Perigee

Poetry

Introducing Nepantla

04 Sep 2014
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The Inaugural Issue of Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color launched this morning. Read the Issue here. And join Apogee Journal and Our Word in celebrating tonight at Columbia University, Dodge Hall 413 from 7-9.
PoetryStand with Ferguson

I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against A Sharp White Background: An Elegy

27 Aug 2014
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I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against A Sharp White Background: An Elegy Morgan Parker After Glenn Ligon after Zora Neale Hurston   Or, I feel sharp White. Or, Colored Against. Or, I am thrown. Or, I am Opposed. Or, When White. Or, I Sharp. Or, I Color. Make it quiet. Wash me away. Forgetting. I feel most colored when I swear to god. I feel most colored when it is too late. My tongue is elegy. When I am captive. I am the color green because green is the color of power. I am a tree growing two fruits. I feel most colored when I am thrown against the sidewalk. It is the last time I feel colored. Stone is the name of the fruit. I am a man I am a man I am a woman I am a man I am a woman I am protected and served. I pay taxes and I am a child and I grow into a bright fleshy fruit. White bites: I stain the uniform. I am thrown black type- face in a headline with no name. Or, no one hears me. Or, I am thrown a language bone: unarmed....
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PoetryStand with Ferguson

Magpie

22 Aug 2014
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  Magpie JD Scott   When I was a teen I stole T- shirts much too small for my body. I klept movies, kept fountain pens deep in my pockets, glossy magazines, pills, cologne, hair gel, lotions, pristinely folded kerchiefs. O the thieving magpie perches in blue and black and white and takes what it wants without the penalties of man. I do my dim mathematics: I am sixteen and caught twice. My feathers are cleaned in this human suit through community service and fees, a nest of bureaucracy cradling. Ten thousand dollars in damage and the white boy pays his fines and continues. He goes on. A trinket does not warrant death. No one should die over the shine of pennies. Snatched packaging is not a reason for slaughter. It’s the same sentence again and again and still it’s not enough. Steal a bag of chips. Make it Skittles. Make it a Popsicle and read me the riddle on the stick: ‘How many Black bodies does it take to _______________?’ O who will be the accountant and sort through the dead that fill this silence? Who will answer? Who will be accountable? I was a bad, brutal teenager, and...
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PoetryStand with Ferguson

Notes On Loving A Black Man

20 Aug 2014
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  Notes On Loving A Black Man Taylor Steele   1. When he leaves the house, know he may not come back. If he comes back, know he may not be whole. Knowing this will not make you any readier for either. 2. When a bullet is the only thing that grounds him Enough to weather the hands of porcelain, Glass shards full with promise, lily torn from womb, Remember, a bullet has never made a happy hymn Of Black skin. And “grounded” here means dead, The way Black skin means dead, And dead means nothing to porcelain, glass, lily But the inconvenience of a fallen tree limb on the way to the grocery store. 3. It’s World War IV. The President is still our President. He livestreams himself singing nursery rhymes About democracy, so we hum it At work not noticing, so we Tuck our children in night, That they grow up unafraid to bear buds of dusk, Knowing someone will burn the tree they fell from, They are the tree. That song just be so stuck in their heads— 4. Oh, how well-oiled the rig is! Hear that whistle a-blowin’? Better get off the train tracks! It’s not that...
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Stand with Ferguson

We Stand With Ferguson

19 Aug 2014
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The acts of police brutality against Black people in recent weeks, in particular the shootings of Michael Brown and John Crawford in Missouri and Ohio and the homicide of Eric Garner in New York, bring us to outrage and indignation. The staff of Apogee stand behind the idea that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” We stand in solidarity with the people of Ferguson, Missouri, as they seek to make sense of Michael Brown’s pointless death, and raise their voices against the ongoing, systematic oppression of Black and Brown bodies in America. We stand with them as they continue to rightfully protest in Missouri, and we witness with the rest of the world, including Amnesty International, as community members, protestors, and journalists suffer a disproportionate, violent response.  We will raise our voices too in New York on August 23rd to take a stand against the repeated abuse of police power in America, the militarization of the people meant to protect us, and the victim-blaming that is a double injustice against the murdered. We are thankful for the strong activist networks in this country, which mainstream media often leads us to believe do not exist. We encourage you to follow mobilizers The Dream Defenders and the National Action Network, and activists like Anonymous, Feminista Jones and Avis...
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PoetryUncategorized

The Vulture is a Patient Bird

14 Aug 2014
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By Fathima Cader One thousand hollow bones suspended from one small island’s underbelly, watery roots seeking anchorage, ours its submerged landscape of crags, broken into language and served with wooden spoons half-toned with salt’s residue, sickled for the hoarding of pre-dawn prayer, the lowering light of day, the remains of night splattered onto paddy fields, darkness packed beneath fingernails, broken from sifting through cracks in parched soil, every fissure a new stanza, a new border, from where we come and to whom we belong, this knowledge of god as place, confluence of meanings and homecomings; meanwhile, our bearing of witness, our presence, our martyrs. We saw; we saw, ya haqq, this scrabbling through time’s departures, we saw, our shahadah.  * Voices carry poorly under the sea, granulating, wires carrying roughly to me my mother reminding me that today marks thirteen years ago that we moved here, our first mooring a dollhouse Mississauga hotel, home for the singularity of one month, its corridors loud with the noise of other people’s luggage, and our first neighbours Afghani and bustling, before we knew enough to know what manner of stories subsequent years would give us to share. This is the week of voices...
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Poetry

