Tag: home

Days of Red and Gold | David Estringel

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Image: Jakub Dziubak

Days of Red and Gold

Sittin’ at the kitchen table—cup of black coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other—I look past catches of blue paint and the remains of flies on screen door mesh, toward the sorghum field just beyond the ranch gate. Death’s stillness—a gravity all its own—has seeped into every corner, permeated the grout of tiled countertops and spaces in between fruit magnates on the old, white Frigidaire like the smell of rabbit in the oven or hints of storm riding out on the breeze. Life’s left the room—no pulse under these linoleum tiles—it seems, leaving it darker, a bit colder, despite morning’s come to call through the window above the sink. I take another sip—bitter on the tongue—then a drag (or two), finding myself—absent-minded–fingering the contents of a chipped, pink and white bowl of green stamp china (of which she was so proud). Four pennies, two dimes, and a nickel. Two rusty paper clips. A half-used packet of B&C headache powder. A dead fly. I remember eating from it—sweetened raspberries, red and golden, from bushes in the garden—when I was small. How I’d toss them back in grubby fistfuls, between chokes on the juice, as honied explosions—sour and sweet—took me to Heaven and back then ‘round, again, while she looked out the screen door, tossing hair from her eyes—cup of black coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other—staring at my father working in the field, beyond.

David Estringel is a Xicanx writer/poet with works published in literary publications, such as The Opiate, Azahares, Cephalorpress, Lahar, Poetry Ni, DREICH, Somos En Escrito, Ethel, The Milk House, Beir Bua Journal, and The Blue Nib. His first collection of poetry and short fiction Indelible Fingerprints was published April 2019, followed Blood Honey and Cold Comfort House in 2022. David has written five poetry chapbooks, Punctures, PeripherieS, Eating Pears on the Rooftop, as well as Golden Calves and Blue (coming 2023). His new book of micro poetry little punctures will be released in December 2022. Connect with David on Twitter @The_Booky_Man and his website www.davidaestringel.com. 

This poem is from South Broadway Press’ new anthology, 
Dwell: Poems About Home. Purchase here.

House of Blues | Susan Carman

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Image: Drew Beamer

House of Blues

She eyes the tired roadhouse
tucked between junk yards filled
with car doors and still-good hubcaps,

hickory smoke heavy on night air,
rubbing against her like a cat.
Inside, past shadowy booths

grimy with time, guitars draw her in
with a walkin’ blues line,
shuffle through 12 bars like they mean it.

Ya feelin’ blue? the drummer growls,
and the crowd spills onto the dance floor
where she joins women with tight jeans

and tight smiles, moving alone, faces painted
hopeful. When the tune slows,
she takes the hand of a sad-eyed guy—

they slide and sway, his breath
on her neck a sweet refrain
in a song of love gone wrong.

Susan Carman is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and served as poetry editor for Kansas City Voices. Her poetry appeared most recently in I-70 Review, Heartland! Poetry of Love, Resistance &  Solidarity, and the anthologies Curating Home and The Shining Years. Retired from non-profit management, she lives in Overland Park, Kansas, where she is an ESL volunteer.

This poem is from South Broadway Press’ new anthology, 
Dwell: Poems About Home. Purchase here.

Home | Caleb Ferganchick

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Home

Growing up, my home was a closet. Not the metaphorical closet where I tucked my sexuality. More precisely, my home was an 8x11in guide to Colorado fish my grandfather gave me to mold my sexuality. Which I tucked inside my closet. In which were tucked letters to my adolescent loves like Jamie, Ally, Shelly, and Jack (especially to Jack). In which, I dreamed of our skeletal home without closets. Where my mother did not tuck her guilt, and the father did not tuck his abusive addictions. Where Jack drove the Hot Wheels car he gave me after our play date. Just like Ken in Aqua’s Barbie Doll. 

There is no instruction manual with the postscript delivered by the owl to your closet proclaiming, “You’re a homosexual, Harry.” By trial and error, you come to understand the fragility of home. And the fragility of queer. And how both must often be constructed like lean-tos on the pull-out couches of allies. 

Like tornados, like earthquakes, like tsunamis, like men in I.C.E. uniforms, my nature was a disaster a home could not weather. So, home became a lonely rainbow. A refraction of tears staining pictures of cutthroat trout. 

Whether by cosmic dramatic irony or systematic oppression, when your home is queer, so often your home becomes a bar. Where fags bundle like fags. And smoke fags. And drink like, well, like fish. Most of whom are obsessed with being fish. So, I learned a new language that gave transformative space to my transient home. Sashay! Shontay! Cinched! Boots the house down! Beat for the gods!

