For Disability Pride Month, listen to Apollo Chastain and sterling-elizabeth arcadia read their work published in Shō Poetry Journal Issues No. 8 and 7.
Two Poems by Apollo Chastain: “Signs” and “Downer”
from “Signs”
I point two fingers to my head and pull my thumb
to go where the angels slot songs into the slender
mouths of their Uzis and let rip with trigger fingers
so all afterlife ricochets with exaltation.
from “Downer”
They paint hospitals blue
to relax the patients. I think
getting married would make
me feel calm.
About this Poem: Writing “Signs” began with a gesture I know from a tarot card: The Hierophant, specifically as represented in the Tarot de Marseille. He reaches up towards a divine space with his pointer and middle finger. It’s a summons, a plea, a denotation, a condemnation to/of a world beyond the earthly. It’s a gesture I’ve always associated with pure power. I’ve drawn great comfort from it at times in my life when I’ve felt I had no power to change conditions that must be changed. This poem is preoccupied with being in a situation you know you will not survive if it goes on, but you lack the ability to shift. So you are willing to open yourself to power of any kind – even if it destroys you, at least it is a different kind of destruction. The poem grounds an inquiry into implications of being in relation to intense power in a performed gesture, centering the body as host and subject of these relations.
“Signs” and “Downer” appeared in Shō No. 8
Apollo Chastain (he/they/she) is either crying in the club or crying in the archive. Their poetry and criticism appears or is forthcoming in journals including Poets.org, the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and Ninth Letter. They have been supported by the McCormack Writing Center and the Smithsonian Institution. Visit them at apollopoet.wordpress.com.
“high tide (2024)” by sterling-elizabeth arcadia
i love poetry. i need to
delete my twitter so
i stop reading my ex’s
tweets. the movie
i’m watching has
full frontal in it.
About this Poem: Beyond the entanglement this speaker has with suicidal depression, I also often think about transness from a disability framework. Usually this framing looks at gender dysphoria as an acommodatable disability, but with advancements in uterine transplantation surgery, there are real questions about long-standing sterilization requirements for legal gender recognition, and about reproductive rights. If cis women previously unable to gestate can gestate after a uterine transplant, would the same procedure be offered to trans women?
“Signs” and “Downer” appeared in Shō No. 8
sterling-elizabeth arcadia (she/they) is a Best of the Net winning trans writer. She has an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers—Camden, and her work has appeared in venues including ONLY POEMS, Prose Online, Boxx Press, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She is trying to leave the United States to escape the trans genocide.