Welcome to the 30/30 Project, an extraordinary challenge and fundraiser for Tupelo Press, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) literary press. Each month, volunteer poets run the equivalent of a “poetry marathon,” writing 30 poems in 30 days, while the rest of us “sponsor” and encourage them every step of the way.
The volunteer poets for May are M. Anne Avera, Desirae Chacon, Heather Frankland, John Hanright, Jillian Humphrey, Shane Moran, Hali Sofala Jones, Christina Vaagenius, and Sonya Wohletz.
If you’d like to volunteer for a 30/30 Project month, please fill out our application and warm up your pen!
May - Poem 3
anthem / M. Anne Avera
my eulogies, my eulogies.
they sing to me. they whisper, wet against my lips, forked tongue flicking against mine.
taunting with what I will never hear.
they warm their frigid bellies on my back. come closer, come closer.
fingertips on their satin scales, pouring wine through their jaw.
they tell riddles that I know by heart.
about the one who tells lies and the one who tells truth and
the woman who will die without tasting it all.
I am giving the life I never had back to the Earth. back to Her soft, white eggs.
I am coming home to the dog that only ever knew love from me
and pressing my nose to her ribbon fur.
since birth,
I have been my own witness.
Our Beautiful Lives / Desirae Chacon
You rise
uplifted on a new sunrise
pain bleeeeds..away
i rise
to stars
speckling the skies
glowing like radioactive radium
you pour
your favourite coffee
the filigree scrolls
unfolding
above your mug
i take a nightcap
bourbon neat
as a turn to look out the window
overlooking the night
a view to wherever you may be
you stretch and yawn
your beautiful eyes open
and are fresh
to the newly minted
rays of sunlight
you look out your window
a longing of solemnity parallel
with a warm hope for a new day
we miss each other
you go
i go
dawns rise
dusks settle
and time collects
as our hearts countdown
like clockwork
as every moment we have
brings us a day closer
to our reunion
For Amanda Schoenberg: Flowers and Politics / Heather Frankland
Flower Child, I was nicknamed in high school
wearing my favorite tie-dye
every Halloween, wearing
Lennon-like sunglasses, letting
my long hair stay long and loose—
my forever costume I could pretend
I just happened to wear,
and it just happened
to be Halloween.
Or it could have been my politics, leaning left,
even more left than they are now.
I would get in debates
in high school hallways
over kitchen tables, on walks home
in playgrounds where we would go
to swing at night and pretend
we were old and wise
so much different
than the children who enjoyed
playgrounds in daylight.
Then Flower Child felt peaceful
like a field of daisies and no threat of poison ivy
like dandelion or clover chains
before they dried up and were thrown away;
it was being cautious in discussing politics
careful in who you let in, who got to see
the soil, and not just the pretty flower
that wouldn’t offend.
And decades later, Flower Child became Flor,
my forever-nickname in Peace Corps,
my identity for years—Flor, brave Flor
who made jokes in another language
who memorized cumbia songs
who listened to stories and politics
who felt alive at night, no playground in sight
just a bunch of people, sitting together
in the cool sand, laughing
and looking up at the full moon.
The Bullet / John Hanright
In honor of the 54 slain at the Pulse and Club Q massacres
“If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.”
- Harvey Milk (1930-1978)
What is the trajectory of a bullet?
Made in the U.S.A., exports of our shores.
What is the trajectory of a bullet?
Shipped around the world, some circle back to our doors.
What is a human life worth?
Roughly 35 to 55 cents, or $500 for 1,000 rounds.
What is a human life worth?
A chocolate bar costs less per pound.
What is a closet like?
Inside: dark and dank, full of mothballs and regrets.
What is a closet like?
Outside: around 24” x 75” – fit for a casket.
What is the price of hatred?
A brief, tormented life.
What is the price of hatred?
Death, suffering, and strife.
What is the shape of Hope?
The size of lovers’ timeless shadows.
What is the shape of Hope?
Ask Harvey, he knows.
What is the aim of a dance club?
Community moving in time and space.
What is the aim of a dance club?
Eyes crowded with lust; hearts keeping pace.
Bear / Jillian Humphrey
On my birthday
I imagine
I am a brown bear
eating wild blueberries
in the sun
after playing in the river.
No one sees me.
Not a fish, not
a bird.
I leave no trace.
Just one bush
missing this summer’s berries,
and a bit of river
sticking to my fur.
I return to an empty den,
sleep with a full belly.
I die having lived
a little life,
like a secret tv show
made only for God.
WILL WE EAT BEYONCE? / Shane Moran
Still on their feet, the favorite
of millions working—
poor or over-worked rich.
Poor ones rubbing the feet
of the enemy of millions
or their oily bodies.
It is easy to confuse
a friend and an enemy
when you are hungry.
Watching dancing feet or lying
at their feet—both will fry
in the same grease
after the revolution.
If we are imprecise with our tastes—
we will lose Beyonce.
DEVOTION / Hali Sofala Jones
A cardinal
fell in love
with a red bird
in a cracked mirror,
abandoned
beside the barn.
She sang for days,
warbled face-to-face,
tapped her beak
against broken glass.
Waited in the hush
of a stooped tree,
its limbs stripped bare
by winter’s blade—
believing
she could coax
that silent thing
into flight.
What should we name
such an act of return—
of calling beauty
to the ruin?
To the fractured face,
the shattered wing,
left for no one
in the wild—
A Mother Walking Home In The Dark / Christina Vagenius
sounds like footprints in the sand
drained of the shore, two steps from
a tide turning back. Birds still singing
somewhere, cooing their babies
to sleep, wings levitating, leaving.
A star named for her transparency,
numbered by novelty, a catalogued card-
with sympathy. There, perched sideways,
dangling from the crumbling edge.
Even a dying star grows wings once
leaves me breathless,
every time.
Transgressive Y.O.L.O. / Sonya Wohletz
§ 1.1 Another milestone, another project finished—
And yet none the wiser, none the richer. My booty still jiggles though, wondering to itself where is my joy at? Got put off its perverse mission, perhaps. Now here I am stuck with the worst of contradictions, confusing it all with my “very cherished” dignity. No use wondering about it if you’re a single mother, poor, and part-time whore—and I happen to be [bless me] all three.
§ 1.2 Lacan, where you at during times like these?
Sliding between confusions like he knows how this will all end—my first guess. Or maybe intonando el canto sagrado de la Paquita, maldiciendo a los chumps that did her dirty—curing it all into pleasure with her throat, articulating a true thing of pearlified beauty. What a shame for you, inútil, she snarks—tres veces te engañé/tres veces te engañé/tres veces te engañé—I’m a goddamned goddess getting my glam on this Saturday night, and you can’t touch me.
§ 1.3 Today:
If I could hover myself over to the territory of the divine, I would seduce at least three people for breakfast, spew prophecies across the sky for lunch, and bathe in rosewater for dinner. I would dance down at the club and perhaps return in the early morning to crown myself in cactus flowers. Open new visions, sharpen strange implements.
§ 1.4 San Pedro, concédeme las llaves al cielo, alright?
Heavenly I think it would be to move through selves and into the gaze of anyone that ever beheld a real woman they’d underestimated and suffer the thirst of eros, of anyone who dared dance naked downtown in daylight, of anyone who claimed nothing in defense of their own failures, let alone insanity. Anyone who beheld the gatekeepers and knocked them with the swing of one luscious thigh to the other side of surrealism before clawing their way back into the delicate balance of
clean house—clean prayers—dirty delusions
May - Poem 2
baptismal / M. Anne Avera
weather perfect, lake water clear, god in the cattails beside the shore.
he held the lamb up and, now, you can see the milky white in its eyes,
gone hollow from adam’s guilt still sleeping, waiting to lay waste.
but thy will be done, be filled, be overflowed. water flushes the body.
blood becomes water becomes wine as the soul is washed. a privilege,
to have this grace and goodness restored, for the hide to dry pearly white.
with the glory of the sunrise and the heartbeat of the hymn, we pray—
the parts of us that know better and the parts of us that want for more.
Weight of a Feather / Desirae Chacon
as i sleep
with weight upon feathers
i am blanketed with life
awaiting my awakening
this beautiful life surrounds
as sleep takes me
on divine encounters
of dreams
birds
call into the night
dusky songs
upon silky silhouettes
streams like night-watchers
constantly marching into the
mists of the ny3t
night fox and moonflowers
arise subsequently following
four o’clocks last showing
a reposed slumber
falls upon the land
as my consciousness falls upon
weight of feathers
one more dream
as birds sing
till arising
awakens
to introduce
this dreaming life
to a new dawn
Southwestern Summer Days / Heather Frankland
For days, a heavy cloud
promised rain, fat
drops to remind us
that there could be
a storm, that the heat
could be
chased away
that our garden
may not remain
dried out promises
of spring fantasies.
For days, that cloud lingered
the sun became bashful
my skin remembered
how it loved rain.
It remembered long summer storms
wet mouths of raindrops.
It felt so very alive
like it was more than skin
a leaf trembling, a tree dancing
roots thankful—deep
in the ground
stretching out
and still growing.
Elegy for a Playhouse / John Hanright
What an unceremonious end to an otherwise inspired play.
We really must get our money back.
…
What? Another mailer? Another fundraiser? What does this one say?
Dear valued patron:
We are drowning in debt. We can’t keep the stage lights on without your support. We need your
help. Please, give what you can. Become a subscriber. Every little bit helps.
Yours sincerely,
The Board
Throw it in the trash, dear, with all the other junk mail.
…
Oh, that’s the theater where they do all that social issue stuff. I’m not supporting some agenda.
…
Am I a season subscriber? No, I just came to see Brigadoon for the fifth time in my life.
…
I can’t wrap my head around it. How could a woman play [insert classic male role here]? It’s like
if a man played [insert classic female role here]. Can you imagine?
I don’t support the gender-bent casts they have had
lately either. What does the Met season look like this year?
…
Pay what you can? Can you make change for a ten?
…
Why am I gonna pay $30 for a production of Hairspray when I can see it for free on streaming?
…
Dear valued patron:
It is with a heavy heart that we must say goodbye to our beloved theater, who passed away last
night surrounded by family and friends.
The theater is survived by streaming platforms like Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Netflix, bad spinoff
series of originally good movies, and AI videos of people falling from infinity pools.
In lieu of flowers, for the love of everything good and beautiful in this world, please support live
theatre.
Yours in community,
The Board
Icon / Jillian Humphrey
The hand ruins the brain
’s design. The image, made
real, is marred.
Mind resists; pleads
fidelity, not sloth.
An image is what it is.
Any tangible or legible
construction of that image
is no theophany,
only an icon.
Why insist on the incarnation
of a dream?
You’ll kill it.
But the body must make something.
With its gladness,
a pile of stones.
With its sadness,
drawn figures, shrunken heads
and hands too large
for their arms.
The body writes sentences
to record what it felt
but the mind
cannot resist
interfering. It assigns meaning
to narrative, interjects
cause where there is only effect.
Why this overgrown garden?
A figment is still a vision.
Without it the people perish.
Flower Moon / Shane Moran
Something
holds me in this body
calling—come to me, come.
You see me shine,
but don’t try
pulling me down:
Do you really need
to learn
the light is behind me—
touch my harsh skin, find
I am not
the body you dreamed of—
you agree,
if you worship
from a distance—
you only need
your eyes—
O you of little faith.
Each month you look for me
and you can’t rest
until you’re drunk
spinning—
clouds pass
my face. I’m waning.
WATCHING HAROLD PERRINEAU AS MERCUTIO WHEN I WAS TWELVE / Hali Sofala Jones
Wings.
Glitter.
Gun.
Black skin.
Shine.
Tell me of Mab.
Faster, faster—
No, nothing
can touch him.
Strobe
of sunlight—
a body full
of breath.
Barrel’s mouth—
choreography.
Laugh. Spin. Spin. Laugh.
Violence, theater.
Blade, prop.
The beach,
a fever dream—
The body,
a costume.
A scratch. A scratch. A scratch.
Where is the rattle—
in that laugh?
Tell me of Mab now.
Not worms.
Not plague.
Wake—
Gladiolas / Christina Vagenius
My father tells me the story of hiding under the dining room table
when he was a boy. After his mother died, after his father made the bottle
his new bride. I don't think of this the night I hide from my boyfriend,
two weeks from turning 21, the studio off Goethe. With the southwest
thigh-high black lacquered vase I filled with turquoise sticks, felt sophisticated.
Walking past PJ Clark’s, a bent elbow brasserie keeping the Saturday gladiolas
perky, a wind-whipped sundress rising over the horizon of my knee, he’d say
was the reason his hand felt hard, hey, I’m talking to you. Honey colored neon
shadows, a ladder of blooms I’d watch wobble, then fall. Gladiola, ‘Imperial Mix’
looks small, inside a puddle of water. Seeds born from a storied stem.
I see you under there.
Meditation on a Russian icon and a moth flies through / Sonya Wohletz
The moth interstices its way past the window—
smoke slips from a candle,
frame to its markings: stripes, ovoid. Morphemes
into the shrine of the saint’s forehead,
high and glaucous, indicating wisdom I suppose—
a certain elevating instinct, suspended
towards a god or the moon, who can
tell. Beautiful, isn’t it—what some people
can gloss their mistakes out of.
There is, for instance: a wing, or hand—raised
in blessing through this gospel of winter—
the saint’s eyes, antennae winking as if to
return the benediction or the place in time
where you realized I have no right I have no right
to occupy this language.
The recursive moment is the choice:
to maunder between, back and forth, up, down.
Voices drift like flakes of ash,
like a pilgrim deviating towards martyrdom
on the cold altar of ice along the Yenisei
in winter. In winter it is the embers
that are themselves alone,
smoldering in two palms. Their relic crease
warms to us and thermal blooms
of prayers lifting—wings into
the night air, fluttering like leaves of an old book
written in a language no one remembers
or cares to inhabit.
