the blueshift journal
blueshift / ˈblo͞oˌSHift / noun
the displacement of the spectrum to shorter wavelengths in the light coming from distant celestial objects moving toward the observer.
TSP
Session One Anthology
MENTOR: CHEN CHEN
hatred
Calen Firedancing
the password to grandma's computer
is hatred and her year of birth
love being too white and fair
too empty for a password
and hatred being the family crest-word
long before her birth year
this morning I escorted her to breakfast
biscuits and gravy tasting like hunger
and an old white couple staring past our skin
and me noticing like grandmother does
hatred of the way sweat glimmers
on large black foreheads
a reminder of cotton and the way blood runs
from thorns to the crushed hair on arms
of dehydration settled on the skin
white as ash
of men and marriage and men and marriage
fleeing west from Oklahoma
of hair knotted and breaking like ships in storm
carrying chained men over
of that same hair receding up the head
making the sweat shine higher and higher
and of strong women where men and marriage were not
and of beatings from strong women
me an athlete until I wasn't
me an enemy to rock n roll until I wasn't
me black unless I wasn't
and always white enough to leave the question open
me digging through family photos
finding documents and awards
family trees and family recipes
family secrets
and the greatest secret of them all
behind the missing fathers
underneath the over-buttered pie crusts
only one ingredient—
~
Calen Firedancing is a freshman at Williams College. He was born in Los Angeles and currently lives with his mom and brother in Phoenix, Arizona. He is studying Political Science and Africana Studies at Williams. Calen also is on the board of Cap and Bells, the student theater group, and is a member of Speakfree, the student spoken word organization. In his free time, Calen enjoys literature, poetry, and film.
intra-truths
Diana Khong
i. i’m bad at calling back. when i look in the mirror,
the word daughter misaligns my mouth. my phone
grows heavy with all the relatives i can’t look in the
eye and their faces coalesce into redness the way
a wound dissociates a bloodstream.
ii. i slot my collapse for the year of the dragon,
when the tide comes back to claim its lost. i steal
a pair of shoes i can’t afford and pretend i’m
glory, half-lidded and nameless american.
iii. all children are born leaking from the gut. my
body never seals so i let a man cherry-pick stray
bones out of me, fill an ash tray with shard and
burst. my tongue doped to stillness, a sloppy
intercourse between me and the self that died on
the boat.
iv. the first dead bird of the season is always blue.
we have no way to explain this except that things
are not meant to become the space they inhabit.
so when my skin is saddled and eyes begin to
bleed, my disintegration becomes synonymous
with whiteness.
~
Diana Khong is a young poet and ghost from the diaspora. She's founder and editor-in-chief of Kerosene Magazine and is staff at Noble Gas Quarterly, Ascend, and Red Queen Literary Magazine. Her work specializes in female sexuality, decolonization, and the shape of mouths. For updates, you can find her frequenting social media on Twitter and Tumblr, both @deerthrum.
Moon Activist
Keyi Liu
Three times in January, rain.
The first rain poured until windows drowned. A night rain.
The snow gave away with a gasp, kissing the earth.
The air even shone, reflecting like blackberries rolling on a plate.
The moon
a cold rock, like when we are transformed
by rain.
We are sisters of the moon and she our Sister
moves slowly through
the sky, and I will tell you
she is not lonely,
people just forget to love her, my devoted sleep companion.
She bathes me
as I drink
and gulp acidic breaths
and reinvent my faces in the midnights.
I hurt—I thought,
it is so cruel that pacific islanders cannot opt out of global warming
and I can sit
warm, smelling the rain from in here like
a foreign dish.
We should all be out there tasting the chemical makeup of
the rain.
We should taste more, more
until our lips
tongues mash together and become the texture of grain.
We should taste
metallic and never forget our element. So I tell my mother
I am now a moon activist.
Sisters like us glow and we light up thick-furred rats that go to bed
without moisturized skin.
The second time
the rain brought a fog, and since it was too foggy to see the teeth of my friends,
I saw a few slivers of grass around my calves.
A full body is life and bodies cut apart
are death.
A rainforest-cat crept near me and I
ate it.
For 18 years I crouched low over a plate
gnashing body parts,
I abstracted strands of meat with my tongue,
and I said
please cook me more blood and the Earth was defrauded
660 gallons of water
to give me a hamburger that existed for three minutes.
And I realized
No, the body breaks, itself and others, it isn’t life,
my body is a graveyard
a grotto of putrid, decayed non-recyclables.
The moon is falling apart,
its lakes dry craters, lunar water evaporated by the sun
rain flowing away from its surface.
The moon is our Sister and we will look much like her in the future
So I told my mother
I would become a Jain and she cried into her pork dumplings
and the fog swallowed her, my mother.
I stand in the third rain as it falls; nourish me steady.
I take a handful,
sifting it through my fingers, washing my hands
as prayer.
I bring my hands together. Sweat nervously.
Violently dry them,
then I'm calm when there is a perfect geometry.
I'm the girl swallowing,
knowing hyperhidrosis won't allow me to shake hands
or hold a love poem.
They crumple and drip drop
when I touch them.
Chiral molecules loving each other; my vision, mismatched myopia;
Would it kill us
to have more foresight? My mother has a heart
on the wrong side of her aching body.
I paid so they could subtract instead of giving her another one.
