Asha Futterman
IN A CAVE WHERE SOMETHING ONCE HAPPENED
after performing in an afro-futurist rendition
of a midsummer night’s dream
in front of a mansion owned by a man
who killed a slave i saw a color almost like black
when i was close enough to touch it
i could not see my love’s eyes
just the holes they sat in i realized then
i don’t want to go inside black but i do want
the gray world black creates
those ambivalent holes in his eyes
are an area of hope
ASHA FUTTERMAN is a poet and an actor from Chicago. Her chapbook, song of gray, is forthcoming from The Song Cave. Her poems appear in ANNLY, Conduit, Interim Poetics, and The Journal. She holds an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis.
ISSUE THIRTEEN features poetry by Luci Arbus-Scandiffio, Rick Barot, Stephanie Burt, Lauren Camp, Laura Cronk, William Virgil Davis, Chelsea Dingman, Erica Ehrenberg, Robert Fernandez, Gabriel Fried, Tracy Fuad, David Gorin, Jennifer Hasegawa, Stefania Heim, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Ish Klein, Wayne Koestenbaum, Christopher Kondrich, Keetje Kuipers, Anna Leahy, Alessandra Lynch, Alicia Mountain, Allan Peterson, Iain Haley Pollock, Adrienne Raphel, Emily Rosko, Lauren Shapiro, Adrienne Su, Cole Swensen, Tom Thompson, Anne Waldman, G.C. Waldrep, and Stella Wong; fiction by Rachel Lyon and Benjamin Niespodziany; nonfiction by Angela Ball and Joanna Luloff; a film essay by Gustavo Pérez Firmat; and Anne Waldman in conversation with Sandra Simonds.