Volume 1, Issue 2 — January 17, 2020
Living Journal
the Lit Mag that Lives in a gDoc
poet. you know what to do.
About
Hi I’m Jonce and this is the Living Journal, which is exactly what it looks like: a Google Doc that I slapped a title on at almost 4 am and promptly posted to Twitter, replying to @BigProsody (who runs Paint Bucket) daring my fellow poets to collaborate on a journal that will forever remain in flux. Poet. You know what to do.
So here’s what’s gonna happen: Y’ALL (whoever you are) can post your poems/prose/artwork along with whatever you want to be called in this digital space. Also a twitter handle which I will link to. For now hard max of 2 pieces per person & I’m aiming for like 20 pages of content per issue. Just know that whatever you post here, Google will have access to it. Duh. Thats p much it. This gDoc will be our template from which all future “issues” will be birthed. Then every “issue” will be made by copying this doc & probably cleaning out the “chat” that may or may not be here.
At this point I have no plans to make this in print or monetize it in any way, unless it can be done in a non-profit publishing-as-mutual-aid kind of way. Places like marlskarx & Trans Women Writers Series have proved that this is possible. So maybe look out for that in the future. But don’t get your hopes up. I like being able to make everything a hyperlink and unlike some of y’all I hate killing trees.
Thank you for being a reader & thank you for being a collaborator. Don’t hesitate on getting involved in the revolution wherever you are. & in the immortal words of Brendan Joyce: “Copyright is for cops. Print these poems wherever.”
salsa factory for the revolution — liv grace (@lollipop_bandit)
TV Taught Me That There Are No Consequences — Nicholas Bon (@1000000horses)
Sonnet Aggressively Upset At Apollo w/ About 14 Surplus Lines — Holly Raymond (@goblin_gavotte)
them II - Sophia Pupo (@sophieontheweb)
Leper? I hardly know 'er! — Hugo A. L. M. Crick-Furman (@HugoCFOfficial)
rainy season — noah mazer (@nowamazur)
nothing but digits — Vin Tanner (@hologramvin)
A letter for a broken heart template — emmett p johnson
Fake Rock — @JumpsuitUtopia
dear students, you are subjects — @mineralscribe
Everyone Loves Jupiter — @junkyardattic
Bayonets of noon (after gil orlovitz) — @pastelcathedral
park creatures — claudia wolf (@zigguratgf)
Two poems — amanda li (@sjsksnsksnm)
sometimes you fight the sun - @ebkwriter
two sappy love poems - @yarrowyesterday
Tongue - Delilah Pierre
I am distant from Port-a-Prince the way I am distant from my grandmother.
Our tongues are oceans apart.
I do not know what her hunger feels like,
Her longing I can only imagine.
So much home has slipped from her gums,
Pieces of Haiti have fled from her like the youngest of Teeth.
I want to know more about Home,
Even if it’s just a handful of sand or the smell of sky.
If she could remember, if her mind hadn’t stolen her tongue or hidden her gums,
I would ask so many questions. We could cross the sea.
I should have asked about
The way the skin of a mango felt What the sun was like right before the rain, What it feels like to be far away from home What made her leave, What made her stay, What she misses most.
I just want to press her hunger and my own close together,
To know what her longing feels like.
I imagine it is like a tooth being pulled out
tongue rubbing up against the gap
A Rare Transgender Moment of Peace, Fifteen Minutes Before Work Starts Again - Kerry Lloyd (@razzkerry)
my parking lot today
(well it’s not mine, but
you get the idea)
is quiet
save for the horrible noise
of every single car that passes
my parking lot today. the wind picks
up. a shiver takes hold &
climbs up my arms.
it used to be cold here. i’m
waiting,
listening to the wind’s whispering voice
and it’s telling me:
“ONE TABLET BY MOUTH
TWICE A DAY”
it’s been a month and a half and i’m finally changing.
my mother
(she has a name but
on days like these, she’s
“My Mother”)
texts me a link
with no additional message
& it leads to a facebook page
of some fucking guys called
“The Catholic Company”
my mother; to thee i come,
before thee i stand,
sinful and sorrowful,
in thy mercy hear and answer me:
why do you only love me as a son?
& why does this “Catholic Company”
somehow sound
so
god damn
Protestant?
