Nepantla

A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color

Editor-In-Chief

Christopher Soto

Manager

William Johnson

Cover Image

David Uzochukwu

Welcome to Nepantla Issue #3

Wow! I can't believe this is already the third year of Nepantla's existence. It feels like just the other day when I only knew a handful of queer poets of color and now my whole life is

surrounded by your community. Thank you for making this journal possible! This year, we read

thousands of poems to consider for publication in Nepantla. We have published twenty-seven

poets below (three of them being posthumous publications). It's getting increasingly more

difficult to publish all of the amazing poems we encounter during the submissions process.

Please do not be discouraged from submitting to us multiple years! This decision, to publish

posthumously, was made in a deep desire to carry the legacies of those who have helped shape

our understandings of self and survival in the world. With Nepantla we want to honor those

who have proceeded us and honor those who are currently living. We are proud to be

publishing the voices of June Jordan, Akilah Oliver, and tatiana de la tierra in Issue #3. This

year's issue was made possible by a grant from the organization 'A Blade of Grass.'

Also, I want to acknowledge other queer of color journals that have formed in the recent years

too. I believe that having a multitude of journals, and not a singular voice, for our community is

extremely important. Oftentimes, people believe in a destructive competition which doesn't

allow for their communities to flourish. I want these journals to flourish because they will

provide more opportunities for queer of color voices to be heard (and from a different lens

than my own). If something were ever to happen to Nepantla, I could rest knowing that my

QPOC community still has a place for their poetry, so thank you to those journals for existing.

Also, and pardon for the awkward transition, I want to acknowledge the recent massacre in

Orlando. A few months ago, 49 members of our community were murdered by gun

violence. Nepantla is not an apolitical journal. We stand firmly against all transphobia,

homophobia, sexism, racism, islamophobia, ableism, etc. We stand against the state's decision

to increase policing in queer communities after our murders. We do not support increased

police presence in queer of color communities which continue to face hyper surveillance and

disproportionate criminalization.

Nepantla Issue #3 is dedicated to everyone impacted by the tragedy in Orlando.

Table of Contents

hyena (an absolution chant for the beloved

Akilah Oliver

community)

Erika L Sánchez

Self Portrait

DataLounge - Gay Celebrity Gossip, Gay Politics,

Meredith Talusan

Gay News and Pointless Bitchery since 1995

Ariana Brown

AT THE END OF THE SWORD

Tommy Pico

from Food

Jaye Sablan

scents of my mother

June Jordan

Poem About Police Violence

Francisco Márquez

Puerto Escondido

Saretta Morgan

untitled (#4)

Nghiem Tran

Winter, 8 pm

Lillian Kalish

Last Sunrise Over Mobile

Isabella X

A Black Woman’s Burden

R. Erica Doyle

wander

jayy dodd

A Future Yesterday

tatiana de la tierra

Ode to Unsavory Lesbians

Ser Serpas

from last 4 months

I Am Only An Ocean Because I Resemble A Vast

Julian Randall

Regret

OUTSIDE MY APARTMENT DEALING WITH A

ROACH HOLE WHEN IT IS TOOHOT TO EVEN BE

Joseph Jordan-Johnson

OUTSIDE TO BEGIN WITH

Luther Hughes

suicide note #1

Malcolm Tariq

Things I Have Been

Watching Paul Mooney Hum Amazing Grace Post-

Jayson Smith

9/11 While Eating Hot Wings From CrownFried

cedar sigo

Tyler, Texas

Oswaldo Vargas

Paisahood

Hiwot Adilow

Mihret

Juan Jose Rodriguez

AstroPhysicist

Jasmine Sierra

on the seventh day

Jennifer Perrine

We Have Come to the End of the Oyster Months

Ocean Vuong

Interview with Christopher Soto

Brenda Shaughnessy

Interview with Christopher Soto

Akilah Oliver

hyena (an absolution chant for the beloved community)

ashe ashe ashe

ashe how you say

ashe ashe ashe

ashe why you say

ashe ashe ashe

ashe which you

say ashe ashe ashe

ashe what you say

who you say

ohkay ohkay ohkay

ohkay how you do

ohkay ohkay ohkay

ohkay why you do

ohkay ohkay ohkay

ohkay which you do

ohkay ohkay ohkay

ohkay what you do

who you do

ayo ayo ayo

ayo why you want

ayo ayo ayo ayo

how you want

ayo ayo ayo ayo

which you want

ayo ayo ayo ayo

what you want

who you want

kikikiki kikikiki

kikikiki how you lie

kikikiki kikikiki

kikikiki which you lie

kikikiki kikikiki

kikikiki what you lie

kikikiki kikikiki

kikikiki why you lie

who you lie

olu olu olu olu

what you kill

olu olu olu olu

why you kill

olu olu olu olu

which you kill

olu olu olu olu

how you kill

who you kill

shalom shalom shalom

shalom why you hide

shalom shalom shalom

shalom how you hide

shalom shalom shalom

shalom which you hide

shalom shalom shalom

shalom what you hide

who you hide

selah selah selah selah

what you let down

selah selah selah selah

which you let down

selah selah selah selah

why you let down

selah selah selah selah

how you let down who

you let down

ye ye ye yemanya

why you trouble

ye ye ye yemanya

how you trouble

ye ye ye yemanya

what you trouble

ye ye ye yemanya

which you trouble

who you trouble

wadi wadi wadi

wadi which you love

wadi wadi wadi

wadi how you love

wadi wadi wadi

wadi why you love

wadi wadi wadi

wadi what you love

who you love

Erika L. Sánchez

Self Portrait

In the white cream

of my lie,

I swallow warm pennies,

listen to the church bells

in the distance—

So much depends

upon insertion.

