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 April are Maureen Alsop, Bob Bradshaw, Sarah Carson, Stan Galloway, Ava Hu, Sergiy Pustogarov, Nat Raum, Daniel Avery Weiss, and MK Zariel.
If you’d like to volunteer for a 30/30 Project month, please fill out our application and warm up your pen!
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.
April - Poem 13
The Bridge contd / Maureen Alsop
The sea is alive and says he knows you. Is watching you. Each day was west and prophetic. The one who is full, the one who speaks through light, the great mind shaking in weakness and the body succumbing. Perhaps the sea will exist now. She is a seed of beginning to us—Wattle heath, redgum. Innocuous and near in this crimson afternoon. The pigeons, a static veil over the fetid postwar ground over a windless, blood-ridden
grassy landscape of hidden sand dunes, weathered pastures. We took from each other a tiny psalm as each raised an axe, a squared token, the sky— sounded our platform—the radio’s seething voices scratch the nightsky. Together we take something from one another. No, we destroy ourselves
A Heist / Bob Bradshaw
It’s lunch
and I’m unwrapping
a long hot dog
carefully, like it was
a priceless artifact
just arrived from Beijing
for the Asian Art Museum
behind me.
I’m happy.
Why shouldn’t I be?
It’s like any other day,
as I sit here watching
families line up
for the Academy of Sciences
to open.
That's why I ignore
a gull's approach,
his wings raised
like a street seller's
open coat.
As I go to shoo him off
his partner sweeps in
snatching my hot dog
with the deftness
of a Paris or NY
pickpocket.
There are never cops
when a big heist
happens in daylight.
Remember
the '78 robbery
when thieves dropped
through a skylight
at the De Young Museum,
kidnapping a Rembrandt,
well, not the old man himself
but his “Portrait
of a Rabbi”?
But I can’t wait years
for my masterpiece
of dog and mustard and relish
to be recovered.
But what am I to do
with no cops around
when that gull strides by,
my hotdog brazenly
held in his beak
like a Havana
cigar?
Kalahari Autumn / Stan Galloway
A cloud of quelea
descends on the tree
beside the waterhole
where the lioness
had coughed in the night.
The thunder and rain
refreshed the grassland,
cheered the air,
slicked trail and sunrise.
Soon no rain will fall,
the grass will mat itself,
the ground squirrels will
see a universe away.
Most animals will seek the delta
or rivers farther north
or die of thirst
because every rainstorm
might be the last.
Heathen / Ava Hu
*
Swirl of the river’s silk,
breath without a name.
River, take me in.
Carp fins fan over river rocks.
The river shifts course.
Lakes, tributaries—
your fingertips in water.
Come to me,
black rocks speak
over the pull of tides.
One last swirl, you said.
The water takes your ankles,
your heart
beats.
You slip under.
The water dreams you.
*
Ode to the Western Skunk Cabbage / Kirsten Miles
Our feet wetted in soft spring clover
e-street rabbits dot the roadsides
in spotted brights and darks.
Camelias pink up yards as we walk.
Shane park’s low slung bog western
red cedars a braided rampart
woody sweetness wafting around us
secret trails labyrinth through emerging horse tails
lattice the grass into murky depths
a primal, swampy incense.
Musk mingled with mossy earth
brilliant lanterns thrust skyward
rising from the black muck of the bog
and we, walkers on the cedar plank
are granted this: the sudden, sharp scent
the yellow spathe like a cupped hand.
To build a space for this is to admit
that our souls need more than a groomed lawn.
The swamp’s honest stink
the unfurling of feathery fern
reminding us that even the sodden mud
knows how to nurture light.
For My Mother (it’s me again) / Sergiy Pustogarov
this one’s
for the roses i’ve planted by random sidewalks,
and the bouquets i’ve given to women
holding my head when i cry.
this one’s
to the store aisles i slowly walk around the corner of,
wondering if somehow your grey hair will appear.
this one’s
to every phone call i always answer,
because i never know if it would be
your voice on the other side.
this one’s
for every ring i don’t get,
for every unanswered voicemail
i’ve left on your machine.
this one’s
to the way my heart broke
when i saw you, and you didn’t see me.
i’m sorry you looked so lost,
gasping for answers.
this one’s
for the day i asked another to stand with me,
on my own wedding day because
you were nowhere to be found
when i found the love of my life.