We're Not Ready for This: An Interview with Morgan Parker

11 Aug 2014
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Morgan Parker is a prolific NYC-based poet, activist, and museum education director. Her debut collection Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night is forthcoming from Switchback Books in 2015, and her poems “Negro Sunshine” and “Their Grandmothers Never Did the Laundry” appear in the latest issue of Apogee Journal. Morgan chatted with fellow Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn resident and Apogee Editor-at-large Melody Nixon about race, gender and politics in the poetry world today. Melody Nixon [MN]: You wrote a Facebook post about working on this interview and all the truths you’re laying down, and you said, “No one’s ready. Not even me.” What did you mean? Morgan Parker [MP]: I think we’re all very accustomed to speaking and listening to bullshit. It’s the American way. It’s easy to avoid being candid about certain topics in mixed company. Your questions were so upfront and big, which is what I appreciate about Apogee in general, but I know a lot of people don’t want to hear it. Some people would rather hear me talk about Beyoncé or The Real World or brunch than the direct realities of my struggle as a Black woman. They want a “break” from hearing about race politics from...
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Poetry

Nepantla: an Interview with Christopher Soto

04 Aug 2014
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Christopher Soto is the founder and curator of Nepantla, a new online journal featuring the writing of Queer Poets of Color. Nepantla offers not only a new creative space for poetry to thrive, but a new way to look at what a literary  community can be. The Journal will go live next month, and Apogee Journal and Columbia’s Our Word are thrilled to be collaborating on the launch reading September 4th. Cecca Ochoa (CO): How did Nepantla come about? Christopher Soto (CS): I was talking trash with Jameson Fitzpatrick about white supremacy and the New York queer literary scene. He gave me the idea to start a QPOC journal and then introduced me to William Johnson at Lambda, who helped me get the project started. The first thing Nepantla hosted was a dinner at NYU. We invited all the Queer Poets of Color that we knew in NYC and sat to discuss our community’s needs. Shout out to everyone who attended our first dinner: Rigoberto Gonzalez, Eduardo C. Corral, r. erica doyle, Pamela Sneed, Timothy Liu, Cheryl Boyce Taylor, Juliet P. Howard, Charif Shanahan, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Rickey Laurentiis, Alok Vaid-Menon, Janani Bala, Jerome Murphy, Tommy Pico, Eden...
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Fiction

Spotlight on Issue 3: Chinelo Okparanta

28 Jul 2014
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Chinelo Okparanta’s story, “Ife Adigo Market—1978” appears in Issue 3 of Apogee Journal. Her first story collection, Happiness, Like Water, was released in 2013, and was selected as one of The Guardian’s Best African Fiction of 2013. Chinelo and I corresponded about politics in writing, immigration, and the discomfort of labels. Zinzi Clemmons: Your story in Issue 3, “Ife Adigo Market—1978”, describes the changes that occur in a Nigerian town that coincide with the arrival of white people—ndi ochas. Can you describe the events that inspired this story? Chinelo Okparanta: The story was inspired by an event that happened to my mom when she was a girl. She, too, had fallen ill and had nearly gone blind when she was young. The story was also inspired by some of my time back home in Nigeria, periods in which there were questions surrounding the quality of medicines being sold there. Knock-off items exist everywhere, but the issue of counterfeit medicines was especially problematic during that time. “Ife Adigo Market” illustrates the battle between old world and new world and the confusion over the better way to go: the native doctors or the new medicines. There’s a sort of hopelessness but also...
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PoetryUncategorized

Ai Weiwei in New York City: An Interview with Kelly Tsai

22 Jul 2014
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Kelly Tsai is a spoken word poet, writer, performer and director, whose latest work AI WEI WEI: THE SEED is an exploration of Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei’s early life in New York City. The performance traces the years before Weiwei became internationally renowned for his provocative, political art. Apogee Editor-at-large Melody Nixon talked with Tsai about her upcoming show and whether art and politics can ever be separated. Melody Nixon (MN): How did you first come across Ai Weiwei’s work? Kelly Tsai (KT): Back in 2012 I was in Taipei, Taiwan, and I saw Ai Weiwei’s exhibit at the contemporary fine arts museum there. When I was walking through the exhibit I saw all these photos of street corners that I knew in Brooklyn and the East Village and I was like, “wait a second, what are these?” Then I realized that Ai Weiwei had actually spent much of his 20’s and 30’s (1981-1993) in NYC as a young artist, which I thought was really interesting. MN: That inspired you to investigate his life story? KT: Yes. With a little more research, I found out that his father was a political poet and he also was friends with many...
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