Floating on the internet, a disembodied hand
palms a pig’s heart, all washed
in Ivory dish soap, immaculate and
clean of its porcine protein. Doctors hope to grow
something human on this pimpled pump.
Someone said it was the heart of a ghost
because it could become anything, could
shatter like glass if dropped. Someone made
a meme, said: This is how boys’ hearts be
for the rest of their lives after one girl hurts them.
The heart’s chambered walls are absolute,
and deep inside the quartet of atria,
sits a girl: the blamed-one, the bride.
She’s packed her hope chest with a milk glass
bud vase no bigger than her hand, a candy dish,
a shallow bowl all wrapped in yards of washed lace
human cells. Someday, the heart will be buried deep
in a chest. I love a task with a beginning and an end,
with walls that stop me in my tracks, clean.
Jennifer Martelli (she, her, hers) is the author of The Queen of Queens (Bordighera Press) and MyTarantella (Bordighera Press), awarded an Honorable Mention from the Italian-American Studies Association, selected as a 2019 “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and named as a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. She is also the author of the chapbooks In the Year of Ferraro from Nixes Mate Press and After Bird, winner of the Grey Book Press open reading, 2016. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The Tahoma Literary Review, The Sycamore Review, Cream City Review, Verse Daily, Iron HorseReview (winner of the Photo Finish contest), and elsewhere. Jennifer Martelli has twice received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her poetry. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review.
Shibazrule, aka Lisa D. Chavez, is a poet based in New Mexico. Her poetry books include Destruction Bay (West End Press) and In An Angry Season. (University of Arizona Press). She also writes memoir and fiction, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of New Mexico. She’s delighted to have the opportunity to be Guest Editor here at The Coop for the month of August.
Light from a match makes a candle feel more romantic.
Lost art: collecting ornamented boxes from high
end restaurants & hotels, plus cheap books
from gas stations. I had drawers full of them
for special occasions & just in case, but inevitably circa past
2am, someone (like me) would be so drunk
they’d light their cigarette on the gas
stove, burn off some hair. How tinged
that smell is in memory w/ joy & frivolity, youth & worries
that loomed like vultures, but from this middle
perch, I know they were shadow puppets at best.
The boxes I’d saved for prized moments that never
arrived—they all disappeared, got lost in one move or another,
which means I probably tossed them in a fit
of self-recrimination about how much stuff I let
accumulate, while neglecting to note that each tiny
carton held an intimate memory of its collection. I’ve got so much wreckage
behind me—lovers, spats, splits, violence (domestic),
divorce. Cops at the door, my tear-stained head
shaking w/ I didn’t call them. Teetering toward
poverty w/ a little kid whose legs hurt from chemo, the two of us
in a three-story walk-up. Memory crunches like burnt hair,
useless, clinging, sticky. My mind’s a junk drawer.
What can I salvage now? I sit in the solitude I worked
so hard to create & wonder if I’ve got one great love left in me.
Is this, finally, what it means to be human—to fail
so deeply you spend years in terror & therapy working
thru what he did to you only to crave that same tight ring
around you again? Connect, connect, pushes some voice, but
every dynamic, I end up feeling trapped in an airless
attic, like I’ve got to protect my spirit from being snuffed.
I don’t do well w/ monogamy, I tell my therapist in a voice
so confident, I ignore that I’m putting the onus on me, once again,
& not the tawdry system. Every love affair, I pound like a mime
against imaginary walls, then wrench free to declare
autonomy, & after this many times down the path, I know:
the problem is me. It would be wrong to knowingly entangle
again, wouldn’t I be engaging in trickery, creating
the kind of enclosure I fear, while secretly
palming a skeleton key? All I seem to do is lay
elaborate traps, & prove I can escape. Still. How many days & years
are we supposed to promise? Why isn’t I love you right
now cradled like a precious creature? I had a short-lived
romance w/ a writer from the heartland, how different
she was from east coast me. We were marooned in the desert
of New Mexico, throwing ourselves upon the judgment
of a motley grad department. I read recently her novel
got published—the one she was working on 20 years ago.
