Ian Axel Anderson and Christina Cha
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Ian Axel Anderson
5 Poems
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Excavation
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the youth is charred &
it is burnt at both ends
I am sick of this city & my
feet and hands are
strung out
at the bottom of a coffee cup
the grinds of my keys are
blood-orchid blooms of pulse in
rigid piano running out of my chest
the haunch deepens
in the back
and the fire is sapped
out of the other end of the eyes
this is prison of hands
faces in the nightly waterfall
and meaning is brushing cheeks & walking away in underwater depths
in haunted walls and
did I tell you yet?
the mirrors have stopped working for me I clutch at an unrecognized face
like you, you, you
and I still believe
I will find what I need
there
buried in my jaw.
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Runaway (from past lives)
Tonight, I will ask herald capturing the gulls,
wherefore these bloodied rivulets of sand?
A nonsensical question, but I must understand death itself now & I will ask her why I must suffer these angled knives, / butchery on the silent islands of computer desks. / ask why I can see the future and why the future is always me
slowly dying. It is my body
always sinking and the chorus
always fading like
the unending orbit of objects in the Kuiper-belt of my consciousness,
crashing and hurtling an expanse they
cannot understand and
will not be able to mend.
the rot is deep in these oceans, mixed into the tar coming from my gas vents and clutching forth in the growling bubbles of heart-poison, / the feelings are close
as skeletal fishes and their parasites, close
as the whale bones of my past can be, / & I was so afraid of loving again so soon,
but we have become luminous lure-bulbs in the deepest blue & I am getting so, so lost here in Paris without you, sifting through tongues and finding myself, consumed and buried, / while stretching for you through these electric wire cables embedded in my macbook /
leading out through the walls of my apartment / and running
back across the silent
ocean floor.
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Death,
what is it to stand up to your ancestors? I can see that war lives inside my ridges / the cusp of my chest is violent and ravenous like the roots of trees consuming the dead, entwining with the charred peat bog at the bottom of the swamp / & I know little, know about the bones and the feeling of brain rot, / while they know the feeling of the cold and the dark / know the thousand years of rain soaking into brine and cave lights/ black into black / & he know stone faces are crawling into dreams and pulling whales from the sea in their bare hands / fins and bent tails over their backs and fish choking in the sand / but these are also things that I have seen in my own dreams / I have seen the figures waxing into the night / fading into the folds of sunrise and living on the palms of the dusk / I see children in the shallows / kicking at waves / sand eating away at their toes, the nails encrusted in carnivorous grains / grains like the ones of shortened carbon / carbon like the peat chars in the swamp’s bottom of my mind / and I am growing roots / I am found clutching to their bones / and suckling at the marrow of life / & afraid / that it will desert me today.
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Hysteria
she is riding up my walls and screeching
the raven hair smokes under the low, low cards
turning over in the grass and
sleeping in the calm
It is soft like the shards were,
leaping through the wood
and splitting open the cracks as the wine is spills into
subtle touches at the door
corners slow into the evening like California,
ice into the mind and veins, ice
from the Coca Cola rum fizzing out
across the edges, splashing the syrup into hands
and writhing in the bad stomachs and
coffee cup full and waiting for the morning–
I am gathering dust in the pressed suit, gathering electron shit from the screens and
rolling back into sheets
at the end of each day, I fall into sadness and self-disgust I was falling like we all were, falling away from
offices that never had anything to do with anything,
haunting the streets to find home,
to find whoever said we could be one
or more
and many all at once
and so I lost
all of you in Brooklyn,
ran from corner to corner and saw people who were sucked into the pavement
and houses, eaten with their
ambition of anything beyond this,
distracted and suffering,
finding the steady deadness of being the same,
being nothing more
than happy, and
incapable of being alone.
