WWPH Writes: Poetry

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Regie Cabico is the first Asian American and Queer poet to win the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam, later taking top prizes in three National Poetry Slams. He is a theater artist and playwright who received three New York Innovative Theater Awards for his work with the New York Neo-Futurists. He serves as a co-chair for La Maison Baldwin, A Gathering of the Tribes, and is a founding board member and current co-chair for Split This Rock and resides in Washington, DC.

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Arboretum

It’s nice to be led across 

a meadow by a guy 

you’re smitten by & he  

smitten by you & you both 

stumble on Lilac Land 

& you realize love is a bit 

like Lilac Land 

You just never expected 

to get there till you smell 

the Lilacs Together

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Wheel of Chakras 

My spine 

is an obsidian 

sphynx 

with no sense 

of humor 

My pubic 

bone is a 24/7 

casino 

slot 

machine

My ribs 

are marching 

bands 

of bottle-nosed 

dolphins 

blowing 

bazookas

My heart 

is a cinematic 

red carpet 

with thumbprint 

apricot cookies         

My vocal cords 

are hydrangeas 

in bloom 

My intuition 

is a jack in the box 

with jill tendencies 

My crown 

                is a little 

           filipino 

                      boi  

singing 

tina turner’s private dancer 

at chuck e. cheese

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© Regie Cabico 2022

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WWPH Writes: Fiction

Eve Cantler is a writer and educator based in Washington, DC. She loves sleeping in the woods, watching Instagram reels of raccoons, and looking at houses on Zillow that she can’t afford. In the fall she’ll be starting graduate school at GW to earn her Master’s in Curriculum and Instruction. 

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The Day We Watched the Seagull Eat the Eel

Coney Island is a cesspool in the summer. The heat from the sun amplifies the smell of garbage that litters the beachfront and boardwalk, igniting the sand so that it sears the bare skin of your feet. The water churns with so much city filth you can’t even see two inches down. Coney Island is a cesspool but I would’ve gone all the way to Staten Island if you’d invited me, so fuck it, Coney Island in the summer was my favorite place to be.

I loved riding the Q train out to the end of the line, pretending that somehow we were escaping the heat of the concrete. I loved being invited on an adventure like I was part of the pack. Loved that you were the one that sent the text like maybe I meant something to you. I felt all grown up. Booty shorts that left my bare thighs sticking to the hard plastic of subway seats, sunglasses on in the train car like the light filtering through the cloudy windows as we crossed the bridge was too damn much for me. Guys and girls hanging out like we were equals. Parents not knowing or caring where we went as long as we made it back home that night. The freedom of sixteen and summer colliding into a beautiful tapestry of “let’s get drunk at Coney Island on a Thursday morning.”

When we stepped off the train and the aquarium loomed up on our left, I couldn’t stop my mind from remembering when I was little. Remembering standing in front of the beluga whales and singing them a lullaby. Same song on repeat. Baby Beluga, of course. I’ve always been a little too on the nose, I guess. This memory made me blush, made me feel too close to the child I was fighting to escape.

 “Maybe we should ride the Cyclone,” I said, trying to prove something. You smiled like you knew what I was up to. Everyone else just sort of nodded and murmured like yeah maybe but probably not and I bit my lip and walked the rest of the way to the beach in silence. Roller coasters made me throw up anyway.

The men who walked up and down the shore selling warm Coronas didn’t give a crap how old we were. As long as we had cash to spare, they’d keep the beers coming. Two bucks a beer, I thought, probably turned a decent profit. That was before I knew what it cost to live in this world. You’d brought a lime and a knife from home. Holding the green fruit in your hand and slicing inwards towards your palm, you offered wedges to each of us in turn.

Over the hours, a graveyard emerged next to our towels. Clear glass and mutilated chunks of lime. How high was the body count when we decided to swim out to the buoy? I can’t remember. The beers couldn’t quench my thirst to prove myself, to prove that I belonged in this group. You weren’t like that. You were just a given. Someone who belonged everywhere and nowhere all at once. The epitome of cool.

The other girls stayed on the beach. I was the only one stupid enough to think I could keep up with the guys. You cut through the gray water with strong, deliberate strokes. Each movement of arm and leg pulling you towards your destination in a clear, straight line. I panted and gasped behind you, fighting my way through the water, battling my own weakness. Salty water filled my mouth and nose as I spluttered, trying to keep it from reaching my lungs.

Back on the beach, the others laughed. Don’t you know how many kids piss and shit in that water? they asked me. I laughed along. A coughing, choking laugh, as my body worked to breathe normally.

“You okay?” you asked me, when I lay back down on the towel I had deliberately placed next to yours. 

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak yet. My mouth was salty. You passed me another beer, ungarnished. We’d run out of lime. I shifted onto my stomach so I could sit up on my elbows like you and drink it. Spotting something in the distance, I nudged you and pointed at it. The others had gone down toward the water to dig a pool.

Amidst the children crying over sunscreen in their eyes, the adults quietly reading, and the wrinkly old people letting their skin sag out from beneath their swimsuits, was a seagull with a lifeless eel clutched in his beak. Weaving his way around towels and chairs and brightly colored umbrellas, he pulled his prize down the beach, leaving a shallow, meandering trail in the sand. He dragged his catch all the way to the water’s edge, where the sand was dark and smooth with wetness. The waves came in and water swooshed up to meet him, washing over his feet and the carcass. The seagull threw back his head, and inch by inch, he swallowed the glistening body of the grey eel whole.

That night we slept together. It was the first and only time. Two days later, they found you unconscious on the floor of your bedroom. I never saw you in the hospital, with all the monitors and tubes. I didn’t go to the funeral either. I was out of town, at a clean beach on a family vacation in Puerto Rico. I wish I had asked you which animal you were watching that day: the seagull or the eel? I had watched the seagull and thought it stood for survival. Catching, cleaning, devouring its dinner, existing against all odds on the hellish hot shores of Coney Island in summer.

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©Eve Cantler 2022

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WWPH Community News

*Our 2023 WWPH MANUSCRIPT CONTESTS OPENS September 1st-November 1st for poetry, fiction, and new for 2023, creative nonfiction. We are eager to see your book-length manuscripts. Even more so, before you submit, we encourage you to take time to read books by our past winners. More details here on our manuscript contests here.

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*Another big shout out to our 2022 fiction and poetry winners: The Witch Bottle and Other Stories by Suzanne Feldman and You Cannot Save Here by Anthony Moll. Look for their books to be published on September 28, 2022 by The Washington Writers’ Publishing House. We will be sharing much more news about these exciting titles in the coming weeks! Keep reading upcoming issues of WWPH Writes for details.

*Thinking of submitting to WWPH Writes? We are looking for poetry and fiction that celebrate, unsettle, and question our lives in the DC, Maryland, and Virginia area (DMV) and our nation. We seek work that is lyrical and dynamic, and we believe in cultivating a diverse and inclusive environment of content, form, risk, and experimentation. New perspectives and voices with craft and fierceness are strongly encouraged to submit. It’s FREE to submit, but you must live in the DMV. Please send us your best work–challenge us with your ideas and writing. We are reading for October and November issues right now. Submit here.

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lTHE WASHINGTON WRITERS’ PUBLISHING HOUSE has a Bookshop! Click here and purchase all our titles at our bookshop (especially if you are thinking of submitting your manuscript to WWPH):

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