It’s full of her usual tropes, & w/ my particularized lens I can note
which grew brilliant & which got tired, but I can
re-direct the same bright light & illuminate my flaws
& gaps, too. Eventually everyone bores me;
my inner world’s so rich. It’s a brightly-wrapped gift, this realm
inside; it’s a burden, I suppose. And yet.
A hungry flame endures, tickles at the veins
of my tied-up heart & begs for one more
great love—it’ll be the last I ask for. Feed me the death I most crave.
Let the flicker of me be extinguished in their gaze.
Bring me a lover who’ll light my cigarette w/ a match.
I’ll inhale smoke laced w/ sulfur & sink into the magic—
Strike. This time will be different.
Sarah E. Azizi (aka Sera Miles) is a queer Iranian-American writer, educator, & activist. Previous & forthcoming publications include $pread Magazine, Phoebe: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Feminist Scholarship, 34th Parallel, Blue Mesa Review, Fahmidan Journal, Clean Sheets, red, The Tide Rises, HELD, Wrongdoing Magazine, the winnow, Superpresent, Nine Mile, and Free State Review. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico w/ her daughter & amongst friends & family of choice.
Shibazrule, aka Lisa D. Chavez, is a poet based in New Mexico. Her poetry books include Destruction Bay (West End Press) and In An Angry Season. (University of Arizona Press). She also writes memoir and fiction, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of New Mexico. She’s delighted to have the opportunity to be Guest Editor here at The Coop for the month of August.
this is how we are born: mother so cruelly
dangling a sweet coveted thing
singing at us with a thin smile
drawn over her lips.
her voice, a siren
promising us a home inside her mouth.
the melody shakes through wet
laughter, reaches over my brother’s thighs,
touches my own. one leg, disappeared.
this is how we die: playing
games for children. next are the limbs
carrying my sister. my mother’s voice again
reaches heavy fingers, taps a feather-brown knee
we watch it fade into the past, where old children go
to die. sometimes, it’s the arms.
or the feet follow the refrain into silence.
that song finally lands on my last leg and i turn
fully into smoke.
quinton chinwe is a black trans poet from north carolina, where they study english & comparative literature at the university of north carolina at chapel hill.
Shibazrule, aka Lisa D. Chavez, is a poet based in New Mexico. Her poetry books include Destruction Bay and In An Angry Season. She also writes memoir and fiction, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of New Mexico.
Blood red
stains Jersey and New York trails,
escape routes used for centuries
with runaway Africans.
From this sunrise ocean homeland spread
people’s stories—
diasporas through five centuries of Spanish, Swedes, Dutch,
English, and United States settlers.
Blood red spreads from the massacres—at Pavonia
where the Dutch murdered their own mixed children.
In Ohio, the militia murders pacifist Lenape Christians.
Blood passes through mothers’ red wombs to landless children
my grandfather,
his parents and theirs.
Descendants remain in mountains of Ramapough,
in the Appalachians of Pennsylvania, and Ohio
in Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma,
Texas, Wisconsin, Canada, Idaho. Still alive,
hearts beating red blood.
I acknowledge with respect
the living Lenape and Munsee people—
all the lands where they dance.
Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate 2007-09, is winner of the Red Mountain Press Editor’s Choice Award for Shadow Light. Other recent books are a collection of essays, Jigsaw Puzzling (Meadowlark Press) and a memoir, The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival (U. of Nebraska Press) Wing (Red Mountain, a Hefner Heitz finalist), and A Casino Bestiary: Poems (Spartan Press). Her Jackalope, fiction from Red Mountain, was acclaimed by Pennyless (U.K.), American Book Review, and New Letters. She has won 4 Kansas Notable Book Awards and recognition from the Poetry Society of America, The Circle -Best Native American Books, and NEH. She is a founding board member of Indigenous Native Poets (In-Na-Po), which sponsors retreats for emerging poets, including a 2022 celebration of U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo at the Library of Congress. She founded the Creative Writing Program at Haskell Indian Nations University, where she taught and was an administrator. Low has an MFA from Wichita State U. and Ph.D. from KU. She lives on Tsuno Mountain in northern California. www.deniselow.net
Shibazrule, aka Lisa D. Chavez, is a poet based in New Mexico. Her poetry books include Destruction Bay and In An Angry Season. She also writes memoir and fiction, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of New Mexico.