this one’s
for the mother who stopped being a mother,
and how i’ve learned that somehow life was still good--
because of the other mothers who didn’t step back,
but stepped forward for your child.
alternate universe: non stop ecstatic dancing / nat raum
my friend tells me the title of soft cell’s 1982 remix mini
and i imagine it: myself doing mashed potato roger rabbit
reject dougies, same moves over generations with different
names. there are only so many ways to move your body
to rhythm and i still haven’t learned to do it right. does it
matter? i don’t sing. i don’t dance. the spirit moves me
just fine—it’s that nothing besides surgery is that serious.
birds innately know the way to glide among cirrus striations,
and they don’t have little bird cops to say the angle of your wings
is imprecise. we ought to bury ourselves as impostors, resurrect
shamelessness. bees make honey to live, not to add sweet
to tea. when was the last time i lived for myself? i’d wager
years ago, wasted at art school parties, free of the concept
of flawlessness, arms waving at random like a tube man.
Haibun for the Tail End of Winter / Daniel Avery Weiss
Winter has stretched itself out as a cat, yawning its snowy limbs out wide and long until their muscles quiver, and then retracting. Whether this burgeoning spring pads out a circle, then lies down and rests (gentle purr like pollen!) or leaps into a tree, watches for prey—we will see. There was a man who pulled his dog's leash in tight so he could take one full minute to smell rich branches of pink. The dog stood still and blithely observed a nearby squirrel.
Cherry blossom
out my open window.
Leaf lands in my lap.
fluctuations II / MK Zariel
a text message poem
either i can solve the problem with a big boundary or i can't
in my defense it is late and i am tired (and gay)
this was a cis white dude with cis white opinions
they’re simultaneously too hard and too easy
i can't exactly recruit one of my friends to come and hang with him
while I'm out of the house.
i’m out of the house right now lol
i can’t think or text clearly
do you want advice on the cat disruptions in the early morning?
thank you for helping aid my continued procrastination, i really
appreciate it!!
these are the perils of being cooler and more mature than other people!
i feel like i’m so upset i can’t think
thank you for correcting me before i fully judged
April - Poem 12
The Bridge contd/ Maureen Alsop
I think of the older spirits who want to come and enjoy the folly. I think
of the sea turning in its angles and projections against us. You asked
how might i become u?
On wonder of recognition to my life at this juncture
The rippling surface of the dream—a courtesy, a fraction
and a flip-tide—the closing and opening of my soul in all
the ways you were alone/ unstoppable/ this grief/ this,
your grief or mine/
On wonder of recognition in my life at this juncture
You recede. Recognition recedes, the ebbing now.
Hair / Bob Bradshaw
At 20 my hair
was shoulder-length
like Il Magnifico’s.
Soon it was longer
than Raphael’s
or Botticelli’s curly locks.
Everywhere
my long-haired friends
and I talked art.
In a few years
my younger neighbors
looked at me
as if to ask,
"Why are you here?
You’re old."
Now? In my 70s
I'm as bald
as a frog.
Yet when I look back
on my days
in Haight-Asbury
I never worried
that I’d shed my hair.
Or grow old.
Wasn’t youth like a lover
vowing never
to leave?
What happened?
What always
happens.
In old age
don’t we always
ache
for the one
who got
away?
The Death of Catreus / Stan Galloway
News of death is never convenient:
postponements must be arranged
daily tasks delegated
supplies marshaled
travel details mapped out
chaos wrangled.
No time to mull the circumstances
rumors that it was my uncle
that Catreus was nothing but a pirate
Such wild stories should be dismissed.
Leave the guests to Helen.
Make the trip to Crete and back
as quickly as a stork
Then return to pick up pieces
put life back in order.
Early Spring / Ava Hu
*
Substitute the sound
of a flute for bird call.
The river rings
the bells of haiku.
The mind of a river
is here and now.
Ringing temple bells
break air,
shake leaves into essence
a listening.
*
imprecise efforts at welding / nat raum
we were supposed to be gold, supposed to be a david
rose and patrick brewer kind of love, where we are both
the flashy dramatic one and the voice of rationality
in tandem. what i mean is i thought this was real, despite
signs to the contrary, because i am trying to trust people.
we were supposed to be new cycles, not endless barbecue
dinners where i find out lies by omission. you said open up.
it’s safe here. i was okay to still fall asleep and dream of locked
doors, triple deadbolts. the light of the morning sieves
through clouds, silver at best. never was i precious enough.