~
Keyi Liu is a first-year at Williams College from Calgary, Alberta. She loves bodies of water, oil painting, and 8tracks. She tries her best to get her friends into Goodreads. She has been published in Alberta Views Magazine, 2 chapbooks, and was the 2011 winner of the National Mathieu Da Costa Challenge for her poem about the liberation of Lucy and Thornton Blackburn from slavery. In high school, she co-founded a magazine for dissenting voices that now has over 60 writers in Canada and abroad. At Williams, she is starting a zine with close friends, volunteers teaching public speaking to elementary school students, and is part of a social entrepreneurship think-tank.
Genesis
Shereen Lee
Sometime yesterday God decided
the universe was half dead, which meant
time for a mid-life crisis. So He remade
Himself in man’s image,
in the image of Adam created he Him,
in awe of dry-eyed destruction
and forest fires left behind as law.
And in the beginning
God brought sunshine,
sandy like signal lights.
And He said, The whole world
is just waiting to be unmade,
and laughed; and He cursed
all the picket fences,
the grass and wind
sedated in borders.
And God fell in love
with weakness, and He said,
Let the walls sleep, and it was so:
and the stars collapsed from their
pedestals, born new into orbit
collision, satellite crashes.
And God saw the world empty and fierce,
and that it was good;
and the weeds smiled for January heat,
and paint flaked off the walls.
And God lamented the
tragedy of his deification,
and He said, Faith what faith;
Stop bothering me, I don’t exist.
And on the seventh day
god saw all of his pathetic homes,
their spirals and symmetry,
their stained-glass sins.
and he turned away from its screaming,
peaceful at last in a field with no reception
endless and free from prayer
~
Shereen Lee has retained all of her original parts and is in fair to working order. She edits poetry at Inklette Magazine.
Rough Translations
Clarity Lim
Honey-kissed dawn and 咖啡 coffee led me
Downstairs where grandmother stirred the morning like
Northern winds in her porcelain 杯 cup.
These memories leave words skipping,
fleeting,
never known.
我不知道 I don’t know. Uà bhō jai.
I heard her calling through the censers cupping
Fragile prayers. Her blossomed lotus holds me.
Bhō jai lèu dă mitgai.
Maybe she can help me hear again,
Words from my grandmothers’ voices.
I chase them like
faint stars.
My memories can’t be heard anymore
Than my tongue can speak them. My mother spells me
Vuch Chang but, the letters stare
Back in confusion. I mean nothing in the alphabet chosen,
A scribble of curves to those who speak me.
“It means clear moon. Or month of clarity.”
But it remains anything but.
I am rough, dialect of mud, grasping at
sounds they baptize
Ancient.
I try but still I
gargle mud.
~
Clarity Lim is a Senior studying Creative Writing at the University of Houston. Clarity began performing spoken word with the help of Kollaboration Houston, a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering Asian-Americans in mainstream media and entertainment. Since then, she has branch her poetry to both stage and page. In 2016, she was the recipient of the Brian Lawrence Prize in Poetry by UH's Creative Writing faculty and placed 2nd for Houston Poetry Fest's Performance Poet of the Year. When she is not in Houston for school, she is in Dallas forcing her sister's cats to love her.
My Imprint on La Raza
Jay Lucero
I've got fear by the throat and refuse to let go.
The one who has control is the woman with this strength.
Power swims in my palms and like the vibrant spinning sun,
I promise to shed light.
Have my skin be so radiant that it glistens on my loved ones.
They become browner/ darker and kind.
My imprint on their form.
That credit isn't only mine.
They come from families of latinos and blacks,
Nativos and brujas,
Who sing songs of freedom through flames.
My mouth smiles with meadows on my tongue.
Esta es la raza.
~
Jay Lucero aka Silverfemme is a senior at Hunter College. They were awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Award from Queensborough Community College. Jay is a poet and actor born and raised in NYC. Jay hosts a podcast called Room Culture Sessions. They are a magical brown oddity that embodies no and all genders.
Asian American Poem Tired of White People's Excuses
Chen Chen
But not all white people are incapable
of learning about the work of— But not one
white teacher I’ve worked with
in almost five years of almost a useful degree
has taught more than one book
by an Asian American writer.
But not one white classmate has said, But wait,
why are there no Asian Americans on the syllabus?
But not one white writer I know
can name as many Asian American writers
as species of birds, even the white writers
who’ve never written a bird poem, not even
the blackbird poem everyone rewrites.
But one night, after a reading, the white friend
of a white classmate said she loved
my work. But that night, I did not
read. But that night, I did not read for fifteen
tersely realist minutes while not wearing glasses
or a feathery gray sweater or this,
my face. But that night did not happen
just one night. But that night happens
in the day, in the cereal aisle, in the Barnes & Noble
restroom, in the rain, in the middle of waiting
for an airplane, it will probably happen
on Mars, when all the white astronauts
declare Progress has been made,
look at what we are capable of!
then call one of the two Asian American astronauts
by the wrong name.
But the white astronauts will get to
complain that their mistake was an honest one,
a small one, that every one of them
has obtained, after all, advanced degrees
in Spaceship Driving, Outer Space
Braving, Known Universe
Loving, American Literature.
~
Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and forthcoming spring 2017 from BOA Editions, Ltd. A Kundiman and Lambda Literary Fellow, Chen’s work has appeared in two chapbooks as well as in publications such as Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Best of the Net, and The Best American Poetry. Chen helps edit Iron Horse and Gabby. He also works on a new journal called Underblong, which he co-founded with the poet Sam Herschel Wein. Chen received his MFA from Syracuse University and is currently pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing at Texas Tech University. He lives in Lubbock with his partner Jeff Gilbert and their pug dog Mr. Rupert Giles. For readings, workshops, and conversations about Tuxedo Mask, please send an email: chenchenwrites [at] gmail [dot] com.