Just look at all this

face hunger!

Even my peaches

are obscene.

Don't you hear my name

dissolve like the body

of Christ?

Siempre salgo

con el Jesús en la boca.

Always tearing

at the hollyhocks,

always so slick

with summer.

Under the corpulent

clouds,

I feed the birds

of my failures,

so tenderly!

My tongue grows plump

as a greedy slug.

Again and again,

an umbrella

opens inside me.

Orifice of heaven–

the twilight comes

like a soiled miracle,

bright as my own

awful pinkness,

and how like a fever

it dazzles.

Meredith Talusan

DataLounge - Gay Celebrity Gossip, Gay Politics, Gay News and Pointless

Bitchery since 1995.

Meredith is not attractive in the slightest. Why does she look like that? She

would scare small children.

All the concepts he holds so dearly in his little albino head are nothing but

sand castles...completely wiped out when the tide (or logic) rolls in.

This person makes Rachel Dolezal look sane and reasonable by comparison.

Also, if you have albinism you are not, by definition, a person of color. If this

tedious pigment-less biological male can insist he's a black woman and

expect the world to accept that...I don't even know what to say.

I don't understand how this Meredith Trans chick gets all these opportunities

to have articles published when (s)he was a stalker / harasser / sociopath?!?!

Albino Black Trans privilege

Why are we discussing trannies here? This is a gay board and trannies are not

one of us. I sympathize with injustice, but I object to having them made a

topic of soulful blabber.

I have a tranny friend and he's not the least bit whiney about loosing his

vagina. He had his corrective surgery and became one of the boys. The

reverse story for guys becoming girls never seems to be a happy one.

What did this one do with its genitalia?

What is wrong with its appearance? Is it some kind of albino?

Ew, what is it! Kill it! KILL IT!

Do women who become men ever behave this badly? I never seem to hear

about it.

This Talusan sounds like a real little shit. And, regardless of whatever her

gender identity might be, she is a biological male behaving in a threatening

way to a woman.

Oh c'mon, the poor deluded dear is an albino Filipina tranny, and not easy on

the eyes either. Do you really doubt she's had a hard life? Focus your hate on

the smug Philly 3 Gay-Bashers rather than this one-tranny army for social

justice.

She's fugly, wonder if she's ever had sex.

Filipino lady boys, trannies, etc are always 100% unhinged.

She's acting like a dude trying to force his way onto everyone else.

as a man who prefers transgirls, got something to say, that transgirl is one

ugly bitch but if she got a got ass and mouth than why not. Not that I would

be in a relationship with an ugly transgirl like that but get all the pleasure out

of it and move on to the next pretty transgirl to be with.

MTF trannies tend to be more looney than a Bugs Bunny cartoon, but the

Asians bring things to a whole other level. Leaving aside the exhibitionism,

hysteric, delusional, self-absorbed and the host of other tendencies trannies

often bring to the table, the Filipino trannies like their women seem to be

universally known for exploitation of men.

Forget pronouns -- Meredith is so sensitive she might claim a split infinitive

as violence against trans women of color.

This Meredith creature must really hate itself. Not only is it a tranny, but also

does the skin whitening creams so popular with Asian women and Michael

Jackson.

Its obvious that this bucket of Tranny Crazy is looking for pain EVERYWHERE.

He finds drama and a reason to play the victim in all situations. Its all about

ME ME ME and he will twist any situation to a reason to scream oppression.

He is an absolute nightmare and a perfect example of why people are quick

to dismiss the Transgender community.

maybe THAT'S why people transition...so they can be a victim.

This guy is fucking delusional. Why he thinks he could possibly pass as a

woman is beyond me. His skin bleaching just adds to the hilarity.

Does Meredith still have her cock?

I hope she didn't cut it off. Or, split it down the middle into a makeshift

vagina.

One of the few ways MTFs can support themselves after 40 is from generous

cockhungry tranny chasers.

I would guess Meredith's story will end very unhappily, especially since she

cannot stay on at Cornell forever.

What is Meredith going to do with her life when she finally gets her Ph.D.?

It's hard to imagine what kind of universities or corporations would put up

with her constant drama and nonsense. No wonder she's dragging her heels

at getting the hell out of Ithaca.

In a few years, meredith will have been kicked out of Cornell for not

graduating, and she will be doing performance art pieces in Williamsburg

which will involve her dumping chocolate sauce over her head and

screaming, "TRANSPHOBIA! PATRIARCHY! HATE!"

Ariana Brown

AT THE END OF THE SWORD

my grandmother’s neck, my

botany & altars, my kink, my

africanness, my father’s hair, my

gospel, my wilderness & name, my

herbs, my sage & tea, my spice, my

good memory, my resistance, my

codes & distrust, my loose jaw, my

grandmother’s grandmother’s tongue, my

grandfather’s grandfather’s burros, my

land, my flesh hands, my spirits, my

poems, my place, my ceremonies, my

balance, my reason, my kin, my kin, my sins.

Tommy Pico

from Food

Keep the dry and wet ingredients in separate bowls before mixing.

You do the egg/cream thing, and I’ll take care of the salt/flower/sugar situation.

Reader, do you hear the moaning plane overhead? Feel the beating noon heat on yr t-zone?

See the sizzle of foam on the salt water? Poems light up corridors of the mind, like food. If I owe

poetry to cooking, this is an inheritance of that lineage

I grew up on a food desert, a speck of dust on the map of the United States—an Indian

reservation east of San Diego in a valley surrounded by mountains that slice thru the clouds like

a loaf, where the average age of death is 40.7 years old. I am 32. I live in the busiest city in

America. I am about to eat an orange.

Every feed owes itself to death. Poetry is feed

to the horses

within me.