Box of Bones — Jakob Maier
I carry a box of bones
across the ocean
I spread them across
the world like seeds
I watch them grow
into concrete buildings
that house many
beautiful works of art
I stand in front
of a large painting
of me looking
into a mirror
It’s called
Box of Bones
salsa factory for the revolution — liv grace (@lollipop_bandit)
if i start going to shul again ill have to open up my tote bag and
let The State rifle through my things and make sure
that i'm JEWISH ENOUGH /// WHITE ENOUGH
to get through the door
but whatever is coming for us has no shape
no name we have heard before
and anyone who says they know what it is
and how to look for it
is a liar
something is coming
split through gears
of ANSWER marches
dont look to answer
our revolutionary moment
or whatever you want to call it
i am telling you
has no name
who is the host for this shit show
and at what point do i
start taking the dogs
medications
fuck me if ill wait for
another thousand dollar
ambulance
to take me to the doctor
museum
its after human hours
and the bodies are walking
around like wilted lilies
like needles buried in soap
in order to thank marx and engels
for their political contributions
we will be taking all their guns
forget the factory
the future lies in fire
TV Taught Me That There Are No Consequences — Nicholas Bon (@1000000horses)
We can start a band. We can devote our
-selves to this task for exactly one episode,
then we never have to mention it again
if we don't want to. Whatever. It's cool.
It's fine. I'll write you poems. I'll bare my
tender soul—pack the little pieces of paper
neatly into bottles that I'll address to you
then throw down to the street. My love for you,
my dear, will be broken glass in the tires
of the world. Inconvenience, one might say.
But don't you forget about me. Don't, don't,
don't, don't. Don't get too drunk & tell me
what you feel if what you feel is only
the sky repeating itself against the rocks.
What we've lost as we go through this life
might still be the point of this perverse routine.
One of us will be delayed at the gate. One of us
will have to decide whether or not to board
the plane. One of us might even protest. It doesn't
really matter where the flight is going. The plane
is not really a plane at all—it's nothing but a plot
device to push us towards an important decision.
Sonnet Aggressively Upset At Apollo w/ About 14 Surplus Lines — Holly Raymond (@goblin_gavotte)
I guess I default to the apocalyptic imagination
cus I sort of remain embodied as the surface
of the moon, that is, white and empty,
spare of creature, only usable
as such a thin metaphor for queerness,
and stomped on permanently by
fleshy astronaut heroes
with square fingernails
and wedding rings
O gormless Apollo this poem
an invocation of your dipshit
ass! Would it thrill you to know
the hours spent rolling
in anime browser games
in my office on the floor
with the lights off
8,000 catgirls with daggers
casting some sort of spell
called Miserable Mist?
a lip of crocus from Trader Joe’s
that rips free on the walk home
from the 40th street trolley portal
and peaces out forever
down the open pit of the tunnel
and towards some kinder doorway?
coming home again with two cardboard
pints of soup? a blister on one finger?
a curve with no foreseeable end?
Untitled — @a_dumb_broad
all documentation
at this time
is an indication of
the same: i was trying
to be good.
at 10:31 i clock in late. the new payroll system (PAYLOCITY— a portmanteau of payment and velocity?) lists my legal, my dead name. it takes a picture of my face that the company definitely DOES NOT save and DOES NOT share with third parties.i am tasked with remembering five customer’s names every day. i have to send it in an email to my department manager, along with one identifying fact about them.
at work i explain to a local ‘green new deal’ candidate that tiktok is rife with cops— actual cops, lip synching to songs including KRS’ sound of the police. so far, i’ve learned cop uniforms include a beanie that says POLICE. during this conversation with the green new deal candidate for local office i realize i don’t have any fucking use for metaphor. i’m sure it’s doing work for other writers it can’t make the body cam footage indicting evidence and it won’t make cops feel less safe.
jackson writes a poem about lots of things, and hate. shaking the hate in, making the hate work for u. i worry that the hate shakes out of me when i walk, that it flutters in and between everything i touch, directionless, divorced from the ideology that birthed it. there’s hate in the internal company email and in the way i stock the wall. i would like to turn the hate into love + solidarity with the worker but this gets recapitulated into capital, which reframes me as a good employee.
love and is attentive and watchful, but hate is a kind of watching, as well. the watching with which i watch a cop tiktok, trying to learn about what is on their cop vest. all of our love happens inside the police state, therefore we don’t know how. it mutates daily into a liberal poem about love for fellow man at the farmer’s market or something something forgive us we committed multiple war crimes and laughed all the way home.
