***Featured Artist*** Julian Randall
There is No Word for The Fear of White Women
And sure, a bird can be freedom or the converse. A wing’s implication is that flight is a methodical form of absence. But I’m saying more than that three stains became birds splayed against her shoulder blade, migrating nowhere. Or that I touched her back never suspecting wings even where the architecture implied it. This may not even be about fear, though it was abundant in the throbbing dark of her room. I might be the bird drifting somewhere out of habit and scarcity. I’m saying that I hated her almost as much as I hated what I would give to not be lonely. I hated her liquored breath, how she talked to me, the teeth of a hammer pleading a nail loose, the way she was the best I could do.
Ode to Being Called Mulignon at a Frat Party & The Silence That Followed
Colloquially it means Nigger
functionally eggplant
my skin takes root as his tongue
lolls wheat swollen in the swamp
of bodies dressed like a lynch mob
the theme of the party is hootenanny
the theme of the party is progress
the theme of the party is 2012
and everything is swaying
from the bass’ throbbing kiss
And still I know now the agony of silence
As my ex-roommate freestyles
and I know that nobody has heard him
Mulignon
malignant
I am spreading?
No I root I know how this looks
if I go back to impulse to throttle
to choke out to pop off
I am the only evidence I have
And that is never enough
Praise now the fallow knuckle
the wilting of fists the early winter
how good I am at telling no one
How I had so much to lose
beyond my skin
like his skin ideal canvas for bruises
to mark my turf with peninsulas of loose blood
but still I own nothing
but regret
I pop my bones to the cadence of his voice
and wish the shifting of cartilage could have been a song
I mean I did not flinch I mean I did not lose my financial aid
that year I mean if they gonna kick you out anyway
might as well break something
on the way out
Aubade With Panic Attack
After Ocean Vuong
Soft light
closed throat
I am an aperture
I flicker in the yolk
of the light
fingers fail
to grasp at anything
I pry open my own jaw
fumble for my phone
between the yawning of graves panic attacks
play Alright
a song always precedes the war
Alls my life I has to
lie about where I am
morning interrogation
I audit my limbs
for what I can still call mine
by this point I know I will pass out
I say often that I vomited
because a surplus of bile
is a better sin than a boy
with no lungs
I close my eyes and see only blood
there is enough crimson
to name a nothing
my jaw is brimming with steam
I gasp until the boy in my mouth
comes loose
a new boy dies each night
his name settles in my gums
and blooms by dawn
Julian Randall is a Living Queer Black poet from Chicago. A Pushcart Prize nominee he has received fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT and the Watering Hole and was the 2015 National College Slam (CUPSI) Best Poet. Julian is the curator of Winter Tangerine Review’s Lineage of Mirrors and a poetry editor for Freezeray Magazine. He is also a cofounder of the Afrolatinx poetry collective Piel Cafe. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Nepantla, Rattle Poets Respond, Ninth Letter, Vinyl, Puerto del Sol and African Voices among others. He is a candidate for his MFA in Poetry at Ole Miss.