Jaye Sablan

scents of my mother

for nana, hu guaiya hao

drugstore lotion

cheap imported cigarettes

grief

flores måyu1

a pot of white rice

anger

instant coffee

bleach

a 6-pack of bud, “the premier beer of the mariana islands since 1949”

boxed curry sauce mix

lipstick, in deep red

yellowed vinegar pickled mango love

boonie2 peppers

trash burning out back

anxiety

eyeliner shavings

fuetsan yan mamuti3

five maternity wards

blood-milk

typhoon season

the space between the equator and the tropic of cancer

---

1 Chamoru for plumeria.

2 U.S. English slang for boondocks, the sticks, or the middle of nowhere. Since the WWII militarization of the Mariana Islands by the United States, the word boonie has been ironically adopted by Chamoru peoples to describe our island jungles. As we have a strong, genealogical sense of place, and historical and contemporary relationships with our neighboring Indigenous Pacific Islander peoples, Chamorus don’t literally believe that our lands are “the middle of nowhere”—an otherwise deeply racist, colonial worldview that European and U.S. American imperial powers expressed about Oceania and her islands.

3 Chamoru for strength and pained muscles.

June Jordan

Poem about Police Violence

Tell me something

what you think would happen if

everytime they kill a black boy

then we kill a cop

everytime they kill a black man

then we kill a cop

you think the accident rate would lower subsequently?

sometimes the feeling like amaze me baby

comes back to my mouth and I am quiet

like Olympian pools from the running

mountainous snows under the sun

sometimes thinking about the 12th House of the Cosmos

or the way your ear ensnares the tip

of my tongue or signs that I have never seen

like DANGER WOMEN WORKING

I lose consciousness of ugly bestial rapid

and repetitive affront as when they tell me

18 cops in order to subdue one man

18 strangled him to death in the ensuing scuffle

(don't you idolize the diction of the powerful: subdue

and scuffle my oh my) and that the murder

that the killing of Arthur Miller on a Brooklyn

street was just a "justifiable accident" again

(Again)

People been having accidents all over the globe

so long like that I reckon that the only

suitable insurance is a gun

I'm saying war is not to understand or rerun

war is to be fought and won

sometimes the feeling like amaze me baby

blots it out/the bestial but

not too often tell me something

what you think would happen if

everytime they kill a black boy

then we kill a cop

everytime they kill a black man

then we kill a cop

you think the accident rate would lower subsequently

Francisco Márquez

PUERTO ESCONDIDO

Península de Paraguaná, Falcón, Venezuela

I remember home with the car speeding off in the night,

my mother held to the gun. This is how life will continue

to happen: the mall held up, the cinema doors slam, four men

dressed as policemen come in with guns, the first-floor bank

floods with bullets. When it ends, people will go about their day:

another day, another shooting. At a certain party someone

will unabashedly defend communism, argue to me the benefits

of “what shouldn’t be called a dictatorship” while they brush off

their Polo and sip their Bombay Gin cocktail. I like to think

that when I find something beautiful, I will no longer be alone.

But what I found is what I’ll never return to—far enough

to reach the lighthouse at the north, the family of fishermen,

the rusting ship tipping out of the sea. I had once found everything.

Saretta Morgan

untitled (#4)

The lover writes a poem about the night we met. How

we turned abrupt corners through the West Village

under a full moon obscured, finally, by the onset of a

blizzard. A week goes by and she removes all the line

breaks. I say, give me a good prose block any day. The

rows of beet and radish seeds I put down in the garden

this afternoon settle in like small brown vertebrae

hugging the cold earth. I want to feel possible in all of

the intimacies: radical / queer / sisterhood / State /

room. The way the phone rings in a foreign country. Tell

me what block is not a good prose block? The heart, its

own many-roomed country.

Nghiem Tran

Winter, 8 pm

That night, my town set the world record

for the most snow angels made simultaneously in one place.

I watched them from my window, the children,

who were loud with joy as they unfurled their wings.

Afterwards, I had dinner with my mother, and she

mentioned that with my studies almost finished

I should start thinking about marriage. Unsure

of how long I could keep my secret, I told her the truth:

I was gay. She grew quiet.

We finished dinner, and after I cleaned the dishes,

she took me to the living room where our ancestral altar was. She

gave me matches and I lit the candles. Then she motioned

for me to kneel in front of the altar. "Pray to them," she ordered,

and with my hands clasped together, I stared at a picture

of my great‐grandparents. "For how long?" I asked, and she said until

they forgave me.

Forgive me for what? I wanted to shout, but couldn't

because I was my mother’s son.

She turned off the lights and sat on the couch. I felt

the candles' brutal heat on my face. Even when I closed

my eyes, I could see the orange flame and my great‐grandparents' portrait

burning within it. Whenever I fell asleep, my mother

came from behind and shook me awake and commanded me

to keep going. This is how I remember her, constantly

waking me, reminding me that my life was a never ending prayer, asking for

forgiveness.

Outside, thousands of snow angels

were melting.

Lillian Kalish

Last Sunrise Over Mobile

Last sunrise over Mobile

a wildly dangerous pink

splitting open the swamp lands.

Driving along the causeway,

which had been called The White Way,

—named after George C. Wallace

an old Alabama Governor—

no longer means passing through Jim Crow

but through an ocean of stares

by older white people at the seafood restaurant

exchanging silent whispers

at your mixed up family.

“Are you from here, Sir?,” she asks,

the waitress to my father.

She does not ask my mother.

In New Orleans, a young man

spits right at my mother’s feet.

I have never seen father so sad

and so angry. My mother keeps on

Walking. Elegant and black she is,

Not letting history’s fools

Ruin her shine. She had been down here before and seen

a world we can’t truly know.

