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I know the last in line is always called a bastard

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Ganymede, BY JERICHO BROWN

A man trades his son for horses. That’s the version I prefer. I like The safety of it, no one at fault, Everyone rewarded. God gets The boy. The boy becomes Immortal. His father rides until Grief sounds as good as the gallop Of an animal born to carry those Who patrol our inherited Kingdom. When we look at myth This way, nobody bothers saying Rape. I mean, don’t you want God To want you? Don’t you dream Of someone with wings taking you Up? And when the master comes For our children, he smells Like the men who own stables In Heaven, that far terrain Between Promise and Apology. No one has to convince us. The people of my country believe We can’t be hurt if we can be bought.

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Questi post sono disposti casualmente secondo una climax ascendente di illegalità, me ne rendo conto.

Da qualche mese si vociferava che in una vecchia chiesa diroccata del mio paesino la gente si radunasse per celebrare messe nere, ma è difficile distinguere il chiacchiericcio dalla verità quando si parla di religione o superstizione nei piccoli paesini di campagna. Ebbene, salta fuori adesso che una delle persone invischiate è attualmente agli arresti domiciliari - non so perché; io non so davvero nulla di questa faccenda e sospetto che chiunque vicino a me dica il contrario menta. La cosa più interessante è però un'altra: costui era una delle persone più coinvolte nell'organizzazione delle attività del santuario del mio paese (intendo, le attività normali lmao), in cui pare le persone si fossero spostate per celebrare riti non ortodossi dopo la messa cattolica. Tutti i compaesani ne sono stati sorpresi, quindi. A questo si aggiunge un forte senso di comunità, al quale io sono estranea, che lega molti degli abitanti della mia frazione al santuario, che fu costruito con l'aiuto di tutti - mio padre, per esempio, si occupò di gettar cemento, e una ragazza che da autodidatta aveva imparato a dipingere affrescò il soffitto della Chiesa. Io guardo queste cose con l'occhio di chi ha da poco dato l'esame di Storia delle Religioni e mi chiedo: chissà cosa si faceva davvero, chissà con quale consapevolezza e fine; e mi sento un entomologo che guarda da lontano tante piccole formichine - non perché io pensi che quegli uomini e quelle donne siano formiche, ma perché ne sono così distante, benché il santuario si trovi a pochi chilometri da casa.

Notizia dell'ultimo minuto, io che non scrivo mai qua sopra, ma questo momento deve essere cristallizzato da qualche parte: I., tra trent'anni leggi e ridi, per favore.

Da tre settimane nel mio paesello una banda di ladruncoli, forse cinque, partendo dalla piazza principale, di sera si introduce nelle case a rubare. Il bello, quello che mi fa ridere e piangere, è che lavorano meticolosamente: rubano per zona, e in maniera ordinata, tanto che la sera dopo si sa già da chi andranno. I carabinieri, allertati da giorni, non si presentano mai sulla scena, verosimilmente per paura. Ieri sera si sono fermati alla mia vicina, forse anche perché a notte fonda io ero ancora in salotto a luci accese. Sì, ma la cosa divertente: mio padre mi ha raccontato, dopo un breve brainstorming generale con mio zio e altri compaesani, che questi tipi simpatici sono stati rincorsi con cani e coltelli stile caccia alle streghe, e che in un paese vicino hanno abbandonato l'auto.

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Probabilmente questo post diventerà il mio quadernino personale sulle vicende agresti & bucoliche del mio paesino di campagna, tutti rigorosamente taggati con "organizzatevi meglio" e "vi fate fottere da X".

Qualche giorno fa mio zio, che è anche il mio vicino di casa - benché in effetti a stento ne ricordo il nome e l'avrò visto dieci volte in 21 anni - insieme a mio cugino decidono di abbattere una quercia. Suppongo che un'intera anca dell'albero abbia spezzato dei cavi elettrici, poiché da casa mia si son vedute le scintille e l'elettricità è mancata per ore in tutta la nostra frazione. Io non credo di sapere quanti divieti abbia infranto avendo una motosega e 10 minuti a disposizione.

Notizia dell'ultimo minuto, io che non scrivo mai qua sopra, ma questo momento deve essere cristallizzato da qualche parte: I., tra trent'anni leggi e ridi, per favore.