Is it the desire to understand again
that which imprisons or seals us upon itself?
Does the saint open mercy like a gate
and cleanse these hands,
cleanse my words of fire?
Free of the fire and of the vision free—
the bone moon, oh, it sometimes
relieves me at least of that.
May - Poem 1
First Poem / M. Anne Avera
I write, now, and think of You.
The abstract, the royal, the heavy,
the You.
Yes, there You are:
my guest and my friend
and my thief and my lover.
You come without body or blessing
and Your presence remains,
regardless of my desires.
Do I want You to stay?
They say the learned doctor
secretly doubts the eternal soul
or the everlasting human will,
while these things lay
like a reservoir
beneath the poet.
Hand in Hand / Desirae Chacon
Hand in my hand
times behind
and times ahead
centuries of bridging
emotions
Melancholy with fury
mixed with waters from the Seine
waters collected in my palm
feeling every single emotion
we’ve ever felt
every single tear you ever cried
falling from your eyes
most beautiful rain
lashes like wings of a dove
when rain falls from them
your tears of the Seine
turned into these waters that
fall into my hand
& tears from the fountains of laughter
when you smiled at me
surrounding in light of the Sun
falling
warming
scintillating
breathtaking
a breathe is respirated
cognitive reminiscence..
next
echoes of laughter
permeating our souls
stitching every single pain we’ve ever felt
into purpose
a balm for our solemnities
a salve for our sadness
a love for a reward
warm skies
dry grasses
balmy blue skies
of oil pastels in the middle of
a hot June
it was 1930
before the dust
fleeting moments of this chapter
of our life
of this life
of this time.
I Remember Little / Heather Frankland
Mae—my great grandma’s name—
three letters to contain
a legacy of memories
given to me by others—
she never forgot
a birthday, she never forgot
a name, she never forgot
to make you
feel valued.
I remember little
me—shy with curly blond
hair from Midwestern
summer humidity,
horns I hadn’t learned yet
to be self-conscious about.
I remember little
me listening to Mom and Grandma insist
that my cousin and I join
Great Grandma on the screened-in porch,
insisting that we sat on her lap
to be read a story.
It was a green porch
or it could have been
green leaves seen
through the screen.
My cousin
more confident that I,
knew what to do
and I followed, trying to pay
close attention
to the story, to the lap
to my mom watching.
I remember sensing
how much this old woman
was loved by my mom and grandma
like it was armor, a block of kindness
like it was concrete bricks
my small hand could touch.
Maybe some of that magic
would flake off
on my palms, in my wild hair
on my quiet tongue—
for being loved that fiercely
must be magical
for being able to love that much
must be something beyond body.
Great Grandma was a magical being
to me, like the unicorns
I believed warded
off my nightmares
or the double rainbows
that promised good luck
or feeling valued even when
you were small and too shy
to say much at all.
Remember, Shelley’s Heart Didn’t Burn! / John Hanright
In blessed memory of Neil Silberblatt
Melodies of Rachmaninoff
Repeat through the cottage –
Stifling a cough,
A poet flips the page
And busies himself with a piece,
This one is brand new,
And nothing will disturb his peace;
It must be brief yet ring true,
For it is his epitaph,
His greatest poem’s epigraph.
Run from that empty urn;
Take up a pen,
Which never lies,
Nor never dies;
And remember:
Shelley’s heart didn’t burn!
Shelley’s heart didn’t burn!
Memories of the immortal bards
From yesteryear and today
Play in his mind’s yard
And then fly away,
Back to their home with the Muses;
But he catches some
And passing out his bon mots, amuses
His party guests, impressed by his aplomb.
Those days are all gone;
All that remains are dusk and dawn.
Run from that empty urn;
Take up a pen,
Which never lies,
Nor never dies;
And remember:
Shelley’s heart didn’t burn!
Shelley’s heart didn’t burn!
Day and night are the same now,
His varicosed hands chill,
And damp sweat rests upon his brow,
But his soul and body are still
One – two nurses tend to his needs
While his love and friends tend to his heart –
The latter of which bleeds
Across the pages of his enchanted art:
“Full fathom five” and all that fine
“Shakespearean rag” and rhyme.
Run from that empty urn;
Take up a pen,
Which never lies,
Nor never dies;
And remember:
Shelley’s heart didn’t burn!
Shelley’s heart didn’t burn!
What untold secrets reside
In that undiscovered country:
Where poets rest upon the divide
Between grass and tree,
One hand in now, the other yore;
Where sick and well are all in all,
Where kings sleep with the poor,
Where bitter tears never fall;
In that realm where beauty reigns –
Somewhere with no more pain.
Run from that empty urn;
Take up a pen,
Which never lies,
Nor never dies;
And remember:
Shelley’s heart didn’t burn!
Shelley’s heart didn’t burn!
Marionette / Jillian Humphrey
My mind marionettes.
When I swing my hands, she
walks. When I dance,
she dances.
When I knead dough,
I knead the mind.
And when I slide my trowel
into the garden, I dig —
my two marionette hands plant
something — in the brain.
Do you see how my hand hovers
over this page and my mind
is tied to it with a string
attached to a bucket
pulling ink from a well?
I can’t think unless I make
something. Striking a match
does less than washing the dishes.
I stand at the sink
for thirty minutes
noticing bits of food
and feeling water
run down my wrists
toward my elbows.
I look up to see my face shining
back — not in the drinking
glass — in the window pane.
There inside me, a flame.
UNCLE FATHER / Shane Moran
There is howling in the morning, I listen
to them breathe. Today, brushing their teeth,
the girls told me I look like their father.
Another way to say, I love you.
These young ones explain my life to me.
Show me as they squeeze their faces—
love can land on the tips of their noses.
Getting on the bus they wave goodbye,
and I miss their mother. I don’t forget.
Sometimes I go back in time. Sometimes
I yell. This is my work—to keep them
out of a fire. I’ve made all my wishes
upon these girls. I listen for the air breaks
from ten till two. At two, I’m waiting on the porch.
WHAT I MEAN WHEN I SAY DOWNTON ABBEY SAVED MY LIFE / Hali Sofala Jones
“One thing we don’t want is a poet in the family.”
—The Dowager Countess of Grantham
There’s something sacred about the way
they hold grief with posture,
how even despair is draped in velvet.
I watched the same war end twelve times,
same telegram arrive in trembling hands,
same butler pour tea like nothing was burning.
My skin flared—red sprawling wherever it wanted—
but the screen stayed pale and British,
orderly as pressed napkins.
God, I needed the soft tyranny of it.
What was dying in me
didn’t matter at Downton.
Matthew still crashes the car.
Sybil still dies, lock-jawed in bed.
But nothing there is final.
Even now, with these hands,
I can return us—whole,
to the beginning.
Cereal / Christina Vaagenius
I made a grocery list of all the ways I wanted to be loved.
Squeezed between the Wheat Thins and tender ripe limes.
Wondered if I'd find them tucked beside the condiments,
the chickpea pasta, the bone white bleached flour, always
escaping the battered seams. Or if I ‘d have to ask someone
for help finding the bread I like with the little seeds that turn
my teeth into piano keys. The cookies shaped like windmills
no one buys anymore, pushed into my 3rd grade pocket, turned
to crumbs by the time I remembered them. Toast-colored sand
castles rising between fingers, swept out to sea. Or if the all ways
I wanted to be loved
would be hidden at the bottom of a cereal box. Marshmallow shamrocks,
four-leaf clover good luck, my fingers digging for a prize shaped to fit
the palm of my own hand.
Lithium 2 / Sonya Wohletz
If it cries—the mistake was involuntary.
What can I say, I am struggling still,
as though my abilities to human were in question;
though I am not—
I am not aching with the mistake of
gorgeous charity but raw
at the filing of stars through my ear root,
thick with the music of brain waves,
their deltas emptying into that peace,
that thankless peace that exists between old lovers.
How lucky, to be uncertain, and yet break
fast quietly at the table before dawn—
how lucky to know the hour
when you are called to recount your
sufferings, knowing they will be received
with suffuse laughter. The noble way, I guess
it opens concrete
certainties so therefore belie
the calculated movement of ancestors, whose
bones angle in such a way that we
may know them, and speak of them with reverence
and wish them safe returns.
I myself was like this—a stray projection
of those past failures, those past griefs,
all of which articulated and unnamed of
myself, simmered in the sliver of the pasture moon.
It will cost me so little to tell you:
(and would you have such patience as to absorb)
the pillared salts before and behind me, and
how now to take them in,
to ingest and hold steady the silent
messages, to steward such fresh image—
a zest, warm yellow separating
my palms from yours.
April - Poem 30
you’ll need to speak louder / A cento Composed by mk zariel
with lines by and from Maureen Alsop, Bob Bradshaw, Sarah Carson, Stan Galloway, Ava Hu, Sergiy Pustogarov, Nate Raum, Daniel Avery Weiss, and MK Zariel.
as though there were no terror.
i have always been able to allow myself to fail
i hope someone pieces me back together into something more beautiful.
pink peony snouts are breaching ground in the verge / the many-tailed surge
so what am i? says the inner voice / weeps at the disembodying chaos
i wonder if you miss the secret of us
But you can mitigate the spirit only so many times
Reinvigorate the meanings in a cloud
Leaving me looking at the ruins.
Audrey Hepburn Searching for a Stray Cat[1] / Maureen Alsop
like soldiers on a crumbling castle wall,
Evergreen—[2]sun inside sun,[3]
Handsof someone I knew[4]—April is the
monthof rising sap—[5] earth
waitingto crack open, to bloom, to
burn[6]and come alive in graphite on the page[7]
and somehow
that sometimes sends me
into a tailspin.[8]
__________________________________________________________________
[1] April 22, 2026, “My Perfect Reader,” Bob Bradshaw
[2] April 26, 2026, “Picking Blackberries, Circa 1970,” Stan Galloway
[3] April 19, 2026, “Magnum Opus,” Ava Hu
[4] April 24, 2026 “I Blanked and Forgot the Meaning of Life in the Back Pocket of My Jeans Before Putting Them in the Wash.” Daniel Avery Weiss
[5] April 20, 2026 “On returning from Birdsong Nature Preserve,” Kirsten Miles
[6] April 15, 2026, “closure,” MK Zariel
[7] April 25, 2026, “sonnet for syanna,” nat raum
[8] April 2, 2026, “untitled,” Sergiy Pustogarov
The Old Couple, The Washer And Dryer, Dance The Watusi / Bob Bradshaw
Whenever old videos
of American Bandstand
are playing,
I’m inspired
to do laundry.
Soon the washer's
boogying,
throwing
its heft around
in slow, deliberate
dance steps
and as American Bandstand
jacks up its volume
the washer’s lid
starts popping up and down
hurling clothes out
like a stripper
flinging off
one piece of clothing
after another!
As she does this
she rubs her hip
gently at first
against the dryer’s,
then brazenly--
swinging its hips
left and right--
the two banging
each other
in a loud clamor,
the house’s pipes
clanging along
joining in
this jubilant
moment
knowing how life
is as short
as a spin
cycle—the timer
unable to be
reset.
April Ends / Stan Galloway
Iris buds have opened
on the back bank
feminine and frilly
after five years of
leafy show
a kind of second puberty
after planting tubers thinned
from the neighbor’s fenceline
a signal that beauty may lie
ahead
Afterlife / Ava Hu
*
Look at me urgent,
melodic, hypnotist.
Erase everything.
Call me by my name.
Dear wilderness,
without you
I am snow.
A house made of rising water
before it floods the lungs.
Two hands
become one.
The way you let go,
I let go too.
Night birds sing
all night long.
Your mind
is a river.
We are the last
two lines.
Until the world
enters your mouth.
Everything that reaches for you,
everything that carries the light.
The world, the size
of a hand closing around an apple.
It’s hard to hold on
to the language of birds
come morning.
Can we walk on water?
A looking glass,
ritual object,
mirror, transmission,
you.
You slip under.
The water dreams you.
Shake leaves into essence,
a listening.
A lifeboat,
a song.
Is there still time
to build an ark?
Their bodies press
into flowers.
Put your hands
over your ears.
Who will remember
the names of trees?
You must change
your life.
Who will remember
the names of trees?
How big are you
compared to the moon?
You break open
a brush of light
across the purple
mountain.
Who will be the water
who lifts the boat?
We are the black ribboned song
of Orpheus descending,
the ascent all depends
on how you hear it.
