from our 2018 Chapbook Series, Lydia Haven’s I Gave Birth To All The Ghosts Here <3

2018 Chapbook Contest: Week 15 Review

Video Poem: Lydia Havens

a poem by Lydia Havens from their chapbook, I Gave Birth to All the Ghosts Here, available from Nostrovia! Press here:

http://nostroviapress.bigcartel.com/product/i-gave-birth-to-all-the-ghosts-here-by-lydia-havens

"Aubade for gender (or a lack thereof)"

If I must have a corporeal form I will do so on my own terms: I will exist the most when the sun also exists the most. Raging

against the dying spite. Making every third-story window into my own reflection. There is pink in the sky

every morning, so there will be pink in my own face always. My hair will grow into its own astronomy. I have

entire months under my fingernails, and they all taste like the pronouns that do not rest easy in my mouth

anymore. May this be my coming out poem. May this be another liminal Sunday morning. I’ll fall asleep at 10AM

to the rhythm of my legal name, wake up to the effortless syllable that all my friends call me.

There is light coming in through the shutters. It all reminds me of my own arms.

Much love and see you next week! <3 -Christopher

2018 Chapbook Contest: Week 6 Review

It's our tremendous joy to announce the 3 winners for our 2018 Chapbook Contest(!):

* Stephen Furlong - What Loss Taught Me * Lydia Havens - I Gave Birth to All the Ghosts Here * Laura Villareal - The Cartography of Sleep

Cheers and much love--we can't wait to share these powerful chaps with you all <3 Presales start in November! Set for December release!

Much love and see you next week! <3 -Christopher

Nostrovia’s 2017 Best of the Net Nominations

Nostrovia! Press is proud to nominate the following poems and authors for the 2017 Best of the Net anthology(!):

Be sure to check the links above to hear the authors reading their poems! Lots of fabulous work!

Cheers and much love!

"To me, passion is when you come home and are able to go to bed feeling totally at ease. You're not too warm or too cold body temperature-wise; all your muscles are relaxed. All because you're doing what you love because you love it."

Lydia Havens is a poet, editor, and teaching artist currently living in Boise, ID. Her first full length collection, "Survive Like the Water," was published by Rising Phoenix Press in February 2017.

BI-

the names of all the girls i have ever loved were wheat fields. endless, a color i almost don’t have a word for, always far away even when they were right in front of me. they were soft. they were always the ones to teach me about resourcefulness and self-harvest. even now, we still talk. there is still wind in the summer. we still love each other. how could we not? * * i love a boy today, and his name is human flight. impossible. maybe because i didn’t think i would ever love a boy like this. nineteen years old and thinking about how to use my body for something other than bitter survival. but i do think i love this boy. this porch-light, hotel air conditioning-sweet boy. i’m afraid to find out if he loves me back, but i’m not afraid to tell my mother his name. somewhere, someone renames their love Icarus, or Rose Dawson, or decides to still call it love. they are promising they will get it right this time.

PROCESSING TRAUMA WHILE MAKING A PLAYLIST ON SPOTIFY

let me sing the word girl with the same passion Art Garfunkel has when he plays “For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her”. teach me how to be the baby blue bass in the punk singer’s gorgeously vengeful hands.

& when the man talks about what he did to me to other men at some bar in Eastern Washington, do not give him the benefit of the doubt, or the slow medicine of piano chords to comfort him & his choices.

Fiona Apple once asked who is stronger: the man who finds it in him to assault the child, or the child who heals from the assault, & i need to know if she ever learned the answer. Carrie Brownstein sings that anger makes her a modern girl, but i know that it only makes me afraid. my family took pride in raising a level-headed child. he always praised me for being so obedient, eager to please him even when my hands were shaking.

i do not have any sort of tempo i can rely on when i’m not sure i will make it back home without fighting a strange man for the right to my own personhood. i have had a song stuck in my head ever since he finished with me, and it sounds like every string on a mandolin curling into a fetal position. or a trumpet trying to sputter its way through an anxiety attack. or Jeff Buckley putting his guitar away right before going to sleep,  or maybe right before going for a swim in the Mississippi River.

every song has to end eventually, but when this one finishes, what will be the final note? will it end while my eyes are open or shut? will it end when i get married? when i have my first child? when i am lying in a hospital bed, unsure of whether or not i was ever able to reclaim my body after a grown man tried to kill the music inside me before it even really began?

“Bi-” + “Processing Trauma While Making A Playlist On Spotify” are previously published in Fuck Art, Let’s Dance Issue #014