I learned that language, too, was a home. Ours was one that could not be deciphered. Because no one cares to decipher why our family struggles with substance abuse at nearly twice the average rate. How our expansive forest of intersectional trees denoting our lineage drinks from a stigmatized watering hole. Yet, the branches stay sturdy enough for us to take our lives at five times the average rate. 

I have read enough obituaries to know how mine may sound. Taken unexpectedly. After a long struggle. As if the struggle was never an indication of the homophobe. Or the revolver. Or how unsurprisingly often they’re the same. I mean, the gay homophobe with a revolver. Taking a family with him that would have died to show him how to live. In a home called queer. 

I will be survived by a long list of family that never embraced me. With no mention of the love that allowed me to survive.

But I have found home. 

My home is not a structure I ride shotgun to in Jack’s hot wheel car. Home is not a bed on which I lay my head when the world insists I don’t belong. My home cannot be taken by a natural or xenophobic disaster. Home is not a mortality statistic. My home is not an early grave. 

My home is queer.

And I vow my home will always be open to anyone who thinks theirs is just a closet filled with unread love letters. 

Caleb Ferganchick is a rural, queer, slam poet activist and author of Poetry Heels (2018). His work has been featured and published by the South Broadway Ghost Society (2020, 2021), “Slam Ur Ex ((the podcast))” (2020), and the Colorado Mesa University Literary Review. He organizes the annual “Slamming Bricks” poetry slam competition in honor of the 1969 Stonewall Riots and serves as a board member to Western Colorado Writer’s Form. A SUP river guide, Caleb also dreams of establishing a queer commune with a river otter rescue and falconry. He lives in Grand Junction, Colorado.

This poem is from South Broadway Press’ new anthology, 
Dwell: Poems About Home. Purchase here.

Pots & Pans | Zack Kopp

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Image: Alexander London

Pots & Pans

The nt. is cold & flesh is sold   in galleries just down the road

       Long spaces of silence are speech   & the stars are knives 

      that stab @ your eyes

You stumble home past churches & brick shit-houses  

  all the pots & pans hating the buildings they live in

        All the houses are heads   & the windows are eyes

                 each house has a different haircut

       @ home, 

this is goddam 

serious business, lazy

electric red lilies asleep in the window, your eyes

playing tennis w/ stars & light 

       in a glass frying pan

               all nt.

Other times it’s a joyride,

                        exhaust pipes flashing in the sunset—zoom—

You get there. You have dreams. You love someone.

The only certainty infection w/ illusion. Some people are there. You 

try to make plans. It breaks down. You keep going. It hurts.

There are books, statues. It breaks down again. You keep going.

You’re the only one there. You’re the only thing real.

A storm of light on the plane of time. 

Zack Kopp is a freelance writer, editor, photographer, graphic artist, and literary agent currently living in Denver, Colorado. His informal history of the Beat Generation’s connections with Denver was published by The History Press in 2015. Kopp’s books are available at Amazon, and you can find his blog at the website for his indie hybrid press at www.campelasticity.com featuring interviews and articles and links to other websites. His improvised novel, Public Hair, was described by one critic as “simultaneously the best and worst book ever.” The latest chapter of Kopp’s “fantastic biography” (Cf. Billy Childish), Henry Crank’s History of Wonders is expected in 2022.


This poem is from South Broadway Press’ new anthology, 
Dwell: Poems About Home. Purchase here.

The Mother of the Oxford English Dictionary | Allison Maschhoff

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Image: Quino

The Mother of the Oxford English Dictionary

mother, n.

definition a.

The female parent of a human being; [2]

as in the one who feeds you with her chest, the one who housed you next to her most sacred innards, the one your eyes search for as you cry.

a woman in relation to a child or children to whom she has given birth; [3]

            the unparalleled truth of motherhood: only one person will ever birth you.

the unbearable truth of motherhood: no world she births you into will as be as safe as the one she made.

(also in extended use) a woman who undertakes the responsibilities of a parent toward a child [4]

every place that has ever felt like a second home to me has had the influence of a woman who houses the strength and presence of a whirlwind framing everything from the door to the walls to my heart.

[2] [3] [4] from the Oxford English Dictionary

Allison Maschhoff is a creative writing MFA student at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Her poetry has been published in The Blue Route, Green Blotter, Windfall, and Better Than Starbucks. She also writes fiction. You can find links to her work at www.allisonmaschhoff.com or follow @allison.maschhoff on Instagram.