*
While you enter hospice I host a poetry salon in which we discuss thresholds / Kirsten Miles
Through the front window Mount Angeles is obscured by clouds,
even Unicorn Point is a shadow
I dream we join your grandson, travel into Hang Va
another generation finding a future in a cave
seventeen poets are gathered under two hundred year old Turkish Hazelnut trees
the Stellar Jay kvells at the bounty while we write
I will invoke you every time my mouth is delighted by some amuse bouche
you so love to surprise your tongue
Behan, Heine, Wordsworth, your reserves,
my first poets on your bookshelf
the tide rises, the tide falls at Cape Flattery when you visit
look, how I have followed water as my source
there is an Emily Dickinson Coconut cake on the table,
little cucumber sandwiches fine enough for a high tea
in Brooklyn, a paintbrush in one hand, a slip of granite in the other
your bright bloom holds a piece of your heart, gently
on the west side of the house, four deer nestle in the yard under the window
below my room
the poppies are rising in Blacksburg, and
the lilacs are emerging, early flags before the day lilies and trillium
the floors creak under our feet, Gentle House walls full of poetry
and the footfalls of those whose love entered here, you are here
the poets have eaten Emily’s cake, written, shared their efforts
now the salon begins, a warm hum, conversation and laughter fill the air
a little girl again, I am listening to the flow of conversation below me
voices of your friends and students swirling up in the evening air excite my imagination
Danny is waiting for you for his next pet and your next walk
for he is, yes, your best boy
now, as the evening closes, there is a pearl in Black Mountain whose glow lights your way
and we will love her for all her days
the penumbra / Sergiy Pustogarov
i belong just below the arc of the horizon,
glinting over your golden head,
casting rays that curve around buildings
through the reflections of your eyes.
i bask in the sunset aura
escaping over your forhead.
the peace flows through
your fingertips,
and touches every particle
in every atmosphere you inhabit.
i belong in the shadow of your being,
where schrodinger becomes the only one
who can calculate my position,
even then leaving half his calculations to
guesswork.
i am an eclipse circling
your presence,
only to return in a million years
still shinning with the same light
you sent me into orbit with.
foiled orchards / nat raum
would that it were as simple as reaping exactly
what i sow, but proverbs don’t account for
changes in the rain or the soil or the sun. i toss
seeds in tilled dirt with reckless abandon, harvest
shriveled husks come the end of the season.
haters will say overwatered but really, the landscape
itself can warp, fertile fields now sapped, clouds
absent from the sky for weeks. fault probably
lies a little in column A, a bit in B—i’m trying
to help, only dousing the vines who starve.
i do too much because everyone does too little.
who could blame me for trying to save it all?
Wing / Daniel Avery Weiss
There were still things that did not get said;
how his purple suit could be so dry cleaned,
how her pearl necklace could gather up its own pearls on the beach,
hitch them to its one twine spine,
how a man's ears cannot be pierced because
they're made of rock.
These things did not get said.
I did hear, however, about the economy
shipping options the poor use for goods
and bads and in betweens, each of which they settle
like a carbonated beverage
into accepting. The walls, the walls, they're
gold.
April - Poem 29
untitled / Maureen Alsop
If Only / Bob Bradshaw
I was 29 again.
If only I could dial the sun down.
If only I wasn’t shouting
into a gale every time
I ask the IRS
for a break.
If only this mass
of flies would choose
another old man
to follow.
If only the Neptune Society
would stop
sending me ads…
The boat’s waiting
at the dock!
If only my hopes
weren’t tumbleweeds.
If only love hadn’t proven
to be another vault
I couldn’t safe crack.
If only I had you
with me, babe,
again.
Turn the Radio Up / Stan Galloway
Let it sing you away
to a night when love was new
recall a park, a beach, a quiet invitation
before the cup of hope was cracked
and love squeezed every raindrop
looking for a miracle.
Let the melody float you
on a raft of reminiscence
where the beating of the drum
foreshadows – stop!
Turn the radio up.
Let the long-ago song
block the ache
and lie to you again
that there will be no end.
Love Poem in Reverse Osmosis / Ava Hu
*
We sink like ships
beneath soil.
We flower-breathe.
We hold our breath
under the weight
of green.
What’s the use
in speaking about
the passage of light
through veins
when we are created
as one image?
We are pulled with violence
underground.
We calm fierce animals
by saying their names.
River snakes. Yellow dust
of bees entering fruit.
Metal turns the mouth
to gold.
Praise water for taking
the form of its mate.
We are pulled by wind
we cannot explain.
Two moons tied
to each other’s wrists.
We are the milk
of ascension, milk
of the mother
constellation.
I call you my other half.
My swallowing mouth.
My moon
eat sun.
Look at me.
Look at me.
Look at me urgent,
melodic, hypnotist.
*
Is This Transgender Joy or Sorrow / Sergiy Pustogarov
drawing
lines
across
my
chest.
dreams
dripping
down
from
my
shoulders.
tracing
hopes
disappearance
like
chemtrails
along
these
fateful
curves.
figuring
out
where
i
belong
between
the
curves
i
chopped
off.
and
scars
that
i
swim
in
the
ocean
proudly
out.
firefighting / nat raum
i once craved touch but luck would never bless me
with its presence, so i dashed fantasies of hands
on my waist. sometimes i think about the reasons
i’d rather be cold than hot—i can always layer up
but public nudity is frowned upon, and i hate to sweat.
in essence, i’d sooner freeze than burn the house down
again. i imagine the shapes i’ve forced myself into
in the name of love, so intimidated by that which stands
before me should i choose to walk these halls again. i lose
control like kids of a certain age lose teeth. bones slip
loose from gums and i too sizzle like a lit fuse threatening
to blow—past a certain point, there’s no stopping it.
Wet Fur/ Daniel Avery Weiss
This spring, the blossoms unfolded
from their buds early.
I folded them and put them back.
It has been a spring of threats like that.
The river near my home is flooded already,
and still the sky appears congested:
clouds stumped by blue,
and then they get darker, grayblue
and then they get darker, black and grim,
and then they have floated away,
and the sidewalk is uncanny and dry.
We have dug for greater things than
existence, something fake and tacky.
I am real now, and like you,
will be nothing to me in a decade.
Memory kills me and spares few precious
moments to consider.
The clouds remain here,
floating like grief,
and drawing shade over
everything with feathers.
We have shivered for lesser things than
existence, something sticky, something
squalid.
Something swells from the treebark.
A tumor. A bubble. A knell.
The roads fold. The light at the
end of the tunnel is LED and bounces
off posters of dead bugs, which
block your way.
The sky dies.
From clouds I cannot see against
a backdrop of horrible night sky silence,
an orgasmic onslaught of rain
explodes into the earth. I saw a fox there,
there on the side of the road,
trotting past like the opposite
of symbols,
metaphor murdered
by the blight
of its pure, sopping tail.
a map of undoings / MK Zariel
you'll be one of that boy's harbingers of doom
my friend says, and i can't tell if she's talking about
you or an abstraction. i certainly aspire to bring down patriarchy
and yet i don't do myself any favors, scrolling through
a confirmed idiot's photos all because i wish
he could have been anything else. i loved you the way
i love an unfinished novel—full of promise yet always
fraying in the last couple pages, defaulting to the same
technicolor cover art & deeply straight stock phrases—
still i made erasure poetry from your canned jokes
your oft-repeated anxieties. i tried to get over you and so
had a brief fling with a vengeful ghost. it didn't last.
i tried to get you back and concluded
that, pathetically, i'd rather split my consciousness
into gleaming shards than ever understand yours.
April - Poem 28
untitled / Maureen Alsop
Riding The Grizzly / Bob Bradshaw
At 14
I rode The Grizzly,
a wooden roller coaster,
known
for its quick—
stops—
its—lurches
ahead
but what I feared most
were its tight
curves—
at any moment about
to fling me out
into space
the way a skeet thrower
catapults a clay pigeon
skyward—
for its finale the roller coaster
throwing itself
off a waterfall,
taking me,
white-knuckled,
with it,
the water at the bottom
flying up
like wild
wings!
Why do such
a crazy thing?
I hoped, hoped!
to impress
Cara!
Over and over
as she stood outside
a railing,
I would sit down
into a wooden crate
of a seat,
faking a smile
like a stunt pilot
at an air show
getting into a rickety
Fokker, a Nieuport 28,
a Sopwith Camel.
Did
she notice me?
Or was she watching
her friends
in another
car?
Later I’d try
writing poetry
to impress Cheryl,
but that was years
away.
But that day
The Grizzly
was all
I had.. My heart
even then
risking irreparable damage,
against all odds,
for love,
—as it would do
again and again
and again.
Desire / Stan Galloway
It is no coincidence that
fire and desire rhyme.
Desire flaming high as a barn
brings the news reporter
when someone fails
in spectacular conflagration –
think imploding submersibles.
But some fires go unreported
serving to cook food
and warm rooms
the desire for creature comfort –
think grandma's quilt..
Failing desire clogs the lungs
of everyone around
all smoke, no heat
all negative attention –
think your last stalker.
And there is desire
no one notices at all
tucked beneath the ashes
of betrayal, rejection, callousness
an ember barely warming itself
tossed out in the ash bucket –
think my heart.
Pilgrimage / Ava Hu
*
The joints of one person
become the next.
Your breath,
the only lighthouse.
Fire makes light
but destroys its beloved:
a monk was discovered
sitting in lotus position
for 118 years,
if you just
let him be,
he could tell you
the secrets
of the universe.
Erase everything.
Call me by my name.
*
How To Build A Book Case / Sergiy Pustogarov
i built a new book
case. broke some oaken logs just
to shape them into twenty
plaintive shelves.
took nail gun and drill to
work and made circles over circles,
shelves marching in line to the
formation of a fibonacci spiral,
and i started wondering if
i could reach the heavens.
i stacked my books in lines,
and columns,
calculating which cell could
hold which width,
the dimensions betraying me just to
see spines bursting through the
seams of cavalcading nails.
words spilled down the trellis of
tanned posts at the edge of each shelf, lit
brilliantly to shimmer in the
afternoon glow.
i thought this should
help me read better.
i woke up the next day
and said i’m never writing again.
self-portrait as kill-devil / nat raum
drunk words are sober thoughts and i’m quick
to label a lie. sugar smooths everything over until
it ferments, becomes fire down a bone-dry gullet.
this is to say i am doing everything in my power
to remain sweet, but chemistry foils me sometimes.
oh, holy saint of SNRIs, please find me some
substance that will at once keep me honest
and settle me. oh, how the juice sucks all the water
from my blitzed body, its sharp-edged molecules
sliding down my throat. same time tomorrow.
Kaolin / Daniel Avery Weiss
How swift, how
delightfully swift, that
the porcelain unspools
itself between my fingers,
as if melting at my touch,
as if my lowly, earthly body
could suede the clay into
something holier
than dirt.
I have buried it at a grave,
the line between kiln
and cremation
and kill
deathly tight.
a butch is a receptacle until told otherwise / MK Zariel
i rarely received your anger, your scorn, your untidy
perfect scrawls in the depths of your mind and notes app—
instead i was your brick wall, your easy target. cut me off
then suffer publicly, as if daring me to reach out
your hollowed-out face an engraved invitation
your collection of blank phrases echoing
like a ghost learning to network. i hate that i can't care for you
with your voice flattening to the shallow hum of a chatbot
and today i had a crisis of faith and pretended
it wasn't about you—because i apparently can't feel close to Eris
until i feel close to a repressed teenage guy with a martyr complex—
and that is the worst logic i have ever encountered, even in a faith
that prides itself on disorder. i found religion the night
you almost left me. i started to give a shit about it
the night you actually did. the first night it was 1am in Milwaukee.
riverwest was too aesthetic for its own good, as usual, and you were sharp
and curated, telling me i made you into a vessel, content only
to receive, to be held. i didn't understand at the time
why you didn't want that—and i wanted to entrance you—
and i wanted you to be my audience of one—and i wanted you
to believe me, for once, without my having to exaagerate
for your benefit, a habit that unfortunately stuck. you never could
believe much of anything—and neither can i, anymore. a month ago
i walked judgmentallythrough the historic third ward, and i didn't think
about you, and i almost passed out in public. i refuse to believe these two things
had to do with each other. i used to call you my life force and now
i settle for my unwilling muse, the person my internal monologue
is inevitably directed at. i hope you have one too.
April - Poem 27
untitled / Maureen Alsop
The Drive-thru Car Wash / Bob Bradshaw
I love losing myself
in the yugen
of broccoli forests, living
“in the moment”
at Safeway.
Yet nothing
beats a car wash
with its cloudbursts
and flash floods
and its sudsy clouds
washing up against my glass—
And fierce rains sweeping
across my hood,
my beetle
now a submersible,
long slats flailing at it
like the legs
of a deranged giant octopus
escaped from 20,000 Leagues
Under the Sea.
And though I feel
like a guppy, its bowl
overflowing, the faucet
at full blast,
I’m as safe
as if I were riding a car
on Santa Cruz’s Big Dipper
—pushed along, as we all are,
by forces outside
our control.
And yet as a bright light
breaks over me,
my car emerging
into the Ordinary
again,
I wonder what
it’s like for a babe
in a womb being pushed
along,
as if it too were riding out
on rollers,
its old world--
of dim waters and tides--
being left behind
for an almost
inconceivable
life. A new
yugen.
Relationship Advice / Stan Galloway
Jealousy clamps
a leg, bites through the flesh,
holds you at the bone.
Suspicion filters rose from daylight
shifting everything Othello green
smothering affection with a dingy pillow.
Distrust demonizes innocence
creates ghosts where no spirit ever wailed
and sucks the marrow from integrity.
Snow / Ava Hu
*
We are whirls
in bark and wood.
An amulet of snow
heavy with moon.
Has the die
been cast?
The serpent turns
with her tail
in her mouth.
The hero turns
and refrains.
Branches bend
under the weight.
Inhale.
The earth is a desolate
wilderness.
The earth is desolate,
dear wilderness,
without you
I am snow.
