UNDERBLONG

Hello! You windless whispers, you soaring manatees of justice. It is us, your Underblong editors, Sam and Chen and a few of our fallen eyelashes, back with a completely breathtaking second issue. Come rest your gills at the ocean-side, put down your wings and lay here, for this time, lost in the words of such brilliance and wit.

This issue comes at an important time for us: we are being reminded of our sacred selves, that we deserve to spend our late evenings, early mornings, afternoon naps, doing what is best for us, best for our hearts. We are also reminded, as we are every day, that we are fighting in this world and carving our dreams into it, that we are abolishing prisons, dismantling police forces, melting each and every weapon away, in our minds, with our words, in every part of what we create. We are on the job not going with the status quo, disrupting business as usual. We are in these beaurocratic machines saying, enough, enough, enough of this process just meant to break our spirits, our ideals.

We are doing this work, though it is not easy. We have had immense trouble getting out of our beds, wiping week-old dirt off the windows, getting off our dirty sex tumblrs. We are lounging and tweeting and deeply tired of all your bullshit, all this institutional bullshit.

And yet, these poems punch our pallets, make our mouths scream for brighter futures. Mag Gabbert repeats “I need a tissue,” and we say, thank goodness, we need tissues, too. Hannah Rego explains that “I’m glad you’ve got such a shiny treehouse.  / I’m ~ so glad ~~” and our joy falls with us from every rainbow, spending an eternity climbing the clouds. Brett Hanley falls in love with Bigfoot and just haven’t we all.

These poems gurgle and toil and launch our bodies to dance, from our wiggling toes to our careening clavicles, walking around saying yes, most certainly, thank you. We are seen in our most inner selves and nuzzled, thoroughly.

And there are so many incredible poets to read here! We just had to keep accepting more and more! I mean, wouldn’t you? Who would have thought that just after one inaugural issue, these poets would perfectly understand our blongy ways, our playful seriousness? These poems explode everything we thought a poetry journal could accomplish, could be.

Friends. Sweet lovers, first-time meeters. Welcome to Underblong, issue two. Where the magic lives.

COVER ART

Mia Salamone - !!!

EDITORS’ NOTE

Sam Herschel Wein & Chen Chen - “Hello!”

POETRY

Hannah Rego - “In the future, my gender” and “I Remember the Precise Moment of Learning Certain Words, like Jostled, like Corrugated ” and “(One More Time) for the people in the back”

Logan February - “The Honest Lie”

Mag Gabbert - “Fever” and “Donut” 

Alain Ginsberg - “Springtime as Judith” and “Angel Olsen Says Every Artist Should Title A Piece unfucktheworld”

Stevie Edwards - “Harm’s Way” 

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach - “Sure as Superstition” 

Omar Sakr - “Sky Orchards (or, The Hazards of Being A Fruit)”

Alex Hall - “for roses”

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews - “Other Deluges” and “Some Mirages of the Heat-Addled”

Brett Hanley - “I Should Have Loved Bigfoot Instead”

Rajiv Mohabir - “Hybrid Unidentified Whale”

Katherine Gibbel - “Send Nudes (My tree was the selfie stick...)” and “Send Nudes (I want to talk about the nakedness...)”

Keegan Lester - “The Abridged Version of the Newscast for Breece d’j Pancake”

Matty Layne Glasgow - “All Afternoon”

Jane Wong - “Dinner and A” and “When You Died”

Emilia Phillips - “If You Wanna Make Sense Whatcha Lookin at Me For?” and “Moonpie”

CONTRIBUTOR NOTES

<3 <3 <3

&

In the future, my gender

awakes on the night cruise to Crete while the other queers sleep & doesn’t burn my ankles with cigarettes

In the future, my gender is grateful to see you at the house party but not because you found me in the literal closet where I hug a fire

extinguisher to my chest. In the future my gender enters your poorly insulated apartment

but because we’re the same warm & the same laser tag token exchanged for little aliens. We win all the tickets playing dance dance revolution We don’t stomp, but gather all the floaty glowy arrows into one fine point in our arms

In the future my gender tells you we’re all in the petri dish & you apologize once

I Remember the Precise Moment of Learning Certain Words, like Jostled, like Corrugated

In the cardboard city :: the world’s straw wrapper :: I wore the wrong shirts :: I wore the right shirts inside-out :: I wore bras again :: I put on bras for you :: the city said why not

I put on bras :: I took them off :: for you I leapt at calls :: at emoji tones through the other end of the phone :: your voice heart-eyed :: how you throated :: the smiley face in a ghost costume

It’s afternoon but a robin hops :: a worm in its mouth :: inside the city :: facades propped up :: nothing behind them :: doorways to the river :: historic storefronts for stick people

You truck :: square after square :: like the Barenstain Bear :: in the transitory cardboard box :: a Seussian tumbling :: You tried to convince me I’m straight :: your face caught :: in the neon light

of the about to be drag show :: but the cardboard edges of all things :: I can fold & unfold :: In your truck :: one tear ran down my cheek :: I thought a maggot in my hair ::

(One More Time)                       for the people in the back

I become unafraid (again) to be ugly.

I decide (again) (unagain) to post up in bad shorts, in the grit, by the Greyhound payphone, & u must pay me to step out of the way. Who will u call to from ur well-fitting clothes? Too bad,                               it’s me again,                                              (again) on the other end                                              of the string + tin can.                                              And (again) I (again)                                              have flown in to ask u                                              to stop asking w/e it is                                              that ur asking me. I’m glad you’ve got such a shiny treehouse. I’m ~ so glad ~~                                              if u fall, Mother World Order will turn ur grass stains into a Tide™ commercial. But the rest of us        have no say in the matter—we’re already back (again) on the bus,      heading (again) (again)            toward a home. Ours.

The Honest Lie

The honest lie is the tree, green & heavy with mangoes. Tap roots braided deep

into the earth, like genetic strands. How my origin never lets me go far. Every pebble

is a homeland, every door in this city opens into my mother's bedroom, with her sad eyes

& her bible. & I can never tell which has more stories. I may be the only thing

my mother doesn't know. Before she goes to sleep, she maps the space my father

left in their bed, smaller this year, but still grotesque as a tree branch. The yellow mangoes

are ripe & stubborn, won't fall to the ground. Too much narcissism to leave behind

an ugly corpse. So a fruit bat mauls the pale skin. & isn't that how it always goes. The wicked

& their taste for me, when they cannot sleep. I want to tell my mother how I am some boy's

elegant midnight snack, low-calorie, leaving his mouth wet with fructose & decadent color.

We watch the bats give birth to more bats & he is every teeth mark that does not love me.

Mother, who do you love when you dream? The curve of your every eyelash, clean 

as a delicate ax-head, how every dying man is cut down, then set free. & I am your son, but

my father's also. Before morning, the wind loots the tree, leaves it standing naked.

On the ground, mango corpses after all, lying filthy outside this same house where

Fever

Donut

I’m eating one Again even though I hate to Some days I eat nothing Others I eat fish Or I eat six Donuts at once

Later on I’ll heave Clutch the counter And the tub Hands still glistening hot Sticky and I’ll want

To empty but not Be able to my belly My throat will sink Into frosted white dreams My face sunk in the porcelain Hole sprinkled ring Flushing

My body’s a tempest And I Prospero all weakness All show come on come in Look there’s nothing No broken drowned woman All spirits all melted Into air into thin Or trying to

We’re the same I think Donuts and me Complete not complete Like the baseless fabric of this vision Of my body Ye all which we inherit shall Repeat

Of course this is a song About circularity about filling And being fulfilled by things Crimson jelly lemon cream We are such stuff

As a body that consumes Its own body a snake Living For years just by digesting Its own heart I digest my own I consume but don’t

Springtime as Judith

In spring apology blooms a painted nipple / say, no matter the shirt there will be a focal point / art history has taught me to focus an eye to denote importance / say you do not see the nipple except in the paintings of supplicant women and so / in the gallery no one expects the nipples to be roses as they blossom from the beheading of Holofernes / red for roses / for blood / for violence / a body is a sharp thing / at springtime a nipple births itself beneath a layered body / say focal point / guide the eyes / a man staring at the peony's only to see the poison / yes the man is always Holofernes / yes Judith was trans / too and oh how our nipples puff the same way

Angel Olsen Says Every Artist Should Title A Piece unfucktheworld

And in the news story a deer is seen with their mouth around a human carcass and who set up cameras around a dying body only to film the deer instead, but in the same week a new service emerges that will mail your ashes to a congress person after you die.

The joke is, you will not outlive an old politician, one who will wear your humanity in their mouth, and in this way they are all humans in deer fur. They crowd around my body and gnaw the skin away, as the world watches and conjures write up.

There is a deer with bones in their mouth—even they know that the marrow is the delicacy—and the joke is everyone is preoccupied that a politician is on all fours using a demitasse spoon to funnel the marrow down their throat and maybe that is what healthcare is supposed to be. Living long enough to be consumed.

