At The End of This Rope by Pichchenda Bao

Speaking about the 21-year-old white man who went on a shooting rampage in Atlanta-area, Asian-owned spas and murdered 8 people, including 6 Asian women, Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office Capt. Jay Baker said, “He was pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.”
 
Our Father, who could not be
there to love and protect,
starts in heaven but ends on the breath
of everyone who did not safeguard these women.
If you cannot give us back
        	this day, this wretched, this ever-lasting, this utterly predictable, this graceless day,
hollow be thy name.
Take back now this daily bread of guns and hate.
Give us back the murmuration of days, birdsong of days, lamentation of days, free-fall of days, the whole dam of days he took from them.
        	Or else,
forgive nothing
while we are forced to live,
        	day after day,
with the open trepasses of coddled white men,
Free us from the tiny confines of their impotent imaginations,
where no temptation will bring us to the end
of their manifold violence.
           
        	Is this not thy kingdom?
Come to the massage table,
altar of the body in pain.
Lead us to the human hands
that knead your all-knowing
heart, though you know
as well as anyone,
how grief is no
        	deliverance.
On earth, as it is in heaven,
manifest this destiny.
For we are yours,
        	now and forever,
are we not?

Pichchenda Bao

Pichchenda Bao is a Cambodian American writer and poet, infant survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime, daughter of refugees, and feminist stay-at-home mother in New York City. Her work has been published by great weather for MEDIA, the Ilanot Review, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. Her honors include an emerging writer fellowship from Aspen Words, a grant from Queens Council on the Arts, and a poetry residency at Bethany Arts Community. She is an Kundiman poetry is fellow. More at www.pichchendabao.com.

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.

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I Try Not to Write Poems About Souls by Issa M. Lewis

They’re nebulous things, the steam
off a boiling pot, the sweat
on a cold glass of lemonade.
They wander, uncontained, willful
and poems are meant to be vessels,
give form to what has none.
But souls can’t survive in jars.
Like when I was a child and collected
lightning bugs, scooped them
right out of the air they floated on
carefully cupped hands so I didn’t
squash them.  I put them in
an old baby food jar with holes
poked into the metal lid,
put grass and twigs so they’d feel at home.
I wanted them to light my room
as I slept, but each morning
they’d all be dead.  There was air
enough to breathe, but their lungs
wanted something more.  Their lungs
were souls and my glass jar a poem
that couldn’t hold them.

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.

More of her amazing work has been published here: https://150kansaspoems.wordpress.com/2022/07/25/stone-baby/

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.

A [rchitect] by Tommy Archuleta

         from My Travel Dream Dictionary

I’m one fuckit away from giving up looking for you  
 
Not you the moon but you the distance between moon and meaning
 
Which is to say never is anyone truly alone
 
And the more I look for you the more the moon darkens
 
Not true   	I never said night resembles the last hour of life
           	 
Love and loss are tricks of light played on us by the Architect says father
 
If by Architect he means pain then yeah 	ok   
 
Now the moon is writing a poem
 
It’s about some poet most poets have never heard of
 
And something about smoke posing as a human shadow posing a page torn
  	from Dante’s Inferno
 
What gets me is the quote face of one’s lost love unquote
 
So I keep on staring
 
Now the moon is leading our horses to water
 
The herd still hours away from settling   

Tommy Archuleta is a mental health counselor and substance abuse counselor for the New Mexico Corrections Department. Most recently his work has appeared in the New England Review, Laurel Review, Lily Poetry Review, The Cortland Review, Guesthouse, and the Poem-a-Day series sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. His full-length, debut collection of poems entitled, Susto, is slated for release March 2023 through the Center for Literary Publishing as a Mountain/West Poetry Series title. He lives and writes on the Cochiti Reservation. 

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.

Loud by Marisa P. Clark

Another restless winter night—
I step outside to walk the dog.
Earbuds in, & iPod shuffle picks
the songs. Queen to Kate Bush,
the Killers to Hank Williams,
Barbra Streisand, Rickie Lee Jones,
Nina Simone. When JLo comes on,
my stroll becomes a strut & then
a full-on dance. The news is
so much worse than bad. I feel
light on my feet. I glide, sidestep,
shimmy shoulders down the middle
of the empty street. The dog
wags her tail too. I dance like
no one’s looking—no one is,
discounting Venus & the moon
slung low on the horizon,
opalescent behind a veil
of clouds. Happiness is
scarce these days of too much
death & fear & no one
coming near. I’ve vowed
to give my all to any bliss
that appears. Bliss turns up
my volume now—it spins
me round & draws me close.
A streetlamp throws a spotlight
on the asphalt, & my shadow
shows, a dark strip of ribbon
unreeling into a leggy dance
partner, perfectly in sync. Look
at those hips swivel & sway!
Listen: you can almost hear
the music that inspires
our cha cha chasse.

Marisa P. Clark is a queer writer whose work appears in Shenandoah, Cream City Review, Nimrod, Epiphany, Foglifter, Rust + Moth, Sundog Lit,and elsewhere. Best American Essays 2011 recognized her nonfiction among its Notable Essays. She hails from the South and lives in the Southwest.

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.

The Art of the Old Lesbian by Diane Silver

Is to slide down the slope of a woman's body
where every time her tongue tastes skin she
splits apart somebody's wall of rules.
 
She's practiced at slamming a sledge hammer
into the concrete that presses down with the heft
of millions of mouths chanting sin-sin-sin.
 
To claim the right to live, she once had to wrench
her body out of the sucking muck of tales spread
thick by magazines, movies, and newspapers.  
 
She's been perfecting her art for 50 years. She
knows what it feels like to skid down a steep hill
far from home on a street in a city without maps.
 
She knows the exhilaration of living a story 
no one believed could be written. She's thrilled 
you crafted a narrative no one has read before.
 
You realize, don’t you, that artists never retire. 
The art of the old lesbian has always been 
to become new.

Diane Silver is a poet whose essays have appeared in Ms and The Progressive. Most recently her poetry has been published in MockingHeart Review and the upcoming anthology, Kansas Speaks Out: Poems in an Age of Me Too. Her most recent books are the Daily Shot of Hope meditation series.

Read more of her amazing poetry on site, here and here: https://150kansaspoems.wordpress.com/2019/08/26/to-the-woman-i-loved-too-soon-by-diane-silver/

Guest Editor 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.

Milk Glass by Jennifer Martelli

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 My Tarantella (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 Horse Review (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.

See some of her other amazing work right here: https://150kansaspoems.wordpress.com/2022/06/27/hot-things-to-me-are-not-dark-by-jennifer-martelli/ and here: https://150kansaspoems.wordpress.com/2022/07/04/dear-_____-n/

Guest Editor 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.

Match Box Girl by Sarah E. Azizi

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.

Guest Editor 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.

onye ụkwụ ya? by quinton chinwe

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.

Guest Editor 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.

A Land Acknowledgement for the Munsee and Lenape Lands by Denise Low

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

Guest Editor 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.