Perigee

Fiction

Fiction by Casimir Henry

16 May 2016
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  MASSA CARNIS   The first time you meet an angel, you are four years old. You’re sulking with your back to the laundry room door because you’ve gotten tired of banging against it. Mother and Father are playing loud music anyway, the bass reverberating through the door. At least, you’ve decided, you can be annoying, when they unlock the door later and find you blocking the way.   You’re a very spiteful person. You vastly overestimate your own competence. The angel is tall, taller than the ceiling, even, bending over to fit in the tiny room with all six of its wings, and it’s so bright that you can barely stand to look at it. It’s covered in eyes, hundreds of them in every color and form you can think of, human eyes and bug eyes and cat eyes and spider eyes and fish eyes and all of the ones that can blink at you do. You bare your teeth at it. The angel says your name, the one that dziadzia uses and no one else, because of all the Zs. It doesn’t have a mouth. Its face is all eyes and light shifting restlessly underneath translucent skin, bulging...
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Announcements

Apogee seeks interns for 2016!

19 Apr 2016
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Join Apogee’s Team Apogee Journal is currently looking for highly motivated writers, editors, and lovers of literature to join our team as interns. Apogee’s mission is twofold: to elevate underrepresented voices by publishing and supporting traditionally marginalized writers and artists; and to bring conversations about social justice and identity politics into creative expression. We are an ambitious young journal based in New York City, with a growing community of engaged readers who support our mission. Working with Apogee brings opportunities for networking with nonprofits, literary journals, writers, and artists in New York City and beyond, and the chance to be a part of a supportive and diverse team of writers and editors who are passionate about art and activism. Responsibilities include: Proofreading blog content for Perigee and posting it to WordPress; Mailing copies of Apogee to contributors, reviewers, and subscribers; Establishing connections with bookstores in NYC to sell Apogee; Tracking inventory of print issues; Building opportunities for reviews and interviews by connecting with like-minded organizations and individuals over e-mail; Copyediting/proofreading content for print issues. Qualifications: Experience managing social media campaigns for events, programs, or organizations; Experience event planning (coordinating with venues, ordering catering, selling tickets, advertising); Familiarity with Google Docs and...
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Poetry

Poetry by Sara Lupita Olivares

18 Apr 2016
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  OPENINGS a small animal in your hands gives one expression the way trauma deepens in its ephemera a type of awe you can sometimes peel back to see yourself renegotiated & watching again        Sara Lupita Olivares is the author of the chapbook Field Things (dancing girl press). Her poems have appeared in Fourteen Hills, Horse Less Review, Columbia Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She currently teaches in Harlem and lives in Brooklyn, NY with her family.
FolioResponses to Sexual Violence in Literary Spaces

TO BECOME LOUDER, EVEN STILL: Responses to Sexual Violence in Literary Spaces

13 Apr 2016
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INTRODUCTION From my time as a crisis counselor, I learned that the term “crisis” refers to a moment when the body identifies intense danger, either in response to a new trauma or triggered by a former one, compelling it to make the most immediate choices for survival. In curating the following responses to the topic of sexual violence in literary spaces, I cannot help but return to this definition of crisis. On March 6, 2016, VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts published “Reports from the Field: Statements Against Silence,” a collection of anonymous testimonials from women naming a well-known poet as a perpetrator of sexual violence; someone who has leveraged the power and prestige of his reputation to ensure their silence. What does it mean that the responses that have followed are not one of shock and dismay but of the acknowledgment that sexual violence has historically pervaded the spaces in which we write and build community? That other writers have spoken up and forged connections between this incident and sexual transgressions of myriad other forms perpetrated by mentors, teachers, and others who wield certain power across literary spaces? I think of crisis now because these moments force us to...
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Poetry

Two Poems by Shonté Daniels

04 Apr 2016
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  Even the Moon   Coyolxauhqui’s body was found, like Sandra Bland, like Rekia Boyd, like Jessica Hernandez, guiding the sea of stars, leading the ocean back and forth, endlessly. Coyolxauhqui knew the dangers of violence and man, begged her mother to not give light to those who tug at our elbows like loose seams of string they can unravel. Women dying by the hands of men who envy a woman’s power, that is history, a long Tuesday night, the tide rising. Even the moon was born from a woman’s severed head, her angry heart still rolling.     La Malinche Goes to My High School   La Malinche transferred to my high school, and already the white kids mock her when her tongue stumbles on English words. They tell her to say teacher, say homework, say fuck. Say it all again in Nahuatl. I warn her about the boy who calls my hair straw because it won’t bend and flow like water. La Malinche counters with the kid who calls her Indian, calls her nuts and berries. Keep your dark skin to yourself, I tell her, so she squeezes herself into whiteness. She hikes her hair up into a high bun,...
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Editorial

AWP, Apogee, & Inclusivity

29 Mar 2016
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As editors and writers who value marginalized voices, we at Apogee continually re-examine the role of institutions in facilitating dialogue and ensuring representation. The yearly AWP conference is one such institution, which both fosters a dynamic and rich literary community, while at times drawing criticism for alienating marginalized writers. Our presence at this year’s AWP conference represents an attempt to negotiate this tension. Through collaboration with other organizations with track records of elevating underrepresented voices, we hope to contribute to important conversations about how intersections of race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, citizenship status, and other facets of identity shape writers’ and editors’ interactions with literary institutions. We hope to help shape these discussions with a framework of radical inclusivity. We want to encourage writers and literary professionals to use AWP as a whole as a platform for furthering this project. If you’d like to join this conversation virtually, please connect with us on Twitter, using the hashtag #inclusiveAWP. We invite you to join Apogee founders Melody Nixon and Zinzi Clemmons as well as Apogee advisory board member Rachel Eliza Griffiths at their respective panels.    From the Margins: Literary Magazines Supporting Writers of Color (Jyothi Natarajan,  Ron Kavanaugh,  Melody...
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Interviews

Thoraya El-Rayyes in conversation with debut novelist Saleem Haddad

24 Mar 2016
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Saleem Haddad’s recently published debut novel, Guapa, is the story of a twenty-something-year-old gay man named Rasa living in an unidentified Arab country, trying to carve out a life for himself in the midst of political and religious upheaval. The novel is set over the course of twenty-four hours, on the day that Rasa’s grandmother, the woman who raised him, catches him in bed with his lover, Taymour. Here, literary translator Thoraya El-Rayyes talks to Saleem about Arab sexuality under the Western gaze, chain smoking grandmothers, and writing a novel in the midst of the Arab Spring. Thoraya: A few weeks ago, I had the misfortune to come across an article in The New York Times with the headline The Sexual Misery of the Arab World by an Algerian writer, Kamel Daoud. He wanted to inform the Generic American Liberal (or whoever it is that reads the NYT) that “sex determines everything that is unspoken” in the Arab world. Everything. The article even came with the obligatory illustration of a veiled woman with her eyes cast downwards – you know, just calling out for the white reader to save her. Sometimes, it seems like you can write any old shit...
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