Last sunset in Mobile, orange

skies eat the past, swamps open again.

Isabella X

A Black Woman’s Burden

“Sisters there is a hole in my heart that is bearing your shapes

over and over as I read only the headlines of this morning’s

newspaper.” - Audre Lorde

Sisters there are bruises on my body

And bullets in my brain

And knives in my back

And burn marks

All over

In the shapes of our names

Chosen and

Dead

As I read only the headlines

Of forgotten news articles

For us forgotten girls.

One day we will all live past our girlhood.

One day they will give us our flowers before we are dead.

R. Erica Doyle

wander

crawling along in this life as the dog bunny hops through.

here again in a field at the end of the world.

my singing has dulled in my own ears,

my useless fortitudes threaten blood with dust.

then I break into a run. I’m running to no where, for no one

in particular. I am running and the hairs on my arms stand up,

stand up where they are, like antennae on a queen about to leave the hive

with her swarm, and follow the sun to a new life.

dear trees, please sculpt the byway; dear breeze, whisper a map;

dear magnetic field, make of me a sail in the solar wind,

that I may unwind into the light of my own throat's longing.

oh praise the one that enters me

I am the child of Audre's coal.

dissipating in her mouth.

turning on the axis of her fist.

I arise perpendicular to the plane of this incident –

so plasma so melt

oh so metal so river

so gristle so petal

oh so alive

jayy dodd

A Future Yesterday

we was dancing, like we could let all the breeze out our lungs,

sounded like a church, like the one down the road with no streetlights

behind the second lot, then abandoned.

the trees didn’t scare us no more, weren’t no more blocks to burn effigy.

just all of us taking turns smiling back and forth,

a concert, a gathering across a main drag.

you can smell the grass & gasoline & frying of peppers,

& grease. it didn’t matter when you got there

just as long as you didn't miss the band, in all white.

a host of beat-box soul, there the saxophone sweetened

the bend in the back of our knees. we knew that dust

wasn’t gonna rise without our shuffle atop it.

the earth finally swallowed all the graves into itself

& sprouted wings & jean shorts, & neon body suits,

riding around on technicolor bicycles.

you couldn’t see nothing but the crackling

of the present. couldn’t hear nothing

but the night finally time un-afraid of its shadow,

the moon stopped boiling blood,

remembered how we always been its creatures

& when the second sun rose we sang to her too.

told her

thank you for the land again,

all our blood been the keepers.

this rapture was a home-going back

to ourselves. it didn’t matter when you got there,

as long as you didn’t miss, the generations of abandon lots,

sprouting streetlight revivals at the end of the world.

even the sea stayed quiet there,

made way for our bones to again quake & holler

— all this, a joy

tatiana de la tierra

ODE TO UNSAVORY LESBIANS

i love an ugly lesbian

one who walks with a limp

talks with a lisp

leaves her dentures out overnight by the bathroom sink

wears polyester pants and men’s cologne, the cheap kind

has a beard so long she steps on it

sprouts warts on her toes, all twelve of them

carries a spittoon in her breast pocket

chortles at church people

i dream of a lesbian who’s always broke

she doesn’t own a car, walks

streets barefoot, near and far

washes all her clothes by hand

steals from wal-mart

scams business-suited man

lights matches on her wooden leg

barbeques freshly plucked birds on her shopping cart

seasons them with salt, that’s all

licks her fingers in the moonlight

i crave a lesbian who’s fat and fleshy

so big she can’t fit through the door at starbucks

and they set up an outdoor café just for her

so fat she wears bangles on her fingers

her belly is a boom box

her stretch marks are hieroglyphic etchings

she’s so heavy, tectonic plates shift beneath her feet

so huge, lake erie is her bathtub

i lust after an unsavory lesbian

she blows away my lackluster day

leads me in a lambada, lights

lantern between my legs

lays my head down on lace pillows

humps me like a lamppost

lacerates me with leather lust

lacquers my body with blue latex paint

logs the forest for prime wood

builds me lakeside throne

sets me there and worships me

-goddess in blue-

lines my path with ladyslippers

ravishes me with sex words

pets me like little lamb

wins me by landslide

Ser Serpas

from Last Four Months

yo pienso piense

when i started my instagram

i shared my successes

only

didnt think i could

grab help in kind

the

kind i needed

i still dont

my body only

knows

as much as

its

allergic

to

thats squat

an

apparition

awaits

you

i wish i never made any

white friends so many

have demanded a life story

but i only have those

of the dead

i dont trust

cis folks

people

cars men

traffic gas money

id burn them all too

im not always that angry

or beaten down

god

dear diary

im on the bus

where are you

why are you

so sad

i will murder every

last one of you

tylenol inherent

i intro

spect my life

im gone

im done and gone gone and done

darkness

is construct

melanated

warfare

convincible

of

separate

unequal

deatheat

the hands

of the

unprotected

silence is death

140 characters vs a colonic

she died on that

cross too heavy

touch me touch me

dont be sweet

‐lady gaga

my boyfriend

is still on grindr

=

fuck that

back to

i give up

dont touch what you cant accord

hate isnt everything

its currency

Julian Randall

I Am Only An Ocean Because I Resemble A Vast Regret

I mean to say I look like no one and this

is considered my best feature

once a man took my Abuelo’s island

and that is how my mother was born

once my grandmother met my grandfather

because they both fled to the same place

more than once a wound was inflicted

and a hand begged the wound to sing

and the wound wept out its one crimson eye

until there was enough history to make me

I mean to say without trauma I would not exist

if there is no invasion I might just be lonely

Joseph Jordan-Johnson

OUTSIDE MY APARTMENT DEALING WITH A ROACH HOLE WHEN IT IS TOO

HOT TO EVEN BE OUTSIDE TO BEGIN WITH

ain’t it wicked / like a boulder of hands / nails bitter at the bite & yellow / coming for

you / their black shells / in flood light / on concrete body / & they scatter like / husband

or / father / hunched cold & / cockless / i fear they have forgotten what i am capable of

