FIRST BOMBLESS DAY

a tanka sequence

by Chen-ou Liu

hometown

once a place of human warmth

and safety

now a pile of stones and dust

where memories crumble

family

once a source of love and help

now whispered names

on trembling lips

with a question, "still alive?"

ruins and ruins ...

under Gaza's smeared sun

childhood memories

scatter like splintered shards

that can’t be fit together

ceasefire deal

once a sunbird singing nonstop

now a mute swan

battling the chilly winds

of hunger and despair

Author’s note: The Palestine sunbird pictured above (Cinnyris osea) is a small passerine bird of the sunbird family, Nectariniidae, and in 2015, the Palestinian Authority adopted the species as a national bird. Native to Eurasia but migrating south for the winter, the mute swan (Cygnus olor) is a rare winter visitor to Palestine.

Chen-ou Liu is the author of five books, including Following the Moon to the Maple Land (First Prize, 2011 Haiku Pix Chapbook Contest) and A Life in Transition and Translation (Honorable Mention, 2014 Turtle Light Press Biennial Haiku Chapbook Competition). His tanka and haiku have been honored with many awards.

JOHNNY DEPP WINS, AND I, LIKE SO MANY OTHERS, THINK OF THE MAN WHO ABUSED ME

by Emma Rhodes

I’m in a courtroom with him in my dreams.

Years live, tangible and growing inside of me.

Stench rotting from the inside out makes me gag, and

the judge thinks I drink and doesn’t believe a word I say.

 

As things rot, their appearance, smell, stories change. 

Leave something to fester long enough it becomes absence, 

memories warp but sickness remains. 

 

We beg you to believe our guts even when they stink.

 

There is a constant drip on the windshield of this car. The evidence is shown 

through the screen so it’s water-warped & memory-warped & 

dream-warped but he doesn’t deny a thing

 

The jury appreciates his honesty, his charm. 

 

Court takes a break. He says we need to play laser-tag—the judge said so. 

That can’t be true and yet suddenly I’m shot by light from all angles, 

put me under a spotlight and call me a liar.

 

The water continues to drip on the windshield.

 

They tell me I had the means to get out. Look at me now. Just drive away they say. Just drive away if it was so bad why didn’t you leave but facing the other wall is a boot on the wheel and I am stuck in his bed, his bathtub, pacing the one single hallway while he left in a car to see 

 

his parents (who are so proud of him, by the way. He was always a great boy.)

 

And Taylor Swift hasn’t said anything this time, none of the #MeToo baddies have spoken.

The water on the windshield breaks through and shatters. 

Glass shards in the courtroom. Everyone yells 

 

“violence!”

 

And I am left. Picking up one shard after another. He walks by, stomps on a shard so it crumbles into a million more (another inconsistency), says 

 

“thanks for keeping me around.”

 

I’ll stop writing about violence when I stop seeing it. 

I’ll stop writing about violence when the world stops trying to kill its women.  

Emma Rhodes is an emerging Queer writer currently living on the unceded territory of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee people. Her work has been published in places such as Prism International, Plenitude, Riddle Fence, and elsewhere.

TERRORISM AND ITS MODES

by Austin Alexis

I compare it to a wintry night:
kale and other crops won't grow:
its land sits barren, dry.
It is defined by lies.
The bodies and shards it scatters
disintegrate in The New York Times.
Its causes it fails to justify
so its effects lack resonance.
By definition it is a cry
whose message, unheard, belies
what it wants to say.
Unpersuasive, it never asks why
its arguments don't make loud sounds
like shopping malls crashing to the ground.


Austin Alexis has published in or has work forthcoming in The Long Islander, Home Planet News, Paterson Literary Review, The New Verse News, The Ledge and other journals. His full-length collection is Privacy Issues (Broadside Lotus Press). His chapbook is For Lincoln & Other Poems (Poets Wear Prada Press). He teaches composition and literature at a CUNY college in Brooklyn and lives in Manhattan, New York City.

HOW WE IMAGINED WE BLED OUR SUPPLICATIONS

by Ranjani Murali

Ink, Blood, and Tears, an OtherWords cartoon by Khalil Bendib

As if water dripping into
            the steel sink, bleaching

our brushes white, scoring the floors
            of our glass-doored office /

as if the vein of our favorite fountain
            pens (the ones that dug into

our index fingers while we caricatured
            old art teachers with balding

heads) had been spliced, spurting forth
            ink-splotched faces, the aphorisms

we drew in bubbles, their blood-vowels /
            as if bullets we drove into the walls

of easels, blithely / as if specks of flesh
            carving out their wounds, sinew

torn in watercolor, shards of glass painted
            in felt-tips / as if the tilt of our

mouths in these scenes, the seconds we
            almost smiled between smearing

steeple-minaret-altar as if wings / as if
            hierologists of tomorrows,

revealing our schisms, our compositions
            in grays and whitespace/ as

if ours, a name stenciled on drywall, on
            acid-free paper, beneath our

benedictions, beneath the as if / as if
            beneath the /  if  /


Ranjani Murali received her MFA in poetry from George Mason University. Her poetry, nonfiction and translations have appeared in Pratilipi, Phoebe, elimae, Kartika Review and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2014 Srinivas Rayaprol Prize and has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center and the Vermont Studio Center.