Da tre settimane nel mio paesello una banda di ladruncoli, forse cinque, partendo dalla piazza principale, di sera si introduce nelle case a rubare. Il bello, quello che mi fa ridere e piangere, è che lavorano meticolosamente: rubano per zona, e in maniera ordinata, tanto che la sera dopo si sa già da chi andranno. I carabinieri, allertati da giorni, non si presentano mai sulla scena, verosimilmente per paura. Ieri sera si sono fermati alla mia vicina, forse anche perché a notte fonda io ero ancora in salotto a luci accese. Sì, ma la cosa divertente: mio padre mi ha raccontato, dopo un breve brainstorming generale con mio zio e altri compaesani, che questi tipi simpatici sono stati rincorsi con cani e coltelli stile caccia alle streghe, e che in un paese vicino hanno abbandonato l'auto.

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On Disappearing, BY MAJOR JACKSON

I have not disappeared. The boulevard is full of my steps. The sky is full of my thinking. An archbishop prays for my soul, even though we met only once, and even then, he was busy waving at a congregation. The ticking clocks in Vermont sway

back and forth as though sweeping up my eyes and my tattoos and my metaphors, and what comes up are the great paragraphs of dust, which also carry motes of my existence. I have not disappeared. My wife quivers inside a kiss. My pulse was given to her many times,

in many countries. The chunks of bread we dip in olive oil is communion with our ancestors, who also have not disappeared. Their delicate songs I wear on my eyelids. Their smiles have given me freedom which is a crater I keep falling in. When I bite into the two halves of an orange whose cross-section resembles my lungs,

a delta of juices burst down my chin, and like magic, makes me appear to those who think I've disappeared. It's too bad war makes people disappear like chess pieces, and that prisons turn prisoners into movie endings. When I fade into the mountains on a forest trail, I still have not disappeared, even though its green façade turns my arms and legs into branches of oak. It is then I belong to a southerly wind, which by now you have mistaken as me nodding back and forth like a Hasid in prayer or a mother who has just lost her son to gunfire in Detroit. I have not disappeared.

In my children, I see my bulging face pressing further into the mysteries.

In a library in Tucson, on a plane above Buenos Aires, on a field where nearby burns a controlled fire, I am held by a professor, a general, and a photographer. One burns a finely wrapped cigar, then sniffs the scented pages of my books, scouring for the bitter smell of control. I hold him in my mind like a chalice. I have not disappeared. I swish the amber hue of lager on my tongue and ponder the drilling rigs in the Gulf of Alaska and all the oil-painted plovers.

When we talk about limits, we disappear. In Jasper, TX you can disappear on a strip of gravel.

I am a life in sacred language. Termites toil over a grave, and my mind is a ravine of yesterdays. At a glance from across the room, I wear September on my face, which is eternal, and does not disappear even if you close your eyes once and for all simultaneously like two coffins.

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On Confinement, BY TORRIN A. GREATHOUSE

I sit across the table from my partner        in the atrium of the psychiatric holding facility

               our hands churched into our laps. We are not allowed to touch. The air between us thick as Perspex.

                       They tell me all the ways this place resembles a prison.

•

               Everything a sterile white                        so clean it could almost disinfect                                a memory.

•

       In 1787,                Jeremy Bentham conceived of what would become                the most common prison design:

                       the panopticon.

               Intended to control prisoners through the illusion                that they are always under surveillance.

•

My partner tells their therapist they are afraid of taking their own life,

                       that they balanced on a building’s edge,                        & three officers escort them from the room.

•

The first cop who ever handcuffed me                                                                                [was my father] left me bound                           till my fingers blued.

         On the days when I can’t remember          his face,                               he becomes the scent of                                                                                vodka & zip ties                                                 the sound of                                                                                cuffs & a bottle                                                 petaling into blades.

•

                          At the booking office they remove my glasses                           & the guards blur into a procession                           of fathers.

•

         I bring my partner clothes & pads when the hospital decides to hold them longer,

         shove each shirt that could mark them as queer back inside the closet & shut it [like a mouth].

•

                              The word faggot scrawls across                               the jail guard’s lips like graffiti.

•

When I visit my partner          they insist on staying inside

                      the sky above                       the patio cordoned                       off  with chicken wire.

•

I plead my sentence down in exchange for: my face, my prints, my DNA                             & ten years probation.

