lockjaw magazine volume 7...lockjaw magazine volume 7 - summer 2019 akua lezli hope telaphen not...

Lockjaw Magazine Volume 7 - Summer 2019

Lockjaw Magazine Volume 7Summer 2019

Editor: Christina Collins

Cover Image: “Insects” by Matilda Banks-Waston and Clementine Banks-Watson

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Copyright © Lockjaw Magazine and Individual Contributors, 2019.

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C O N T E N T S

Akua Lezli Hope Telaphen ................................................................... 4

Hadiyyah Kuma Martyr ...................................................................... 7 Compounding.............................................................. 8

Dani Putney For Judith Butler ..................................................... 10 Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf ............................. 11 Talk on My Thighs Jouissance ................................................................ 13 Sizzle....................................................................... 14 Call Me Wallaby ..................................................... 15

Kara Goughnour Severed .................................................................... 17

Jonathan Travelstead Particle Collider Physicist ......................................... 19 Suffers Head Trauma

Teresa Milbrodt Swimmy .................................................................. 22

Alicia Hoffman Matins .................................................................... 25 Postcard from Planet Earth ..................................... 26

Matilda Banks-Watson and Clementine Banks-Watson Collage ............................ 6, 9, 12, 16, 18, 21, 24, 27

3Lockjaw Magazine Volume 7 - Summer 2019

Akua Lezli Hope

Telaphen

Not indifferent to deathis not traitorousis not casual about lossdoes not make waris not small

does not kill without reasondoes not flee the nowdoes not discard the smell of the beloveddoes not dismiss the sound of the beloveddoes not abandon its childrendoes not stop learning

is not oceanis not rainis not mountainis not plainis not cloudis not skyhas no wingsdoes not flydoes not nestis not light

does not eat meatdoes not liedoes not build

4Lockjaw Magazine Volume 7 - Summer 2019 - Hope

does not fear nightis not red, yellow or bluenor purple, orange or greendoes not hoarddoes not steal

does not forget the whipnor the caressis not limited by ears to heardoes not have hands or pawsdoes not walk flatfooted

is not weakdoes not forget the sojournnor the water source

5Lockjaw Magazine Volume 7 - Summer 2019 - Hope

6Lockjaw Magazine Volume 7 - Summer 2019 - Matilda Banks-Watson and Clemetine Banks-Watson

Untitled (Flowers)

Hadiyyah Kuma

Martyr

I had a dream I carried a lamb in my arms, and I thinkabout that as I sit across from you. You’re poking a steakwith your fork in a diner as the sun rises. You say youhave to work but you’ve been fired so I know that’s a lie.That’s the business. Leave then, go the gym. Walk on thetreadmill, die of thirst. Eat the air and hope that’s enoughto fill how many gaps in the stomach? Two? Eighteen?Make sure to hydrate. Sweat is stronger than pride. Ormaybe pride is stronger. I see it burning your eyeballs red,your wrinkled lips steaming. I want them to dry off and fallinto my palm. I want to control your legs. All I have is yourfork in my fist, poking desperate holes into the sky so thedarkness filters through. It makes you want to sleep butyou make choices to counteract this. Choosing to raisethe speed with seven beeps, choosing to turn wet andorange and burn. There is nothing I can do but watch. Inthe dream I did that too. I put the lamb down in a patch ofgrass and left it alone.

7Lockjaw Magazine Volume 7 - Summer 2019 - Kuma

Hadiyyah Kuma

Compounding

i.in the magic sunlight I kiss puppies in their sweet little daydreams and I become sweet but not as sweet as the pups I become sweet enough that my sucrose tongue rolls itself into a loop and I get boys to jump through it just to see if they fit and they do I go to bed with wild satisfaction and the night is bandaged and no longer bruised / like those thoughts I beat black and purple in my brain

ii.I stare out the window of a walgreens in queens new york the way sugar dissolves into water and my cousins ask me if I am awake and I shrug because how am I supposed to know what waking is if I can see clouds shaped like people and people shaped like coat buttons in my lucid dreams / my fingers still ache from pulling at them

iii.with my mother’s curtain buckle clamped on my eager wrist I wait for my skin to break thinking that daughters are like warm Guyana tea scum a forgotten film melted upon everyone’s comfort just another tarp over a boiling hot tongue-numbing water sugar chai and milk / keeping all the hotness in and waiting to pour waiting to shudder

iv.like those thoughts I beat black and purple in my brain / my fingers still ache from pulling at them / keeping all the hotness in and waiting to pour waiting to shudder / waiting to bubble / pop everything apart into flecks of melting dirt / or maybe it is chocolate / the only difference is in the sweetness / you will only know when / if / you taste it