There, the Apalachicola River unspools / Kirsten Miles
Cutting through the tupelo apiaries and the sundew.
You found your Helen, or perhaps she found you,
a woman whose heart beats in the same green meter,
mirroring your passion for the Florida I remember.
Together, you two returned me with my daughter
down the glass-clear pulse of Wakulla Springs
the same waters where, as a toddling child,
I first followed your boots and had my eyes blessed open.
You brought the wilderness to my door,
an orphaned bear cub tumbled
with a four year old in a thin nightgown on a wood floor,
fawns cradled like kin, you never let me get away
with childish selfishness.
Your voice like no other, wise, both bold and restrained, quick to laugh.
You, who marched me, awkward, into an officers' ball in my first gown,
wept together over The Yearling and wept again
with my children over its tender breaking heart,
knowing that to love the wild is to know its cost.
It was always a matter of looking closely, wasn't it?
From my first rain soaked hike in the pacific northwest
to name the swifts that spend their lives in the breezes,
in the mud of a paleoarcheological dig in Savannah with my daughter
returning to the Spanish moss-drip of the Florida panhandle,
a 300 year old dwarf cypress grove in Tate’s Hell
finding a miracle of access at Rish Park to give her back
again to our beloved Gulf Coast waters.
More than my first book of natural history,
than names of flora and fauna,
you gave me the gravity of the earth,
a world never empty
the holy, tangled history of the dirt.
Now, when the wind leans into the pines,
I’ll gaze through a pair of your eyes,
mine forever open,
reminding me that we are only as deep
as the things we stop to notice.
The Lament of Cognito Amor / Sergiy Pustogarov
as we climb to the top tonight--
a slow and steady cranking fills the air:
the turning gears creaking and groaning pause the world.
we have reached the initial plunge,
as we stand above it all for a single moment--
we see the land below spread out for eternity--
a circus laid out for the amusement of the rich,
unchecked without precautions for the masses--
ready to send millions hurdling down a roller-coaster.
the ride holds no basis in physics,
but rather claims the pursuit of a thrill for the few:
for death counts no longer matter this time.
jump down--
set off your paraglider, and hope
you will each the ground in safety.
watch as the cars fall off the tracks.
reaching up your arms in angst--
and wait.
catch--
one soul, and then another;
as many as these feeble hands seek.
breathe--
and do not die during this time
from a plummeting track upon your neck.
oxygen
will only assist the others,
when you have put on your mask.
Hypothesis / Daniel Avery Weis
He is alive in my dog's eyes.
He is alive in clay.
He is a microbe,
a macrobe,
and a bathrobe.
He is alive in my printer, where he
drinks from the ink cartridges, he has
peeled off the curtain he used to hide me
from the view of his indulging in his
favorite things alone
(cover the eyes of your children—joy
comes creeping in).
He is alive in a text box, which is an urn.
He is alive in the “fun guy” of the fungi
in a bad joke.
He is alive and playing pool (he is also
riding the balls like circus balls and guffawing
at how silly this image is).
He is alive in a suspicious rendition of für elise,
composed by my dog, which is the sound of
his heartbeat beneath the fur.
He is alive in between unstoppable forces and
immovable objects.
pathways / MK Zariel
my life is a reflecting pool full of algae and pollution
you can only figure out who you are by combing through
distortion, through the endless drift of people-pleasing.
i just gave a reading advertised as a midnight event
that turned out to start at 7pm. i felt a little guilty
despite myself. i will get hate mail from the militantly nocturnal
and then i'll wake up, knowing it was another anxiety dream
for nobody. artificial light reflects on the ceiling, the window
brightened only by distant neon—the entire Midwest a collection
of houses that look like each other. copy and paste neighborhoods
and you have a doom spiral, a human cost, a wayward rippl
that floods through everything. it's easy to procrastinate
when everything you're trying to do leads back to personal growth.
i don't want to heal. i take a deep breath. i want to have healed.i take a shallow breath. i cancel plans, smile despite myself,
make other plans, walk through liminal spaces only to get yeled at
i want to have been loved and i keep walking.
April - Poem 11
The Bridge contd/ Maureen Alsop
Fluid-submerged-angelic sun, within the rapport
of our language, the sun—?
