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Sydney Ranson Jul 2013
I feed my appetite with your voice. Your fricatives pirouette on my tongue. Each sibilant hangs on my teeth, then slides off and leaves its wax to pile up in my throat. I cough it up and collect it in a jar. It sits on the shelf in my basement and becomes familiar with the musty cloak of yesterday’s wet laundry. On the shelf, there are jars of swollen strawberries and gritty half-skulls of pears, blackberries like bundles of balloons. But in your jar, suspended in their own sugary liquid, are ripened vowels that arabesque when I give the jar a shake. I wipe the damp film off the metal lid with my thumb. Now I’m sitting in bed at 2:00 a.m., scooping your words from their glass house with a sticky index finger, speckled with seeds, semicolons, ellipses. Each dig gets me closer to your older, sweeter language–closer to what I’ve been craving. The last drops cling to the jar’s lip until I tilt it to mine, and I’m full-bellied, staring at an empty jar. In the bathroom, I slide a finger in my mouth until it reaches my throat and the words come up and fill the toilet and overflow onto the floor, puddle around my crooked toes and stain the linoleum.
Sometimes you have to try and explain love in weird ways. This is one way of doing just that.
Donall Dempsey Aug 2015
she said her name
was: "Zeta Ampersand!"
"Wot?" I wotted?

her Da had named her after
some mathematical function
Ampersand she just liked the sound

she even signed her self
ζ (& ) "...the artist formerly known as
my self!"

"59 & 509...both primes!" she smiled
"30, 031...isn't!"
"!?!" I said

I watched a snake
of sweet sweat slither
between her cleavage

"...the Buckmisterfullerene molecule is
like a soccer ball...blah de blah.."
"Uh huh..yeah...I'm...eh...listening..."

to my heart beat
wildly out of control
she an Everest...I the foothills

said she liked
Daft Punk & kissing
"Now there's a coincidence..." I whispered

Daft Punk I didn't know but
I had a 1st Class Honours
in kissing &...stuff

we made love with
AROUND THE WORLD on replay
"Call me Z..." she sighed

*** with her was like
voicing alveolar sibilant fricatives
"Gee Zee...geeee!" was all I could say

I was an quantic entity
experiencing wave/particle duality
for the first time forever
Dans la féminité brûlante et vélaire
Des talons hauts des dimanches
De mon ingénue libertine apicale
J'essaie entre les tons montants et descendants de Carmina
De circonscrire les hauts et les bas
De l'empreinte palatale
Qui sépare la plume de l'os.
Je deviens fou phonétiquement.
Mon corps exulte entre soprano et alto.
Je ne comprends pas les mots
Mais je saisis la différence de parfum
Entre labiodentales et bilabiales
Quand en mina dans le texte de Carmina
Elle m'allaite de ses voyelles crues et consonnes de feu sourdes et sonores :

"Ce qui fait circoncire le cheval
Se trouve dans le ventre du cheval"

Je convoque alors mon sélénium et mon chrome
Lentement accumulé
D'occlusives, de fricatives, de nasales,
De continues et de vibrantes.
Je convoque la phonétique nue et la phonologie brutale
Et même le va et vient de la psychogénéalogie
Sans oublier le fantasme de Jeanne Moreau et l'onirisme d'Angélique Kidjo
Mais seuls peuvent comprendre
Dans le lait caillé
Les pouliches nées le dimanche
Les jeunes poulains nés eux-mêmes le dimanche
Et je suis né caïman un jeudi
Et je m'interroge :
" Ce qui fait circoncire le caïman
Se trouve dans le ventre du caïman ?"
Jonathan Moya Jan 2021
I.
All through elementary school
blonde beautiful lip reading teachers
would try to correct my “th”s by snaking
their tongues between their teeth and
holding it there, ripe cherries
tempting me to bite into them.

This was the one thing my withdrawn self
throbbing with the first thrusts of male
enthusiasm couldn’t stop thinking about—
all those thin throats with patchouli scents
wildly, willingly, whispering interdental fricatives
like a throng of French kisses to my thirsty lips.
I thoroughly desired the apples of their necks—
to chew them, **** them, swallow them,
eat them all -all of them- all of it,
every one so meaty-sweet and
erupting with wet dreams.