8Lockjaw Magazine Volume 7 - Summer 2019 - Kuma

9Lockjaw Magazine Volume 7 - Summer 2019 - Matilda Banks-Watson and Clementine Banks-Watson

Untitled (Davidson Dip)

Dani PutneyTo Judith Butler

If closet doors could speak,they’d say unravel.To festoon my body in silk isto pick a scab neurosis a stylenever let the wound settle,as in recovery pre- and post-injuryor lava meant to freeze itself igneous.The prickle of polyesterfelt by a body in fashionresists biological inertia: What’s rest anyway but a prescription for gender, can’t eczema on upper arms —hugging rolled sleeves— be enough?The only tool Goddess gave uswas fascia,language followed then currencythen it made sense.It’s all relational isn’t itthe origin of commodities: Darwin, your beaks look like skin hair prick.If closet epistemology burns cotton,I was well-charredbefore jumpsuits and rompers burst—the criminologist foundpyrotechnic gossamer—

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Dani PutneySylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf Talk on My Thighs

I ask them:Did you want to be memorializedbehind a shadowbox of leg hair?They respond with a kissacross my thigh gapand I say a thigh gap isn’t feministbut they say hush, darling,your twink body has never been so trans,its kaleidoscope is buried in your skin. Excavate it.Heather Love taught me to feel backwardbut I’m unstuck.I ask:How do I become a woman? Nothing.How do I become a man? Nothing.I say guwapathey say mabuhayI say guwapothey say mabuhay.I’m waterborne across the delta of my gender—did I transcend flesh to become a goddess?No, the queerest part of me isblack leg hair upon Cebuano skin,curves splitting a tight waist,hands with hairy knuckles and bony knucklesand the softest knuckles anyone knew.



Untitled (Memory)

Dani Putney

Jouissance

What does it meanto be penetrated,to give in to vulnerability?My body is a grave where I’m reborn as god (dess) of pleasure.I want him inside me. I want to become him. My body trembles as his hand glides along my spine.I lean into callused palm—worker’s touch—hardness alive with memoriesof power tools lumber too much dirt.I tongue sweat off his digits,think about the holes spelunked.My DNA forges a cosmos of possibility within his pores,connected by touch,master master master me pleaseexcavate and refill over and over.


Dani Putney

Sizzle

Boy,I clutch your dusty legas if to say stopbut also: never let go.Our torsosdrown in lakesof plasma—my aortatransects waterborne.A skeleton tells alllike flies lapping aftermath.Is this—hush. Bleedwithin me.


Dani Putney

Call Me Wallaby

Tuck me into your fat,nuzzle my cheek as I unravelwithin your belly, escapeeof the prickly desert.The microcosm of our macro-molecular pouch births the bilayerof sandwiched love, caughtin a furry blizzard of eyelash kisses,tongue tangos, umbilical matrimony.We’re hypodermic bygones,tangled in a hop-hop interstice,stitched to the convergent cellsof paws interlocked,caked in dirt.



Untitled (Insects)

Kara Goughnour

Severed

The way the black birds caw in Pennsylvania sounds like the splatter of spilled grape juice in a wood-paneled basement, gargled and fluid, a martyr for the dying teen trying to glide fake wine down their friends’ gullible gullets. How gargled and fluid it must’ve sounded, that out-of-towner who spun out on the sharp turn onto Beaumont, branches catching her right in the chorus of that one that everyone starts singing once you’ve been on the road long enough to get sick of the good stuff. And every branch in the yard broken, covered in sick, picked at by birds with beetle-black wings, the olfactory of the decapitation gushing stink the width of the hometown field; the hair medusa-wild, a golden brown with a slight tint of green. The kids said it was mold, and mold don’t grow that quick but it does make you fake buying drinks for your friends, each of them slapping down whatever they’ve got. It does make forgetting something of value. It was something you never look away from, a clump of you thumping out through the exhaust, you driving away without it from the cotton candy dance of red and blue behind you. It was like that carjacker in Arizona, me coming in from getting off the bus, and there’s Ma making a fly trap of her mouth with that wrinkled, tan hand flapping over it. And you keep thinking the camera will cut, so you watch, because someone’s gotta be looking out for you, but it doesn’t cut and you watch a man shoot his head clean off before the TV statics out to a mesothelioma ad and quick as that it’s you and Ma in the sun-speckled living room knowing that you’ll never see living the same again.