/ a body before fire as comfort / match rotten / stock of impeccable fly-borne bushes //

oh i dare / far too often / to burn / my mother / she a root / thinning above ground /

deserves no less than the wood / in his pyre / body too broken / (knees, hip, back) too

bent to be at the mercy of a man / one who follows her to lunch / in sunglasses & hat /

as he is aware / i do not have to say why he hides himself //

there are five of them / crawling out of the manhole cover / a crack in the metal /

dawned into darkness & back into the same / i stand over them with raid & spray /

scurryscurryscurry / a way of proving to the world i am like him / & they will see me as

such / yet i am more than holes / washed-up in white foam / cruel with no end / &

what is cruelty / if not our finer genetic trait //

Luther Hughes

suicide note #1

in this dream, my father is dead.

i pour alcohol down your spine—

slender canal—and your house flowers

with music. this is some kind of funeral.

you swat your eyelashes

when you want a kiss. my lips are fake.

i take them off, garnish the edge

of my wine glass. the bartender’s tattoo

is my home address. i visit his mouth

at the end of the dream. he asks

about sadness. i don’t move.

i don’t want to move. my father watches

me through the bartender’s

muted eyes, says stay safe. i can’t. i’m black.

i stammer outside, lipless, a siren

searching for destruction.

this is some disease, you say,

enter me slowly. everybody

is watching, raises their wine

to my father’s death. that gets you off.

the disease, i whisper in your ear,

is osteoarthritis. it takes you from the inside.

you feel its tail roping my dna, crossing out

cartilage. a need for home. that keeps you

afloat. i lean back into you the way

the city storms. i’m from here.

this is where i was born,

point to your pelvis. you rise.

my father stays put when the water

beads down his new home. lovely coffin.

when my tongue confesses

to the slaughter of black boys,

you speak your condolences.

my father’s grave is damp from the rain

and this city ain’t worth the gray sky

it paints. i blame my gay, its hunger for men.

the body’s dagger. my first mind says

jump. drown. give your bone

before it steals away inside

the tyrant’s belly. you push me in.

i thank you.

Malcolm Tariq

Things I Have Been

called:

black

African American

non-hispanic

Black

(American)

Chief.

Yes, madam.

Are you a

man?

Are you a

Boy

or a girl?

Brother.

Son.

Nigger.

Bitchhhhh

Are you

transitioning?

Sir.

I just want to know

what to call

You.

Freak.

Peculiar.

Bruh.

Don’t be

a sissy.

Faggot.

You my

Nigga.

You my

Child.

You my

Brother.

Baby.

Smart.

Love bug.

With your

Funny ass.

Faggot.

You a

writing

Motherfucker.

Nigger.

Friend.

Did you hear

That,

______

__________

______

_________

_____

Nigger?

Jayson Smith

Watching Paul Mooney Hum Amazing Grace Post-9/11 While Eating Hot Wings From Crown Fried

don’t try this at home (by yourself). we’re at war & i’m American (again), sleeping at 8 like shit. new, visibly cankered. coy. mythologies locked in before morning coffee (there’s an order to this).

a working list of what makes my teeth white? dick. chicken. everything but solitude (it’s unbearable—

twelve niggas going to flight school bad). & repercussion is so certain (but you knew that). peep the joke hiding: i leave him a blues & he leaves me for dead. who knows about being (pathetic yet) functional.

you got shoes, i got shoes so i suppose we should be intimate. maybe just moan (at our echoes). it’s

mostly productive with a punchline involved. (i haven’t smirked in weeks.)

cedar sigo

Tyler, Texas

2 out of towners

in the sharp grasses

white churches

not a hair feels out of place

They say the next county over

from Smith is wet

You go around Ben Wheeler

Through dumb-fuck White House

Back over Black Beauty Ravine

Drink till mothers due

back at the home (for memory care)

for a random viewing of Eastside-Westside, 1949

(Where Stanwyck and Ava Gardner step into the same picture)

Finally alone together

more arrowhead hunting

We are fuses left scorched under lavender skies

where Karen Carpenter’s longest note

is broken in half. Near dark I shot what I thought

was a long stick

and didn’t check back for two days

It was a water moccasin

head all blown off

and caved in

slick as snot

Oswaldo Vargas

PAISAHOOD

Is this what it means to be a Paisa

Hearing Mariachi tune instruments

to play out my eleventh hour

Too tired from migrant labor

to ask the sun why this is so

Hoping Ama y Apa are all right

Counting almond rows and out-singing the tractor

to pass the time.

Is this what it means to be a Paisa

To be visited by the corn-sent saint

jugs full of water hanging from both hands

plaid shirt unbuttoned just enough

tip of a serpentine tattoo visible

me wanting nothing more than to follow it

to canonization

to Paisahood.

Hiwot Adilow

Mihret

No offense to God, but

every thing my mother prayed I wouldn’t be, I became.

Every place she prayed I wouldn’t go, I went.

I walked so long I found Mercy.

I draped her thighs over my shoulders & drank.

She’s abundant

& I’m finally alive.

Had I been what I was supposed to be I’d be my mother’s

safehouse. I’d be her mother land. I wouldn’t wander, I would remain.

Were I from whence I ought to be from

I’d call this something else but

I belong to the country I was born in. Everything I’ve done has been in Love’s name

& in Love’s name

I’ve done these sins:

I’ve clenched my fist. I’ve run.

