Nnadi Samuel
Chaos Theory - 1st Place
Chaos Theory
I go gently towards the ruin, cradling a lover.
we loot the street's nominals; trying to shop for the right pronouns,
trying to out-guess all possible ways humanity has to trim us.
as I dress this manuscript, there is someone out there opting out of the binary.
my straight mother, grieving through the boy I did not bend to be.
exit was too much luxury.
yet, she mourned the boyhood I left behind so well
I picked a different nominal that defies her blessings:
anything to keep me out of her mouth.
I shoplift a noun too aggressive for her prayers.
I want her without hurt, still
when she beats her tongue, the words arrange me by bits.
I know the efficacy of vowels.
girlhood beads like soft wreckage over my skin.
each female I've known glory in the accident.
dying hits my feminine side,
and I bow under the sharp weight of inheritance— stone-cold,
& intimate with the loss.
of what use is empathy, for a world ebbing towards chaos?
at dusk, my lover and I palms the ruffled cigarette,
and flames a riot from there.
our lips, incinerating grammar.
each female I've known could outlast an uprising.
I, a pronoun this perishable.
I shouldn't be seen fragile, but for the rules governing this body.
Its mere syntax.
how I come to terms with knowing that English has my sexuality at heart
far more than the world.
binary is aging arithmetic. I attempt subtraction, and my folk calls it misfortune
befalling them in simpler terms.
they build the ruin into a protest the poem sustains a thorough gash in.
everything else stays dead.
the smoke abates. I outlast the flame, half-baked.
kitchen shout outs to all females, effeminate kids
and those risking their lungs to tear gas.
I wanted a poem without corpse.
I go gently towards the ruin, cradling a lover.
mallet and a proem in my hands.
they seek destruction and prelude:
what way to acknowledge those we lost to this.
what sobbing tragedy.
Nnadi Samuel (he/him/his) holds a B.A in English & literature from the University of Benin. His works have been previously published/forthcoming in Suburban Review, Seventh Wave Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, Quarterly West, Fantasy Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, The Capilano Review, Contemporary Verse 2, Gutter Magazine, Agbowo, The Blue Route Magazine, The Cordite Poetry Review, Gordon Square Review, Rough Cut press, Trampset, Beestung Magazine, The Elephant Magazine, Birmingham Arts Journal & elsewhere. Winner of the Miracle Monocle Award for Ambitious Student Writers 2021(University of Louisville), Lakefly Poetry Contest 2021 (Wisconsin), the International Human Right Arts Festival Award 2021, and Canadian Open Drawer contest 2020. He got an honorable mention for the 2021 Betty L. Yu and Jin C.Yu Creative Writing Prize(College Category). He is the author of "Reopening of Wounds" & "Subject Lessons" (forthcoming). He reads for U-Right Magazine. He tweets @Samuelsamba10.
Mair Allen
While the Clouds Slowly Lower
Themselves Onto the Beach - 2nd Place
While the Clouds Slowly Lower Themselves Onto the Beach
The waves lap, indifferent.
He asks, do lesbians fake it,
even with each other?
As if we are not quite human,
less layered, or apt to light
two cigarettes after a long night, or pray
for a messenger bird to slash open the sky. I laugh,
as if women don’t practice lying
to each other before we lie
on top of each other; as if I wasn’t the first woman
I pretended to love. Sometimes I fake it
with myself. By it I mean I close my eyes
and imagine those hot clouds seeping inside of me.
By it I mean existing. I am a slow erasure
at the edge of the frame, wavering
mirage of city skyline, empty beach.
I’m afraid I’ve never not faked it.
Some women are overexposed
photographs—time lapsed. Some women are
not women at all, but scratches on the film
you look through to make sense of the image.
You wish. My words canted
at the last, desperate rays of sun.
Mair Allen is a writer living in Minneapolis, MN. A current MFA candidate at Antioch University, their work can be found in Griffel, Kithe, Oroboro, and was the 2020 first place winner of the Mikrokosmos poetry competition.
Murphy Reed
four rules for the revolution - 3rd Place
four rules for the revolution
one. Lead poisoning from industrial maquillage
is a masculine form of submission
the difference between conformism and revolution is simple;
skinny boys can wear skirts
and I can be a man who covers his drink at parties
two. boys in crop tops must show ribs,
boys who look like girls must wear pants.
there’s a point where it becomes redundant,
maybe with a sharper profile I could dye my hair uglier colors
three. I know exactly how I want to die:
at just the age where it’s still tragic
bloody so I can’t have an open casket
four I look like something that does not exist.
when I wash my hands I run water down my forearms like it will make them longer
and on some days I rip my lungs from my chest in hopes that they grow back baritone
I am the kind of man who cannot walk home alone at night
and shoves himself against rocks to make him flat and angular
I cannot cleave myself into pieces because
it only makes me prettier
Murphy Reed is a San Francisco- raised poet and musician. As both an artist and a writer, he spends the majority of his time prowling about for inspiration.