*
all the steps from the pole barn to the berm / Kirsten Miles
measure Place road gently carrying that
rib bound vessel beating out to sea
past the little ponds blueing down the sky
elegant Long Tails glide over mirrored peaks
Hooded Mergansers with their impossible crests
slaty sided Harlequins, their mousey peeps
returned these years since river Elwha flushes
back her path and claims her mouth
Bushtits and Pacific Wrens flit, eagles whistle
over the growing crest of surf as the path
turns towards the Strait
metering the breeze along the spit where
sand is still learning its own course
loose grains silt down footprints on the bank
yesterday’s channel is today’s dry bone
the current drifts a restless
scrimshaw for steelhead and salmon to scry
This is the way
I am built of the same silt same wild
unpatterned spilling
the same stubborn refusal to fit
I’ve spent my seasons dammed
up steel struts straining before the thrust
unmakes the bank
the way the heart must lose its shape
to find its reach
see how the river takes the weather’s pitch
gale winds scrape the gray skies clear
tides lap or ravage, she makes a braided delta
tosses the skeletons of prehistoric trees
today her mouth widens
sand spits trail from her eyes salt-singing
each day newly carved
Main Street BookShelves / Sergiy Pustogarov
i wish i knew which way my words would
go,
between collapsing
sonnets
and lines spiraled so
far away;
they aren’t even free
verse
anymore,
just something i like to label
not quite there.
still slipping between
agents’ fingers,
readers’ minds,
and journals’ grasp.
i’ve spent the afternoon
passing up the
main street
small town
bookstores,
staring through the
windows
to spines lined up like
soldiers marching to
their next homes bookcase.
but i’ll just go home tonight and
type words onto a
screen
for others to wonder what
happened in
my life.
hollaback duplex / nat raum
the fever jostles you like earthquaked skyscrapers
swaying in hopes their foundations are sturdy.
even sturdy foundations hope for chaos sometimes—
who doesn’t want to be a bit undone? sameness bores,
wanting those who don’t usually unravel to bare teeth
at their enemies for once. the fight in you is innate.
once your instinct takes over, enemies ought to flee
in droves. you feel hungry. you need to sate the itch,
unsatisfied after decades of starving. hundreds
of hands stroke your throat at once. it’s up to you
to take your own and grab back, fracture wrists
and hearts and ties to that which no longer serves.
no more heartbreak—untie the tethers and release
yourself into feverish sky, still gently quaking.
An exchange about my dog./ Daniel Avery Weiss
you do not have to optimize for productivity / MK Zariel
a text message poem
most of my tasks are basic self care.
i'm reading lacan for the first time. it's not going very well.
yes, that's happened before.
plans ended early so i'm killing time:
someone implied i was cis today and it really bothered me
i won't hold her accountable so it might be perfect!
dealing with a bunch of interpersonal crazy stuff.
he clearly is just afraid of culture <can you ask not to talk politics?>
that means we don't shit talk people's art in front of them
i've seen people of all genders do this.
if he's a poetry reader at all, that'd be great to know
tell me before inviting twenty different people.
yes, i'm sure
if it's not a hell yes, it's a no
April - Poem 26
untitled / Maureen Alsop
First Driving Lesson / Bob Bradshaw
The car—leaps—forward.
Whoa! Easy…easy, he says.
The car—jerks—ahead--
--stops--jumps again.
It's like our dog
when I’m walking him
and his radar’s picking up
another dog nearby
and I keep having
to yank him back
on his short leash
from running off.
Obviously the car
needs a tuneup.
Maybe it’s the brakes?
I offer. The instructor
shakes his head.
You might want
to keep your left foot
off the brake pedal
when you drive.
Slow down
when we take curves,
he reminds me.
Yeah yeah.
I've always aced
my classes. I'm expecting praise
as we take our first turn.
Jesus! God!
he shouts, leaning back
into his seat
as if slammed
by G-forces.
Let’s take another
turn! I need the practice,
I say, overriding
his instruction
to pull over…
Okay, the first lesson
didn’t go great.
I failed it,
my dumb instructor tells me.
I say I’m available
tomorrow. Maybe
in two weeks,
he says. That’s
when I start
vacation.
Picking Blackberries, Circa 1970 / Stan Galloway
After Erin Murphy
never quite enough bowl or bucket, balancing
the last ones like soldiers on a crumbling castle wall
Evergreen, Himalayan, Cascade, Mountain
sweet varieties of childhood, all with thorns
some small, some oblong, some without a shape
we braved the heat of August, proud
of purple fingers earned at seven cents a pound
Untitled / Ava Hu
*
We are pulled by things
we cannot name.
Is it the mind’s nature
to bend bamboo
just enough
so it won’t break?
Do thoughts have sounds?
The beating beneath my jacket,
does that have
a sound too?
We are photographs
of a river in sudden release.
A house made of rising water
before it floods the lungs.
*
If My Mother Met Noah Kahan / Sergiy Pustogarov
she’d probably hate him
just like me.
we’d be smoking weed together
in the backyard
of an old rundown
farmhouse that
we decided to visit
back in the north just
for one week.
we would be intoxicated on
speeches that
hate on the patriarchy,
while we both just keep
trying to climb the ladder ourselves,
questioning whether the world should
know our name.
will we just curse our
future with fame and money?
we would talk about
the north with all we left behind.
little black sheep running away from
the flock,
trying to see if
we could find somewhere
we belong.
and i don’t think we quite have
found that place yet.
happy here
but not truly knowing how
the way of life works.
but today we remember the beauty of
mountains and auburn leaves,
nestled within mountains named after
grandparents we never met. but
we guess that they probably fought
for the racists,
the bigots,
and the colonists.
its still got a quaint charm,
just to run away from.
we chuckle over the church next door.
where our childhood friends will
still walk in on the morrow,
dressed in their suit and ties;
reciting lines
we learned were the only thing that
mattered during childhood here.
but since then we ran
for the hills,
down on the other side of the mountains.
just trying to avoid the
wreckage that has overtaken the towns behind us.
but we still come to visit on nights like this,
telling stories unlike the way our
mothers told us for years.
but my mother won’t meet noah kahan,
his words are just to pure for my company.
but god i miss the northern lights
so i’ll just start over again.
against rot / nat raum
all the stones on my altar are red. this is how little i know
of desire right now, or maybe i know too much of desire
and not enough of the fruits it can bear—they hang low,
close enough to bite if i had the balls. indeed, i’m terrified
to even finger waxed skins, let alone pick seeds from teeth.
the sun doesn’t have to set for me to cast sex spells; hunger
can exist at all hours. i run the highlight reel and fuck off
to bed, afternoon sun-dappled ass in the air. i’m too shy
to invite company, so i have to manifest it. something
is coming. someone is cumming. and i can only see it
when i close my eyes and remember i too am body—
these folds of skin, this limerence, this soft celestial.
No, Okay, I Love You / Daniel Avery Weiss
He's in a bottle—
neck, thin and wily,
uttering stale things to
legs that can't peel
themselves from the
sheets, as corpse-like
as he will be in a
week.
No, his tongue hobbles,
one of the first words
to reject its way back
into his brain of snapped
plastic and burnt rubber.
No, no, no, he breathes,
bubbling up at nurses.
Okay, he confesses the next day,
and I see it as repentance
for his first word back
being fuck you at the
first stirrings of mortality,
a rejection of a rejection
of a rejection of a rejection
of a rejection of
the brain, the way it drags
him into its crevasses
which are really just
bigger hospitals and
myriad memories that
could have happened.
Something weasels past his lips and
I must ask for clarification:
Are you trying to say, “I love you?”
Speaker and poet now enter. We witness
as one his nod, the breathy desperation of
his I love you, witnessed as a
see you tomorrow,
and tomorrow and tomorrow,
as a have a good night,
as a good night,
as night,
as night,
as night,
letter to a straight bro / MK Zariel
the sky was the color of a week-old bruise or
a buffering screen when you stared me down
on the sidewalk, your cacophony of college merch
and offensive slogans as bright as day. you jeer out
casual judgments, vacant glances—your drunk friend
wears something overtly misogynistic—a red logo
on your tee shirt and every tee shirt—like a bloodstain
you wear to prove that vulnerability terrifies you.
i hate that i still wonder what you're thinking
when you stare at me. i will unravel any man who asks me
if i'm a boy or a girl again. i will put off transitioning
solely so i never look like you. i will, realistically,
silently judge your fashion choices and keep walking
and talk shit with my friends and hate that all i can ever do
is file away another data point on how not to be. the sidewalk
was the color of regret and spilled drinks when you stared me down like
a silent curse that ricochets through the air—i walked past, you
continued shouting. nobody shouts anymore, don't you know?
we all learned to shut up because you never did.
April - Poem 25
untitled / Maureen Alsop
First You Grew Up, And Now You’re Leaving Us? / Bob Bradshaw
The doctor pulled you out,
the room blood
and howling cries,
but we hadn’t parted
completely yet…
that would take years.
Even from the start I was like play-doh
in your hands.
Who shaped who,
sweetheart?
But here we are,
and a young man stands
at the altar with you—
ready to kidnap you,
to whisk you away.
Who gave you permission
to grow up, to fall in love?
Was it your Dad?
I’ll never forgive him
for allowing you to walk
away, into what?
A man’s arms? That’s
all it took?
After decades
of my love, my prime years
spent focused
on you?
Men…they do this to us
in the guise of love.
They take from us
what we value most.
And now Dad
insists on the bride’s
first dance? Mom booted
to the sidelines watching…
Is that my place now?
The sidelines?
What am I to do
tomorrow? Pick up
your room?
Dust your old dollhouse?
Oh, to retreat with you
into its rooms again….
The game of love and parenting
was rigged against
mothers long ago.
That young man you married?
He will never love you
as much as I do.
Never.
The Poem and I / Stan Galloway
After Denise Dunahel
My speaker wants to be someone
no generic cloud-embodied voice
the way I wanted to be Tarzan
when I was 12 and reading through an old mirror
not launching myself from branch to bole
but protecting the world from wantonness
and discovering a willing woman in my arms.
At 16 Jessica 6 escaped her false world
into mine, complete with a decrepit government,
finding her renewal, without death,
free will restored and choosing me,
or at 17 torn between the snark of Solo
and the earnestness of Skywalker
and either way embracing the cloud-clad Leia
saving my own universe, inside my head.
I tell the poem I’ve outgrown those adolescences.
The poem laughs, pointing to my college textbooks.
You just learned, the poem says, that Jane and Jessica were really
Daisy Miller and the Wife of Bath when not controlled by
male authors synthesizing life through their own broken lenses
letting characters dance inside an artificial ring.
Lolita was Nabokov’s Leia, but they don’t exist.
Well, Nabokov does, we both agree, the poem and I,
and none of us is whole without our second selves.
Love Poem / Ava Hu
What is the sound of one hand clapping? — Buddhist koan
*
Gateless gate.
The body half
out of the ground.
Shining lantern, mirror.
Coincidence
or an omen?
Proclaim, “Earth
is my witness.”
Sound in the body.
A bell under the skin.
At first, someone
was afraid.
Earth as my witness.
At first, someone
held back.
Earth as my witness.
The object of thought
seeking itself.
Two hands
become one.
*
Diving into Lake Crescent under the Snow Moon / Kirsten Miles
six figures in bathrobes, phantom breath rising
nostrils frosted in the February bite
bare feet stationed on the snowy dock
edge inky lake lapping below
five inaugurate the newest
a deep breath just before you jump
its warm bubble shields the heart
paddle hard as soon as you hit the water
here, stand closest to the ladder
five bodies vanish, plunged into the still dark
I pull the night into my lungs
The lake waits like an open cave
I am the last witness, and now propellant
the leap is a severing
liquid ice breaks around me skin on fire
a sudden concussion of clarity
The ladder rises like a prayer,
and I am leaping up it, back to the dock, back
where we are six seal skins reborn laughing
electric in the milk-glow moon
How to Apologize from a Narcissist / Sergiy Pustogarov
say you’re sorry // but we both know you aren’t.
say you didn’t mean it, // so i shouldn’t be upset.
say you don’t really care // that it hurt me, // or whether i // flinched.
say it’s my fault // these emotions are mine, // not your problem.
tell me to stop placing // my fragile heart in your hands
while you blame me // for what you did.
say you’re sorry, // then turn away.
say that should make me happy, // now you’re wounded.
i must have done something. // it’s never your fault.
how unfair.
say you’re sorry. // you aren’t.
say nothing.
leave.
sonnet for syanna / nat raum
the nightmares form themselves, it seems,
and come alive in graphite on the page.
we have this in common, rhena and i. how
else could i hope to communicate the worst
of it? words may never be enough. i close
my eyes and see every shadow of the night.
faces i do not remember take bites of me,
and i arch my back in pleasure. fantasy worlds
call when awake, glitched-out mythical
creatures or not. all we ever wanted was to be
understood. i haven’t taken a lover in over a year;
the thought disgusts me over half the time. still i’d climb
mutant vines skyward and sigh in the clouds if someone
got close enough bear me, for even a moment.
Shino Haibun/ Daniel Avery Weiss
There are two thousand three hundred and fifty steps to melting him into a sunset, each of which requires having skipped the previous step. There are centuries of bothered potters stifling silicosis so she can surface, each yielding masters who prefer mud over memory. There are fires, little golden things, little golden things that eat the sky, and little golden souls to turn the leftovers into pyrite on porcelain, each of whose bodies froth with envy at stars surrendering themselves to clay. There are ingredients which want you dead, and each must be the other to yelp the tinny spontaneity of the vase in your kitchen. Chance was born and died in this muck. Burn it.
My glaze tiles are wrong.
The porcelain wields
a false orange.
on blocking out / MK Zariel
i know the general outline of who i was: the pulsating sparks
the crushing of fire against velvet, the energy only qualified
by the bounds of time. i know i would have said i didn't have much
to live for, and i know that was a lie, and i know i was held but unseen—
i know the general outline of a constellation of parts, i know the muffled shouts,
i know the difference between bystanding and cold complicity—
i know boundaries like scattered files on the floor, i know the half-whispered
oft-repeated phrases that populate them, i know the feeling of sparks dimming
to accommodate cold touch, cold water, the weight of a body no longer real—
i know the constellation aligning.
April - Poem 24
untitled / Maureen Alsop
My First Great Grandchild / Bob Bradshaw
“Granddad you look so young!"
Ashlyn, six years old, says,
gazing at my photo.
I wasn’t much taller
than a bonsai, I say, spreading
my dusk like canopy.
“How’d you get so old?”
I shrug. “Granddad,
I love that bird’s nest
atop your head.
You look cool! None
of my friends’ grandparents
are as cool as you!”
