Articles

On this morning, clouds the color of faded denim pad the sky, a wintry San Francisco sky, and it is the perfect sky for the work that lay ahead. I put on some Dwight Yoakum, he of the Bakersfield sound, crooning about the late great, golden state.

The front door is open, and the fan above creaks. Her right arm chops the air in declaration, her eyes never leaving yours. The ring on her finger glints. Ghosts circle the living room, swishing, floating, witnessing. They whirl with the wind.

Here is my compass    my parting gift 

Flattened pennies    half a heart    would do

but this is my chosen pact:    point of reference 

place of convergence    no one’s destination 

My mom worked at a hospital downtown with a parking lot carved in spiraling concrete deep below the city. When I ran a fever, she took me there to deposit at daycare for the sick. It was like preschool but without windows and with more fluorescence.

We wandered the city in spiraling circuits, watching bar neon flash synaptic impulses, made our way through underground tunnels, on the Red Line, on the Purple Line, on the Gold Line shimmering above the Arroyo Seco, in Lyfts stalled out in Westwood’s motherboard, on foot, passing the warm glow of the pupuseriason Vermont, our mouths watering as we imagined gizzards and soju, the Prince’s red leather booths encircled by suits of armor.

Lilith works at night. Penance, some would say, for her alleged crimes. It’s true that people have loved to wag a finger in her face. She’s been accused of terrible things. You wouldn’t know it, here, with the soft song of a lullaby on her tongue, the rhythm of the monitors in the background.

The poem “Okandja Irogo” is part of a larger manuscript called “Cabinda”. It is a work that is influenced by the history of Angola and Cabinda from the Portuguese colonial era to the modern day. This poem was born out of an eternal feeling of loss and of belonging to a mix of the main subgroups who live in Cabinda, the Vili, Sundi, Yombe, Kakongo, Woyo and the Linge. I am part of the so-called diaspora but I am fully aware of where I come from.

by Allie Spikes I shave my head on my friend’s sultry Texas porch. Swollen West Nile mosquitos   hang in the whir of falling strawberry locks. My reflection bends, my new jaw softer   than I want. The blue of my skin glares too pink underneath, like baby mice freckled by chicken   pox and scorn. …

by Jai Dulani twisted roots stretched out towards each other Parvati, my mother’s mother jawed Sindhi. her daughter, refugee camp Punjabi. matrilineal severed bark.   I spoke English to my mother’s Hindi   not everything makes it upstream   we’re from pre-partition Pakistan. blood-dripped alliteration we background each other casual.   my 2nd generation despair, a …

I would be lying if I said I didn’t miss anything about orthodoxy; it mapped a path for me that led across mountain ridges with lush vistas. Poetry has become a kind of surrogate for orthodoxy, except instead of one beaten path to the peak, there are manifold deer trails, switchbacks, creek beds. Swards of green to ford.