Distilled Diplomacy
How can agreement be quantified
by everchanging politics
that benefit so few?
One wonders,
how can distilled tears of the martyred
be cleansed from rubble,
drained of spirit
and tarnished by magenta?
How can diplomacy be truthful
in an era of guised greed,
nationalistic in tone
and vain in nature?
But obedience must be solicited
as paradigms consume beings
flesh and all,
into a distilled diplomacy—
where any humanity is rebuked, and only rapacity is left.
Songs of Revolution
are arias sung to taunting winds
that fluctuate with wandering opinions.
Like dawn break on summer’s morning,
there is no reprieve from assured change,
but hymns are only sung where consecrated masses
sway to collective effervescence primordial,
a tambour borne out of discontent
and silent shackles ever heavy.
For lies are told to appease heavy hearts
tempered by bitter oral tradition,
lullabies sang to the masses,
prayers whispered to the many
all waiting for sudden salvation.
But revolutionary fevers demarcate
warring humanity from mammals many
and intricate in existence,
where difference will inspire treason
and subterfuge beyond mindless decimation,
where warring groups divide ever further
and individualized dissent is the norm,
and songs of slaughter will again proceed
revolution radical, assuredly irrational.
Anthony Salandy is a Black Mixed-race poet & writer who has spent most of his life in Kuwait jostling between the UK & America. Anthony has 2 published chapbooks, The Great Northern Journey and Vultures and a novel, The Sands of Change. Anthony is Co-EIC of Fahmidan Journal. Twitter/Instagram: @arsalandy
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative’s Editor, Laura Lee Washburn, has selected July’s poems around the site’s current theme “We’re Speaking” to capture voices pushing back against the current attacks in the U.S. on human rights and on democracy. Citizens of Kansas have an attack on their state constitution on the ballot August 2nd on which we hope they will vote no in order to preserve the Kansas legacy of being a free state in which all citizens have bodily autonomy. We stand in solidarity with all people affected by current rulings from the radicalized Supreme Court.
You grew out voluptuous and inappropriate,
conjured from blood and breath
and landed on a strange shore.
And when you had filled your vessel,
licked every drop of sustenance from the walls,
you curled, let your blood grow sluggish and dark
and sighed yourself into a granite sleep.
Layer after layer settled and smoothed
your features clean. On the outside,
your mother’s hand curved over roundness
that no longer had place, as if she could
polish your skin into golden pearl.
Issa M. Lewis is the author of Infinite Collisions (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and Anchor (Kelsay Books, 2022). She received the 2013 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize. Her poems have previously appeared in Rust + Moth, North American Review, and South Carolina Review, amongst others. Her website is www.issalewis.com.
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative’s Editor, Laura Lee Washburn, has selected July’s poems around the site’s current theme “We’re Speaking” to capture voices pushing back against the current attacks in the U.S. on human rights and on democracy. Citizens of Kansas have an attack on their state constitution on the ballot August 2nd on which we hope they will vote no in order to preserve the Kansas legacy of being a free state in which all citizens have bodily autonomy. We stand in solidarity with all people affected by current rulings from the radicalized Supreme Court.
