four poems
by Keagan Wheat
“I had been thinking
about my fading memory
of dinosaurs, my fading
desire to prove a boyhood
by standards I disregard.”
Ashes In My Mouth
by Jazzib Akhtar
“There’s a harshness to the blue mist I’m smoking. It’s a familiar sting that lingers like unhealed scars.”
INTERROGATED
by Tamara Al-Qaisi-Coleman
“His wrists are cuffed against the bars of this prison beyond prisons
As if a man with brown skin cannot travel
without implications of terror”
SAN ISIDRO
by Tamara Al-Qaisi-Coleman
“You watched men dig holes deep into the earth
Until their straw hats disappeared into the black
Dumping bodies of sugar mill workers into these mass graves”
Abject Permanence
by Carlos Campos Jr
“Obsession is abject permanence
Desiring end but remaining there”
A Smile without a Shield
by Jazzib Akhtar
“There’s something about experiencing racism in real time, it often comes at times when you don’t expect it.
What is it about 12 weaponizing everything?”
Until
By 3 Black Women Rice Students
“until that original system of oppression upon which the police force is built is completely dismantled, it’s fuck 12”
Black Hair Ghazal
by Aris Kian
“knots, cornrows, two-strand flat twists and drips between my legs, i’m taught to keep my girlhood”
Brown Protagonist
by Aris Kian
“I am penned as dust and dawn, as sunlight
and pink horizon, mixing cement”
Circus Act
by Aris Kian
“Black girl be the best assistant / with how she falls / victim to a show / she never asked to be inspotlight
spotlight”
Code Switch
by Aris Kian
“furling, sucking air into his chest, & I thought, ‘that! that is the language I want for myself.’”