and the police hatred is personal, capital and it’s in the superstructure. hatred and love matrices on macro and micro levels. i can no longer write about like, the insides of fruit though it makes me cry and apertures and wind and the rain in the mid-winter northern california. can’t write about distance or different images of myself or being in longing and in purgatory. it doesn’t seem okay, to write poetry like that. when sean bonney writes something he seems to be seriously doing magic with words. the words are breaking things up and clarifying things and making the state stupid and the people more cunning. i was hoping if i just wrote enough i could make my way into a space, my own little niche where it becomes a real incantation— not just like, fuck this and fuck that. fuck work let’s take off our stiff collared shirts and not go back. like when i write something happens and PAYLOCITY is scared, PAYLOCITY is shaking. the managers sit up somewhere in their homes and they’re uneasy and they can’t say why.
we’re watching bon appetite and one of the chefs says, “when everyone’s in the kitchen together, and it’s working really well, it’s like we’re dancing.” jackson disagrees: because they’re at work, being paid. or is it because when they dance, waged, and there is no one to see? i do a little dance every day, and collect my wage, and say DEATH TO AMERICA although no one hears me maybe i silently transmit it to the product thru my shaking + hateful hands.
Leper? I hardly know 'er! — Hugo A. L. M. Crick-Furman (@HugoCFOfficial)
It’s not very classic of you
to shed your skin so easily
and not in chunks, like they’d want you to do
it’s on purpose,
so you can’t be picked up after
and made into a suffering idol
like a child in a grocery cart’s seat
whose mother wheeled away from the crisps and things
and sought green in blacker pastures
hands that heal still grasp too,
and you’d rather not deal with that today,
no thank you
so you’d flee the great healer,
who’d tack your flesh back on in gobs
and pray to stay broken
it’s braver that way--
to die for your own sins
or someone else’s
somewhere else’s
The found can’t write a prayer for the lost
and there’s no priest alive that can say them.
rainy season — noah mazer (@nowamazur)
the rainy season is almost over. there are two weeks left of the rainy season. there’s a month of rain left. I believe all of these statements. At night on the streets named after the b-movies of european cities the banking-app ads blink blue in two rows in the dark like teeth, like the turquoise grills i dreamed about. in the rain the bicycle delivery guys pass one by one, black rubber ponchos draped over their bags like humps. they come dripping like huge bats and keep coming.
after he married hilda gadea, ernesto guevara lived a block down from me but i don’t know that yet. when i come to know it they’ll be pasting thin fake bricks to his building’s front. the socialist party’s headquarters are being torn down for short-term rentals. in front of my apartment a hule tree is digging down into the sidewalk, knuckling its roots under the curb. the hule is an arm the sky has grown to tear up the city— the sky knows what the developers are doing and says NOT IF I BEAT YOU TO IT, MOTHERFUCKERS. i plead with the sky in my best particulate-matter accent: please give me just one turquoise tooth cap.
nothing but digits — Vin Tanner (@hologramvin)
“two four seven three nine three six”
2473936 2473936 that was me for two years 2473926 2473936
2473936 2473936 and i still can’t forget it. 2473936 2473936
2473936 2473936 sometimes i think i have 2473936 2473936
2473936 2473936 but it was so ingrained 2473936 2473936
2473936 2473936 all i was in the system, before even my name 2473936 2473936
2473936 2473936 two for the minutes you’re allowed to cry 2473936 2473936
2473936 2473936 2473936 four is for every consecutive guy 2473936 2473936 2473936
2473936 2473936 who thinks he’s so funny with his 2473936 2473936
2473936 2473936 2473936 “are you sure you’re gay?”s 2473936 2473936 2473936
2473936 2473936 seven for the shifts you have this week 2473936 2473936
2473936 three for the times a day someone threatens your life 2473936
2473936 2473936 nine for the times you think 2473936 2473936
2473936 2473936 “god i am really about to quit” 2473936 2473936
three again to remind you anger can’t pay the rent
six doesn’t mean shit------
2473936 2473936 what did you expect? 2473936 2473936 2-2-2...
they don’t care / they don’t care / they don’t care / they don’t care / they don’t care / they don’t care / they don’t care / they don’t care / they don’t care / they don’t care / they don’t care / they don’t care / they don’t care / they don’t care / they don’t care / they don’t care / they don’t care / they don’t care / they don’t care / they don’t care / they don’t
unless you’re making them rich.
did you forget to smile?
“hi! what can i get started for you?”
Sleepy poem — @roseopossum
winter is a time for feeling simultaneously hollow and alive /
for sleeping too late and remicrowaving your coffee for the second time /
for watching your parents watch CNN in the living room and wishing the country you live in didn’t exist /
for scorning the omnipresence of autocapitalization that is ruining your prized aesthetic.
winter is when it’s still 90 degrees outside in texas / and when you spend 30 minutes walking around the husk of a former shopping mall / rummaging through items at forever 21 that you still can’t afford to buy /
even if you believed in fast fashion in the first place, which you don’t.
there’s a certain romanticism to using comic sans as a font / a certain thrill that comes from daydreams / of kissing a girl on the neck or punching a politician in the face / an uncertainty about how many of us will be alive ten years from now /
a certain feeling that there is no home to return to, but that maybe together we can create one.
A letter for a broken heart template — emmett p johnson
dear [REDACTED],
do you still think of me when you see the color [REDACTED]?
cause i will always think of you.
i will think of you and the way that you held my hand,
and the way that you told me that my [REDACTED] was [REDACTED].
do you think of [REDACTED] me? Can you still imagine my lips on yours?
i still dream of the days when you told me we’d be together forever.
of the days where we would live in [REDACTED] and we would have
[REDACTED] [REDACTED].
oh, a [REDACTED] can dream.
it hurt, you know, what happened between us. the way
that you said [REDACTED].
i still miss you though. i will always miss you [REDACTED].
i hope you will miss me too.
maybe, just maybe [REDACTED], moving on will help us both
heal.
love, forever yours,
[REDACTED]
Fake Rock — @JumpsuitUtopia
If it hadn’t been for the flood, the dollar store plastic diamond ring might have been a tad bit offensive. A mockery of a tradition from before the world unraveled. Liv was characteristically thrifty, (imagine buying fast fashion in 2052), but a child’s gaudy toy ring for her fiancée was another level. At the very least it needed a disclaimer, an asterisk to explain the joke, to say to Rachel, “I know, I know, it’s meant to be commentary, it’s post ironic, I still love you.” Or, it would have, if she hadn’t presented it to her on the roof of the Dollar Boy (™), watching that wave grind through their tiny rust belt town.
The age old romantic practice of giving diamonds to your partner-to-be was invented, like most things, to make some robber baron even more of a baron. Value ascribed to thousand year old rocks, value extracted from some poor dude in a cave. Incredibly though this one was even worse, the decayed remains of dinosaurs, the last folks to experience an unraveling of this sort, sucked out of the ground and processed, refined in factories running on that same dinosaur juice, shipped across the world in planes and tankers running on that same dinosaur juice, pressed into a parody of a cash grab in some plant in some forgotten town running on that same good good dinosaur juice.
At least the dinosaurs died by accident.
And yet somehow, as that ocean took their home from forgotten to gone entirely, the ring said far more than Liv could have ever said herself. The dry, dark, laughing-crying humor of a generation that knew they were fucked from the start. If they had been consulted, the people that is, before all the advertising, before the solutions to self actualization were synthesized in a lab, would they have wanted any of this? Be it a clear rock or a clear fake dinosaur rock, would they have taken that over breakfast? Over dancing? Over butterflies? “All this. For this,” said Rachel, holding up the ring in front of the torrent raging around them. Liv laughed a raw laugh. “Yeah, bit more than a dollar.”
dear students, you are subjects — @mineralscribe
poetry by lab light, floors dusted with
sediment ten million years old
staring and asking questions! directly into
the skull of a crocodylo morph. yes absolutely
I share the bones and let
anyone into the microscope rooms who asks
and that’s life breathing into forgotten jaws.
fellow students,
whether you research in colonizing Institutions or by the pirating of Academic Journals or!
whatever kind of student you are,
you are not objects, not a bone to be analyzed not some thing from some place
you are a moment from a time and a movement from an environment
You are something Living
proof of a resistance and justice
I illustrate ancient saurids napping
because of course they did, and I
owe them that much for teaching me their ways.
Everyone Loves Jupiter — @junkyardattic
for flinging asteroids at the earth
but when I do it
I'm "bending the laws of physics" and "an intergalactic menace."