F [ire]
Twice I call out your name
And twice the river stops flowing
Two men wearing long coats are standing where the road ends
One of them has a snake ready to strike embroidered on his back the
other a willow tree
Touch either one and you’ll feel sick for a whole century
Everyone knows that
Even so I want to soothe the snake
Want to commune with each patiently sewn leaf
I want to thank them on and all
Feed them Christmas candy
Both men take off their coats thereby exposing their wings
As I burn with envy a picture of you stealing apples comes to me
You the hot yoga instructor who always forgets my name
Not you the distance between moon and meaning
The phone rings it’s the river can I come over to console her
Now I’m moving like Jim Morison
Not the Jim having just shot one gram of heroin
Rather the Jim on stage at the Hollywood Bowl circa 1968
As if matters already aren’t tense enough
O[uterspace]Hating and loving people both goes the radio can happen to anyone
I’m driving slowly along a dirt road
At the foot of every dead tree rests a basket of daises
Why won’t my headlights make the eyes of black dogs glow
I stop get out and write your name in the snow
Tired of feeling lonely everywhere you go
I want to use my tongue but don’t
Act now and receive this handsome knife set free
Maybe nothing I do will bring you back to me
There’s a man standing knee deep in the river
He thinks too much about outerspace I say to myself
He says O you mean loneliness
No I mean outerspace I go
No he says You mean loneliness the god to so many down here
Don’t you think loneliness is deadly up there too I say
O yes he says most definitely
More deadly even than fire
Tommy Archuleta’s work has appeared recently in The New England Review, Laurel Review, Lily Poetry Review, The Courtland Review, and Guesthouse. His debut collection, Susto, is slated for release March 2023 through the Center for Literary Publishing as a Mountain/West Poetry Series title. He lives on the Cochiti Reservation.
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative’s Editor, Laura Lee Washburn, has selected July’s poems around the site’s current theme “We’re Speaking” to capture voices pushing back against the current attacks in the U.S. on human rights and on democracy. Citizens of Kansas have an attack on their state constitution on the ballot August 2nd on which we hope they will vote no in order to preserve the Kansas legacy of being a free state in which all citizens have bodily autonomy. We stand in solidarity with all people affected by current rulings from the radicalized Supreme Court.
even scrunched under
tucks and turns, layers upon layers,
it’s undeniable
my belly does not ask
for organization, thriftiness
it’s a snugged-up litter of wolf pups
growling, yipping
and I listen because
my belly knows things I don't know
warns me the guy on the train
when he offers a pull on the flask
and I am young, alone
some days it sulks
demands ordinary sustenance
dark hungers
if with a gentle finger,
you wrote your name across
my belly would hum like honey,
promise to rise, promise more than enough
sky between the trees
not always right—my belly
does not believe
I unplugged the iron no matter
I haven’t ironed in ten years—but
when I hear
my belly that too loud friend
call my name as she stumbles
across the crowded airport, there’s
nowhere to go but into her arms
Deborah Bacharach is the author ofShake and Tremor (Grayson Books, 2021) andAfter I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her work has been published in The Antigonish Review, Cimarron Review, New Letters, and Poet Loreamong many others. Find out more at DeborahBacharach.com Instagram @debbybach Twitter @DebbyBacharach
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative’s Editor, Laura Lee Washburn, has selected July’s poems around the site’s current theme “We’re Speaking” to capture voices pushing back against the current attacks in the U.S. on human rights and on democracy. Citizens of Kansas have an attack on their state constitution on the ballot August 2nd on which we hope they will vote no in order to preserve the Kansas legacy of being a free state in which all citizens have bodily autonomy. We stand in solidarity with all people affected by current rulings from the radicalized Supreme Court.
Maroon
To feel like I’m escaping an uncontrollable season, I head to Maroon Bells. A moose rested on Maroon Lake. The guide at the entrance said, “keep moose a thumb-cover away,” so I gave that moose a thumb’s up and wink. Maybe next time it could help out and gesture back, I am ready to feel clasped by this planet, for my support system to include poetry and the poetry of land.
I find it helpful when my feet are bare against sanded shore of lake or creek. A comforting memory evokes smiles, but I’m comforted thinking of you at your most hollowed, empty as wintered slopes.
