issue 6
october 15, 2021
Blue Moon
by Anna Jekel
editors’ note
Hello
from academia. Goodbye from the void. Hello, from our big, gargantuan life changes. Goodbye from Snottr, a dating app for Men who love Men who love Snot. Hello from multiple overlapping realities. Sam is in GraduateSchoolLand, in the MFA. Chen is in ApplyingForJobsLand, with beautiful bountiful prospects of a new life. We are moving our toes and lives forward. We are stumbling and scared and excited and bursting. And with great change comes great ineptability.
Yes, we are slow journal runners. Slow pizza eaters. Slow, big gay sippers. We move through the world at a pace not fit for capitalism™. Not fit for the roller derby parties we are perpetually late to. Not fit for much, but gosh, we are trying to work on this. But we also know—this is our pace, right now. We are working to listen to what our bodies ask of us. Listen to what the world is gargling at us, that this is a time of upheaval, that we must rest, rest, rest. And we listen to what the poems whisper to us, late at night, as we read, as we ~edit and struggle~ together on facetime.
And friends? Gorgeously dressed friends?? Issue 6 is whispering right back, in a supersonic scream. These poems bedazzle (and tbh brutalize) our buttoxes and spank us right into the warping time loop of the future. I mean, talk about planetary 🌸magique🌸 like we have never magique’d before!!
Firstly, a momentous and robustous round of applause for our dear Blongprize winners! Our uber- (nottheapp™) blongratulations are in order! These 4 poets’ work has tickled and stunned and moved us to frothing depths. leena aboutaleb offers us brazenful new ways to talk about love, asking “do you think it’s possible to fall in love on the moon?” Yaz Lancaster reconfigures elegy and dissent in this latest apocalypse, asserting “No new violence, every map drawn / to scale. & Lands cherished. & Blackness too.” And then our runner ups! Ally Ang examines gender and desire in very frank, very funny lines, for example, “It makes me want to tongue kiss / the toilet bowl or eat my own / placenta.” And Simone Person (de)constructs a brunch with Lena Dunham with wonderfully damning accuracy: “She dumps every buzzword into my ears.” A skyful of balloons and confetti for these poets!!! These are america’s The Lost Kingdom of Atlantis’s Next Top Blongees!
And the celebration continues with more unforgettable, un🐝lievable work. There’s Julie Chen’s “ear spoon” poem in which this delightful line appears: “stop trying to diagnose yourself, my penultimate therapist said.” There’s Bee Morris’s “Guilt Duvet” which wraps us up in a complicated warmth. There’s Kristi Estefania Stout Larios, who reminds us (in case we forgot!), “there is always an eat pray love at the goodwill.” These are just a few of the tingly treasures of issue 6. And to top it all off like a devastatingly charismatic cherry, we’ve got an interview with the brilliant author of Thrown in the Throat, Benjamin Garcia.
So please, dear sweets. Your saccharine sweaty rumps. Your overly ogling balls of eye. Please let these poems wash over you, like a godzilla-powered kickass wave. Let yourself be fully mauled by the true and the blongnificent. Rip off your lingerie through your ripe gym shorts for the bunghole of Issue 6.
les editors,
SamChen ChenWein
poems
Allison Titus - “The Department of Quiet Failures”
Uma Jagwani - “the fifth season” and “I’m not a regular mom, I’m a cool mom”
leena aboutaleb - “b<3ik: a poem of emails” and “yeah maybe I’m still in luv w u” ✨Winner of the 2021 Blongprize✨
Simone Person - “I Make the Mistake of Going to Brunch with Lena Dunham and She Spends the Whole Time Asking Why Black Women Don’t Shave Our Thighs” 🌙Runner-Up for the 2021 Blongprize🌙
stevie redwood - “ode to the house of weeping queers: #1”
Remi Seamon - “The Nipples are the Eyes of the Face”
Rita Mookerjee - “I Dream of a Goodbye Feast with My Ex”
Ally Ang - “There’s Nothing Sexy About Wanting to Die” “Anti-Ode to Girlhood” and “Dentistry” 🌙Runner-Up for the 2021 Blongprize🌙
Darwin Shire - “Genderbird”
Bee Morris - “Guilt Duvet”
Sophia Liu - “Poem in Which There are More Words for Love Because “
Yaz Lancaster - “Ratios” and “Put simply, it’s this way” ✨Winner of the 2021 Blongprize✨
Troy Osaki - “Not My Barong from the Closed-Down Asian Mart on Lake City Way but Another One”
Kristi Estefania Stout Larios - “SONNET FOR THE EMBODIMENT OF MY BIGGEST EARTHLY FEAR”
Adrie Rose - “Aubade”
Mya Matteo Alexice - “beholder”
Andy Lopez - “In the holding room for my disembodiment surgery”
Akhim Alexis - “Black Boys Summer 2015, Hanging Outside Grandmother’s House as she Hosts Church Ladies”
Emma Stewart - “Pata Poem”
Macks Cook - “Boggle”
Shannon Pulusan - “bb—”
Lisa Cantwell - “noir portrait”
Melissa Ho - “Confession”
interview
with Benjamin Garcia (by Mag Gabbert)
Anna Jekel is an artist living in New York City. From Newton, MA, she grew up in a creative household where she was frequently drawing, crafting, taking photographs, and playing dress up. She graduated magna cum laude from Northeastern University with a B.S. in Theatre Production and a minor in Global Fashion Studies. After graduation Anna held various fellowships as a costume designer, including an apprenticeship at The Juilliard School, but shifted to painting as her primary means of artistic expression during the pandemic. Her paintings are emotional landscapes of her mind, simultaneously enigmatic and open, spiritual and bodily. Anna’s work often reflects her struggle with depression and her exploration of gender, sexuality, love, and relationships.