Slack
Johanna wakes to a white-bellied blur, a frantic smudge of a bird looping the motel room. It jerks sideways, something hunting or hunted, bounces off the window and scrabbles at the mirror. Its wings pop so loudly, the sound ricocheting off the pressboard walls, that at first she thinks there are dozens of them. Hundreds. [...]
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New Guinea Fishing Song
Alone in his canoe, a New Guinean man begins to sing, hoping his song will charm fish to his net. Although the sea is dead calm, this is small comfort to him, as its glassy surface is a closed door and reveals nothing of its bounty. It shows only his reflection. The fisherman hopes to [...]
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Welcome to Issue Folk
Welcome to Anthropoid’s Second issue: Folk. In this issue: A plague of beetles, ultimate grand supreme, big sky country, the ultimate flower, #notyourtonto, goldfish obituaries, and a woman grows gills. To us, Folk is a collective of the human landscape; its clans, tribes, kinships, and legacies. But the collective is made up of individuals. We are isolated within […]
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Evergreen
When I was homeless, I ceased to believe in poverty. My headrest a shale of old bones, stone laceworks my boudoir, evergreen wine bottles and smatterings of newspaper my chamber walls. My mind was a trash of elements. A waste, perhaps, of DNA strands as long as a wingspan, but even vipers have it. Then—the [...]
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We Belong To Non-English
She pours the salt on the tomato slice. I am salt and tomato. I am spilling seeds. I am knife. I want to be everything that enters her mouth. “I’m pretty straight.” Slice. If the tomato were a finger, it would be bleeding my signature. Instead, it is black. I cannot eat it. I am [...]
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2 Poems
This Land Every night the jackals come to the prickly undergrowth beneath this porch, pulled open from Mount Carmel like a drawer with an unmatched sock. Their cry is mournful, hopeless, a wolf howl more like weeping. I lean across the rail to see them, but they are not for seeing. Only a gleaming eye, [...]
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All Indians Are Magical
they can tell time by looking at the sun they can hear the buffalo running two hundred miles away even if they live in Chicago or Minneapolis or Farmington they can heal your broken leg with a wey-ya hey-ya chant if there’s no doctor at IHS because the funding for the year ran out they [...]
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A Thing In Motion
An inch and a half from my jaw line I first felt the pain. Like someone had pressed the back of an earring into my skin over and over. When I started to feel it on the other side, that’s when the vague worry grew into a concern. It wasn’t my concern, but I knew [...]
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On Beauty
1. The frame is not big enough. The camera cannot capture desire. The light is not enough to slow Sabrina’s hands as she fingers the beads on her dress. The aperture is not wide enough to speed up the shutter or narrow the depth of field. Still, this is but a fraction of a [...]
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Goldfish Obituaries
My goldfish, two of them, died last week. These two, glittering, golden life-forms, John Fitzgerald ‘Jack’ and Kilgore Trout, are gone. I’m not particularly sad. They were only goldfish; but for some reason I’ve been trying to not think about them since they passed. I woke up that morning, shaking off a hangover headache and [...]
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The whole unprecious
It’s almost fluorescent, the purple inside. A fistful of follicles, ten thousand between palm and skin. When did I know my body well? It’s gorgeous, the almost wet, the always-shine of it. I can count folds with a makeup mirror. I can make a phallus of fingers to clench around, but that’s not the point [...]
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2 Poems
This is Not a Decode this is about our relational differences, it’s about the curls in my hair, the darkness of my thighs. So I’m split a thousand ways, binaries of opposition, reduce me to body parts, but the width of my cheekbones can be deceptive. I am going unsignified today (lbr, it’s not that [...]
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