Lockjaw Magazine Volume 7 - Summer 2019 - Goughnour 17


Untitled (Stay Safe)

Jonathan Travelstead

Particle Collider Physicist Suffers Head Trauma

Deplaning, my legs buckle on the airstair & I crumple,each thud of my skull against aluminum treadplatejuddering sigmas & binary into a Greco-Arabic mess on the tarmac. Passengers streaming by don’t know what to make of it.Fuel vapors. My mind, shimmery as the fiery curtainpierced by a silver wire leading to a fingerprint on the other side, glyphed in gold. ________ I’m in a fever, or it’s the night of the Millennium& I’m eating mushrooms bruised purple beneath the gills,bitter as walnut. I’m getting smaller until I’m five years old, lying on my back where everything looks like Christmasbeneath a snow-dusted sugar maple tree who waits,patient, to dress me in Sunday stars. ________

Where am I? I don’t know what day this is I’m tracing braillefrom contrails of dragons. Pinching fuselagesof 757s to specks while car mechanics check the invoice at my bed’s foot. No. Hospital chart. I taste fine,I can’t say. Neither can I say We’ve found the God Particle.We’ve found the pullstring, & the grotto’s lowest levels

19Lockjaw Magazine Volume 7 - Summer 2019 - Travelstead

20Lockjaw Magazine Volume 7 - Summer 2019 - Travelstead

where the children hide. I can’t tell them I’m unstuckin time & space. I can’t tell them I’m the Maid of Orleanswhose skull burst with the tintinnabula of bells at hearing the Holy Word. ________ Lord of Revealment, I’ve heard the first pings.I’ve seen the guy wires strain. Lord God of fifty-thousand-wattradio towers slinging our lamentations into space, I weep at the tension of sunflower petals, unfurling.Engineer, whose foil birds heal me with every flyover’s shadowedwing. I weep at the compression of tear ducts, the compassion of electricity. From my backon this tarmac, I weep as spinal fluid haloes my headas a medic once told me haloes any pool of blood. At the physics of flight & the magic of human fucking bodieshurdling oceans in the time it takes reading the NY Times.At what dire sorcery departs us with each understanding science brings. At divisible gods just coming into focus.At looking up after looking down for so long,& looking back again. At what arguments retire to the leaves & grass.


Untitled (Map)(The Daydream)

22Lockjaw Magazine Volume 7 - Summer 2019 - Milbrodt

Teresa Milbrodt

Swimmy

In the morning my goldfish is dead. Again. I stick my finger in the water, brush his fin. Swimmy’s tail flutters to life. I got him at a summer carnival. He dies every week. I didn’t invest in a huge aquarium, just a little bowl, so he goes round and round all day. I think he dies to spite me, protest his cramped existence. I drag him back from paradise–the big sky aquarium with plastic plants and ceramic castles–but I can’t send Swimmy down the toilet. He’s frowning when I leave, plotting another suicide. I’ve worked at the pet store for three years, an easy commute, four blocks away so I get there on foot. I walk everywhere in case something needs help. Today I revive a swallowtail butterfly. My sister says it’s dumb–insects are supposed to die. She lectures me on cycles, migrations, the horror of swallowtail butterflies overrunning the planet in a cloud of yellow and black. Whatever. At the store, three gerbils kicked the bucket. I revive them for the third time this month–some weird virus is going around the cage—but I keep myself humble, can’t do much if the lop-eared rabbits stiffen. I was powerless when my neighbors’ six-month-old Dalmatian ran into the street last month and– I was too hopeful. Made promises. My neighbors shoot mean glances when I walk past their house. It’s dangerous to overestimate myself when people are crying. The talent only works on things smaller than a softball. Some crying kid brings a blue-tailed skink stiff as a popsicle stick. I take it into the back room, call over my shoulder I’ll get him another lizard. The skink squirms to life in my fingers, and the kid smiles, bouncing out of the store. Hope he doesn’t squeeze it too tight… My boss says I save the shop money. He makes me revive rats before we feed them to Agnes the python. It’s mean, but my boss says Agnes wants live food. Most of our rats aren’t. I can’t bring Agnes back, too big, so I keep her around this way instead. A good and humane thing, says my boss. I don’t argue loudly. He signs my paycheck. I like Agnes a lot. When I stroke the rats’ backs and feel their limbs shudder, I repeat that Agnes is following instinct.

23Lockjaw Magazine Volume 7 - Summer 2019 - Milbrodt

The afternoon slows. I bring back bees, deluded souls that bashed themselves to death against the window, died on the sill. Their wings hum hesitantly. I crack the glass an inch, tell them to fly back to their hives, be careful. News reports say some parasite has been killing honeybees. I must save them, one bee at a time. I need a greater mission, apply for jobs at zoos, but secretaries say yeah, someone will get back to me. I could save endangered small things–birds and shrews and ground squirrels—but who cares unless you can resurrect an elephant. Imagine the morning talk shows, movie scripts, endless book deals… Walking home I revive two swallowtail butterflies, believe they flutter their thanks on the breeze. Swimmy floats dead in his bedroom bowl. He can wait until morning.


