Imperative the morning shower, not to greet the day,
but to soothe the mood that takes to harden overnight.
I assume by now laughter and banter are brittle old ghosts, their power to amuse all spent up.
I fumble around the hallway with eyes closed – trying out something new, mostly because why not?
My wet hair drips, drips, quietly drips onto the knife drawer while I look for birthday candles and any excuse
to celebrate the generic days, and wouldn’t you have guessed it: I cut my hand. A fist locked in pain with the intensity of a monsoon,
but my eyes remain shut out of stubbornness, or boredom; nobody around to ask why? Instinctively,
my hand smears my eyes and everything in its path in a rush of desire to wear these days as a wound.
Zoé Robles grew up in Puerto Rico where she studied Comparative Literature. She has recently worked teaching English to immigrants. Her poems have appeared in Adobe Walls, Malpais and other publications. She currently lives in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Brooklyn-based painter Gina Magid has been the recipient of awards including Guggenheim Foundation and McDowell Colony fellowships. She has had solo exhibitions at Feature Inc., Artists Space, and Ana Cristea Gallery in New York, and Acuna Hansen Gallery in Los Angeles.
You’ve been distant since the last time we had sex – Two weeks ago in the hotel room, escaping quarantine to kiss and dance, Because after six weeks of isolation, one needs to touch another human. Your cock, my lips, your hands, my breasts –the images swirl violently. Sleepless tonight, I’m wondering who you’re touching now – it becomes an obsession. At 1 A.M. I find myself on your darkened street, in front of your house, stalking.
As I slowly drive by, a woman darts frantically into the street toward my car with torn stockings. In tears and staccato breaths, she says she has just been assaulted in the back of a car while having sex. Because even during a pandemic, soliciting prostitutes on dark streets is an obsession. I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s nothing new. For millennia, men and women have engaged in this power dance. Into my car she leaps, cheaply perfumed, bleeding, nails jagged and broken to the quick, escaping his violence. I’m saddened that someone could do this to another human.
I’m ashamed. What excuse do I have for being there? I could say “I’m only human.” What would I say, amid the commotion and confusion, should you catch me on your street, stalking? Driving away, realizing how impulsive actions and bad decisions can end in violence, Because this was not part of our arrangement – we agreed it was only about sex, And now agonizing over the ridiculous schemes of this perpetual dance, Of complicated relationships and enveloping obsessions.
She’s so fragile and beautiful. Helping her becomes my new obsession. I hesitated because I was afraid for my own safety, but how could I deny another human? I imagine her in happier times, with her friends, laughing and dancing. Am I any better than her? I am the one who was secretly stalking. I console her and ask questions, careful not to judge her for selling sex. She’s only been doing it for the last six weeks – this is her first incidence of violence.
Our last night, pre-quarantine, you asked me my safe word and I was turned on by your violence. Six weeks lonely, that dangerous memory became my obsession. Now, I am pressing you for another hotel room meeting so that we can once again have sex. I want to break through your distance. I want to rescue her. I want to connect as humans – Without pre-conditions, without arrangements, without hesitation, without stalking. I want for us all to love, to laugh and, in happier times, to dance.
I told her about us, about that time in the middle of the restaurant when we danced. Her tears stopped. She liked that about you and for a few minutes she forgot about the violence. She laughed when I told her the reason I happened to be there was because I was stalking. She’s a woman, like me, who loves – she understood my obsession. It was then that we connected, human to human. That universal struggle, like so many women before us, trying to fulfill our needs through sex.
So goes this convoluted dance that sometimes leads to obsession, Enduring the violence that comes with being human. Stalking the streets and sometimes relinquishing ourselves for sex.
Yvonne Brizula is a rising poet, writer and storyteller from Southern California. Brooklyn-based painter GinaMagid has been the recipient of awards including Guggenheim Foundation and McDowell Colony fellowships. She has had solo exhibitions at Feature Inc., Artists Space, and Ana Cristea Gallery in New York, and Acuna Hansen Gallery in Los Angeles.
I would drive you through empty pandemic streets for hours, ease you with bluegrass, blues, old rock, funk, tell you Drink when someone mentions the devil in a song. You’d be drunk fast, riding in my car’s steel bubble, staring out at pines, dogwoods, hibiscuses, oaks, & empty lots— escape, a breath releasing. Today, a rabbit on the lawn, you are alarmed by everyone observed through safety glass. Maybe tomorrow you will calm as though selecting dinner from the garden, as if before the virus there were peace.
Ace Boggess is author of five books of poetry—Misadventure, I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, Ultra Deep Field, The Prisoners, and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled—and the novels States of Mercy and A Song Without a Melody. His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Notre Dame Review, Mid-American Review, Rattle, River Styx, and other journals. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison. His sixth collection, Escape Envy, is forthcoming from Brick Road Poetry Press in 2021. Brooklyn-based painter GinaMagid has been the recipient of awards including Guggenheim Foundation and McDowell Colony fellowships. She has had solo exhibitions at Feature Inc., Artists Space, and Ana Cristea Gallery in New York, and Acuna Hansen Gallery in Los Angeles.
The space in which I could be alive became smaller and smaller till unable to live I could only exist, yet the shrinking continues so I must soon cease even doing that.
Connor Orrico is a medical student and field recordist interested in global health, mental health, and how we make meaning from stories of person and place, themes which explored in his poetry in Headline Poetry & Press and his sounds at Bivouac Recording. Brooklyn-based painter GinaMagid has been the recipient of awards including Guggenheim Foundation and McDowell Colony fellowships. She has had solo exhibitions at Feature Inc., Artists Space, and Ana Cristea Gallery in New York, and Acuna Hansen Gallery in Los Angeles.
It’s May here. The sun is still high at almost six, and yet we can hear in the distance the loud calls of mating owls, the evening criers of a chartreuse spring. The noise-worshipping neighbors across the street are gone for the evening. Here on this porch yellowed with pollen and so much dust I sit and watch the neighborhood cats eat the kibble I scatter across the brick steps.
I wonder where the neighbors are now in this year when disease swirls in the air, but there are places to go, so many bistros and bowling alleys opened to the touch of believers who disbelieve. I wish I knew the heady high of being fearless, being feckless. A breeze stirs, and I turn my gaze to our narrow street where a child this morning drew long-haired figures in chalk across the gray asphalt. Girls in pink dresses, girls reaching across undefined lanes with arms long as telephone poles, arms nothing more than yellow lines, arms touching no one and nothing. Now and then, a car drives over the bodies.
The cats chew their kibble, and I wonder if the piles that I feed them will keep them from breaking the necks of those smaller than they. Science tells me no. In the distance the owls still hoot. They would devour the babies of these hungry cats, if they found them.
In back rooms of shopping malls, managers count money, a fraction of which will be theirs. Soon the child with the chalk will return. I will watch her draw more children in the street. I will tell this story, a story she never
will know that I tell. Soon enough, a sedan will approach, moving slowly. I will watch as the child will dutifully rise, step quickly, as someone must have taught her, to the safety of the shoulder grass.
Jo Angela Edwins is the first poet laureate of the Pee Dee region of South Carolina. Her chapbook Play was published in 2016 by Finishing Line Press. She has received awards from Poetry Super Highway, Winning Writers, and the South Carolina Academy of Authors. Brooklyn-based artist Gina Magid has been the recipient of numerous awards including Guggenheim Foundation and McDowell Colony fellowships. She has had solo exhibitions at Feature Inc., Artists Space, and Ana Cristea Gallery in New York and Acuna Hansen Gallery in Los Angeles.
Global Poemic 