I’ve bitten my tongue dead raw. Mihret covers my chest while I hum & swallow blood.

She keeps me warm. Doesn’t ask for me to stay.

Juan Jose Rodriguez

AstroPhysicist

a

Hijoooooo

de la gran

chingada!

almost trembles the locked door out of its hinges.

Inside there’s a fuzzy 18 inch television,

y a welted indio who failed his remedial English exams.

A indio who couldn’t translate

the blank papeles of belligerent civilization

that enclosed his bastardized name.

A indio who sleeps on dictionaries,

believing that the contact will help memorize

every entry con his accent intact.

A indio whose parents don’t know

how to read, but they associate red zeros

con a reluctance to try, a resistance

to integrate into the exploited gates

of irate achievement that apprehend jaded

wrists y clenched fists

that used to roam

through dirt roads, ramshackle cathedrals

mud brick plazas, y

jungles concealing

monumental stones con

the vernacular of the universe.

Tonight on NOVA, asteroid belts

and

segregated paradises.

Jasmine Sierra

on the seventh day

I PUT HER TOGETHER from

self-reference. eyes on the mirror.

hands, on the keyboard. she will have

this - skin, like mine. freckles, like mine.

fat, like mine. she is half-spun from my

dreams; i sleep just for her, orchestrate

a crown of thorn / placed upon her mantle.

her name means 'to tear', but in passing

i call her Woman King, the Eve who

sprung from the pulling of my ribcage.

(when she is grown, i will lay my bone

down and let her bloom).

Jennifer Perrine

We Have Come to the End of the Oyster Months

All that time, I was briny and bivalve

for you. Through winter I traded the sea

for your mouth, roiled in your landlocked hands, fed

you raw, left my armor glistening, tossed

off in gutters or turned into the earth

of your garden. I made every shallow

place a bed for you to gather my pale

iridescence, my fine ridges, body

curved as a comma or teardrop, filling

your whole palm. I gave you my delicate,

brackish bones. You dredged me rough from the reef,

alive, morsel of flesh plump with clear blood,

crisp as snow on your tongue. All those brief, dark

days, I promised cucumber, melon, bright

liquid summer, never felt the heavy

gloves you wore to dull my scrape, to soften

my sharp frame, never troubled when you slipped

that short, stout blade against my hinge, the twist,

the pop, the knife sliding up to sever

the muscle that held me closed, never cared

when too much force would strip a red sliver

from your connoisseur’s finger, never guessed

your disgust when you first tasted my murk,

when the bay could not stay cold and I turned

lush, exuberant, protandric, clouding

the water, spawning millions of others

I might be. How you contracted then, shut

tight, left me to spoil in this heat, this meat

still rich and mineral, swimming in juice

that once summoned tides, that once summoned you.

Ocean Vuong Interview with Christopher Soto

This year Copper Canyon Press released, to widespread critical acclaim, Ocean Vuong’s first full length poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Vuong’s collection is an astoundingly graceful examination of queerness, language, love, (resistance to) assimilation, the war in Vietnam, mourning, and discovering what it means to be Vietnamese-American.

Sitting with Ocean over a friendly dinner, I sprung out the question, “Hey, I’m starting to edit Nepantla Issue #3. Can we do an interview together?” He said yes. Thus, this interview happened on the

impromptu on a walk back to Ocean’s house, after dinner. The recording is interrupted by cars on the

street, running into Peter (Ocean’s partner) on the sidewalk, a neighbor who doesn’t want us on the

stoop. This interview feels like home--two friends sharing life and chatting about the craft we love.

Can you tell me a bit about your use of repetition within your new book ( Night Sky with Exit

Wounds)? I’ve heard our mentor, Yusef Komunyakaa, refer to repetition as a rallying cry. I was wondering how you relate to repetition?

I’m interested in how a word changes. A lot of times we are told that words have definite meanings, an economy that gets exhausted in a certain space. I was hoping to explore that perspective and see how a word can garner different contexts and pressures based on what surrounds it. For example, in one of my poems I say “good or bad” twice. The first mention is very comical, the second mention is much more

serious. I’ve learned that language is very malleable and there is a limitless ability to change it,

depending on what you do in the space between repetitions.

I’m also interested in the use of American pop culture within your work. You reference John F.

Kennedy , Whitney Houston, and other pop figures. Can we talk about your relationship to

Americana?

I guess, this is an attempt to gather all of the paraphernalia that is vital to me so that it’s not just paraphernalia. I’m trying to find meaning in these Americana signals and beings that exist. I was very interested in JFK because he is an American president who was one of the main orchestrators of the war in Vietnam, the war that killed up to 4 million Vietnamese people. What happens when a man like that is not even safe? So I wanted to speak through the person who was closest to JFK, which was his wife,

Jacqueline Kennedy.

It was a challenge for me to step into the voice of a white women but I realized that there was a

common ground for us and that common ground was the destruction of the bodies that we loved. And

through violence I saw a moment where, ironically, a woman of her status was feeling the same as

someone who comes from the lineage of a Vietnamese peasant. I was interested in how far I could

stretch pop culture into the personal ruptures that happen. Whitney Houston is another example. She

died a very human death, of addiction and in that poem where she is mentioned, I am thinking about

the overdose of friends that I grew up with. When I use pop culture it is usually an attempt to find

common ground. Andy Warhol uses pop culture similarly. He was obsessed with Coca-Cola. He said a

king in Saudi Arabia would pay the same price for a Coca-Cola as a regular person on the street and it was this moment of a common bridge across all classes.

I’m wondering about the various languages that you have in your poems--a high lyric, a colloquial

English/Vietnamese. I’m wondering about how you write into these different languages and dialects?