Could you and your daddy
build a bird feeder,
and hang it on me?
“YES!” and Ashlyn sprints inside
—but when she comes out
she’s a teenager,
wearing a spring dress
and sandals,
and carrying an obsidian
bird feeder. A translucent
water bottle hangs
on one side.
“You look handsome,
Granddad!”
As I’m about to offer her
my last yellow blooms,
her mama calls her in.
Red hummingbird sage
is spiking the air
when Ashlyn returns—
in her twenties,
carrying her first
baby.
They gaze
at our famous
bird feeder—Ashlyn
as optimistic as spring
about their future.
—While winter
slips onto me a soft
white robe
from inside the house
Ashlyn lifts her baby
to the window.
“Look, sweetheart,
snow!”
Day 1,154 / Stan Galloway
Beauty makes no sense in a world / where friends die*
To wake in the night to the shaking of the bed-
room from a new crater in the parking lot
should not be normal
should not be ignored by a compassionate world.
Power out on a sub-freezing night
should be an emergency
not an irrelevant circumstance.
No one talks of Mariupol or Bucha anymore
but bodies still decay there.
Coffee at dawn and roses replaced in the broken window
do not erase the morning’s obituaries.
“Elegy” by Josh Schneyer [Eunoia Revew, 8 Apr. 2026]
Prediction / Ava Hu
*
My pencil drawing
of a small house
built with soft talismans
to bring in the light.
The author writes us
in black and white
lines across rivers
and fields.
Pink sakura blossoms
sweep across the page.
What do we hold
onto from this life to the next?
Does hunger mean
taking everything at once?
The way you let go,
I let go too.
*
BiPoLaR RoCkEt ShIpS / Sergiy Pustogarov
i DoN’t WaNt tO hUrT yOu,
So LeAvE mE a SiGn In ThE sTaRs.
i’Ll SeE iT aS i’M fLyInG bY.
A rOcKeT sHiP iN tHe NiGhT,
tRyInG tO fInD mY rOaDmAp
ThRoUgH cOnStElLaTiOnS,
uNtIl ThEsE rOcKeTs BuRsT aLl ApArT
AnD sUdDeNlY i FaLl DoWn
tO tHe EaRtH.
FoRmInG nEw CaNyOnS
wItH tHe DeBrIs FrOm My CoLlApSe.
I kEeP gOiNg On ThEsE jOuRnEyS,
a NeW oNe EvErY qUaRtEr.
NeW sTaRs I’vE fOuNd,
aNd NaMeD aFtEr ThE sOuLs
WhO i LeAvE bEhInD.
i WiSh I KnEw HoW tO sTaY pLaNtEd;
FuLlY gRoUnD iN eArThS mAgNiFiCeNt CoRe.
bUt DaIlY,
NeW cAlLiNgS.
nEw AdVeNtUrE,
My SoUl WaS nEvEr MeAnT fOr.
oNe DaY iT wIlL aLl SeTtLe DoWn,
ThE eArThS gReEn PaStUrEs
sOoTh My WoRn OuT sOuL.
BuT i HaVeN’t FoUnD tHe RiGhT mEdIcAtIoN fOr ThIs YeT.
self-portrait as a citadel / nat raum
all slabs of formstone and stacked-up
barricades, there is nothing this body
can’t weather. who needs a tower
when you were at once built and taught
to repel the forces of evil? everything
is supposed to be black and white
like this—you’re good or you’re bad.
when you don’t tell the truth, that’s a lie
by omission. there’s a reason no one talks
about what lurks within the city’s walls;
they still want to sleep soundly and say
there’s only splendor here. they don’t tell you
this, but when you build your walls this
high, you’re stuck with what’s inside them.
I Blanked and Forgot the Meaning of Life in the Back Pocket of My Jeans Before Putting Them in the Wash. / Daniel Avery Weiss
O, the glorious Point of it rests in the Hands of
someone I knew for a bit in college, who
teased the absurd wit from the hands of a situation
like a thread from a threadbare
comforter, thereby exposing something abysmal
and, like spilled milk, hilarious.
How very public.
Let’s be frogs, you and I.
on people-pleasing / MK Zariel
the text chain glows like an unwanted spiral, the mood lighting
of your house equally piercing, illuminating a bunch of trash
that you pretend not to see. i try to set a boundary like a human
and i see the no-compute flare behind your eyes
and it is a brick wall. it is a loud obtrusive walk that kicks up dust
and envelops all. it is a buffering window. it is a rerun—
the television flickers in and out in your room, the sound
like a white noise if it were overwhelming. you talk over it,
but pause it when anyone else talks. you get upset
when people anticipate your needs and when they don't.
you write a letter—and i've done this a thousand time over—
and my exhaustion cuts like a blade. it is the specific pallor
of someone who's pulled an all-nighter in the airport
and been yelled at the whole time. it is anarchist infighting.
it is a conversation with a void. it is an attempt to reason with one's cat.
i don't know why you claim to be emotionally intelligent
citing the two theorists you've read, only to develop
a mysterious amnesia for boundaries. you perform an idiocy
that lingers as long as you need it to—and it is the cloying
smirk of a politician. it is a soundbite. it is a problem player
at the d&d table. it is ad copy for nobody. it is the refusal to hear
anything you didn't optimize. you talk about your diet.
i begin thinking that if i dematerialized out of sheer disgust,
i'd lose weight (all of it), and you'd be proud. you talk about
your opinions of people you don't know. i wish i never knew you
never came into your sphere of influence, not close enough
to gossip about. you talk. i break.
April - Poem 23
untitled / Maureen Alsop
The Search / Bob Bradshaw
I’m sitting here,
legs dangling,
from the highest book shelf,
thinking of you
and your cat
El Senor.
Climb down
from the shelf,
my heart advises.
Go out, find someone
just like Ann.
But I could drift
down the Yangtze,
ride a barrel
down Niagara Falls,
drift through Rome,
Florence, Venice...
I could cross
Times Square,
or listen to folk music
in a coffee house
on Bleeker Street,
or scan the crowd
gathering this afternoon
in Washington Square…
What are the odds
of meeting
someone just
like you,
Ann?
She would need
to be your long lost
conjoined twin,
separated
at birth.
She would have to feel
the way I do
about your absence—
wondering
if I will ever
feel whole
again.
Cleaning Crew / Stan Galloway
A jury of turkey buzzards
presides in the old white pine
above the cabin
weighing evidence
sniffing through the rising mist
the smallest twinge of rot
knowing another deer strike on U.S 259
will feast them today.
Before the sun has topped the ridge
they flap up to a thermal and glide
in ragged spirals
down the mountain.
Possession / Ava Hu
*
This sinking boat
possessed by air.
Master of weather.
Keeper of branches.
Snowy thread
as it unwinds.
As far as the sound
of a falling branch.
White-eyed angels. The music
of branches winding into
other branches. Heaven.
White world. This boat of glass.
Who knows the sound
of a branch falling
when no one
is listening?
*
in the high-shouldered glow of May / Kirsten Miles
it appears in a topology of hardwoods, a sixty acre wedge
of forest that still speaks its first language
light filtered through lobes of white and swamp oak
spring fed ripples lined by mountain laurel, native thickets,
undiluted by invading vines, or stilt grass rivulets braid teasing sparkles
between roots and burls rising from gravel bars
in the cup of the fluvial curves
sun-tipped fingers pointing toward
slivers of sky in a secret knot of streams
the Golden Club fires its torches, lining the midstream
amidst banks lined with rare ferns, green ribs waving
a river of their own ephemeral witness,
between asphalt progress, a peninsula of concrete and
dumpsters perched above the mouth of the spring
How hard it is to shield what is quiet.
clinging to the gravel, never wet leaves, roots veined into earth
despite flood or drought refusing to vanish
until the water itself is asked to leave
What Happens with SSRIs, Abuse, and Dreams / Sergiy Pustogarov
she shook my shoulder,
calloused hands wrapping my deltoids so
hard the prints were left on my skin the next morning.
all i could hear was her shouting in my ears:
you belong to me.
you must do what i say.
shut up and sit down.
shocked with fear and perpetual confusion i
stood still.
the floor below me swayed as i questioned
my rights to not sit down.
the boards began to ebb and flow
as i told myself nowhere was safe to seat this hurting body.
the walls began to close around me
as i became closer and closer
to that final decision: i would not sit and
be beaten more.
suddenly i found my voice.
yelled no and made it all stop.
the breath left the room as her lungs
inhaled. shock swept over the
floorboards. the walls jolted in their march to
my toes.
then she marched me out the door , around
the building and through the back of
some murky place she called
the church.
Her piercing cry ripped through
the building as she yelled out
the pastors name
and ordered he come here.
does this child dare have the right to
say that they do not want another
beating
bruising
scarring.
i say they are mine.
i will treat them how i dare.
the pastor bent down his ear,
graciously held my face.
and whispered softly so almost no one could hear.
don’t worry child.
this too shall pass.
your mother doesn’t own your soul.
so i ran away.
from my mother.
and the church.
sonnet for shrike / nat raum
After “The Lesser Evil” by Andrzej Sapkowski
my apologies to blaviken, but renfri vellga
is my problematic fave—who among us,
given the chance to right our own wrongs
the old-fashioned way, wouldn’t slaughter
a village to get to the root of the problem?
solar eclipse be damned, i too would strike
all parties responsible for my misshapen
sense of self. i am not always the hero
in my own story, but so often, the cataclysm.
i won’t defend my fallout, the hollow eyes
of all i meet who plead for mercy. violence
begets violence begets violence—so the circle
spins. i find fault a funny concept, in that
it’s always mine when the fracas is done.
The Train of His Great Midwest / Daniel Avery Weiss
And what is that train I hear?
With a dozen full bodied whistles
and a hundred little passengers,
living each their little lives as they
pass? And do I hear you there,
singing some sallow song?
And what is that window that I see?
And is that you, humming some
Minnesota hymnal praying a
man into a river? Does this
glass you forge hide you from a
mountain you have mourned?
And dear, do I see the ash of a
river’s lavish valleys
sat between your teeth
as a bluebird, and dear,
for whom do you take a bluebird’s life?
Our passenger flying sideways?
And what is this home
to whom you are bound?
Its thousand bricks of clay
dug from a canyon in the meadow of
your soul? And dear, what answers are bore
of the fruits of your travel?
speculate / MK Zariel
recall the day i apologized to you for being trans—
hazy afternoon, social awkwardness, auras crashing
into each other—hazy boundaries, social change, and nobody
but the one individual most likely to accept me.
so in my friendgroup, what are most of the people?
you chide me. so what am i? says the inner voice—
i know, a few moments in, that i had only self-repression
to apologies for, among the weeping decay of the trees
among the people you were before someone tried to define you.
so in the universe, what are most of the people? you say, hoping
that bias passes like a 2010s trend long forgotten—we'll outlive them
at least long enough to learn who we are without them.
April - Poem 22
untitled / Maureen Alsop
My Perfect Reader / Bob Bradshaw
What would she be like?
I’d settle for one reader,
much like I would
for one umbrella
during a downpour.
I’d also want my reader
to be beautiful,
and tall.
But not so tall
her face is veiled by clouds…
a reader whose height
requires me
to reach her
by climbing
a firetruck’s ladder,
wobbling
on the top rung
as I read my latest poem,
the wind riffling
its pages.
No, I want a reader
like an Audrey Hepburn
searching for a stray cat—
a poet—
in the rain
in an alley.
I wouldn’t mind getting wet
if I could be clutched
to Audrey’s
chest!
Desert / Stan Galloway
The lone and level sands stretch far away*
I thought we had built something wunderbar
explored new landscapes
airports
foods
laughed long into the night
over the word funicular
defended each other’s
dignity
reputation –
until you said you had to go it alone
and promptly found someone else journey with
leaving me looking at the ruins.
* “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Book of Breathing / Ava Hu
*
Your mind
is a river.
Death, a field
of offerings.
If the weight
of your heart
is lighter
than a feather
pass through
the serpent gate.
Remove your gold rings
and bangles.
Remove the crown
from your brow.
Stop thought.
Stop breath.
Set the heart
under the left arm.
The book of breathing
inside your chest.
Become the form
you desire.
Your mind
is a river.
We are the last
two lines.
*
Warhol In the Bungalow / Sergiy Pustogarov
we paste posters of Andy Warhol
above our beds
And collect newspapers each morning
To pulp into paper mache
Adorning the cracks along the wall next to Andy
Hoping the slopping scraps of paper
Will cover enough peeling paint
To woo the next humble lover
Into our bed
as we touch their bodies
We hope to grasp their memories
Pulling them out with each kiss
So we may learn
What the past was like
We are seeking siblings
Family
And hope
In this crazy chase we have told
Ourselves is just for love
After fucking
We snort a line of cocaine
Off each others insolent pecs
Gasping for air between each set of fitful coughing
Completely ignorant as to
The rules of doing drugs
In the middle of a studio apartment
On the 115 floor in New York City
But somehow we made this
Altar a place
To collect the past
Like little marionettes
Coming for the stroking of a dick
And leaving as a scholar
A bungalow in NYC
A museum of the past
And portal to the future
Mixing drugs and sweat
Cum and with scraps of margines
Together we march on
Together we are the city
abundance finds me / nat raum
in money, yes, but also in love, that spiteful force
which eludes me still, not for lack of flip-turns
in stomach and quickening heartbeats—i have always
been able to allow myself to fall, but the problem
is in the plummet, the hurtling, the things i yell
when control leaves my body: fuck you i hate you you’re scum
and no one believes i don’t mean it and who could
blame them, when venom makes up the meat of the anger
behind my voice, when i fear the affixion of too much, not enough,
or both in tandem, when he asks for goldilocks’ porridge
and i bring back big bad wolf—extra fangs, hold
the patience—and maybe i don’t want abundance
after all, i just need to know there is a holding room
somewhere for all of this feeling.