Stagnant sun, surreptitious and cold. Tall, toppling,
tariff-ridden sun, what rooms
did you keep? Patterning back across the sea. Coralita
Flowers & Hibiscus Vines strangle out the light of this
wedding: the sea’s photograph, a blotted impulse,
bric-a-brac, deception.
Love In The Dentist's Office / Bob Bradshaw
My dentist leans over me.
She’s a voice behind the light.
When she takes off
her face guard,
she’s perfect—
like her smile.
I run my tongue
along my teeth, stones
ragged as a reef's.
I blush, ashamed
that my mouth
is so common.
I want to talk about Van Gogh
or Wuthering Heights
or….Jane Eyre
but words like "gingivitis”
pepper her vocabulary.
As a rebuke
she hands me a mirror.
"Do you see?”
Before I can ask her
to elope with me
to Fiji,
she hands me
two bottles
of mouth
wash
Agamemnon’s Engagement / Stan Galloway
Brother, you will think me fickle –
Nothing new!
That sister –
Clytemnestra –
she’s got brass
I go hard just seeing her
send a servant cringing to the stables
or survey a room along her subtle nose.
I’ll have her –
I know she has her eye on me –
and I’ll take her
to heights she’s never known –
she will ogle what’s beneath this armor
beg
for more.
You take the other –
I will be your advocate
but know you’ll have the poorer choice –
you will be bound to Sparta –
better that though than you living
in my shadow back in Mycenae.
As brother-kings, we’ll have everything we see!
Annunciation / Ava Hu
*
You are yellow
with pollen.
Counted apple seeds
in your palm.
Hymns stain
your lips.
A moth-winged flower
opens.
A single pistil
emerges
from the throat
of the flower
sticky,
potent.
When I shift beyond
the mind—
the blossoming
heavy, sweet.
A lifeboat,
a song.
*
Wakulla Springs / Kirsten Miles
i .
heels drag the sandy bottom
holding against the slight current
little waves lap along her cheeks
in the shallows
trickle into her ears
between her lips
hair sways with the slipstream
teasing toward the deep outflow
As though there were no terror
in a hole
ii.
the glass-bottomed boat a portal
the crystal surface colorless as air
suspended over wintering manatees
billowy eel grass darting minnows
the shadow of the massive spring
her father is a bright stroke against
the dark cave mouth
she is a small softness leaning over the rail
her skin a contracted shudder
iii.
this fear is not a wall
but a map’s beginning
she watches him clear the deep
finds the rhythm in the spring’s slow pulse
this is the floor of every cavern she will later crawl
the depth of every ocean she will one day cross
learning how to stay afloat
iv
fifty years later adrift
once more downstream
her daughter spies a least bittern in the reeds
manatee and calf swim alongside
pale shadows over those same green channels
minnows dart in the eel grass
night herons crowned in black
rise in a croak of surprise
no glass portal to reveal
the water’s liquid biography
urban sediment an opaque erasure
ghosting the spring’s mouth
The Secret of Us / Sergiy Pustogarov
i wonder if you miss the secret of us;
all that we held within our bosoms
at just nineteen years old.
skinny dipping in the river down the way--
and laying on each other’s chest after
puffing away at a pack of malboros.
we spent hours laughing together,
while our lips became magnets for each other;
and we laughed thinking about if mom ever found out.
we were mesmerized by the peach fuzz trailing on our chest,
while our hands stayed tangled together:
and we told ourselves this was forever.
when all along we knew this was just
a teenage fever dream,
that lasted every weekend for six months.
but it could never give us more than
a few days of solitude,
with the sun setting in the background.
and when the winds turned harsh;
my mother finally figured out
i was down by the boys all the time.
she slammed my bedroom door shut,
and screamed my name as a fag in the papers;
just to make sure i could never love again.
but i still taste your lips every time
that i hit a malboro drunk at the end of a night--
fifteen years later.
imagine you dance on highwires / nat raum
the issue is not the walking of the tightrope—it’s the strength of the net that catches you when you fall. you could balance for hours if only you had learned to trust nylon. too many things called themselves strong and then tore before your eyes for your liking. you know how to look for where the weak spots are. no one believes you. you are the kind of helpless you swore you could never be, wide-eyed in the presence of a spotlight and all these witnesses. you stand on only your left big toe. nobody claps. you skip and skitter to flute-notes and lose your footing. everyone gasps. deep down, you know even if you can’t find the places where weaving wears thin, they are still there, waiting to drop you one last time.
