Session Four Anthology

MENTOR: Rosebud Ben-Oni

I Feel Pretty (Remix)

feat Disordered Eating

~

Patrick Mullen-Coyoy is a queer, mixed-race, Guatemalan poet, college adviser, and Capricorn from Lansing, MI. When not helping students navigate the bureaucracy of higher education, he enjoys investigating and complicating the place of queer Central Americans in the U.S., whether through analyzing others’ art or mapping out his own identities in poetry about Ariana Grande and Elle Woods. His work has appeared in The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States (Tia Chucha Press), The Michigan Daily, and The Kenyon Review blog.

I II III

I have been writing    your bequest: guesswork abjad    I promised
backward                  I would swallow the rest of that sea
to find you drowning
as though            in brackish currents
even the wrong bodies would lie
still           enough to curl lineage into krekhts
would bear our blood   spilt over rocks on a grave you will never see
even the strange script   would form one family
strung together with such salt
would be a lifeline

~

Hannah Berk