Clarice Lima
Clarice Lima is a young bilingual writer and Literature undergraduate based in Brazil. With a lifelong love for stories and all things warm, they mostly want to be kind. Her words can also be found on Horse Egg Literary.
The atonement of a story named shame
After Robbie’s Atonement (2007)
The story can resume We will resume Will you forgive me?
Marigold blue tales Weddings baked sweet sour Sin summer bears blessings
The good scent of a decorated room I will not set my foot on
Wandering into your house barefoot Snapping your antique vase
You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad Bringing fire flames on back & hands
Saving your sister from fate Handing you her a love confession that tells of lust
Marrying you in three minutes Was it worthy it for Unluckiness wars to hunt years
From the night of justice red & blue green you & what was not true
Did you hear my mom cursing your bloodline outside the iron flower gates
I was a new born when I could distinguish right & wrong Maturity ages poor
Is there something about money I was not told How can it buy a double-edged
Knife named love Turn blue eyes black by night Mend atonement incautious
If I could measure the cost of daydreaming I would give it my boots to Find you
Take this hurt & go Don’t you remember how I looked at you I could do it I would
Move in shame across & away I can lie I am lying with my mouth shut
I am no longer pretending I wouldn’t like to be someone else
No one has ever had this little Broken ceramic Demise letter Black rough leather
I want to believe you true yet I call you & your sister answers repellent
Time is the one writing me honesty What I hold from you is an empty promise
That tells no tales I can act upon Wasn’t it too wicked of you to grant me dependence
On fading colors Wasn’t it heinous of me to believe in the repairment of flesh
Waiting for truth to muster I falsify I can again become the man I was
For I fear the truth is too bloody for paper to soak in Swaggering on life I trust
I do not kill in the name of survival I simply endure it
Until I become the white house with blue windows By the waves I break
The sky grey in fog & death Where do you live I hope in my chest
Do you seek me when I am not here Do you imagine me in you within you
On this field of innocence flowers Veiled book words Kneaded mistake thread
Piano keys unforgiveness white Our porcelain bodies broken blunder floating
Before we touch Endless return I will die with eyes agape to you for you
I will scream scare the battalion If lovers survive why are we both dead
I will resume & leave without shame I will
Come back Come back to you
Malvika Jolly
Malvika Jolly (b. 1993, Rouen) is an artist, writer, and emergent translator living on occupied Munsee, Lenape, and Wappinger lands in New York City. Her essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in Chicago magazine, The Margins, and South Side Weekly, a Chicago-based alt-weekly where she is a regular contributor focusing on visual culture and community history. From 2020–21, she worked at the Brooklyn Rail as the Special Projects Associate where she helped program, produce, and host the New Social Environment and curated the Radical Poetry Reading series. She curates the New Third World, a monthly reading series inspired by the Non-Aligned Movement’s dream for the third world.
Dream Daughter in the Ambient of the World
Once we sought to remember past continents
through dream revelation, to trace the routes we took
back to the shores where we were birthed.
Now we know no country but each other.
Dispersed across the ambient of the world,
we are all each other’s dream daughters,
all each other’s past, present, and future.
We are the fruit fallen in the shadow
of the non-fruiting tree. In this nation
of darkwaters there is only us:
no frontier, no chartered passage, no borderlands.
We bow our heads as we pass beneath each other’s auspices.
We are an odd sort of commonwealth, charting poetics
and labor economies. Power cuts out across the dampened city.
In the dark, we dream daughters like the moonflower
blooming, just once, in an Englewood alley.
In the twilight desert, we dream of bougainvillea,
blushing on the boundary wall old as Independence.
The people of this city suffer an infestation of History,
for which wound and cure are the same.
After the good doctors cannot cure us,
we seek the less-good doctors:
we are the rafts built from ancient doors
to which we long ago lost the keys.
No language but communion.
No passports but the sea.
Jasmine Kaur
Jasmine Kaur (she/her) is a punjabi, queer writer/artist. She likes to surround herself with stories and poetics in any medium, including audio, video, still images and performance. Some of her work has been published by Renard Press, …ongoing…, streetcake magazine, and Stellium. She’s currently a Masters in Philosophy student at Delhi University. You can find parts of her on the internet at https://sites.google.com/view/jasmine-kaur/ or @trying0000 on Twitter and @jasmineismeltingintosummer on Instagram.
consume
i eat oranges
of the setting sun
citrus fingertips
Alex Mountfield
Alex Mountfield is the co-editor of Icarus. Their work has appeared in Icarus, Gold Soundz, and is forthcoming in Púca and Exploding Appendix. They write and publish a poetry blog via email @harkherald.pdf
Second List
abacus
Albertina Sisulu
backgammon
blooming tenfold daily
caring way too much
David Wojnarowicz and all his dying friends
disrespectful summons
eleven different languages
gardens filled with tea
giddy, short-tempered
glittering rings in locks of hair
incense that doesn’t smell good or bad — just smells
kids who want so badly to be martyrs
kneading bread
love at the end of things
love for all posterities
love in perpetuity
love of possibilities
manky pots of herbs from supermarkets
mechanics and plumbers and electricians
my uncle and his dog
never-ending dinner parties
no causes, no effects
one big family of poseurs
one big family spilling out into the street
one big family who show up for each other
over the hills
Peter Hujar and every cell in his dying body
roof of the world
scales
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
shinbone
substitutions
“surely a bloody husband art thou to me”
symbols chalked onto the leaves
tiger’s milk
vertebrae
whelmed over
Emily Tracy
Emily Tracy is an undergraduate at the University of Georgia who believes deeply and profoundly in the love poem. Her work can be found in Stillpoint Literary Magazine and in her diary, one of which she invites you to peruse.
Everything is Shapeless in the Time Blob
But I remember your arms from the before time
when you were a long hard ring around me
and I pooled in your middle.
Maybe I don’t remember;
the Time Blob mothballs can’t keep abstraction at bay forever
(because forever is out and moths are in).
The moth wing patterns bleed into the wood grain of your bedroom floors
where they eat all the crumpled-up cash you hide under the bed in the condom box,
none of which is allowed in the Time Blob.
The rules here are that I love you and there is no space or light or time.
Sometimes you bite into an orange slice, right, and don’t quite scrape the bottom,
and there is no wholeness anymore, no sense in the meat of the fruit, only taste and feeling in
your dark wet mouth.
That’s how it feels in the Time Blob.That’s what the verb is that connects us here, the tearing at the pulp, squishing into the cavities in
my top molars,
I ___ you in the Time Blob.
We are shapeless in the Time Blob.
We are everything here, the orange and the mouth and the peel and the teeth and the taste.
The Time Blob runs in and through us until everything without is within
And how good does it feel? To bleed painlessly into each other.
To dissolve and to love and to become.