If we learn anything from mountain topography, it’s the creative way to remove reality; to pretend flood season isn’t coming after the char. Or to avoid comparing bodies with the continental divide; streams, blackened burn scars, deep crimson canyons, death-red cliffs. I ask the white-watered stream, “Is there anything else who is hurting? Is there something I can do to show I care?” When I sense her glacier-fed body tightening like screw into wood, I quietly repeat: someday you’ll know, someday you’ll know—An Ache
I don’t mean to seem like I’m complaining, I never want that warmth to set, not even for a period to sleep, but today it’s one-hundred degrees with no sign the fires throughout these Rockies will pause. I’m really missing cool breezes on chipped porches—I have a difficult time facing pastel colors and palmed yucca during midday when we’re at our warmest, but I breathe.
I read and reread “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” and I ache all throughout, sweating spine and hips I forget to acknowledge, so consumed with endless day—Someday you’ll know—and I do know I want that backcountry erosion of self, of rising darkly, a body as shadow cooled from dark loam beneath the uncontrollable flamespread. A friend from elsewhere asks “What’s the difference between burn season and wildfire season?” I’ve been feeling a lot of silence in and around me; when children skip rocks on the creek while adults grill meat and still smoke cigarettes. There is silence at the opening of cans. The difference between burn season and wildfire season is silence.
Sunbathing through Wildfire Season
To mutate into something else, I lie on a faded lounge chair by the pool despite the smoke-fueled air which makes the sun a hot-tinged scarlet. Muted and so perfectly round, I see it daily these days as I sunbathe through wildfire season, I stay still and silent while miles of evergreens burn seventy miles away, blowing to me.
Or, I lie in a hammock and feel it cradle me as a body-bag where the wildfires become mute as the fabric folds lightly around, off-ground and comforting, off-ground I can trust the trees which hold me. I could use some more trees to prop me up: Aspens, Blue Spruce, Piñon. (I could use a little less rocked crag caves and flood paths within me.)
Kristiane Weeks-Rogers (she/her/hers) is a Poet-Writer among other titles such as copy editor. She’s the author of the poetry collection, Self-Anointment with Lemons (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and 2nd place winner of Casa Cultural de las Americas’ inaugural Poetic Bridges contest.
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative’s Editor, Laura Lee Washburn, has selected July’s poems around the site’s current theme “We’re Speaking” to capture voices pushing back against the current attacks in the U.S. on human rights and on democracy. Citizens of Kansas have an attack on their state constitution on the ballot August 2nd on which we hope they will vote no in order to preserve the Kansas legacy of being a free state in which all citizens have bodily autonomy. We stand in solidarity with all people affected by current rulings from the radicalized Supreme Court.
On my morning walk, I pass by houses on stilts, sweat in a summer sun hotter than I can remember. I pick up piles of plastic, bury belly-up fish released by the ocean in high sighs. I pray for the strength of the cordoned squares safeguarding a sea turtle’s nest and the wooden crutches propping up a dying palm. I praise the salted air I can still breathe in and out freely. I praise this planet that keeps giving despite our abuse. I close my eyes and say to no one in particular: Let us cherish Mother Earth while there’s still time—before it’s too late to undo the damage we’ve done to her.
Nicole Tallman is the Poetry Ambassador for Miami-Dade County, Associate Editor for South Florida Poetry Journal, and Interviews Editor for The Blue Mountain Review. She is the author of Something Kindred (The Southern Collective Experience Press). Find her on Twitter and Instagram @natallman and at nicoletallman.com.
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative’s Editor, Laura Lee Washburn, has selected July’s poems around the site’s current theme “We’re Speaking” to capture voices pushing back against the current attacks in the U.S. on human rights and on democracy. Citizens of Kansas have an attack on their state constitution on the ballot August 2nd on which we hope they will vote no in order to preserve the Kansas legacy of being a free state in which all citizens have bodily autonomy. We stand in solidarity with all people affected by current rulings from the radicalized Supreme Court.
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative 