Anatolios Magazine: Issue #9 by Anatolios Magazine

~ Issue 9, May 2021 ~

Editor-in-chief Aya Whitfield (@avolitorial) Literary Editors Kavi Kshiraj (@graharaja) Tuyet An Liu (@aavillainess) Lianna Schreiber (@ragewrites)

Anatolios Magazine accepts submissions of poetry, prose, and visual art (including photography) during the open submission periods indicated on our site, anatoliosmagazine.wordpress.com.

General Submissions Moon Over The Line by Lee Jia-An………………………………………… 4, 7, 10, 13, 16, 19 passage by Carol Mikoda…….………….………….……………………….…………………5 Scarecrow by Seth Jani…….………….………….………………………….…………………6 The Bridge by Harriet Stratton……….………….………………………….…………………8 Exiled: Los Angeles by Arthur Kayzakian………………….……………….…………………9 Humus by Lau Bowcock……………….………….………………………….………………11 Resurrection Note by Seth Jani……….….…….………………………….………………12 Primavera by Zella Rivas…………….…………..………………………….………………14 Picking Beans by Corey Turner……….………….………………………….………………15 Transfigurations by Seth Jani……….…….………….…………………….…………………17 Կայծակ: Sonnet of My Grandfather the Original Lightning by Arthur Kayzakian…………18 Lazarus by Zella Rivas…….………….………….………………………….…………………20 ..oo .

Moon Over The Line (watercolor), Lee Jia-An 4

passage Carol Mikoda we have passed through winter’s underlit tunnel to the other side where geese walk over stale ice to resurrect a nest where birds’ chorales shake dawn air the driveway is mud again fall’s brown fields uncovered beneath bluest sky our disbelief shows but like ivy leaves turning toward the south window we cannot help ourselves we rejoice the dance in our minds apparent as we throw off down jackets too soon the glitter of sun on every branch and twig outlines the sleeping chaos that waits only for a few more degrees of sun’s slant and warmer light to burst into green song

Scarecrow Seth Jani I kissed a scarecrow in the last harvest before the absence of crows, before the trees revealed their wire-tapped tips to a whispering sky and our hearts were silent. I kissed every useless thing I found until the utilitarian slipknot fell like loose ends to the forest floor. When the blue moon no longer held the dream of empires and became again our soft mother I turned at last to the empty wells and found the rain transfigured, found our thirst returned to us as a mysterious spring.

Moon Over The Line (watercolor), Lee Jia-An 7

The Bridge Harriet Stratton 1 I’d been out of range for days when the text chimed from my phone in the middle of Hell’s Backbone Bridge suspended over a chasm strewn with strafed rock, an abyss like the distance between us. just so you know I’ve begun testosterone injections. more info - if you want it - later

No signal to reply, I had no voice, no choice but to carry us across — I was – and was not – surprised. 2 No longer she, but he; not my daughter, they’re my son. Lips slip on masculine pronouns, my tongue worries an abused sense of tense. The full flavor of our grandmothers’ name – unused – stales in the dark cabinet of my mouth. 3 The beard grew in soft, framed the face of a familiar stranger who came to ask if I would christen him a second time. Touched, I bless and offer our grandfather’s given name.

Exiled: Los Angeles Arthur Kayzakian We fled from green oil tanks and the scent of chemicals, from fire bluster and windows rattled by gunfire. We fled to make poems out of cemeteries and write prose out of psalms. Here, our windows are stained with promise. Our prayers are made of glass. From a confiscated garden infested with guards, we fled to an army of daffodils. We fled and we fled from Allah burning in the trees, from gutted staircases and swollen buildings sinking to the sand. We fled from the parade of sirens. Here, at night, dogs bark in the junkyard. Our hands up against the wall, we have been taught we die without one another. What do we know of love?

Moon Over The Line (watercolor), Lee Jia-An

Humus Lau Bowcock I welcome the rot with purpose the skin above my liver, the skin beneath my arm, the fleshy places that flinch over their own fragility

I could use bleach to scour out the insects But I know how much cleaner are the forest floors that grow over themselves piling leaves over carcasses, slow deflation into soil Carbon in the mouths of beetles Pollen, again In the mouths of weeds Ah, so I too have a place to spill cartilage then rake out the pile

Resurrection Note Seth Jani Just once, I want not to fear my body with its wilderness of hungers, its ritual flame of losses and grief. I want to hold it as I hold other bodies, believing in their rarity, their irregular light. These elements we love in the shape and grist of human form become something else, someone new. They cycle into nothingness and are spun back from the residual charge. The same way a forest drops a rain of quiet seeds and a new forest rises up into the smoking void.

Moon Over The Line (watercolor), Lee Jia-An

Primavera Zella Rivas I keep my weather app full of cities the world round. It’s my way of tangling the red string around my fingers. Somewhere someone dances. Somewhere someone opens a window. Here, beauty comes in small doses. A movie, a phone call, an unexpected cold snap. Everyday I peel a mandarin with nails I’ve let grow long, slip pieces into my mouth. It’s biting into brightness, biting into light. I am unfurling from somewhere deep inside myself, like a breath or a fist. It has been slow, it has been gentle, but it has also been inevitable. I am not the same person I was last January, all quickness and clenched teeth. I’ve spent a year learning to be still, which might be a sort of learning to exist. Now everything is love, love, love. And hope. That too. The trees are not in bloom, not yet, but they will be.

