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Here’s another reason to support Apogee Journal: Because it takes up space that would otherwise be occupied by more of the same. Instead, Apogee brings unabashed, scarce, lyrical truth. Never was this more evident than in Issue 3. Morgan Parker: Sometimes I don’t shine / and I see, how a mirror / makes me two. Wake up / in stings, black / Radiohead. Black Sylvia / Plath. On those days I am / only an idea. A broom / sweeping. A constellation. Rich Benjamin: Racial issues can differ in the center of the country, but I don’t think it’s better on the coast. It’s a different set of racial issues, and a different set of ‘race phobias’ … there can be a level of self-satisfaction on the coasts that says they’ve handled their race related problems. Christopher Soto: lorde know(s) that cis-hets don’t like me / baldwin know(s), how white homos exoticize me / i hope that heaven got a gay ghetto / where my qpoc family don’t feel shame / don’t feel too brown or black / or femme and phat Kaitlyn Greenidge: Her mother fights for good things but can’t hold onto money. She never...

Nonfiction

NONFICTION: The Living, by Melissa Valentine

Apogee Journal

04 Sep 2015

The Living Melissa Valentine Oakland, CA 1999 A letter addressed to me has been slid under my bedroom door. In the return address corner is Junior’s real name, Christopher Valentine, followed by a long number. His handwriting is of the precise, practiced sort that has never written much except from prison, as if his life depends on it. For many days I do not even touch it. It lies on the floor in a heap of my teenage life: graded papers, glossy fashion magazines, photos taken with friends, books, clothes, a letter from my brother. He mostly writes to Mom and Dad, promising things that make them boast for a week, that he’ll get his GED in prison, that he’s reading one of the books Dad sent, that he plans to go to college when he gets out. But this letter has my name on it. I crank open my bedroom window and step out onto the roof. With a cigarette, a lighter, and the letter, I sit on the warm shingles of the roof and stare out over the neighborhood into a sea of rooftops and trees. I light up a Marlboro red and look at...

Poetry Uncategorized

POETRY: Two Poems by Kassy Lee

Apogee Journal

02 Sep 2015

THESAURUS dot COM Kassy Lee Claret, maybe? A simple Kool-Aid rued hue. Inside, the body of someone who hates me. Outside, a tree muscles out its raw fruits. The gentle arc of the moon laps up the blood. A puddle of which is subject to the same forces as the tidal ebb and flow. The bay window chafes my outer thigh as we make love. The goldfish knows. He doesn’t grow jealous. I was charmed by sweet kernels of corn between your gap-tooth, the boy with the Dead Sea cosmetics booth, the ripples of a wound. Even if you believe that the horizon is a snake with its tail on its own tongue, a kid on my Chrome browser will still be dead. You’ll go on trying to overanalyze my texts. I’ll go on with my cellphone camera, recording my nephew killing roaches with Raid in order to play it back in reverse. Death happens only once, and then all is rewound. God can make a rusty revolving chamber, like your heart. God can make a military grade tank on a sunflower-hugged highway. That’s within his means. God can make pies as wide as July, a silvered token...