*                    *                    *                    *                    *

 
“Oh, you’ve been to Taiwan? I am so jealous. I love Thai food.”
 

*                    *                    *                    *                    *

 
You see a performance along the beachside. There’s this teenager doing acrobatic tricks before a crowd. When he is done, he brings a hat before people, asking for money. Your partner gives you money and asks you to give it to him. You turn to your partner and ask why he won’t go give it to the boy himself. He shrugs and nods you to go with his five-dollar bill. Confused, you go and drop the money in the hat.
 
“Thank you,” the performing teenager smiles at you. You gesture a nod for him.
 
“Japanese?”                                                                                                        You stop. Blink. Shake your head.
 
“Korean?”                                                                                                           You smile and shake your head.
 
“Vietnamese?”                                                                                                   “No,” you say to be polite.
 
“Filipino?”                                                                                                           “Nope.”
 
He is absolutely lost. “What are you, then?”                                                 American?
 

*                    *                    *                    *                    *

 
You are with family for the holidays. The table is set and the food is warm. Chatter from all around the house fill the air. A sudden burst of laughter reaches your ears. It is in a language familiar for you to hear.
 
They ask you about school. They ask about your grades. Your internships. Your health. Your sleeping schedule. How much you eat a day. What connections you’ve made. Did you not know that your cousin is doing just fine in that other Ivy League in the east? They ask why you have gained weight. Do you always look this messy? Maybe consider using some skin products. You need to get more sleep. You need to graduate, soon. Are you dating anyone?
 
Oh. You are. Well.
 
Did you meet at school? At your internship? At work? Who are they? What race are they? Who is their family? What do they do in their free time? What sport do they play? What about instruments? What languages do they speak? What kind of—
 
Your partner only knows English? They know nothing of their own culture?
 
Now that you mention it, you could also do with some improvement. You need to know your language. What’s English going to do for you? Everybody speaks English. You’re no different. Do you want to work at some small company with no international communications? How far do you want to go in life? You should think about that.
 
Eventually.
 
Eventually, the conversation changes pace. There is reminiscing of your parent’s hometown. To the home of your grandparents. It captivates you. There are stories of war and survival. Of running along the banks of rivers in bare feet to catch little shrimps. Stories of walking down the street after school to the local candy shop where your mother would pick up her favorite dessert, once a week, with her allowance. You mention you’ve been to that city once, to add to the conversation as your family bite at pieces of pears and apples and dragonfruit after dinner.
 
To your mistake.
 
So what if you’ve been there? What you see is the city that’s been rebuilt and modernized in the last twenty years. You know nothing about when the city was just a town, nothing about when the country was of a different name, nothing about anything that had been, before globalization. You’ve lived in the United States all your life, you’ve been so modernized. You know nothing about what it means to grow up there, in that part of that country, and breathe in that air. Your mind has been so simplified. It knows nothing of war and the struggle for survival. You don’t even know your own language. The traditions of our life and your family will die with you.
 
Your mother calms down your father’s mother.
 
But she is right, your uncle says. He leans back with a hand on his chin and looks at the table as if in heavy philosophical contemplation. Kids these days, the ones from Asia. None of them care about their heritage.
 
The table nods all around you. You make quick eye contact to the siblings and the cousins who share in your struggle, but silently wish you had kept your mouth shut. You turn to the younger ones who do not understand and have yet to learn what lies ahead in their future, in this home.
 
They grow up so ignorant, your uncle continues, shaking his head. You’d be lucky to find any Asian kid born here that’s truly bilingual. That knows what the hell they’re supposed to prepare for the Lunar New Year. I mean, just the other day…
 
You bow your head to excuse yourself and bring your plate to the kitchen sink. You place it in softly and turn on the water to pretend you are rinsing your plate. You are rinsing your thoughts. You tell yourself you belong in your family.
 
You must belong with your family, because even when they see how Americanized you’ve become, it is still not Americanized enough for you to belong in the United States, in a land where the narrative is so black and so white, so black against white, so determined to throw everyone in every shade in between back to their motherlands, back to a land that does not wish to call itself your mother, back to the Eastern lands of this Westernized world, full of mysterious superstitions and strange mouths eating strange food and speaking strange languages, conversing with different looking people and filling their days with unordinary things, as if bound by a different part of space, a different place in time.
 
You turn off the water and rejoin the table.

Author Bio

Greg Yerumyan holds a BA in English and Political Science from UC Davis and is pursuing an MA in English at Chapman University. His poetry has appeared in Westwind, The Allegheny Review, and Z Publishing’s California’s Best Emerging Poets: An Anthology, among other publications. He works as a writing tutor at Chapman and Fullerton College.

Featured Image: “loneliness” provided by alainlm is licensed under CC BY 2.0

In 1969, an eighteen-year old black boy was stabbed at Altamont
by one or more of the Hell’s Angels, who were working concert security.

I heard they killed him
because he drew a gun, which he did,
people saw it, but they stabbed him before that.
People also say they killed him
because he was belligerent, high and swaying,
or they killed him because he pushed to the front
of the stage, wanted to see the show close
like walking outside to see snow as it falls, near enough
to be touched, and I think Meredith knew that, they say he loved
the music, and by the way, that was his name, Meredith—
and people also say they killed him
because he yanked away when he was grabbed,
because he ran. On the ground, back to grass,
he said, I wasn’t going to shoot you. I imagine
the space above him, the music other humans made,
unaware, and beside, nothing mattering but his breath.
There’s footage of this, the Angels descending,
the body losing its pulse. People say he was killed
because his skin made a noise louder than the music.