Picking Beans Corey Turner The clouds were a shelf holding the light above us and off of us. It was another summer’s day with my great grandmother calling me by my mother’s name by mistake as we rushed to pick butter beans and cucumbers before the storm came. She wore a towel folded and wrapped around her head under a straw hat that never slipped when she bent to lift her basket and take my 5-year-old hand to walk back past the compost pile and garage to start dinner. My hands went to work, sitting next to her, twin bowls and brown bags for the hulls filling. We rocked and shelled as she prayed and called me by my mother’s name by mistake. We watched as the storm came.

Moon Over The Line (watercolor), Lee Jia-An

Transfigurations Seth Jani A longing for yellow brings those deep ghosts out of their icy chasms and into the pulse of houses. They remember the sun, almost, a vague god they worship somnambulantly. Haunting is prayer. The calling to mind of some other self, some other sparkle. Oh let me lose a century for every moment I’ve secured through fear and small heartedness. Let me be a shade orbiting the wilderness and caught in sad legend. This morning I saw the ghosts struck by a labyrinthine ray of light. They weren’t dissolved but became another element. They haunted the sky a second time like a star or cirrus-cloud, like a streak of distant rain.

Կայծակ: Sonnet of My Grandfather the Original Lightning Arthur Kayzakian After Terrance Hayes My name in Armenian used to mean priest. At the gate a guard raised his gun, too many priests here—forced to contort his name before Tehran, my grandfather changed it to electricity, bolted it across the border. Now my name means lightning. The gloom around the electrons of my name carry the charge of an empty chair, the volt of a girl who sketches a sky dead without birds. My grandfather held loss for his name. It is a story of a man whose name became a ghost, who tucked the bones of his last name in a duffle bag and shuffled his feet to freedom. His body an asylum for his missing name, which followed him like a phantom longing for a tower of souls. All because he said lightning. His head a trumpet blowing out an anthem of sparks.

Moon Over The Line (watercolor), Lee Jia-An

Lazarus Zella Rivas If this is the world falling apart, Let it be a soft apocalypse, then. Let the green grow through the cracks. Let the water run still clear. Let the ashes fall around us, my love, let it all leave us untouched and breathing. Let the words be words of survival, of weathering, of birth and rebirth. Would that I live. Would that I thrive. Would that I become again.

Author Biographies LEE JIA-AN was born under an Aquarius full moon with her roots buried within the tropical Malaysian peninsula. Her paintings and writings, populated with forest trees and plants and secrets, are the distorted mirror reflections of her long and humid childhood spent in the tropics. Jia-An is also an MA Authorial Illustration graduate from Falmouth University, where she spent a year listening to the stories of the ocean and forests living by the coast. // Website: jiaan.tumblr.com // Instagram: @j.anlee CAROL MIKODA used to teach writing and new teachers. Some of her work has appeared in New Feathers Anthology, Grief Becomes You, Children, Churches, & Daddies, and Acta Victoriana. She lives in upstate New York where she walks in the woods, photographs clouds or treetops, and makes music as often as possible. SETH JANI lives in Seattle, WA and is the founder of Seven CirclePress (www.sevencirclepress.com). Their work has appeared in The American Poetry Journal, Chiron Review, Ghost City Review, Rust+Moth and Pretty Owl Poetry, among others. Their full-length collection, Night Fable, was published by FutureCycle Press in 2018. Visit them at www.sethjani.com. HARRIET STRATTON wrote poetry as a teen but studied, practiced and taught Fine Arts. Retired, she re-embraced her love of perfect words in perfect order and joined the Poetry Collective of Lighthouse Writers in Denver, Colorado. She’s published in local literary journals but is proudest of a protest poem in The Colorado Independent before a key election. She lives on a butte in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. ARTHUR KAYZAKIAN is a poet, editor and teacher who lives in California. His chapbook, My Burning City, was a finalist for the Locked Horn Press Chapbook Prize and Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize. His poems and translations have appeared in several publications including Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, and Prairie Schooner. LAU BOWCOCK lives in Florida where she looks for inspiration in the aging of herself and the sea. Her work has mostly remained self published. Her and her works can be found @smallepics on tumblr. ZELLA RIVAS is a bisexual Latina writer, poet, and language student. She enjoys listening to French music, being overly critical of movies, and reading. Visit keeperoftheflame.tumblr.com for a carefully-curated glimpse into her tastes in art and literature as well as for more of her writing! COREY TURNER (she/they) is a nonbinary poet and coffee professional. Originally from small town Virginia, she holds an MFA in poetry from Mills College and currently lives in San Francisco. Their work is largely about breaking out of abusive systems and learning how to be tender again. 21