I’ve always got my hand in one pocket
and the left hand of God in the other
Imagine having no keys to any buildings
now imagine being born comfortable in your skin
Lowkey I am always asking everyone
do we want to be the sort of people who yield to an afterlife?
I put myself in harm’s way more than once
to get somewhere else
I could be in Vegas at the table flipping chips
I could be sunning myself
I could be a creature who lives at the bottom of the ocean
If you can, imagine always belonging in water
Now imagine how salt feels, desiccating to rock
I'll tell you two truths and a lie
No mother loved me
I can spin gold into straw but not straw into gold
When they put in the chip, my skin was parted
in a ragged serration that since has healed
I told myself and maybe was correct
Harm's way then was the only road
Bayonets of noon (after gil orlovitz) — @pastelcathedral
& when I sit up sunlight gladdens
the sewergrates of somerville
& I wonder what is a poem to my landlord
whose skin reeks of fried lemonrind
who laughs in capital’s vernacular
what is a poem to my landlord
a poem to my landlord isn’t shit
but a self-inflicted rent hike
a drought drenched in gasoline
a bushfire in the chestbone’s meadow
so I tell him to fuck off to hell
and write instead to the spider knitting
behind my mattress tremors in her fur
1000 latticed eyes making mosaics out of
missing rent checks and bad credit
chewing on a fruitfly sunbeam in her hair
she tells me a poem is nothing more than
sweet pears in the dimpled sky
an hour of stolen labor-time
against the molten bayonets of noon
park creatures — claudia wolf (@zigguratgf)
Two poems — amanda li (@sjsksnsksnm)
1
There are dark tundras within me
Midnight towers crane toward moonlight
Sinister winds howl above mysterious dunes
Where we cannot yet look
Cascade over these harsh mirrors and I’ll be in the watchful room
Shower me with your glittering pieces and show me the truth
The texture to these lands are divinely mine
Feel them with your calloused hands
Let me teach you
How to knead death into living
2
I do not know what I am
My gravity and orbiting mysteries
Who knows the lonely spinning and inertia of love
Who recognizes its myriad earthly faces
Silently, I must go there
And the separate and glorious girl stars burning on the horizon
Each genius, revolving solemnly
That clumsy dance of desire and fear, blindness searing fresh and painful tears in cosmic
space
The ever present shallows of death
Anchored by the crucial loneliness of American psychosis
And tugging on each other’s unmet rage
We grow skyfallen iron gates to scaffold our haunted houses
Painful steps lead to terrifying attics
Nostalgia won’t save us
We must face each other
Eyes wide open
sometimes you fight the sun - @ebkwriter
and maybe this is too much adderall
and maybe I intended to study.
and maybe that is the story I will stick to
like the bedsheets have started to stick to my skin
this is what shame does to you,
it fucking sticks
latex and spandex and this is what my broken brain
started to do to that metaphor.
and maybe it's 4:30 in the sun is coming up and I am awake
I am awake
I am awake
I am awake and I am soaked in sweat and burning and burning
drowning in dopamime
other than that this is a poem about porn
and how I would call this a relapse
but there is nothing that strips me down more
than the language of addiction
and it's better here than a gas station bathroom anyways.
two sappy love poems - @yarrowyesterday
the bank teller gives us a pride-themed lollipop
That’s Showbiz, Baby
a hand extends from an A/C vent
she says her catchphrase again
Who are you? always looking
for an out an escape
route windows in this film, finally,
The People Under the Stairs
the landlords are the murderous
incestuous villains i don’t mean to kink
shame with their padlocks and gunshots
F I R T H E N O R M I T Y walking home stifle
even a smile
s urveil . re sort
after James Clapper
each tile of skin and limb
into Vane or Vestigial
catch it bagged remains
of private life yea if i drown myself
in him where the waterose
in her maple stretch “[k]not
wittingly” she grows sore
bee yawned the limits my
mouth makes five gallons of honey each
asphalt scrape cardoor bruise jangled
surgical rawed implant
armbar harvested
split hotdog style Hers & Hers
dripping faucets cooling
S uh M mer Ges Ture to sure blindless
windows but days and days ago the lens it seems
the public good o the shore-sighted
now left of me herising Tide
p _ _ ring over her shoulder Little String
Witch pendant he says I Like To watch her aching
sciatic nerve her back eyelash
smudged with my sweat-wetted
mascara Flicker
Flicker the names we use rushing
rushing molten images
of wind and confusion