Sickness Insomnia / Daniel Avery Weiss
A number of things:
The life inside
A series of malfeasances
By an immune system
Cells
Progenitors
How a virus looks like a typo
How sickness includes
My nose
A sneeze
A hundred slumbering explosions
Awaken
i'll do it later / MK Zariel
it could be my last night on earth and i'd still spend it
procrastinating. the tasks pile on like weeds on
a suburban crank's monoculture lawn. the numbers
are slightly scary. i have been type A for a long time
witness my shrug when someone asks me
if i need to take a break. we live in a world in which
being a good student means exhausting yourself,
then rebel against it and decide that being a good anarchist
means exhausting yourself with a smile—that being
an anarchist at all means forfeiting one's ability
to delegate. my friend tells me that, after thirty years
of organizing, she's only now learned that she
can tell other people to do things. i hate that i can relate.
i have been left-wing since middle school and a people-pleaser
since conception. i think i came out not crying but instead saying
no, really, anything is fine. it could be my last night on earth
and i still won't answer my freaking email. somehow i think
this is cosmic confirmation that i'm a bad person. even as
a practicing Discordian, i can't seem to let go of the moralistic
preaching that seems to have all of humanity in a polite chokehold.
i could unlearn that, but it would be a task. i could take a deep breath,
but it would be a task. i could procrastinate, and i could die,
and i could live.
April - Poem 21
untitled / Maureen Alsop
The Life Of A Failed Poet / Bob Bradshaw
“Poets write about misery,”
my friend said.
He appraised me
with his sad eyes.
"You’re a failure.
Happiness
doesn’t look good
on a poet’s resume.
You need more Trochees,
Dactyls in your life--
preferably
starting at the beginning
of your lines
the way Misery
must begin each day
of your life.
You’re plagued
with the Anapest,
making your poems
and your life too
lighthearted.
Not to mention
outbursts
of Spondees
when your team homers.”
And not to mention,
I add, at night
in bed with my wife!
OH, MAN!
He goes on. “All of us have rage
living quietly in us
like bullets
within a revolver’s
cylinder.
Just pull the trigger!”
Seeing me smile
my friend shakes his head.
“You’re incorrigible.
Name one good poet
who’s as happy as you!”
What should I do? I ask,
desperate to be miserable.
He shook his head,
before striding quickly off.
“Stick to limericks.”
Meriem’s Lion Song* / Stan Galloway
to her doll, Geeka
Yesterday hunters carried in a dead lion.
It smelled quite dead.
No more will he slink silently on unsuspecting prey.
No more will his great head and dark-maned shoulders
strike terror in the grass eaters drinking at the pool.
No more will his roar thunder the earth.
The lion is quite dead.
When they brought his body into the village they beat it
with their feet and the butts of spears
making sounds like a ripened melon with the carcass
but the lion didn’t mind.
He did not feel the blows, for he was dead.
When I am dead, Geeka, neither shall I feel the blows.
Then I will be happy.
*borrowed and adapted from The Son of Tarzan, chapter 5, by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Ordinary, extraordinary / Ava Hu
*
Scent of summer rain
on the river. What
we take we will remember,
secret notes on a secret river,
memory as long as the wind.
What’s yours is mine,
what I remember I forget,
the way your name sounds:
bells in the churchyard,
the fresh-faced wind.
What’s yours is mine.
Everything we are:
tiny spaces between the stars.
Collisions. Blind negotiations.
We are invisible incantations.
The clamour of the river’s
slow dance
to the sea.
*
black sun / nat raum
“Black Sun is a reference to a certain eclipse, better known in the context of the Curse of the Black Sun, or Mania of Mad Eltibald. It was a prophecy made by the mage Eltibald that foretold the end of the human civilization in the hands of sixty girls born during or after a certain eclipse … It might be that the Curse became a self-fulfilling prophecy, for some of the girls who managed to flee [their] persecution later inflicted cruelty on others because of the treatment they had suffered.”
—The Official Witcher Wiki
what else could it be? the moon walked
in front of an oversized star, cast its permanent
shadow over my body. i emerged in the dark
and thought surely this must be as bright as it gets.
any brighter and it would sear, i convince
myself, and prophecy agrees—i am fated
to rend all i hold dear with my own two hands.
claustrophobic as i am, you have to believe me
when i say i’d gladly be hogtied if it stopped
the destruction of which i’m capable. my grasp
is always too hefty, too firm to gently cup a moth
i’m too chicken to let go anyway. i’ve gone and grown
attached again. divination points toward the clock.
i know what half-lives are, have felt gold degrade
in real time before. the end of you and i is no different.
it’s because i was made like this that i drive lovers
away. it’s because those lovers ran that i’m bricked further
into the holding cell of my own overreactions. clip
my tongue and watch what happens—i will still find a way
to break things anyway. and you should know: the eclipse
will take your eyes if you look directly into that corona.
Clear-cut Forest / Daniel Avery Weiss
Shreds of dank wood.
Greenbrier thorns
stab at my feet.
for the wreckage / MK Zariel
there are better days to come says a teenagerly scrawl
on a decidedly abandoned dumpster. can confirm, although the bar
is on the floor. the air is heavy with repressed emotions
and the aftermath of severe weather—it's hard to tell which—
the subreddits aching with ambient climate anxiety
and people wondering where to belong. i make a little idle
small talk with someone growing aggressive by the second,
edge away, make an excuse, come up with something
believable, if not fully true. leave, rejoin, walk away—
protect trans kids says every sticker on a decidedly
overwrought lamppost. i don't know if i need protection
anymore. maybe i just need a break. i drift through a room
avoiding interaction solely because all the cis people
seem to know each other. the gender binary is nature's
AI slop—self-replicating, impossible to distinguish
from anything real.
April - Poem 20
untitled / Maureen Alsop
Oh, That Merseybeat! / Bob Bradshaw
How Am I?
Old age is good. I don't miss
the tropical heat waves
of menopause.
Still, there’s the fear
of falling, breaking a hip.
And my pacemaker
can’t keep as good a beat
as I had in 1963.
Gerry & the Pacemakers
were my favorite band!
How Do You Do It?
#1 on the charts!
Oh god, Rory
And The Hurricanes!
Rory's pummeling rhythms
like good sex!
Remember
The Cavern Stomp?
The floor so cramped
all we could do
was hold
hands
--and hunch forward,
lean back,
shift our feet
--maybe share a cigarette,
and who knew,
with the right song?
the right band?
the kisses would be flying
nearly as quickly
as the rapid
drumbeats!
To Know Me / Stan Galloway
my civilization . . . does not go deeper than my clothes*
one hundred and eleven neckties
at the end of a career
but not a single suit that fits –
clothes have never made the man
just costumed him
created a predictable façade.
to know me is
to see beneath the shirt
to feel the sweat of digging on a summer day
to smell the garlic coming through my pores
to hear integrity in the timbre of my words
to taste truth in my thoughts
and understand me bare –
vulnerable in trusting you.
*Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Return of Tarzan
Love Poem / Ava Hu
*
We move through space.
Seers and prophets
summoned by the explosion
of dust and heat.
The unseen
becomes seen:
dawn, stream, current,
the many-tailed surge.
We move through space
between forms.
Folded current, your heart,
the lines between birches
unfasten
in weather and wind,
until the world
enters your mouth.
*
On returning from Birdsong Nature Preserve / Kirsten Miles
The live oaks canopy their knotted limbs
arching ghost lace tree tunnels
Spanish moss feathering evening light
tiny scales raised to catch any breeze
mouths open in pursuit of the humid Gulf breath
April is the month of rising sap
the lush green fur, resurrection ferns
that ride the tops of fat oak branches
are a scorched rust, a brittle curled skin
Now moss and fern and tree wait with a holy
patience in the long kiln, one thickening of clouds
lowering down in shower, a sudden voltaic green
meeting the rising mist of the road
we are waiting for the sky
to remember its only job
Do n Yo ur Sh oes No w Part 1 / Sergiy Pustogarov
b r o k e n
d o o r
f r a m e s
s c a t t e r e d
a l o n g
a
r o c k I n g
h a l l w a y
I t ’ s
b l a c k n e s s
n e v e r
f u l l y
I l l u m i n a t e d
e x c e p t
f o r
t h e
f l I c k e r i n g
s o l e
l a m p
a t
t h e
e n d
o f
t h I s
e x p a n s e
t h e
s w a y
o f
t h e
f l o o r
s t o p p I n g
u s
b e f o r e
w e
r e a c h
e a c h
w I n d o w
t o
s t a r e
o u t
a t
t h e
h I s t o r y
w e
k e e p
s e e k I n g
a l o n g
e a c h
n e w
e n t r a n c e
s o m e h o w
w e
k n o w
t h a t
s I l e n c e
c o m e s
f a s t e r
t h a n
u s
w h e n
w e
f o l l o w
a l o n g
e a c h
n e w
d o o r
g r a b b I n g
t h e
h a n d
o f
a n o t h e r
j u s t
a s
t h e y
s l I p
p a s t
t h e
t h r e s h o l d
l o s t
I n t o
a n o t h e r
a b y s s
chasing the high of hydroplaning / nat raum
i actually am interested in seeing
god, thank you—sweet nothings
and deistic comparisons from lovers
don’t do it for me anymore. i take
my dirty martinis the same way i was
bottle-fed my kinks—vulgar. olives
are best served from a jar, brine ice-
cold. now twist the dial to the right.
i need to be a little terrified to feel
sane. when the sun shines, i smoke
my joints in twos like cigarettes.
and when it rains, i slip and slide
across a wet carpet of cherry
blossom petals on pavement.
Des Plaines River Flood / Daniel Avery Weiss
Water laps at my feet.
The riverbank obliterated.
Scores—
armies
of oaks
rise from the surface, petrified.
There is no swamp here,
and the trees, they
cannot swim. A squirrel
dances through
its last breaths.
supportive rival / MK Zariel
April - Poem 19
untitled / Maureen Alsop
A natural antifreeze, the body thaws, and I practiced small noises at the beginning. A room I
remember. Dawn’s false polish is a crutch. The thing I miss will not be this spell. The singing
trees? Maybe. The turn in my body, most definitely.
The moment the pasture mends, the complaint moves separate from the practice of oxygen.
Practice Amnesty, my mother feels in the water A sugar, a crack in the mouth happier than
embarrassment. Because I am here.
Personal Time / Bob Bradshaw
After sex
you quickly turn
to your cell phone,
and its glow.
You study its screen
as if it were a translucent
crystal ball,
our future just
out of focus.
Entering your life
proved as easy
as slipping
an obsidian engagement ring
onto your finger.
Babe, remember the beach,
our lives lived in sandals--
how we cuddled
in the dusk
under the pier?
Do you recall…
“Not now, I’m watching
a podcast.”
Your phone’s screen
fills with fake snow flakes,
adrift in the air
with the notes
from a Bing
Crosby song.
I’m forgotten, a chore
checked off.
Should I ask for more
personal time
for Christmas?
You laugh at your screen.
Remember when we used
to laugh together?
Magnum Opus / Ava Hu
Sun inside sun.
Water tangled inside water.
Magnum opus
as chaos among branches,
heaven to earth,
earth to body.
What conceives itself
also gives birth:
milk of nebula, salt
of the philosopher’s stone,
mercury, dew, fog,
the Holy Spirit rising.
Elemental as stars
on your eyelids
squeezed closed
tight.
The primitive answer:
go towards it,
everything that reaches for you,
everything that carries the light.
Merlin finds a blue-gray gnatcatcher / Kirsten Miles
concealed behind a post oak leaf
copy-catting bird
calls into her song (a true poet)
tail flicks spiders off branches
a cornucopia in the canopy
we feeder our birds
(away from mirrored windows)
goldfinch cardinal titmouse wren
the usuals curate
our morning reading
hold our phones up
to the moss veiled canopy
presses the mic
red-eyed vireo materializes
into my palm
her breeze-silked question
downslur tone slips
a tiny symphony in
her upswing note
livens our day
ovenbird’s s t a c c a t o b u r s t
peppers the soundscape
a cacophonic mask
(my father’s hearing aid rings)
merlin catches the worm-
eating warbler’s tri i i ll
under a phalanx
of white oak leaves
entire worlds
live in the canopy
audible and unseen
we press end recording
filing away the liquid gold of the wood thrush
(check the morning list
who remains)
left-justified images
pin each liquid tone
infinitely on recall
library of avatars
behind glass
forest abridged
One Foot in Front of This Body / Sergiy Pustogarov
one foot
placed parallel
to the cracks in the floorboards
the other waits,
perpendicular,
refusing alignment
a chandelier
hangs from the ceiling,
its arms stretched out
as walkways
for the insects all around.
they crawl their thin devotion
along glass and wire,
marching toward flight.
taking wing,
they cross the room,
land on my foot,
and i follow them,
one foot in front of this body.
sonnet for voegesite and exfoliants / nat raum
i like luxurious things. my standards
are low—this means lavender incense,
steam shower, terpinolene in bloodstream.
i wouldn’t know what to do with a porsche.
i cannot place it on my altar to manifest
the rapid demise of capitalism. instead
i suck sediment from overripe pores,
dissolve my dead skin cells with foam
and my bad dreams with the stone
of innocence. i reverse the ten of swords
and poke each person who has hurt me,
just as a warning—betrayal releases itself
in the presence of deployed spines. i am
still my own best defense in that regard.
Poem Composed of Words My Opponent Used to Defeat Me in Words With Friends in Alphabetical Order (a Pseudoabecedarian) / Daniel Avery Weiss
Airy and approximate, my eyes sample
blame as a screen declares, THEY WON!
Drat! I don’t say. These days, I sip blue light like a sad martini.