This poem is from South Broadway Press’ new anthology, 
Dwell: Poems About Home. Purchase here.

Walking | Jozer G

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Image: Leonides Ruvalcabar

I got that special type of walk

The type of walk your

Daddy used when he first talked to your 

Mama type of walk

Yea!

I got that special type of lean

So smooth you’d think I’m cruising a low-rider

On Cinco de Mayo 

See, I’ve been waiting on my walk for a while now

Ever since I was a little chavalito

I can recall my father walking me through the process

At an early age, he would say

Walking is one of the simplest ways you could show someone

Your freedom

“See, the first step to being enslaved is to actually get caught!

Why do you think Martin Luther King Jr and Cesar Chavez

Spent all that time marching!?”

“You have to stay on your toes, Mijo

This system has interesting ways of turning a man into a slave”

If you asked my father for a ride

He would tell you to

Walk

After crossing the desert for a better life

My father sees my walk to any Open Mic

As an easy stroll through the park walking

In my father’s footsteps has taught me that

If you love something you will do anything you

Can to get to it

Your feet will get you there if you allow them to

My father walks with the determination of an immigrant

Like his children will starve if he doesn’t walk fast enough

Like there are immigration agents chasing after him

He is America’s worst nightmare

A bad ass in a foreign country and I

Always wanted to walk just like him but

I always seem to take the wrong steps

Walking in and out of Jail

Pacing in my cell like a caged Ocelot

These must have been the ways you get

Enslaved my father talked about and

It all started in the seventh grade when doctors

Explained to my parents why I walked with a slight limp

My right leg was shorter than the left

Forcing me to apply most of my body weight on the right side

I developed a walk that would quickly label me a thug 

I guess the inequalities I was exposed to finally

Drenched through my clothes and into my bones

So now I walk like I got a wounded knee

Like the structure holds me down by my back pockets

Saggy jeans are one of the side effects left over

From my oppression and

When you walk with this much weight at an

Early age your steps

Begin to sound like ticking bombs

The type of walk that’d make a motherfucker

Move out the way the type of walk

That’d make a cop want to follow you

In 2012 Trayvon Martin

and all the years after

Mike Brown

Eric Gardner

Jessie Hernandez

Sandra Bland

George Floyd was murdered for

Having the same walk as me

Trayvon was only 17

They asked me why I cried

Because he walked just like me

Because he was just like me!

Still perfecting his own walk still getting use to the

Feeling of walking in a black man’s shoes

This is the reason why boys like us

Never achieved social mobility

How can we climb the ladders of class if we can’t even

Walk through our neighborhoods without feeling like

Someone is chasing after us

But I’ll risk it all to show my son and the rest of the

Chavalitos in the world that we can walk to a

Better future instead of having to walk away from everything

That we can walk across the stage and graduate

Instead of having to walking in front of a judge

That if we all walk at the same time

The weight of our steps would force the world to flip its rotation

So stand up and walk with me

We have the world at our feet I think it’s time

That we exercise our freedom

Jozer G is a poet, musician and actor based out of Denver, Colorado! Jozer’s work has been featured on American Theater Magazine, HBO, PBS and Univision. Jozer released his debut EP on June 24th, and a new book at the end of the year! 

This poem is from South Broadway Press’ new anthology, Dwell: Poems About Home. Purchase here.

Poetry Anthology Partnering With Village Institute

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South Broadway Press is partnering with the Village Institute to raise money for their operations. To do this, we have created an anthology of poetry entitled “Dwell”, which we will be providing copies of to supporters who donate $20 or more.

You can find the link to the fundraiser here!

The Village Institute is a live/learn/work center designed with and for refugee families in Northwest Aurora. As it says on their website, they “help families build wealth, worth, and wellbeing by bringing housing, language learning, job readiness workshops, and mental health services all under one roof.”

“Dwell” is an anthology of poems about our personal and collective identity of home. It is a full-length collection of over 35 poets meditating on themes of love, immigration, grief, homelessness, and impermanence, among other topics. The anthology features the work of such poets as Caleb Ferganchick, Abigail Chabitnoy, Crisosto Apache, Aerik Francis, Wheeler Light, Said Shaye, Liza Sparks, Zack Kopp, Jessica Rigney, and many more.

Thank you to LiveWork Denver, who provided a generous grant to make this anthology a reality. In line with the mission of this book, LiveWork Denver does incredible work to create access to homeownership for folks who may otherwise feel ownership is out of reach, including facilitating opportunities in community housing, co-buying, cooperatives and live/work spaces.

Thank you for your support. All donations and shares are very appreciated!