Meg Boyles is an MFA candidate and poetry fellow at Chapman University. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Hendrix College. She has been recognized by The Eudora Welty Foundation for her poetry. Her writing has appeared in several journals, most recently in B O D Y, Apricity Press, and The Cortland Review.

Featured Image: “Altamont Free Concert” provided by Twitter Trends 2019 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

the layers of my skin don’t fold and tear

when I come across a photo of yours

as my eyes remind me

the years spent are now a scattered memory

and I realize I don’t want someone new

to be a part of the same cycle

where a stranger becomes a friend

becomes a lover and a stranger again

and all I’ll hold at night

is the regret that I ever tried

that I put down my wall for once

that I shared too much

that every feeling I planted into your soul

doesn’t belong to me anymore

and is gone with your presence

with the pain I clutch in front of the TV screen

at 1 a.m. on the couch feeding my pathetic heart

my loneliness that consoles me with darkness

and laughs at me in early mornings

when I wake up to an extra pillow beside me

when I sit at a table for one

when I walk on the streets with cold hands

glued to my empty pockets

missing the fingers that would provide warmth,

still waiting for that blue light on my phone to blink

to prove I still have a reason to be this attached.

Maryam Khamesi is a Chapman University MFA student who enjoys writing lyrics, poems, and short stories.

Featured Image: “324/365 – Light” by Stuart Chalmers is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Mark Broesamle is a poet.

Featured Image: “Abracadabra” by Gerry Dincher is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Enclosed in Wesley Rothman’s poetry collection, Subwoofer, are poems about how music lives inside the body. The poems, which touch on history—both the poet’s and the world’s—and race as well, follow a wave-like rhythm, growing in volume then returning to the quiet. Rothman writes of coming to terms with his whiteness and how that affects his love of music, of certain songs. With a strong voice, Rothman questions his place in sound with language and song. He proves his musical knowledge. Each poem calls to a tune, a musician, or genre, until the reader herself can hear it, can step inside the music too.

Many of the poems in Subwoofer explore not only how we are affected by sound, but how language affects the way we view the world. In “The Sleepers,” which is one of the collection’s best poems, the poet recalls being a teenager and finding a strange power in voicing an ugly word with his friends, “lobbing the word like a football / with no referee.” The poem opens:

Forbidden combinations of syllables

Hijack the mouth   the throat   shoulders

The delegating mind   If the word is taboo

Understood or otherwise   a body says it

Most abundantly   I did not know

The anatomy of it

The poem questions, What does our privilege allow or disallow us to do? How is language like a weapon? How are words a mirror? What are we forgetting when we speak? The poet writes into this poem what he now knows: “We were grateful   unbridled   no one / Victim of the word was around.” Within the poem, there is an absence of punctuation, and instead, small spaces where periods or commas would be. At one point, Rothman points to this, connecting the blanks in the poem as blanks in a gun, and the word he used as a teenager, a real bullet, something that could wound or kill. The word was “a coded cue,” he writes. “No one knew / They were training us.”

Like “The Sleeper,” the best poems in Subwoofer write about music through a human-involved narrative lens. “Sinnerman,” a poem in which the speaker runs while listening to Nina Simone, utilizes this lens well. “Down to the dark tides / Of deep notes, she calls up / Cacophony,” Rothman writes, the sounds of the lines turning in readers’ mouths. Along with the runner, the power of Simone becomes physical, wrapping itself around a tree. Rothman is able to find words for the ache of listening to Simone, specifically the song “Sinnerman,” recognizing himself as both someone yearning to do good and someone who knows he has done wrong. It is a kind of poem to knock you out.

The following poem finishes the job. In one of the shortest, simplest poems in Subwoofer, we find one of its brightest gems. “Esther” is an elegy about a widow, who lived inside a closed room and prayed with her rosary beads. The language in this poem is careful, each word adding to Esther’s image. Rothman writes, “For years, / Each morning she muttered / From five to six. How she prepared / The day like a potter.” But even a poem that does not seem to be about music finds a way to let sound in. The poem ends like this:

The last time

I saw her she was grinning & speaking

In tongues, about her life, I think. I don’t know

If that was torment or ecstasy

Delivered by whoever might have been listening.

Overall, these poems give us the strange and wonderful gift of seeing music. Some, like “The Republic of Beat,” share this by the poem’s format, long and winding, with an asymmetrical shape and playful line breaks. Others connect sound to vision, like “Song, Remembered,” which thinks of a punch as an echo. The “Rupture of epidermis (some steps removed from skin / which belongs to a person, the wince & burn / That is theirs)…” The effect is magical almost, letting the readers experience a new connection and perspective on sound.

The way Rothman is thinking about bodies, the way he thinks about sound challenges his readers to consider their relation to the world around them. Finishing this book, I listened to the sound of my legs stretching out on the couch. I heard the noises of people outside, then went out to greet them. When I returned and opened my laptop, the sound of my typing and the turning of pages seemed to my ear, for the first time, to be music.

Meg Boyles is an MFA candidate and poetry fellow at Chapman University. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Hendrix College. She has been recognized by The Eudora Welty Foundation for her poetry. Her writing has appeared in several journals, most recently in B O D Y, Apricity Press, and The Cortland Review.

Featured Image sourced from:  https://www.culturalweekly.com/slice-summer-poetry/