Ex post facto failure. My phone's wretched
gown of a phone case unusually physical in the moment,
its allure purring somewhere in my nervous system.
Jai! something yells. Something, something, something one
li away from someone. I am here to
outrun a thing that mothholes your digital soul.
Quai positioned to import words of no import, a
res hall comes to mind, fruitful nonsense and
runes dotting the walls. But these dreams, these sweet
veils part themselves to me only after one unskippable ad—
whup the white farmers’ flawless green landscape, harvest
wonky neon wheat that dots plaid picket fence paradise!
Zee. What a silly letter to declare itself and win
deciding / MK Zariel
the internet ripples with unexamined labels
used and discarded like clothing—being transmasculine
and butch, i have to admit that anyone who dates me
by definition is gay—and straight. i long for a discrete
category sometimes, to be gay like a historical figure
like an archival portrait, like one of those fucking losers
in the Mattachine Society, who i owe my current survival to
yet still find kind of sexist. it's funny how that works.
queer history gives us the tools to dismantle it, yet we remain
somewhat lacking in self-awareness. the anarchist infighting of
the 1920s repeats itself today, just with shorter speeches
and less of Emma Goldman being obviously closeted. we still don't know
how to plan a meeting without driving one another up the wall
and we still don't quite know whether we're gay or straight
or both at once. i don't know if i necessarily care. if someone's
Midwestern relatives would call me a slur, i'm probably gay—
and i hate that this matters so much to everyone else.
April - Poem 18
untitled / Maureen Alsop
I came from the place of fire I wrote don’t write, invent complaint. People stopped leaving me. People came day in day out to find praise which was better than everything I’d been used to giving. In the hibiscus season, people wore the noise outside my head. Harder I said I said where is the leader now. I was eager for every wish. I was parts of the wish and far pushed to become it.
Wu Wei / Bob Bradshaw
I loved my ’61 beetle.
I could hear in its chugging
four cylinder engine
its steady advice:
"Just keep going.
Keep going”.
Driving along Big Sur
I saw the sea
for the first time—
its arms spread out
as if saying “Take it
all in…”
Like a red-winged blackbird
I wear my heart
on my sleeve.
Yet I know the wisdom
of letting go—
like the coast’s cypress,
the storm’s winds
surfing through it…
“Go with the flow,”
a friend advised.
“The future’s like
your beetle, without
a gas gauge
or even a way
to know how far to go.
You're a poet.
Trust your gut.
Wherever it leads.”
That sounded Zen,
advice the Kerouac in me
wanted to hear.
Years later,
my heart’s mileage
piling up, I travel
the off roads mostly,
tapping along to music
on the radio, as happy
to be singing alone
as I would be if Bob Marley
and the Wailers
were bouncing along
in my back seat
jammin’…
One and Two / Stan Galloway
Alone contains the word one, not two
As do abandoned and lonely
One is found in stone and bone
Things hardened against abrasion
Together sounds like two from the start
Connection as in network and trustworthy
Two become artwork and understood
Soft, alive, empowered, too.
Water Walker / Ava Hu
*
Moon crosses water.
High winds, witchcraft,
the rising of waves.
Walk on water water.
Water whose devotion
knows no end.
Speaking water,
shivering water,
water with many mouths.
Do you lift
the feet of the god?
Do we live in salt?
Can we walk on water?
*
Driving his Bluejay to Tallahassee / Kirsten Miles
into the sultry southern air this car
the same deep, ink-wash blue of that
Volkswagon hatchback that carried us through
the seventies when we were young and invulnerable.
the AC is a ghost, and the air is a riot of wild ginger
honeysuckle, a spicy, blooming that fills me
I describe it when he calls, erasing for a minute that
metallic scent of his hospital room, all the wires
he is finding his footing again
a stubborn rally in the heart of the storm
the machines losing their argument with his will.
I am steering our memories toward the celebration
the Bluejay humming a low, steady prayer
this feels less like a goodbye
and more like a reunion
as my father’s stubborn pursuit of life
which introduced us accompanies me
I lean into the curve, breathing easy in the petaled air,
driving through the scent of everything that’s still alive.
On the 25 / Sergiy Pustogarov
quarter
century
flip
it on its side
roll
it round
the table
guess
which side
comes up
first
lucky
poor
never
know
which
one you get
till
all the fate
is told
heads
or
tales
never tell
their
truth
till halfway
through
the game
life
never shares
its secrets
till halfway
through
its thrall
guess
i’ll be back
at fifty
tell yall
which one
made
it better
heads or tales
coping mechanisms / nat raum
my body finds the concept of recoil to be an afterthought.
i am not immune from being the problem—after all, ask
for impossible things, get incomprehensible results.
i could still stand to move a mountain or two, terraform
my shrinking territory into something easier to traverse,
hazardless. sometimes i think i have sculpted enough
for a lifetime; sometimes i see only progress ahead,
jagged dead pines studding craggy peaks, deep rapids
which swallow those brave enough to dare. looking
behind me is carnage, ahead still a void. and i still
discover bruises of my own, say where did this come from?
and shove my thumb into the center of gruesome
purple blemishes—i have to test the pain, push myself
to every one of its edges. i am as pink inside as outside,
as soft as i always have been. it’s all relative. the present
finds me identifying five things i can see,
four things i can hear.
Sonnet of Marmalade Chicago / Daniel Avery Weiss
I yearned to eat the yellow as a child.
A skyline yawning wide with sulfur wings.
A hundred late night lemon lives alive
in looming towers. Children teethe on each
and every planet in their path—the men
in suits and oath that yesterday looks like
today. Stupidity is just a thing
that carves a face from light pollution. Street
lights can digest a city whole into
a snowbank now—the gnarled limbs that gave
this here its somber glow, which so gave name
to clouds and nights, are now a mess of LED.
And what am I allowed to do but lie
awake and mourn the orange in my head.
(personal) growth / MK Zariel
social awkwardness is not a knife; it is a dull ache
deep in the marrow of my bones. i get annoyed
and yet don't notice for a solid month—don't notice
until i'm already venting, brittle truth and honeyed lies mingling
to form something still easy to ignore. i try to paraphrase
to explain with the utmost accuracy—by then you've walked away
you've cast off understanding like the layers
you shed in the early days of summer. i try to apologize,
i watch my cat chew a plastic plant, i find it somehow relatable.
i used to long for destruction and now am almost
content with artifice. i read a thinkpiece, set a boundary,
stop exaggerating, start crashing, watch my cat chew
a living plant, and hope to grow toward the sun one day
without claw marks holding me down—the greenery here
is full of perfect little monocultures, attempts at normalcy
i learn to avert my eyes like a desperate soul
with a seasonal allergy. social awkwardness is a pesticide
and so is the fear of not being believed. with it in the air i grow
twisted, toxic. i am a violet wilting at the center, queercoded
even in decay. will you walk through this field of poisoned lavender
and find it sweet despite yourself? i am a plastic plant
currently being eating by a determined feline with a grudge
failing at boundaries and not quite sturdy enough
to avoid a collapse.
April - Poem 17
The Bridge contd/ Maureen Alsop
Bleak sun
Born sun
Subdued sun
Warrior sun
Smut mouth sun
Ancient sun’s spiel
Victory sun
Lost sun
Resistant sun
Spike sun
Sidewinder sun
Stereoscopic sun
Consummate sununfolding sun
Gambled sun of a thousand garbled dreams
I am taking the perched sun, the perfection of illumination
Ploughed sun
Shared sun
Late sun and evoked
Lofty journal documented sun, expressionist, realist, symbolic
Apple blossom sun-grenade
Blinkered sun blind
King Kong…Writing From New York / Bob Bradshaw
After my fall
I’ve lived a quiet life
in an artist’s attic
growing orchids.
From the roof I can see
the spire of the Empire
State Building.
How grateful I am
that before I plunged
to the ground
I managed
to set Ann down as gently
as I would an orchid
on a ledge.
Old, I keep in shape.
Every day I go down
in my Adidas sneakers
to the basement gym
to lift weights.
Done, I throw a barbell down,
the floor jolting.
Recalling Ann
still leaves me shaken.
I ease my way
to the spa,
the heated water jets
meant to nurse my pride—
my loneliness
a weight too great
to be lifted.
Ann’s strong hold on me
refuses to let go.
How can I forget how
at first Ann swooned
like a cut flower
when she’d see me?
I couldn’t help myself.
I stared back,
feeling the way a gardener
must feel getting
an exotic cutting
from the other side of the world
holding it
—loving it—in his palm
for the first time.
Don’t orchids
thrive everywhere today,
in Europe, the Americas,
Skull Island?
Their gauzy
delicateness
belies them.
Hardy, robust
as gorillas. More so.
We can’t live anywhere.
Beauty can.
After the Breakup / Stan Galloway
Lachrymose has nothing to do with lactose.
It’s closer to lacerate or just plain lack.
Those words might bring a boy to tears:
salty percolation of grief through the eyes
heartsick blood through tissue
the hollow where you used to be, unfilled.
Comet / Ava Hu
*
What is the sound
a comet makes?
Forces of nature
we can't control:
the moon wired your heart,
planets enter each other’s dark.
The theory of everything
pulls inward
to the size of a hand
closing around an apple.
*
Wine Corks in the Trash / Sergiy Pustogarov
Cabernet,
Next to sparkling rose.
The corks lying in a cupboard.
Give me yours,
And I’ll add it to the jar.
Each floating wooden block
Disappearing as soon as I drop it in the glass bowl.
Where did these go?
A secret I held
Between my fingertips
for just two seconds.
Pick up the trash off the floor.
Gather up the papers.
Stack them in piles on the table.
A thousand moments thrown down.
Grasping at straws
To make them into piles,
Neat and collected
For the future mind to see.
Wonder where the trash will go now.
Out the back door
To another man’s home.
He gathers, digging,
Searching for some refuse
Just to make his home warm at night.
I cast it out
And all along
It was gold for another man.
A secret I let go of,
Dripping through my hand
To hit the ground outside.
And now it’s watering the earth of another.
there is a goddess / nat raum
and she has bpd. be honest.
ebbs and flows are natural—
earthquakes and cyclones, too.
i know we want order by design,
but what of chaos, her switch
backs in roads already winding?
something unpredictable awaits.
Two Tables Over at the Diner / Daniel Avery Weiss
I puncture the yolk, and a flurry of feathers comes
flooding the air.
Why do you think Jews move to Israel? Israel [inaudible].
Rye bread swinging seductive swirls of brown
and hurricane gray.
Hitler wanted us to be more white, now it's [inaudible].
My partner orders milk. I must confess I saw
the cow in the corner of the room.
You know, in 20 years the Dems are expected [inaudible]? It's scary.
The cook presses down, hard, and his flesh, fresh
from the deli, stirs in hissing plumes of smoke.
Have you seen the protests on the college campuses? The universities [inaudible].
It began to hail outside.
Windows that never crack.
“Can you do me a favor? I think you're depressed.” I'm not depressed, it's
just depressing. I'm not like that. I got two kids.
If they moved to Israel, I'd follow them.
“I know, but [inaudible].”
The cashier takes our cash and skewers
a copy of the receipt on a small metal pole. Flight from the premises.
falling behind / MK Zariel
you talk to your cat like a person & stay
in one of two or three places, so at peace with your
surroundings as to seem anxious to anyone
who doesn’t know you well. you talk to me like a person
too (or maybe that’s just how you relate), casual admissions
laced with nothing but good humor & unspoken pasts
you don’t talk about your feelings. your D&D characters
are exclusively loud, rude jerks. sometimes i wonder if that’s
your shadow self, if you enjoy the way that apathy
lets you take up a little space, show a little anger,
be a little real. sometimes you move like you’ve never
been told to make yourself small, yet you do it anyway—
are you scarred or just polite? closeted or just
certain that the ritual of transition is beneath you?
i never understood people who responded to my coming out
with we like you anyway—as if my existence
is cause for a referendum—you instead fill the void
with strangers’; assumptions and ignored stares—
you are, by all objective measures, cool. i don’t know
what that makes me, too earnest or similtaneously
too gay and not gay enough at the same time. it’s funny
how that’s always the problem. sometimes i dream of a world
where your peace extends a little further.
April - Poem 16
The Bridge contd/ Maureen Alsop
Hyperbolic unable to stick the lens to the sky sun
Pitter patter sun
We love Whitman forever stand in his shade and weep sun
Blanket: sun
One done and done sun
Dun-colored sun, of course
Morphed sun or morphological sun or morphine sun
Where is the
Rehearsed sun
Preplanned pancreatic sun
Death star of Dionysus
Need I say it
Mute sun
Injured sun
Rapture sun of nosebleed
Nose to the sun
Spaceship view of
Performative sun
Generational sun
Eliot’s Gerontion sun, a depraved sun, for sure, with many other features
Generous sun, give me some foxglove
Traditional sun
Liberated sun
Paper-mache sun, what earth is this?
Sunday sundae sun
Distrustful loathsome lover sun
Triangular sun (at dusk)
Subdued sun
Haloed hallowed held
Multitudinous sun
Awash with
Dribbling diminished dementia disordered sun of contagion & hysteria
A bloke’s sun
Old-mate-sun
Misguided sun
Bay sun
King Kong / Bob Bradshaw
What was Kong thinking
as he carried off Ann?
He gazed down
at her as tenderly
as if she were Skull Island's
first orchid.
Ann screamed,
and kept fainting
as if the steam and clouds
of the jungle island
were chloroform fumes.
Did Kong think opposites
would eventually attract?
What were his plans?
"The Eighth Wonder of the World!"
Kong became the biggest star
in The Big Apple.
How I cheered
when he broke loose,
his chains shaken off
like party streamers.