When I see a cop, I fear                     even my breath                                                        criminal

                    & when my therapist asks me                     if  I’m suicidal                                                               I lie.

Perhaps both are a kind of  surveillance.

•

Tear gas floods the street,          sharpens water to a blade          hidden in the orbit of my eye.

                   & just like this, a squad car                    remakes my sadness a weapon.

If my partner snaps cuffs          around my wrists

                                [& I asked for this]

have they also weaponized my desire?

•

A woman in the facility tells my partner:                                 I know what you are. Says:                                 Sinner. Says:                                 Anti-christ.

My partner goads her on, babbles in false                            tongues & is confined                                         to their room for safety.

•

Once, a cop dragged me into an alley &                                        beat me like he knew                                        exactly what I was.

         What does it say if sometimes                                        when I ask my partner to hit me

         I expect his fist tightened in their throat, his voice                                     bruising their tongue? •

I am arrested & placed                                            [in the men’s jail] in solitary confinement.

          They tell me this is protective                      custody. That they couldn’t afford                                 the lawsuit if  I were killed. In this way,                                            they tell me I am a woman

                     only when I am no longer                                                                                breathing.

•

The origin of the word prison is the Latin prehendere — to take.

          It follows, then,           that to take your life is to prison           the body beneath dirt.

•

[Historically,           suicide is a criminal act].

•

Balanced on a building’s edge, I imagine some permutation of  this moment

                                where to fail at death                                 would be a breach

                                                                      of my probation.

•

We both weep for the first time

                                           upon release

when we see the sky.

                                           Pale blue

sliced through

                                           with a single helix

of razor wire & bordered

                                           in sterile white.

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Six Lines for Louise Bogan, BY MICHAEL COLLIER

All that has tamed me I have learned to love        and lost that wildness that was once beloved.

All that was loved I’ve learned to tame        and lost the beloved that once was wild.

All that is wild is tamed by love—        and the beloved (wildness) that once was loved.

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Time-Sensitive, BY FRANNY CHOI

“When did the ‘present’ begin?”            —Lauren Berlant

When the tyrant’s voice comes on the car radio, I close my eyes in an effort to slow the rate at which hopelessness enters me. With this act, I hurl myself faster toward extinction.

Every morning, I stretch, put food in my throat, and fail to forgive myself.

At night, I sit down to watch last year’s extinctions paint the wall, while next time’s fire buffers in a perpetual next time.

Somewhere between these, I occupy the present tense, with all the confidence of a settler.

Sometime before was when the things we survived happened. What am I surviving today: the war or its unending ending?

I remember none of it and so live without language for its opposite.

The country (was/is) divided, the US military (occupied/has occupied) the country, I (return/am returning) there.

What is the opposite of the present tense?

(I’m speaking, I say, until it’s no longer true.)

I love next time. I love it with all the declarative confidence of a child who’s never fished the softened bodies of her parents from a river as soldiers chew cud.

History hangs inside me, like a dependent clause.

History ends when its mirrors rush from the future like brake lights, polishing me into language.

After the catastrophe. By polishing me; through buffering grammar. In red memories dotting the highway smudged out by a storm. By the tyrant, unevenly distributed. With current.

The screech of tires is just the sound of my past catching up with yours.

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The Black Saint & The Sinner Lady & The Dead & The Truth Adjust, by MORGAN PARKER

For one thing, I hate stillness. On the front porch, waiting, I see an animal I don’t recognize:

feet of a bird, wings of a leaf. The grotesqueness of attachment, the loudness of the woods, I knew it

when I was dead before. I died for my sins and because of this, I am in the woods now,

aching. It is June. I am used to being a certain kind of alone. Soon my photosynthesis

will complete, and I will be the gap between Angela Davis’s teeth. Do you ever

love something so much you become it? Like how when hard rain comes, you learn

quick. You straighten your shoulders and hope this is better than touching.

I say casual death , and the half-moon is my enemy, some uncertain white girl.

I wish I didn’t care. I am myself shaking hands, so subtle no one notices.

Sometimes, it’s my rib cage, or my throat does the same damn thing as my skull,

the little bear inside it. Please don’t make me repeat myself.

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PEREO: Per non incorrer taccia/ di volubile, tu stessa, a te nemica/ vittima farti del tuo error vorresti.