Poem on Fire (Read the News or I Will Cook Your Notebooks) / Daniel Avery Weiss
Your books are booking the book
burnings (your kindle is kindling).
I am going to microwave your mother
board. Pressing “add +30sec” is the key
board. I have taken your word salad and tossed it
out the window. Your five syllable words are
defenestrated.
Deleted your oeuvre, retyped it in Microsoft Word,
and exited without saving.
I have found your latest collection and eaten it,
page by leathery page. It was signed. I ate your name.
I cooked a reduction of your sonnet and now
there are six lines. I wept
at his wily grave and grieved my grieving father and
gorged on a yellow star. Eat this poem when you are done or we will be
disintegrated.
I need you to at least pretend you’re helpful / MK Zariel
a toddler points at a sculpture, saying someone couldn't have made that
the paper-maché gleams under museum light, crafted by someone
uncredited. i tell them that every object they've ever seen is a made thing
and much of it used to be trash. they look amazed, then underwhelmed, then
eventually distracted—the pasted-together dead trees shine with the certainty
that only art for toddlers can. it has one job—to impress without being destroyed—
and i know the damn feeling. i used to be trash too and then i was a girl
and then i was an object to project ambitions onto and then i was a useful idiot
and then i came out. every trans kid is a made thing—sculpted by
the relentless pulling-at-threads, intuition soft like a whisper
i can never tell if i'm having identity revelations or just
making something out of nothing—but hey, isn't that what art is?
the kids continue to gossip, this time about a girl in their class
who they call crazy. instead of telling them to be respectful i just smile
hey, i am too, but i'm pretty fun, right? nobody laughs.
i hope someone pieces me back together into something more beautiful.
April - Poem 10
The Bridge / Maureen Alsop
PAX it stands in my mind. I call her back.
Reenact the day
But you can mitigate the spirit only so many times
Attack Of The Giant Ants / Bob Bradshaw
I skidded to a stop, mere feet
from THEM!
—monstrous rust
colored ants swarming
in the middle
of the road.
I couldn’t
see anything, the things
crawling over my car,
my hood, peering
into my windshield
with huge, fiery red
compound
eyes.
A huge hiss!
They’d punctured
my left front tire
with their huge jaws!
Far ahead helicopters
were circling a brute,
its antennae
waving angrily.
I turned the radio on.
“Everything is normal.
There were reports
of giant ants,
but the reports
proved false.
There is no need
for concern.
If things change,
the public
will be notified. The pregame
for tonight’s Dodgers game
will return shortly.”
Menelaus Upon Missing Helen / Stan Galloway
Did I not know:
not with the mind
no words or tones betrayed her –
instead, in my very liver
dread that precedes any utterance
her need to bathe
to travel
to sleep apart
live life in pieces of her own
spend time on her own diversions
all the things she tired of sharing with me
Flirtatious looks abounded
Then the words:
You’ve got to let me see
where this thing with Paris goes.
And now she’s out to sea
thinking all life’s eddies will be smooth
that oars dipped in the water
leave no pain
that unspoken promises can’t simply drop behind
not seeing there the seeds of fire and sword.
Ark / Ava Hu
*
We vanish
under waves.
Salt on the skin.
The earth swallows you.
The marrow of cypress
reddens the water.
Lamentation, the bending
of boughs.
Have we lost favor
with the gods?
Plant, wind,
body and bone.
The moon crashes
into the earth.
Salt enters
the lungs.
Is there still time
to build an ark?
*
Twin Hazelnut trees / Kirsten Miles
leak leaf-light through
a century of rain
crowns splayed and wide under
light of the sky’s blue weight
roots explore an architecture of dark
seasons moss a language of limbs.