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Visions
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we are all just guessing the future and moving the stones, sifting through the augur’s entrails / But I know. I am blind and writhing in the moments as we love, as we want, as they run
through our fingers like water, palms full of gallons and moving towards the floor with the spice and the wetness, / the city alive and crawling forward, the earth spinning and the universe pushing outwards into the sky / it is eatery open past three and it is sandwich full of meats, / chips and the forgotten cans of soda along the tables, I sit with friends and speak of the past, choke on drinks meant to be spilled for the birdt / the flash of my rings consumes my fingers, the oily pastel of the deli lights / & I read the receipts / I learned that I killed the hair in bleach to calm and trick, fool the aging and maybe affirm queerness, become the next person the self needed, become me and become new / I shed the skin of this city, pushed it back & peeled them all away / & I learned that I am terrified of these friends / or of their judgement / I am sinking further into the mind / & I will flee at the end of summer / to walk across the ocean & dream
for a time / on my own, in another city with
another inescapable history
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Ian Axel Anderson is a poet living in LA. He has worked with The Poetry Society of NY (in NYC, Paris, and LA) for the past decade and is a featured performer at The Poetry Brothel LA. His first chapbook, Death & Los Angeles, was published in 2015. https://ianaxelanderson.squarespace.com/aboutis
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Christina Cha
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The Account of the Second Man
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Stories too much for one person, for me. To carry, to tell.
Aim upwards into the ether for someone else to use the force of it, burn it as fuel.
A controlled shout, crafted. Shape the rage and vengeance and sad into something
else. Pair it with the deep need to be seen and pain be heard and not everyone is able
write about their trauma so why don’t you.
The account of the second man
the one who roams
Does he have a family, untouched on the surface, rotten at the root.
Has he convinced himself it was a dream
or
just two creatures with a terrible curiosity. How to smash frogs under boards, play mad doctor and patient. Alien autopsy. Boys will be boys who will murder and wonder, what happened?
Goat head hanging in a tree, singing.
Aunt and artist murdered, dumped in a parking lot.
I am grateful: he roams free, and does not have a home in my chest
stuck to the rest of memories and mythologies and imagined things.
I don’t want to be in his mind. I am grateful: he is not in mine. Unlike Sarto, whose presence I work to undo forget ignore, this one is blank. Not written into my DNA personality timeline. Driven into me young. He has no place but to drift, forgotten.
Doomed, though.
*
You better bet he is fucking doomed
and that if he shows his face
*
…the one who got away. He is on a sidewalk in the northeast, far away from California
south. Nothing behind him but a dry light. He is lucky, or he is dead. A puff of flat
gratitude, a flash in the sun, a moment. Does he feel me feeling him? A
person who can murder doesn’t feel someone else’s pain, he only feels his own, no one
as real as he is.
Was he the brilliant mastermind? It certainly wasn’t Sarto.
Does he possess evil and cunning, owned by a demonic force a burnt breath whispering, prodding at him: run, run now.
Is he a fiery mess of grief and pain and denial, cursed by his own evil acts, bad magic turning back on him until he consumes himself with stupid use of drugs. Way too much heroin, or oxy. Something dulling. Is he lucky, or is he cursed. Is he in prison for something else.
Perhaps he is dead. Does he want to be hunted. Has he confessed his murder, does the story spill out of him as sloppy secrets do. He floats. He drifts. He waits, suspended.
His life ended then.
I know nothing about him, only that he is a corner of a story,
A sentence, a few words. Less gravity than a ghost.
And yet: the legend says the detectives served him what justice they could, tracking him down and getting him fired from his job as a chef every few years. I divert truth into this memory of Dominique Dunne’s murderer, whose stories I heard at the same time. Justice For the Families of Homicide Victims, a group started by her father. This chef the archetype of a man who murders, and moves on.
There was one man, there were two. Sarto insists it was the husband, the police are certain it was not. They know who the second man is, was. They kept track of him.
Not enough evidence to prosecute. Why does no one search for him? Does it matter? Is the record sealed? Could he be found?
I could ask Dad, but I don’t want to hear the answer.
He likely won’t say, or maybe he will give a half-truth, which he half-believes, used to seal the stories away.
Have care for the wound. Deflect, with a slippery piece of plausible fact, a wax-off redirection.
I know when I do this too, blur truth and pain into fog.
This fights hard with and was born with the rest of the mechanisms. The learned vigilance and sharp ear for deception, all antennae tuned in to subtext.
It’s so easy to feel when someone lies:
That pause, the holding of breath, keeping a secret. Ask the right question and that
stopping of words is a tamp on my heart like a piano key pressing a silent beat.
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Christina Cha is a poet and film maker from LA. She lived in Berkeley where she taught writing, and now resides in Montrose. Her writing has been published in many journals and her upcoming book, The Dream of The Unicorn is forthcoming from The Los Angeles Press in Winter 2024.
The Los Angeles Press 