Mirra, Vittorio Alfieri; Atto secondo, scena seconda, vv165-167

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original [sin], BY ALISON C. ROLLINS

In ancient Greece, for all her heroes, for Medea    ...    water meant death. — Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

i poured a bowl of cereal, threw the empty box in the trash can. granddaddy pulled

the box from the trash, poured the crumbs into a bowl, then doused the sand

in milk. he looked down at the bowl, murmuring about how he had survived the depression. told

a story about asking for hot water at colored diners, how he would pour ketchup in cups to make soup.

this was how i first learned i am             wasteful.

 •

i would stand in the bathroom with my mother. would ask her why the water in the bowl was

red. she would tell me she had eaten beets. i suppose i was too young to learn

the truth, milkflowers spill petals red.

 •

in my catholic school of fish, we took a beautifully wrapped box, passed it around the class,

unwrapping it piece by piece. afterwards it was cleverly explained that the box is

a girl’s virginity

the gift we give our husbands.

& who wants a toy that has already been opened? half the joy is in untying the string.

this is how i was taught that at my very core, i am              ungrateful.

 •

i met someone recently, in an irish bar, who told me it’s about knowing what i need.

he said later what you need is a wife.

that night i prayed to god for just a man and not a man that trails the woe

& maybe this is why god serves me wakes of milkman and tea cake

a lip service of sorts at hand.

 •

maybe this is how i end up throwing good things away: phd husband stepdaughter stepson a little tiny baby              unborn

locked them all in flooding house with tearful grin.

this is how you come to know you are               unclean.

 •

at times i smell of rain, blouse damp with the cloud’s breast milk,

this stomach a sloshing bowl of watery swish.

i curse the phantom belly moon, can still hear the sound of  you in still water.

                           the wind begins to push a heavy rain, drops spill from every crevice of the flower.

& then suddenly, the rain begins to pour.

it always all ways asks for forgiveness.

a ghost kneels in me,              asks to be spared.

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On The Coast near Sausalito, BY ROBERT L. HASS

1. I won’t say much for the sea, except that it was, almost, the color of sour milk. The sin on that clear unmenacing sky was low, angled off the gray fissure of the cliffs, hills dark green with manzanita. Low tide: slimed rocks mottled brown and thick with kelp merged with the gray stone of the breakwater, sliding off to antediluvian depths. The old story: here filthy life begins. 2. Fishing, as Melville said, “to purge the spleen,” to put to task my clumsy hands my hands that bruise by not touching pluck the legs from a prawn, peel the shell off, and curl the body twice about a hook. 3. The cabezone is not highly regarded by fishermen, except Italians who have the grace to fry the pale, almost bluish flesh in olive oil with a sprig of fresh rosemary. The cabezone, an ugly atavistic fish, as old as the coastal shelf it feeds upon has fins of duck’s-web thickness, resembles a prehistoric toad, and is delicately sweet. Catching one, the fierce quiver of surprise and the line’s tension are a recognition. 4. But it’s strange to kill for the sudden feel of life. The danger is to moralize that strangeness. Holding the spiny monster in my hands his bulging purple eyes were eyes and the sun was almost tangent to the planet on our uneasy coast. Creature and creatures, we stared down centuries.

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The deer, BY LAURIE SHECK

The deer is patience, the deer is what we see standing in the woods, half its jaw shot off, just staring. You ought to kill it now but you lift it into the back of the pickup. At home you pack the broken bone with mud.

Healing she moves toward you. Shy, she rubs her head against your leg. What I love in myself and others

is in the dream I have of this deer though she was real: she came out of the woods bleeding, she knew how to die but healed. The deer that walked one day back into the woods

is standing by a pond now, alert, in a wash of sunlight. How quietly she stands there as if there were no way to not belong in the worlds, as if it were this easy.

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We Play Charades, BY UMA MENON

My first instinct is to translate the word. Make it easier to understand without saying the word itself. I feel guilt for this mistake— for changing languages instead of describing. Isn’t this an easy way out? My mother and I are playing charades alone. We make this mistake over & over, our tongues too quick to learn. After all, isn’t this what we are used to? When one language fails, we try the next & the next until someone understands. A syllable escapes like a captured cricket, singing for its love of freedom. It is too late to go back now, to jar the language we first learned. We do not want to, either, so in this game, we swallow first. Card, swallow, describe, flip. Card, swallow, describe, flip.