It took a while for me to see all registers of language as tools for creative work, particularly something worthy of the respect to be used in the craft of poetry. Often times we speak of poetry as elevated

language. And I found myself struggling to obtain that standardization of language because I didn’t come from the class where that elevated language was spoken. But when I was reading Ashbery it was so

liberating. There is this poem where he just starts off by saying, “Hey you!” And CD Wright also, she has such a democratic view of language. That liberated me to look at language, and all sonic and vocal

moments--such as words like “yikes”--as materials. But I had to work through the high lyric to get there, in the same way that Duchamp, Pollock, Picasso, and others have had to work through so much craft in

order to use the most common tools. It made me aware of where the language pressures are in relation

to other registers.

Last craft question, let’s talk about how you organized the book. What’s your editing process like?

I never expected to have a book this early. Jen Bervin, at Poets House, made us put a book together and that helped propel this book. At first, I had to think about the thematic / chronological moments or

weave all of these moments together. I think Eduardo C. Corral weaved a lot of his book, Slow Lightning.

I wanted a designated space for my family’s story, in an unbroken narrative, because a lot of times the Vietnamese immigrant story is told by white veterans. I think I had to sacrifice a lot of innovative

moments that I wanted to do, in order to tell the story linearly in the first section.

In the second section, I focused more on America, queer bodies, my personal experience--an American

body navigating through personal violence, and the violence that my friends have felt. The last section was an interesting moment for me because that is where I decided to weave the thematic and the

temporal nature of the poems. I think if the editorial process was longer that my book might have

looked very different.

What would you consider success to be from this first book?

I experienced success during my book launch. For me, it’s when a writer gets to be in a room where the people he cares about and loves are in the same space listening to what he has to say, if even briefly. For me that is success, to be able to speak with one another with our best intentions. I always see that as the end goal, to reach humans. Success is when the world becomes a vehicle for the work.

Brenda Shaughnessy Interview with Christopher Soto

Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of four books of poetry. Her most recent collection So Much Synth was released in 2016 from Copper Canyon Press. Shaughnessy and I first met at NYU, where I studied

under her in a poetry workshop course.

In this interview we discuss music, writer’s block, safe spaces in queer communities, motherhood, and more. It is a pleasure to be speaking with her again for Nepantla.

Hello my mentor, thank you for taking the time to do this interview. I’d love to talk about your most recent collection So Much Synth which came out with Copper Canyon Press, earlier this year. Maybe we can start with talking about the process of creating the book. I heard that you were only able to start writing after taking voice lessons. Can you tell us about that?

After I finished my 3rd book, Our Andromeda, I felt drained; I had nothing left to say, my heart was wrung out and I was sick of myself. You know that feeling after you’ve poured everything into a poem or a book of poems, where you’re just embarrassed? All that stuff you wrote! Ugh! Suddenly everything that was

private is now out there in a paradoxical way. It’s not private anymore, but that doesn’t mean anyone’s reading it. Whatever was precious and interior is now available to be ignored, as much as read. So there was a period of ambivalence and stasis.

One day I saw a Facebook post by the magnificent poet and artist Pamela Sneed, in which she said she

was taking singing lessons and I was struck by that. Here was a woman who was undeniably one of the

most powerful presences I’d ever seen. And she was going in to learn something new. It inspired me, so I started taking singing lessons with a wonderful instructor named Rebecca Pronsky (in Park Slope,

Brooklyn! Poets, go to her!) and somehow the process of forcing myself to be embarrassed, just “letting it rip” allowed me to stop wallowing in bullshit. I had to face my own voice. It didn’t matter if I couldn’t sing. I could still learn. I could still submit myself to the discomfort of trying to get better at something I wasn’t good at, and didn’t know how to do. Sure it was embarrassing, but so what?

From the first day of singing lessons, for about 6 weeks, I could not stop writing messy, dorky poems and, as in singing class, I did not care how I sounded. Once I stopped worrying how I sounded, the

poems flowed, surprising me day after day.

Embarrassment is so useful. We often just use it to shut ourselves up. But I found that I could use my embarrassment against itself: a new kind of fuck-you to an inner critic I hadn’t realized I’d been listening to my whole life. Really it’s neither difficult nor devastating to hit a wrong note or to write a bad line of poetry. Just write another. Sing another song. Big whoop, I realized. But it took me decades to figure that out.

How do you usually deal with writer’s block?

Writer’s block is just fear. When faced with fear, we fly or fight. Unfortunately, when it comes to writing, those two instincts merge into the same thing. We flee ourselves and we fight ourselves and in both

scenarios no words get written. I wish I could face this fear the same way I would if I were about to get on a rollercoaster. Like, “I know I’m scared but it will probably be fun, if I don’t die or puke.”

Facing a blank page is facing mortality, it just is. I don’t know any way around that. It’s terrifying. But just as terrifying to turning your back to the page and running away. It will always be there right behind you!

There is a lot of music in these poems. Was that influenced by the voice lessons? I’m thinking about your poem “But I’m the Only One” after a Melissa Etheridge song. How does music function in this

book for you? How does music relate to identity?

There are certain eras in one’s life where the music you listen to becomes inextricable from who you

are, who you are becoming. Prepubescence and adolescence are such times, when you can channel the

beginnings of sexual desire into the music you love. Maybe it’s not safe to explore sexuality at 12 with other humans, and maybe at 17 you want to explore but don’t have the chance to. Desire doesn’t go

away just because you can’t express it. So we memorize the lyrics, we dance alone in our rooms, we

make mixtapes, we get crushes on bands. For me this time was during the 80s, when synthpop was

everywhere. Artists like Duran Duran, Madonna, Prince, and Erasure provided formative, ubiquitous,

endlessly exciting coming-of-age soundtracks.

