Aris Kian
Aris Kian is an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow pursuing her MFA at the University of Houston. She is ranked #10 in the 2020 Women of the World Poetry Slam. Her poems are published with Write About Now, Underground Journal, Houston Review of Books, The West Review and elsewhere. She is a Pushcart nominee and a 2020 Best of the Net Finalist.
Poems
Protest
Suck your tongue behind your teeth, sweet-sand crack, matter-of-fact girl. Call that buzzword your songbird, your chirp in the wood, the branch-snap cackle freak-deep in a stone throat. Hope to heaven’s only hotline the cop following your feet’s got a jam in his pin. Dim the dusk in a haunting only niggas know the smoke to. Still the slow-rise of skyscrapers so they snag sidewalks new slabs to stumble-over. Spit the pigeon back into the streets, feather-mouth, rust-royale girl. Don’t ask whose wind it’s turned a wing to, which weather it’s learned to worry. Skim the ribbon cutting too close to curbsides hardening under the yawn of the mayor’s last term. Churn the milk chilling in potholed streets, honey the heartache you can’t hammer out. Watch them slick the road then ask the cameras how you landed ass-down. They’ll line the horses at the city center of your chest and call it a state fair.
Mythtropolis
I open my mouth and out
pours the concrete
solid as a step
sunset settles behind the high-
rises as we begin
scraping the city off our teeth
evenings spent spitting
rocks into plastic bottles
cough and watch dunes make way
sweat sandmen on sidewalks
hawk potholes closed
kissing cracks
until they slick smooth
who else can’t stop sneezing
stairways these days
I lick my hands
and lean on a pillar damn near
from thin air
and a boy turns his tongue
into a skatepark
another buries himself
underneath his own vomit
we cannot tell the difference
between an open mouth
and renovation
a smile from a cemetery
headstone-still and sedimentary
look—I think I saw
my great-grandfather
in the swirl of sawdust
the lining of his lips
residue-white
he once made a park bench
with his bare hands
if you sit you’ll feel the baritone
rumble in his chest
and mistake it for the jackhammer
just down the street
nothing here is familiar
to me but the body
never forgets its own
footstep how the block
will lodge itself
in the back of a throat
and return the second
it is close enough
to remember

Issue Statement
GMR: What is an issue in your community that you know is of utmost importance?
AK: Gentrification & Policing, i.e. the increasing Houston Police Budget.
GMR: What is the issue at hand?
AK: Stopping the displacement of Third Ward residents with the developing gentrification projects like the Ion through the Houston Coalition for Equitable Development without Displacement.
Defunding the police and allocating resources and funding to underfunded departments within local government in Houston through organizations like BLMHTX and the Houston Abolitionist Collective.
GMR: How can GMR readers know more and possibly help?
AK:
- Houston Coalition for Equitable Development without Displacement: linktr.ee/hcedd
- Houston Abolitionist Collective: liberatehtx.com