Stellar’s Jay’s perch—that blue spark of noise—
all sapphire and arrogance
chickaree darts a jagged thread
through latticed branches
deer fold themselves into our shadow
noses damp against the mulch
breath rising like a slow, white prayer
and they who stand— arms stretched high
where the sun breaks into coins
think to name the way we endure.
a story in the branches
reaching out to touch the wind
the work we do in secret
the ancient braid of wood on wood
the two of us, tangled at the bone
in the quiet geometry below—
how two people, a century gone, once stood
with mud-stained palms and a single bucket,
turning the soil until it tasted like a promise.
planted us side by side
now gone names softened by moss
the compass points of a life
tucked our feet into
this dark pocket of the earth.
now a single knotted pulse
The Barbell / Sergiy Pustogarov
man and woman in the gym.
girl straightens her hair in the mirror.
man flexes his biceps.
the man laughs with his girl,
plotting their next move.
then reaches around her front
to tussle the hair,
she had just laid down.
he smiles.
returns to the bench.
the girl turns around to say
i hate you.
i read the lips because
i can’t hear.
no other words were legible
during these deaf moments
in the gym on a monday night.
they turned back to the benches,
smiling.
i said
i hate you
to the barbell
just to return and smile.
i looked in my own mirror
and told the demon next to me,
i hate you
just to smile again.
auto-destructive asphyxiation / nat raum
cw: BDSM/kink
a hoe phase would break me and heal me
all over again, emphasis on the fission, but i think
i’m oversimplifying it. i wouldn’t have envied
myself in past timelines, peeling off a black oxford
in the understated amber streetlight streaming
through a mt. vernon window frame—back then
my body didn’t belong to me, but the night
and the bottle and the hand around my throat.
i’d say i could be the same shell of myself, but i am
one already, just a different flavor. i have gone
so long without touch that i bristle at the thought.
i know which thumb i want to trace my trachea—
that’s the problem. i never draw blood from the hand
that sustains me. i just want to choose the hand.
Parco / Daniel Avery Weiss
Graffiti in its homeland,
swaddling the aqueducts,
cooing lullabies to the great
dead snake. Porco
dio, it whispers. Porco dio—e
vaffanculo, Meloni. On the other side,
umbrella gyrates slow across
the pasture, interrupted by slippages of
collapsing Roman tufa.
Down, down, down, they must have
thought—we all go
down in history, rust or
ballad kill us.
I need you to at least pretend you’re helpful / MK Zariel
I say out loud to a computer while running on
six hours of sleep and no hours of rest,
after the crushing realization that finals week lasts approximately
ten weeks. i still don’t know how to feel sane
nor is that a standard to aspire to, or so
a very earnest work of theory says. i melt down and call it liberation.
i look into my todo list like a collage—a planning thread full
of difficult personalities, a shame circle, a harrowing truth,
a heart-to-brain-to-deflated-heart for people with more
commitments than named feelings. i need you to at least
pretend you care, i say to most institutions, knowing full well
that they won’t. in a way it’s easier when structures
are abhorrent enough to almost penetrate
the glassy-eyed sheen of assimilation—i wish i could take comfort
in knowing that even normal people see this as a problem. i can’t.
i still pretend i’m helpful.
i need you.
April - Poem 9
untitled / Maureen Alsop
Who’s Grumpy / Bob Bradshaw
You’ll need to speak louder.
Car alarms outside
are always going off.
Don’t get me started
on the nurses.
Pill pushers!
That’s why
narcotic agents
aren’t allowed
to visit!
The vegetables?
Salty mush!
And the meat!
Well, the flies
don’t complain.
And my room? Stuffy?
I’d sleep better
in a morgue's drawer.
Why complain?
Don't others somewhere
have it worse?
But, dear, if you could
do something about the clouds?
They’re never
positioned right—
too much light
gets through.
Some days
too little
Helen Contemplates Infidelity / Stan Galloway
Orpheus had Eurydice six months of the year,
sharing her with Hades,
but holding her,
delighting through the summer in their personal adventures.
Sharing wasn’t his idea
but true love let strict monogamy
be reluctantly released
to have her half time.
So why should Menelaus grumble
when I have a stout servant in the night,
knowing I’ll be taken for an hour rather than two seasons,
knowing I will love him no less in the morning,
knowing he can have me anytime I choose.
Pollinator / Ava Hu
*
They are marked by
red canyon.
God of the subterranean,
god of the yellow bloom.
Their feet, wet
with marigolds.
Do they watch to see
if Orpheus looks back?
Their bodies press
into flowers.
*
Tawney’s Cave / Kirsten Miles
The squeeze is the gate
palms pressing powdery dirt
toes pushing the slip
of her twelve year old body
the world has already
begun to demand she stand tall
but here the only way forward
on her belly
into a cool dark air
the hiss—a sharp, white secret
escaping the brass vessel strapped
to the crown of her young head.
