Two Poems by Bri Stokes

Boomerang:

Down from the chapels and
from the porticos draped in

star-spangled curtains hung like
sheared flesh, hung like gathered

joints and boasting loss of sight and
teeth—Her wailing seized

the valleys and riverbeds, and I felt
the tilting moon in the hills of Her palms,

in the hiss of the crowing dirge
we sang for flattened hearth,

for the girl in the pink sweater
with the wide brown eyes

and for the prisons and oceans
and the lions licking wounds.

I said
to Her:

“America, where is the
sovereign power that formed you

from pyrite, like my father’s father
promised me?”

I once prayed in the woods
inside a temple of

branches, and I felt the wind
rise and cease with

the waltz of my lungs,
and I knew She was alive;

I fear now that She has
fallen prey to

Old Sam’s silver tongue—
to glinting teeth,

shuffling and chiming
like silver coins in the hands of a magician.

I said
to Her:

“America, will you
sow seeds

of marble or parables of death?
Will your promulgations

be kind beyond Heaven’s gates—when the
Virtues and Powers raise cobalt fulminations

for silver-eyed ghosts, for the debts you owe?
Will you make

wine of bones or leave them
to evoke dreaming?

Will you stand in sinking soil
or raise bells for the

riven air, for the rose-gold
Dawn,

for the sigh of cicadas,
for the braying of crows,

for the Sight
that spells your renaissance?”

To be restless within Her
undulating arms is to quell the red chaos

of a hawk: see the blue in its eye,
the white of its claw, the winged stars that

fade but have not
ceased their drumming.

pinkmania


Bri Stokes is a writer, editor, curator, cultural worker, producer and poet born, raised and living in Los Angeles, on unceded Tongva land. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in BuzzFeed, 45th Parallel, the Northridge Review, and elsewhere. Bri is a former poetry editor at the now-disbanded Hecate Magazine, and served as the Managing Editor of Issue 04 of SKEW Magazine. Her debut chapbook, A Throat Full of Forest-Dirt, was published in late-2023 by Bottlecap Press. Earlier in 2023, she was longlisted for Thin Air Magazine’s “The Bird In Your Hands” prize for poetry. In 2018, she was awarded "Best Short Story" by the El Camino College Myriad for her speculative fiction piece, Pr(e)y. Bri is an editorial assistant at HINCHAS Press, a 2024 Voodoonauts Fellow, and a member of The Seventh Wave Magazine's 2024 Digital Residency cohort. More information about Bri's work and artistry can be found at her website, bristokes.com.