Caring for another’s health so much that you own them. There is a news article about Chechnya again and the ways that the rounded up queer youth are condemned to death by their parents, how there is no care for their health now that their health is against their government. And is that what it means to be queer? To be human and queer is to be found in a forest, eaten by animals on all fours.

And I say I enjoy my job because they give me insurance and the seventy hour pay checks seem more compassionate in that way. The more I live the less likely I will be able to control when or why I have died, and it’s May Day and I am working again, thinking of Louis Lingg and how the night before his execution he committed suicide.

The anarchist slid a blasting cap into prison and detonated it in his mouth and I wonder what would I feel if in Chechnya and condemned to death? There are reports that families are contacted to execute their queer children but we keep deleting our family members from facebook, so who would bring

the bullets to send me into a forest for deer to consume my bones? Or maybe that is healthcare? Like Lingg I will die in agony regardless of the paths in which my life takes, and so why not go to the politicians as they stand in a circle, in the forest, and light an explosive in my mouth. Only half of Lingg’s face was detonated, and he lived for six hours more,

so I imagine I would too, before my bones become a consumable thing, and want to imagine Louis Lingg was able to cry from his remaining tear duct.

Wonder if the politicians would call my family, weeping, for they were unable to find my body living enough to murder it

Harm’s Way

Sure as Superstition

If you pee in a man’s soup, grandmother says, he’s sure to fall in love with you and never leave.

I’m never startled when sunflower heads burst

into what isn’t flame, when their seeds bring luck and yellow petals

parting, when flower heads given in odd numbers die

too soon to wear the grave, a reminder of the body, how it loves or withers

under the pressure of dry roots. Best use steaming borscht, she says, so he eats it up

red and rich and burning. And I imagine my father at her kitchen table,

a xanthous bouquet of gladioluses —white ones would be

my mother’s wedding flowers— a bowl of borscht before him,

an omen, so surely red and hot and comfortable, he couldn’t leave

Sky Orchards (or, The Hazards of Being A Fruit)

for roses

i’ll splay myself out for you in the rain

cuz the wind smells like vanilla soft serve and midnight cum tree

we were drunk, checking out the corners of the old house calling out our baby (dyke) names like conjuring the dead

i dream there are new owners ready to spray the gay away

of spectres once crammed into childhood closets, spackled shut with torn out pictures of sinéad and courtney love

we stain our teeth with summer silk in prep for renos for roses

we drink the swamp milk of a flooding city that’s banned us all summer from the nude beach like             a hate crime, god’s infinite colonic has no mercy;

our bodies a private subterranean unveiling now

            we will not             be clear-cut / we will not             crack like a sun             bleached reef

we pray a solar flare is remedy, on our knees & summon a 2nd cuming

but for now, a fly-by-night swooning of the queen cicada crying us out into the dark

i will build an altar from             HER GLOW and consent over and over to thick stems, & of bulldagger             dug into half-crescent

and where our bed sits on wheels we have declared our future like a pre-dawn premonition:

Other Deluges

There are, of course, times in the tropics when you’d think             it couldn’t come down any harder and there’s threat             in that: drowning, or cracking, or the sick wash and             thud of one followed by the other. There exists also             a solution into which this precipitates though I am             not a chemist, which is obvious. I have lost my book             of folktales containing the myth of the lanzones fruit,             the woman pinching away its poison for her child.             The ants in the kitchen have forced me to store all             of my cereal in the refrigerator. The rain continues.

And roofs become radios, the gray noise sweeping every             room with a broom made of profound differences.             The startle, then the soothe. All cleaning is simply             moving something from one place to another. The             friend with whom I share my bedroom has done             much more work with postcolonial theory than I             have and she says “I think it’s important that the Fil-             Am community recognizes the insidious effects of             decades of hard assimilationism” and I think yes             it’s a real bear explaining to my mother why I am             here. My mother says why would you want to do that.

Some Mirages of the Heat-Addled

{the beginning of Manila on a map is an ache in the shoulder of the Pacific}

{i’ve always wanted to shine but perhaps not this much, i am a wrong beacon}

{the air fills its bowls, runneth over, runneth away with its attendant utensils}

{slogging through the day i am the servant of my own legs, their carrying capacity}

{and the sky’s density and the sun and the watchtower of mixed parentage}

{itemized, i stand as in front of a mirror for too long, khaki body like a puncture}

{literal swimming in a salty tshirt, shames of cloth oh hello you’re very close}

{dripping is commerce inasmuch as one exchanges drinks with the street}

{coconuts serve as greenish metaphors, hanging as they do usually well out of reach}

{i am not an ad for whitening cream, please remove me from the billboards on the ring roads}