Anne James has edited and solicited work for Ploughshares, St. Petersburg Review and Zymbol, the latter of which she founded in 2012. She also served as Treasurer of the New England Poetry Club from 2012-2016. She now works as a freelance editor, literary agent, translator and publishing consultant. She can be reached at annejjames@gmail.com.
Laura Contreras was born in Cuban in 1995 and is currently pursuing undergraduate degrees in history and Chinese at Havana University. In 2017, she conducted tours for Chinese and Costa Rican visitors to Cuba. Contreras worked as an English-Spanish translator for UNEAC at the International Poetry Festival of Havana, also in 2017. She was employed as a Chinese-Spanish translator in a Cuban Factory for a company based in Shanghai in 2018. Contreras currently works as a private Spanish tutor and teacher.
Yma Johnson is a first generation Sierra Leonean immigrant who began her writing career in 1996 as a journalist in Puerto Rico. She has written articles on topics ranging from the criminalization of the mentally ill to Japanese swordsmanship. She is a master’s candidate in creative writing at Eastern Michigan University where she taught rhetoric and composition. She also taught a poetry at a women's prison. Yma won 1st place in the 2012 Current Magazine Fiction and Poetry Contest as well as an honorable mention from 2014 Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Contest. Her work has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, the St. Petersburg Review, The Encyclopedia Project Vol. 3, an anthology of experimental literature. Her fiction was also anthologized in, “Cthulhu Lies Dreaming,” short story collection of works inspired by H.P. Lovecraft.
Peepholes
La Traversée Difficile
Untitled Verses
Peepholes
Over the brief crossing of two silhouettes the calmness of the one who shall die first. Depths in the fruit’s skin. A tacit movement at the shadow. Courage as a punishment, obligation turned into desire. I’m not afraid of hollowness. It’s a pile of air The fire you watched… Only the weight of time creates a deaf heartbeat in my brain.
La Traversée Difficile
1 Ways to view the disaster by the oblique glance, defused. The inertia of the terrified mannequin is in the air. 2 Almost on the surface the hand was tensed when it squeezed the fruit. Since Isidore every table announces dissection. 3 The inertia of the terrified mannequin is in the air It’s the sale. It’s the sacred death of the cycles. 4 The scaffolds that carry the glance go to the supporting point without protruding. The grisly game of poses, the stairwell, the misfortune above The spirit floats balustered.
I had been tight up on a litter. For me, blind was the motive. The rush never granted to me. I was ruled by a blade. Sothey bruised a dead body. I inflated my features with water, leaving them clean. Without wanting to, I had to see you. The two-tailed snake has only one head.
In the interpretive cell I attempt to describe the mold of my own brain . With my fears still everything passes by. The light clings. In the flow I feel. They would fetch the salt for me without me seeing them. Offspring of the night, I love the face of a rotten corpse.
From where do the relationships continue. If you act as always, it will incriminate you. If you pretend, know about your mistake. You were getting away blameless, marking your skin off to see it grow up. I look at my sacrifice in the frozen imagination. Its punishment thrusts it against me. The prophecy can be seen. Linger in the dark and my shadow haunts my shadow. I wouldn’t cut something down if it weren’t strictly mine.
Like you “I obtained the lover by absolute mistake.” The room is the space of my brain’s country. Onto the inside the glassy appearance freezes. Onto the inside the sinuous structure is a knife. I’m at a landscape identical to mine and I want to go back. The forgotten effort torments in your mind. This way, trapped in a void of involuntary flesh, made from the dark substance of my veins, I throw an enormous net. I open myself in the fire.
Run away from the too perfect windows, destinies, the chain, even though it looks too long. Run away from yourself. Naturally your face fits in deformed angles. Time has its own rhythm. Unmask social obstinacy the biological nature of life. Burned in the shape of a butterfly. “May the thoughts spontaneously come true.”
Give this time what that time takes. It burned for the stretch of hunger until this ringing of the indifferent fact. “Don’t you ask immensity.” What they hid away to be shown, clinging to the infinite goodbye. “A permanently sharp blade loses its edge.” Alone and unmasked I tore off your torn weapons.
Read blood on it: your swollen face with disdain. The instant when a girl dries up. To tear a piece of eyelid up to see. It stings this that I leave behind. The obstacle will let you move forward. Can you not see me without my eye? Outside the world is too cruel for you who were born in captivity.
Anne James has edited and solicited work for Ploughshares, St. Petersburg Review and Zymbol, the latter of which she founded in 2012. She also served as Treasurer of the New England Poetry Club from 2012-2016. She now works as a freelance editor, literary agent, translator and publishing consultant. She can be reached at annejjames@gmail.com.
Laura Contreras was born in Cuban in 1995 and is currently pursuing undergraduate degrees in history and Chinese at Havana University. In 2017, she conducted tours for Chinese and Costa Rican visitors to Cuba. Contreras worked as an English-Spanish translator for UNEAC at the International Poetry Festival of Havana, also in 2017. She was employed as a Chinese-Spanish translator in a Cuban Factory for a company based in Shanghai in 2018. Contreras currently works as a private Spanish tutor and teacher.
Yma Johnson is a first generation Sierra Leonean immigrant who began her writing career in 1996 as a journalist in Puerto Rico. She has written articles on topics ranging from the criminalization of the mentally ill to Japanese swordsmanship. She is a master’s candidate in creative writing at Eastern Michigan University where she taught rhetoric and composition. She also taught a poetry at a women's prison. Yma won 1st place in the 2012 Current Magazine Fiction and Poetry Contest as well as an honorable mention from 2014 Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Contest. Her work has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, the St. Petersburg Review, The Encyclopedia Project Vol. 3, an anthology of experimental literature. Her fiction was also anthologized in, “Cthulhu Lies Dreaming,” short story collection of works inspired by H.P. Lovecraft.
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