Self-Transcendence For Bahraini Teens by Arianna Reiche

You appear in your mother when she is in her mother’s womb. Before they’re even born, girls have all the eggs they’ll ever have, and so you come into being in the year of your grandmother’s pregnancy. You have two birthdays. You absorb ideas from previous generations; of course you do. A folksy saying that your father got from his mother who got it from her uncle might come out of your mouth without any intentional effort. I say ‘scuttlebutt’ not to sound cute: I say it because that’s what it is. Scuttlebutt. ...click to READ MORE

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No. 210 20230609

Kyle MacLachlan is so hot!

SIN (COMMA) SIN (COMMA) SIN

upstairs in my closet
         I’m watching
         a movie with sex
in my favorite lacey
        safety
        shorts I’m
drawing a pentacle
        with a fat sharpie
into the hairy grey shag

compost heap cancer thoughts,
meanwhile
a tiny white light throbs in
Christmas tree pubes, slow, then
desperate, buttressed
by peace, goodwill
towards men,
New Year’s
reek.

I. Sons of Bitterness

I fell from the wind
I landed at the boat docks

I was tangled in a fishnet
To get out I learned to chew
It broke my teeth

i feel hung by the ribs

the sunlight coming down tattered
around the muntins

making golden quadrilaterals on the tiles

Somewhere on the straight line that takes you from the Redwoods to Los Angeles
there’s a town called Chico; where I’m from and where Adrien insists on stopping
because he does not believe that the odometer is telling the truth when
it says we have sixty miles left before running out of gas.

Every morning when the sun cleaned up after the moon,
I slipped into my old white coat with frayed sleeves;
wondering why the wind whipping off the creamy skies,
never washed me away.

Meet one another
My dreams I dream
But find no others’ addresses
And take the different routes

She told me it wards off evil intentions
and bad vibes. I smiled and said ‘how much?’
I found it on a velvet tablecloth
at a Chanukah art fair. Saw myself
in its craggy blackness. Every morning I fight
with the cheap clasp I picked up on Allenby
for 5 Shekel, 25 if you count the costume chain, to adorn
a thing that does nothing.

You grew up afraid deer would tangle in your high beams. A dark road unraveled to the sound of the radio and took you to town. You’d pass salt piled high for the winter roads and think about climbing those grayscale mountains until Adam said you’d die if you did. Suffocation by salt. Take in the ocean air. A neighbor with no use of his legs built a boat in his driveway. Sail away.

Dormant lavender emits
Its scent when touched.
Before it blooms midsummer
It tells you who it is.
People do that, too,
If you stand close enough
To sense.

Father grips the shopping cart—
his dazed pupils zombie-wander

aisles of paper plates, turkey basters.
Spittle dangles off his lip’s cliff—wiggles

like parental pointer finger. Tinfoil slaps him alert.

there are five muted trumpets hanging
from the ceiling in the hallway of
my apartment two more in the stairwell
they play a frequency which causes the
microplastics within me to quiver

My homeland is where there are mountains, streams and churches. And there it is accepted that the youngest son lives with his parents. I moved out when I was twenty-three. By Armenian standards, I’m a rebel. According to Moscow’s, apparently, I’m a freeloader. However, my timid rebellion was as successful as a rebellion itself can be.