As for the Melissa Etheridge reference, that poem was set in the mid-90s, when that song was popular.

At that time, too, I was coming into a new sense of myself as a penniless, heartbroken, poet-in-training lesbian in New York City. That song was an anthem for those of us who had nothing but passion.

I’ve heard you describe your second book Our Andromeda as a book to your son and So Much Synth as a book to your daughter. Can you explain? I’d love to hear more about femininity and adolescence

and power in your poem “Is There Something I Should Know” too. (Also, I just discovered that is a

Duran Duran song).

You just discovered that it’s a Duran Duran song?

Okay. I’ll just feel old for a minute here.

Minute’s over, now to your question. Our Andromeda is a book I wrote in part to process my transition into motherhood, a transition which, for me, was catastrophic. My son was not brought safely into this world and the trauma was and is profound. I wrote that book to save my life, and to be the strong

mother I needed to be and have since become. My boy knows love, and security, and happiness, and he

also has major disabilities which disallow most if not all of the rites of passage most of us associate with growing up. Then I had another baby, a daughter, who did come safely into this world, and she is

growing up with all the typical ups and downs of a girl with no disabilities. It made me think, a lot, about the reality that even when there are no massive, obvious obstacles in one’s life, and growing up is still pretty perilous.

One night, talking with Craig, my spouse, fellow poet, and dad of our two kids, we somehow we got on

the topic of girlhood, and what it was like growing up a girl. What it was like to be a free, happy little kid and to suddenly plunge, at age 11, into 700 days of nonstop hormonal chaos, an irreversibly changing

body, sudden street harassment, sudden objectification, and this terrible sense of danger all the time. I described all these things and was blown away by how the ordinary, everyday experience of coming into womanhood was really so secret. I ‘d been so ashamed and afraid and humiliated even though

everything was “normal” and nothing bad really happened to me. It was bad anyway! Ordinary

adolescence meant coming into rape culture silently, unknowing, powerless.

I committed to writing about it, even though it wasn’t what I wanted to write about, because I had always assumed that we’d have found a way, by now, to stop or at least protest the rampant

objectification, dehumanization, shaming, belittlement, and general degradation of young girls as a

cultural norm. I figured by the time I had a little girl to raise she’d have less bullshit to have to deal with. I don’t know why I thought we’d have “progress.” Because it’s only gotten worse. Girls are in more kinds of danger now than ever before, things that didn’t even exist when I was a girl (internet predators, cyberbullying, etc.) on top of the old ones. It’s sickening. I wrote my truth to break silence in the face of that myriad danger. I want my kid to know (whether she reads it or not) and I want all of us who went through our own gauntlet to know that being a girl and becoming a woman isn’t an inherently

disgusting, embarrassing, dangerous, unfair and humiliating thing. It shouldn’t be. We can call it out. I want my daughter to know that even if our culture surrounds her with cruel insults and threats to her humanity, sexuality, voice, opinion, mind, heart, and body, she doesn’t have to be silent. I want her to know that she is entitled to deny those insults and to defend herself against those threats, and to claim her power by believing in herself, in her truth.

Lately, I’ve been struggling to relate to some of my queer community because of trauma that I’ve

faced inside the community. I am thinking about your poem “Why I Stayed 1997-2001.” How do you

relate to your queerness now, after having two children?

Cruelty and violence inside the queer community is another place of terrible silence, isn’t it? “Why I Stayed” was something I wrote in solidarity with other folks who wrote about their experiences with

intimate partner abuse. I felt safe in my lesbian community, but I wasn’t safe with my lesbian partner, and I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, even though everyone knew what was happening. I think there

can be a lot of internalized homophobia—and overt biphobia—going on in situations like this: feeling

one doesn’t deserve better because one has absorbed the cultural hatred of sexual minorities. This was back in the 90s, and many people weren’t out—lesbian life was a cherished subculture and I think some of us felt a terror of being seen as damaged or less-than, a terror of feeling unworthy of love.

I know that when I was living as a lesbian, I was pretty biphobic myself. None of us lesbians wanted to be left for a man, and for some of us, that’s what “bisexual women” seemed to threaten. But of course my biphobia was there because I was afraid of my own bisexuality, afraid because I was one of those

“traitors”. Fun times! Once I came to terms with the fact that I loved who I love—that that’s all sexual freedom is about, being able to love who you love—I became much more comfortable with who I am,

who I’ve always been. I’m still bisexual, even though I have two children begotten in the old-fashioned way. I’m biracial, and bisexual, and my two kids are both Geminis, so there’s a lot of double-ness in my world.

The book starts with a poem you published last year in the New Yorker, called “I Have a Time

Machine.” This poem ends with the lines “I thought I’d find myself / an old woman by now, travelling so light in time. / But I haven’t gotten far at all. / Strange not to be able to pick up the pace as I’d like;

/ the past is so horribly fast.” Can you talk about how time functions in the book and in your life?

Well, that’s a big question because time is such a mystery, a lie, a constraint, a waste, a miracle, a waiting game, a Jenga game, an accumulation of vanishings, a constant failure, and also all we have!

Our entire lives have to be fit inside this time we have. And when I think about how few years a

beautiful poet like Max Ritvo had, and how many years we’ve been deprived of the live presence of

Lucille Clifton, and how the recent loss of CD Wright is heavy with the weight of years and years of her poetry the world needs but that time didn’t allow for [….]

Poets can’t beat time. We are stuck in our timeline. The words we write will maybe have more time than we do, but we must find the time to write them, line after line after line, if only because there will be a last line, and we don’t want to have already written it.

Thank you again for your friendship and your poetry!