This selection, chosen by guest editor Merrick Sloane, is from When the Trumpet Is Blown by Quraishiyah Durbarry (Resource Publications, 2023).
9.
The door I bang on
Is invisible
My voice rang in the
Void
And your name dies on my lips
Every time I call it
Though I do everything right
I bind my mind
In blind faith
And chant your name
A hundred times
Breaching on heresy
Yet. . .
Your voice does not come to my ear
Not even blurry lines
In the wasteland of my amnesic
Memory
I hold your cloth
Like a talisman to my heart
But my imagination
Fickle as fire in a gale
Cannot fly heavenly high
It wanders about and sets
On the lowly grind
On a dirty, ugly, daily
Regime
And I bang on
From one o’clock to 2 o’clock
As a remembrance of a remembrance
Quraishiyah Durbarry is a doctoral student in comparative literature at the University of Clermont Auvergne and has so far ventured into several genres, including poetry, novel, and drama. A bilingual author, Quraishiyah writes in both English and French. She was Co-Laureate and Laureate of the Writing Prize for the Passe Portes Festival of the European Union in 2015 and 2016 respectively.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick’s work has appeared in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Stories for the Road: Trauma and Internal Communication, BLEACH!, citizen trans* {project}, Arcana Poetry and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol and ANMLY. Merrick’s poetry was recently selected as a winner of the Garden Party Collective’s contest on Neurodivergence / Intersectionality and as a winner for AWP’s 2025 Intro Journal Awards. Their work has received support from the DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium and Sundress Publications. Merrick writes so that others may feel radically loved.