They would undress themselves,
my harem besides me on the river bank,
their white stomachs dewy and shivering,
the ribbiting Croquis behind the marsh
chanting to me to instruct these chicas
in the ch’s— chas,  cha-chas, chochas
of the Puerto Rican mating call
with no use for this, that, these, thems,
just the rich vowels of legs parting
telling them each where
ella es hermosa como la luna.
(She is beautiful as the moon.)

Once Senorita Lujuria brought to class
a persimmon plucked from her garden
ripe with the musky  smell
of what the girls thought was chocha
and the boys imagined was ***
that she sliced into two equal suns.  

Knowing that it wasn’t ripe or sweet
I refused the first bite she offered.
I watched the  others spit it out,
their palms full of bitter disappointment.


II.
When I got home my mother was cutting
off the crown of a pomegranate, scooping
out the core without disturbing the berries,
scoring just through the outer rind, until
it quartered and could be gently pulled apart.
I stuck out my hand and she inverted the skin
until the berries fell warmly filling my palm
and then into a red plate

Her body was a bruise, especially her hands
I gently rolled her wheelchair
to her cluttered room
where she sang an old Spanish song
asking for the ghosts to take her away.
Her song swelled and she cried it out of her
heavy with sadness and sweet with love.

After she had passed I stumbled upon
three scrolls tied with purple velvet string
folded under a down blanket in the basement.

I unrolled three paintings done by my mother
in the Frida Kahlo style.
  
The first was a self- portrait of her holding
a quartered pomegranate in one hand,
a sliced persimmon in the other.
The second was of her staring out at the ocean,
her body bulging with the idea
of my joyous conception.
The last, was an ****** tableau
of her and Senorita Lujuria
in a forbidden embrace, signed and
dated two years before I was born.

The first two painting had the deftness
of a thousand skilled repetitions,
the taboo one sprawled with arthritic loops
but still hathe talent of muscle memory.
My eyes teared with the knowledge that
my mother never lost the things she loved,
her son, the colors, scents and textures
of all the persimmons and pomegranates
so neatly sliced and lustily devoured.
honey Feb 2023
from [redacted]. to [redacted]. to [redacted].

1.
first impressions have always failed us.
i'm sorry.
sweet and shy quickly burned into a numb saccharine.
i apologize for the unpleasantries.
for i know that i may appear gentle but i do bite
and i merely wanted to show you my teeth.

2.
you're beautiful.
i could never tell you so up close
but since we've met, i've counted every lash on your lower lid and chased strays across your cheeks behind my eyes every night before i sleep.

3.
i loved you a stomach's full.
when i got home i rewinded your every word slowly like a vhs tape
dissected and digested each sound steadily
hid every syllable under my tongue to feast upon later
and let the fricatives kiss the front of my teeth.
i let the rolling, darkness of your timbre shiver down my spine and up again.
baby boy, your accent is guttural
yet your tongue never clips.
you give it to me straight,
sweet legato flowing from your lips.
your words are movements
and our conversations symphonic
it hurts most of all that to have earned your silence

4.
would you mind if we just talked some things out?
if you forgot every time i disappointed you
and viewed me as a woman
again.
i don't ask that you forgive me,
but know that i'm sorry.

5.
you made me angry.
a hell of a lot.
teeth shattering
lung seizing
6/8 time signature heart beating
seeing and tasting copper
dog mad
******
and all for reasons i can't admit.

6.
i've loved you a night's full
past the brim of isha
to the lips of salatul duha.
i prayed istikhara in the last third of the night
when God descended to the stars
as if to proclaim my love to Him and the billions of celestial witnesses

7.
i greedily want it all
all of you
to taste every smile
true or for show
to wipe away your tears
and lay your head on my chest
to coax out the little boy inside you're afraid to share with everyone else.
to have your trust and make you feel like a man all the same.
can i be that for you?
Briscoe Sep 2019
My brother and I
Sit in our uniforms.
A cloud sniffs whiffs of the house,
Shifts and moves on.
My bare feet fricatives
Sound as though a warm afternoon.
"The buffaloes are gone.
And those who saw the buffaloes are gone."
-Carl Sandburg

— The End —