I knew it would turn out badly
when he kidnapped Ann,
climbing the Empire State building
the way any ape
takes to the treetops
when threatened.
What was his plan,
to live forever with Ann
in the world's tallest tree house?
What did Kong know of Helldivers,
their bullets swarming him
like bees from a broken hive?
We gathered around him as he lay
in the street.
Was Kong just another romantic
who could never
think things through,
just another fella
who had fallen for a girl?
Or like many of us, was Kong more,
a creature unable to adapt
in a fast changing planet,
Ann Darrow like the old ways,
something he could never
cling to forever?
How It Ends / Stan Galloway
The ring lies on the shelf
the dust of disconnection
deflecting sun
a dark circle that once meant
what?
Can you promise yourself until death
when you wake up to the dawning awareness
that the one you’ve given your life to
no longer thinks of you?
Intimacy devolved into indifference
emotional eviction long before awareness
love like rose petals fallen from an old bouquet
unswept in an empty room.
Honey Guide / Ava Hu
*
We drift
to and fro in a boat.
Topography of what
we mean to say:
the lines of mountains
pull to a thread at dusk.
Put your hand over the side
of the boat.
The spotted honeyguide
leads us to the hive
hoping we destroy it
so he can eat what we leave behind.
*
Spring on west 11th street / Kirsten Miles
pink peony snouts are breaching ground in the verge
love-in-a-mist throws delicate green tangles
amidst the California poppies rising from
western cedar mulch I shoveled over the grass
my contribution to lawn replacement now
a thoroughfare delighting neighborhood dog
walkers, threading through the bleach-bright driftwood
tall iris spears, donated rhododendron, silvery artichoke
last summer the lupines stacked their star shaped leaf clusters
thick purple buds tightly tiered in colorful spires
the neighborhood held its breath, or at least I did, anticipation
drawing me out each morning with the dawn
today nine deer, those local demi-gods, carefully dismantle each
new shoot, pulled from the ground and laid neatly to rest
Hour Glass Crystals / Sergiy Pustogarov
she sat at the desk,
heard the scrape of the wooden chair
along the creaking floor,
and turned the hourglass on its side--
peering as the sand crystals
pulled by an invisible force
fell to their opposing ends,
and the clock stopped ticking.
here she said,
“i can remember this moment--
when times stands frozen,
as the moments are no more.
this is where love is born,
when power knows no greed,
and brutality cannot steal from being--
for nothing is yet to be born nor die.”
but as she sat there, she heard the rush of oceans
from inside a simple ball of glass;
and knew that even then
the waters were calling back for their power.
gravity began reaching out her arms
to claim back the sands of time.
for existence, if ever frozen
loses hope for the tide to come tomorrow.
social transition (non-transgender version) / nat raum
here i am mixing beer with lemonade and saying
i’m a failson, job a rapidly moving target. tax day
said you didn’t need that body, right? those organs
so shiny and unharvested, those legs you wish you could
cut off anyway? i shove the feeling down and ask
table twenty-two if they want more bread to soak
up their piquillo pepper sauce. i am impermanent
and impotent at once; i don’t know where to keep
putting all of these skeletons i am amassing. what
i want to know is how can you hear i’m a hurricane,
say no, i love you for the precise curvature of your eyewall,
the power behind the winds, then back away when you see
the true strength of the storm? you promised
an exorcism and delivered another dent in the armor.
what, you thought this was the only time i’ve wrestled
my demons and lost? you don’t even know my full name.
Post op for cataract and the azalea / Daniel Avery Weiss
After a distant friend’s social media post
Broken pinky and the rosebush.
Intravenous immunoglobulin and the tulip.
Bomb and the forget-me-nots.
Names on my cast and the dandelions.
Gutted house and the magnolia.
Thigh fracture and the begonia.
2nd degree burn and my basil.
Tape over needle in hand and the foxglove.
Post-regret scar and the lavender.
Eighteen stitches removed and the marigolds.
COVID test and the water lilies.
Our bodies die and dill.
self-portrait as my cat / MK Zariel
i’ll make a small tortured sound anytime someone
leaves the house and i don’t know why—desperate
for community, for something to cling to
i’ll knock something over and it will be loud
and immaterial. people are used to me
by now. every stranger i meet talks about me
like i’m not here. i scratch the couch
and it doesn’t respond. i scratch the wall
and leave a mark like graffiti like an endearing
story to be told online. i am a meme template
i am suspicious of most food i am in need
of attention and also want to be left alone
i could chew on this. i can’t quite manage to fall over.
April - Poem 15
The Bridge contd/ Maureen Alsop
In the grass, the sun a beleaguered invocation—
Blank sun virtual sun simulated flame
Crude sun
Erudite sun
Native sun
Static sun
Since brightness. Your body is live.
Baedeker sun
Bastard sun
Another sez so sun
Then there is the blind wayward sun
When Did Old Age Arrive / Bob Bradshaw
Old age shuffles into my life
with wide box shoes.
Large print books
more and more arrive
from the library.
I thought losing my youth
would be okay.
But here I am,
mysterious bruises
on my hands.
I bruise as easily
as I once flirted,
as if it came
naturally.
And my hair?
It's like a white powder wig
Mozart would wear
—and Ben Franklin
before he chucked his.
Oh, if only I could discard
old age as easily
as Ben dispatched
his white hair!
Shouldn’t I have been warned
of old age’s approach?
Where was the alert
in big fonts on my laptop?
Who will address
this egregious,
this unforgivable error?
Who will fix this problem
of old age? Who
will make things
right again?
Cats Online / Stan Galloway
Why is half my Insta feed composed of cats?
Cats climbing
jumping
slapping
tunneling
pin ball
ing
opening doors
investigating paper bags
impersonating owners’ voices
or giving form to AI witchery
singing on American Idol
making pizza
pancakes
pierogies
Whatever happened to the cat
who ventured
from the deck
into 90 centimeters
of snow?
At least online
I have no mess to clean.
Infidel / Ava Hu
*
Infidel, my heretic,
beautiful bleeding
canyon, your hands,
gloss of blackbirds,
your hands, the lean
of saguaro,
the pink disappearing
Flower Moon,
collision, violet mountains,
the light changes so quickly
it’s hard to hold
the language
of birds
come morning.
*
mapping a brown eared bat in Tom’s Cave / Kirsten Miles
the mouth of a cave is a gangly invitation
for the limbs of an undomesticated girl
skin, muscle, and knobby knees undaunted
by bruise or scrape
three lamps lit the little limestone
pocket that summer, together a traverse
to a crawlspace, a lake of liquid
mud on the other side, two explore
she waits with lamp and notebook,
alone but for a small brown bat
a hanging knot of fur
and muscle, frosted in cave-dew
each droplet sparkling in the flame
an hour of spare carbide
ligh snuffed for the return
she gives the silence an hour
trades her eyes for the weight of dark
internal machinery, left without a task
begins to sing to itself in the dark
silence here is not empty
a crowd roars, waves break
press against her eardrums
strain to hear companions
the lap of a muddy lake
fingertips on damp rock
hard ridge against her spine
more tangible than still air
the bat and girl small cargo
of this windless ship of stone
yearning for the compass
of a breeze
her lamp a stored reserve
promise in the inky dark
touch now an illusory sense
listens with her skin
kindles her inner light
At The Grave During War / Sergiy Pustogarov
Remember the names of Palestinians killed in the conflict.
a mother
knelt at her son’s
grave
two hours after
the dirt
was shoveled
over his remains.
his thin arms and legs
had been
too mangled
to even
hold a viewing.
the family
forced to
mourn without
a final kiss
goodbye.
the wooden sign
stood there
with the words etched into it
with a burning torch
already desecrated.
10 year old boy
Ahed Bakr.
shrapnel still
burning down
even the war
never kept enough time
to say goodbye.
war never cared
for the process we call grief.
the fury of destruction
never said a mother could mourn.
next to this grave
lies another
grave dug.
destroyed before it
could even be filled.
another life
doesn’t even
have a place to rest
after all this fighting.
Flight of the Mack Trucks / Daniel Avery Weiss
Spring emerges with seven trucks
trundling on the riverbank.
Almost named,
they spit rubber into pot
holes and bump their grim beat,
bouncing, their dumb
founding, smoking parade exquisitely between.
Scores of water
logged trees, entirely
stumped at the rhythm pulsing
in their legs, consider the steel boxes
twisting onward nearby.
The Des Plaines,
flooded,
shivers as they pass.
closure / MK Zariel
i googled you and saw nothing but a little
bad design and a healthy dose of LinkedIn grifting,
somehow meeting expectations when the bar is at the core of the earth.
the air feels thicker now, pressing down like futurity—the trees wilt low
embracing the ground you used to walk on—and i reread your goodbye note
watching you carve a caricature for yourself, a creature made of
anxieties and things discarded. you try to tell me that
you just aren't that into me, and for some reason
you think i need to hear your critique of egoist anarchism instead.
i don't. i walk through the monoculture of your mind, the impeccable
groomed lawns, the wildflowers trimmed down—my house of stone, your ivy grows
and now i'm covered in you croons a mixtape—and nothing could be further
from who you were. why grow when you could stay conveniently small,
you'd say, asking me to do the same. i googled you
and saw prose that may as well have been written
by the large language model you call your brain,
and saw repression congealing around one all-important image
and saw earth waiting to crack open,
to bloom, to burn.
April - Poem 14
The Bridge contd/ Maureen Alsop
Where are the illuminate horses? The young men in hunting costumes?
Shasta daisies collapse into bells under the sun’s tripod gaze.
An Idle lone pine lurches against a sunlit cliff face, a deep chasm where
Monastery monks
guide the lost ones in their journey
But what was it, the sacred travel, the fractious nature
Delphiniums rinsed of insects the lighthouse turning its need
The old vision? A memory of darkness—I'm thin & clear. Birds stitch
through waves whilst my dray overflows this abundance & peace
A Housefly Recalls Emily Dickinson / Bob Bradshaw
At first Miss Emily
would pass by me silently
in her simple, pique
white dress.
Still, I had the sense
our lives would always
be linked
in ways unpredictable.
I wasn’t like
the green bottle flies
or the bluebottles,
their iridescence
like a dragonfly’s wings
in a sunlit mist.
I wore a laborer’s
dull gray clothes
and moved
from room to room
like a domestic servant
humming Irish tunes.
Soon I could just whisper,
Pst! Pst!
and Emily would read me
her latest poem.
We were both introverts,
unlike "perty" Vinnie
who loved
crowds,
especially when Father
would throw
yet another college
commencement party.
All those young men, Em!
Their small talk
diminished them
in your eyes!
I didn’t impress anyone
with grandiose plans
and yet Em loved me -
she swore it -
more than Vinnie
loved either flattery
--or her cats!
"Are we so different?" Em asked.
"Me a poet, you a fly?
Aren’t we a pair ?
I’m a Nobody!
Aren’t you too?
If only we could hitch
Our carriage
To Immortality,
And ride out of Amherst
Together!"
Eating / Stan Galloway
Gluttonous death / will make a meal of me. --D.S. Martin*
We all die from something.
Eating is as good a way to go as any other.
I’m not too proud to fall asleep conjuring smorgasbords.
But I refuse to seek some Dahmer wannabe.
I’ll eat my way out on my own terms.
Martin, D.S. “My Final Credits.” The Role of the Moon. Iron Pen/Paraclete Press, 2025. 34-35.
Channel / Ava Hu
*
Pouring from the lips
of a god,
soil interior,
broad strait,
water to water,
your trace
in bolts
of lavender,
are we floating
restless, reaching
for one another
in a hurricane
of stings and breath?
I see where they light fires
on the river
for the dead.
A looking glass,
ritual object,
mirror, transmission,
you.
Mother { } Dowager / Sergiy Pustogarov
Requiem of the AIDS Crisis
bleached hair
on
the sidewalk
party busses
cheering
squeals
clapping
dark rooms
silent death
Mother
{ }
screaming cries
lonely
beds
kisses
forgotten
newer fruit
trailing ever
behind
{ }
barren funeral
empty coffin
ashes
burned
and
burned
burned
yet again
maybe now
safe
to handle
with twenty
layers of latex
{ }
Dowager
kinky
hands touching
ass
warped
into gray particles
still not enough
purify
more
never holy enough
blissfull
{ }
Mother
now honored
speeches
books
songs
musicals
nothing
for them
back then
now safe
and careless
no fear
of
silent
death
thank you
Mother
{ }
Dowager
Plum Vase with Cloud-and-Crane Motif (Goryeo dynasty, late 12th or early 13th century) / Daniel Avery Weiss
O, ye with the perfect neck,
swinging yourself as a thin rope
in gentle waves—flies
as black as eyes envy
the ginger likes of your
petty pace. Reinvigorate the
meanings in a cloud,
see to it that the clay watches
history slip into a humbling,
childlike
slumber.
perceive me like your surroundings / MK Zariel
a stranger downtown says she loves
my lesbian haircut, and i feel affirmed for two seconds
until she shouts out—“and your body, girlie”
and i thank her and i hurtle toward the void
Madison is a collection of lukewarm neon lights
and very cis opinions, nonprofits metastasizing
like invasive plants. everyone’s supportive
until you catch them on a bad day. i read a zine
in middle school claiming the butch lesbian body
is the only kind that can’t be commodified
under capitalism. how i wish that were true.
people can commodify anything
if you catch them in bad lighting on State Street
somehow both caffeinated and tired.
i try not to think about it. my gender is what
people see when they feel judgy. does that mean
my gender is high maintenance
and my pronouns are sit down / shut up?
my body is not a temple; it is a college campus
growing trashier by the day. it is a downtown
with one anarchist gathering and ten overpriced
restaurants for nobody. it was getting a little
too gentrified, then i transitioned. i go for a walk.
a stranger finds out what it’s like to judge thin air.