a balloon

“we all out of helium”

i said,

“can you call me, when you get more?”

Some days I wake up
and it is terrifying.

A dream of you is only “good”
while its happening — then

its just pissing with an open door, missing
the deeply imagined thing,

wondering how will I ever know
if I really came in my sleep?

You’re so enthusiastic.
Your midwife roommate

has used your dehydrator
for her clients’ many placentas.

The machine is clean and damp on the drying rack,
you could proceed, you could make your beef jerky,

but instead you must call and let me know
about the dehydrated placenta.

This is one way that you tell me
that you love me.

Another is when you leave a package in your freezer
clearly marked:

“SNAKE: DO NOT EAT.”
I appreciate that.

But sometimes affection
is a salve we rub over affliction,

like the way you take the unknown calls
that come into my phone from 609 numbers,

and never disparage me for assuming they carry news
of fresh death.

The way, once, you listened
as I practiced a eulogy between bites of pickled radish.

Do you remember that dim afternoon?
Curled like quotation marks on the bed.

A mouth opened
between us.

Holding each other, kissing casually,
you started to squirm,

rolling your forehead
over and over my chest.

Do you remember how you said it,
the very first time you said it?

You answered “I love you”
when I asked “What’s wrong.”

Sarah Matthes is a poet from central New Jersey. Her debut collection of poetry “Town Crier” won the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and is forthcoming with Persea Books in April 2021. Selected poems have appeared or are forthcoming with Pleiades, The Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, Yalobusha Review, poets.org, Midst, and elsewhere. She has received support for her work from the Yiddish Book Center, and is the recipient of the 2019 Tor House Prize from the Robinson Jeffers Foundation. The managing editor of Bat City Review, she lives in Austin, TX. sarahmatthes.com

The light came in flat under the clouds the
way it does sometimes at sunset in the winter,
projecting the gold of the suncatcher in the window
onto the cascade of her hair, and I realized where
artists found halos for their angels. Her
silhouette was holy in a way I thought I had lost
to God’s brutality, but the magic didn’t last longer
than the time it took for her to pull the blinds.

Later that evening, I tried to recapture the
moment in a photograph using a flashlight and
a mirror, but all I accomplished was to connect
the thinning patch on her crown to the hackneyed
landscape we’d bought at a motel auction.
You can’t force providence. You can only make
sure you are open to the gift when it is given,
the way the fish waited patiently for Noah’s flood,
then danced in the blue-green light, shadowed
by one lone boat and a feast of floating bodies.

Tom Barlow is an American poet and fiction writer whose work has appeared in over 100 journals and anthologies including They Said (Black Lawrence) and Best New Writing and journals including Hobart, Temenos, Forklift Ohio, Redivider, Your Daily Poem, and the Stoneboat Literary Journal.