Untitled (Beach)

Alicia Hoffman

Matins

If mine is a whale song. If downin the heart is a tunnel. If canaryexists, & yellow flight is possible.For cowards the mind is a minefield.If one step forward equals viableshock, one step back is yes, this toois false flag, barreling crescendo,rupture opening. If the woundis exposed. If it more quickly heals.If it is consciously covered. If it hidesin plain sight. A trick of the light.If every new morning is a settlement.A slow sift and stall. Perhaps a pausein the great experiment, our backsagainst the wall. If we stare downthe barrel. Fight or flight. If we area gathering of wind. As if bodywas always the only metaphor.If we gust. Rush. Blast. Squall. Roar.If we open so wide it is its own stillness, its own precious resource.If it is a fullness we feel, and we letthe language of it, and it saves us.

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Alicia Hoffman

Postcard from Planet Earth

Hello. How are you? Here, there are two peony leaves flipped upside-down in the garden outside my window but as far as everyone knows there is still only one moon. From where I stand, it appears green isn’t enough to describe the variety and variable nature of nature. Do you have it? One on the outside and the other one inside your head? Most days, mine is held straight and narrow, an anchor I stay safely grounded by. This seems easy, but language is in fact the most difficult way to let anyone know anything, like how much you may love them, which is why most of us wander around in our own nature and try and try. If we ever get a chance to meet I would like to learn your tricks and tips. I would share them often so slowly at first and then quick we too will be able to say all of the things we wish: fluorescent and muted and orgasmic and petty and variegated and more, and more, and the moon will become a dictionary of synonyms for luminesce and the stars will be an accordion of infinite possibility and when we see each other after the mooning and the starring we will have tongues so ferocious with sweetness for what we’ve always wanted to say it will all pour from our insides to our outsides so fluid and quick we might become a brand new nature and it will all be because of you so thanks so much take care.

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Untitled (Girl)

CONTRIBUTORS

Akua Lezli Hope

A creator and wisdom seeker who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, and metal to create poems, patterns, sculpture, stories, music, adornments and peace, Akua Lezli Hope’s collection Them Gone was published by The Word Works. Her poems “Montserrat” and “Awaiting Your Return (for Jamal Kashoggi)” were nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Hadiyyah Kuma

Hadiyyah Kuma is a writer from Toronto. Among other accomplishments, she has curated a playlist of restaurant sounds because she is soothed by indiscernible chatter. Find her on Instagram and Twitter, where she tries her best to be quirky and relatable.

Dani Putney

Dani Putney is a queer, non-binary, Asian American poet exploring the West. They’re often lost in the kaleidoscope of their gender. Most recently, their poetry appears or is forthcoming in Noble/Gas Qtrly, Prismatica Magazine, and Transcend, among others. Presently, they’re infiltrating a small conservative town in Nevada.

Kara Goughnour

Kara Goughnour is a writer living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They are the author of Mixed Tapes, forthcoming through Ghost City Press. They are the recipient of the 2018 Gerald Stern Poetry Award, and have work published or forthcoming in The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Third Point Press, and over forty others. Read their collected and exclusive works at karagoughnour.com.


Jonathan Travelstead

Jonathan Travelstead served in the Air Force National Guard for six years as a firefighter and currently works as a full-time firefighter for the city of Murphysboro, and is poetry co-editor for Cobalt Review. He received his MFA from Southern Illinois University of Carbondale. His first collection How We Bury Our Dead (Cobalt Press) was released in 2015, Conflict Tours (Cobalt Press) in 2017.

Teresa Milbrodt

Teresa Milbrodt has authored two short story collections, Bearded Women: Stories, and Work Opportunities: Stories, a novel, The Patron Saint of Unattractive People, and a flash fiction collection, Larissa Takes Flight: Stories. She believes in coffee, long walks with her MP3 player, face-to-face conversation, and writing the occasional haiku.

Alicia Hoffman

Originally from Pennsylvania, Alicia Hoffman now lives, writes, and teaches in Rochester, New York. Author of two collections, her poems can be found in a variety of journals, including The Penn Review, Radar Poetry, SOFTBLOW, Rust + Moth, Up the Staircase, and elsewhere. Find out more at www.aliciamariehoffman.com.

Matilda Banks-Watson and Clementine Banks-Watson

Matilda Banks-Watson and Clementine Banks-Watson are a collaborative duo based in Brisbane, Queensland (Australia). This is their first appearance in Lockjaw Magazine.


lockjaw magazine volume 7...lockjaw magazine volume 7 - summer 2019 akua lezli hope telaphen not...

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