Two Poems by Malik Ameer

Little Everywhere and Big Daddy’s Bad Ass Boots “We meet again which life is this some say it’s hell some say it’s bliss some neither know nor care to glimpse what is temporal and what is permanent.” We meet again which time is this much has changed but who still remembers it ages come ages vanish….. ((((((((((((((!!!0!!!!)))))))))))))))) my man drags his eyes from a past where we lived on another planet he almost explains but saw we dug it his wife laughs and asks “yeah but what’s all that got to do with sticking to our budget?!.” We meet again which world is this talking to her belly she asks, “what is your name?” she blinks and in that instant she lives a thousand lives when she opens her eyes her child reminds, “I am what I was unable to finish, I will be that web weaver reminding this world of what is always endless”   Writer’s Rites to write until every rite achieved glows into every infinity as not only something to be said but also as everything to be lived as a means to destroy the ordinary and exemplify the extraordinary defying the natural and being one with...
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Until Now Gives Way to Then: Notes on Fun Home and Fun Home the Musical

By Yardenne Greenspan It was surprisingly hard to rate Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel, on Goodreads. I’d read it last October—quite late to the game, I know—and was touched to my core. How do you define the experience of reading a book that makes you feel simultaneously elated and devastated? How do you recommend a graphic novel that contains about six squares of drawing and fifty words of text per page, and yet can take about a week to read, every sparse square containing multitudes, working on three different levels of content—image, dialogue, narration—that are both hidden and revealing, analytical and bashful, courageous and terrified? I gave it five stars. I’d only recently discovered the world of graphic novels, a late revelation that made me sorry for all that wasted time. This, after all, seems like the perfect genre for me, because if there’s anything I like more than books, it’s films, and if there’s anything I like more than films, it’s books. Fun Home is a graphic memoir, in which author Alison Bechdel recounts her childhood in a funeral home and tries to make sense of her father’s latent homosexual tendencies and of his death under unclear circumstances (interpreted...
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WJDC? Would Junot Díaz Cry?

Submissions Close to the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Navigating Feelings of Inferiority By Christopher Soto “When I finished [Slow Lightning by Eduardo C. Corral] I bawled. Wise and immense.” —Junot Díaz, The New York Times Book Review    When Carl Phillips became the first queer person of color  to judge the Yale Series of Younger Poets, I damn near shat my pants and shed a tear at the same time. The Yale Series of Younger Poets is the oldest and one of the most prestigious poetry book publishing competitions in the United States. And as a young QPOC poet I was so happy, so proud, to see my gente represented within this prestigious competition. I remember thinking “hell yea, we gunna take up space in this hetero-dominant, white-supremacist, elitist poetry series.”    Mhmm.    And then when Eduardo C. Corral became the first (queer) Latino to win the Yale Series of Younger Poets, chosen by Carl Phillips, I remember thinking “this (particular) system is about to be dismantled!”    Mhmm.    And then, when talking to a friend about Carl and Eduardo / what they do for QPOC confidence, my friend told me that I should submit my manuscript to the Yale Series...
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