She is a small moon in a throat of limestone
a quiet lever of bone and light
carbide headlamp cutting light into the opening
cavern lined with glistening limestone teeth
walls draped in flowstone’s velvet hush
knuckled spires rising here and there
tasting the ancient
damp breath of the earth
unlearning the sky
A tiny figure jeweled with droplets hangs
before her, a reassurance of life
in this world
of rock
some things
require us to get a little bit lost
in the tight spots
before we can finally
stand up and breathe.
massage boards for heaven / Sergiy Pustogarov
i’ve bought a thousand massage boards
trying to break the knots
that turn my neck
into stiffened old oak boards.
i’ve worked with reiki
trying to release the fears and woes
my muscle store as frantic pains.
worked with god too,
raising my voice from the beams
of an ancient farmhouse.
pleading for help to guide this soul
toward that desired haven;
while rewriting the lie
that heaven is reserved
for a three-word prayer-
whispered from the deathbed
of one who spent their precious breaths
killing a thousand smaller lives.
i’ve spent my savings
rewiring my nerves,
teaching them not to flinch
at those souls who wreak havoc;
still awaiting their free pass
through the pearly gates.
and sometimes,
when i’m bent over in the living room,
ass up, breath taught,
trying to untangle myself again:
i hear saint peter saying
welcome home,
you blessed broken heathen,
who never knew which question
unlocked the perfect gate.
so you asked them all.
you sought every path
through redemption’s burning traps,
hoping to one day it might be enough
to let your body
finally rest.
wind's howling / nat raum
a mourning dove, cataclysmically close
to back porch, throats gentle coos
into a starched blue sky. we had alley
doves on eaton—fittingly, i only knew
how to mourn when i lived there. still
i peel layers of myself imbued with you
off of my skin, trying to remain convinced
i am better off. still i know not how
to exist without you, the music of our shared
ecstasy or the ensuing stretch of misery.
sometimes i see myself as a parasite—
head buried in blood vessels, thirsting
until gluttonous coma arrives and i expire,
fall to forest floor, and learn to crawl again.
Seven Haiku for Early Spring / Daniel Avery Weiss
Sweet milk—
the cherry blossom
greets me.
We splay ourselves
in the dew,
the roly-poly and I.
The crane stoops low.
A snap, a splash—
a salmon.
Gull on the rocks,
heckling. An icy tide
envelops our toes.
Ice—
steam—
a toad's breath.
Magnolias.
A thin rustle of wind.
Petals.
Under the beech tree,
ants fluttering
across my lap.
how to navigate writer's block / MK Zariel
look up a themed call on the internet, find a thousand
variations on "sad" and various texting abbreviations,
say screw it and write another political screed
about being trans. (indie lit is a reflecting pool
into which one pours trauma—) say i'm done
and get rejected. say it's beautiful but not nearly
comprehensible enough—say where are the explanations
of why exactly you're doomed. (an inbox is a void
into which one sends praise and extracts money—)
tell an editor that you want to see trans joy represented,
tell Instagram that you want to know who you are,
tell nobody. join an organizing project and explain poetry
to three people, go to a reading and explain anarchism
to yourself. when people ask if you're an artist or an activist,
nod, wink, change the topic. (a college application is a series
of narrowing questions—into which one combines twelve practices—
into one cohesive brand—) talk to teenagers, explain everything
to everybody. look up a poem on the internet, look for an accessible one
for a friend who thinks poetry isn't for her, find neglected websites
and opaque verse, worry she's right. say screw it (because you're still trans)
and try to at least jot something down.
April - Poem 8
untitled / Maureen Alsop
Candy Cigarettes / Bob Bradshaw
You’d roll your tube
of candy lipstick
over your lips,
trying to look as sultry
as Brigitte Bardot
with her pout.
While you printed the air
with your fake kisses,
I’d open my pack
of chalky sweet
cigarettes.
The packs came in covers
similar to Dad’s
in King’s, Round Ups,
Stallions, Jolly
Winstons.
I’d smoke a cigarette,
halos wafting into the air,
as I imagined
James Dean
lighting up,
Natalie Wood and the future
loitering around
his Mercury Coupe.
Our future was a drag race
I looked forward to.
For now it was enough
that I looked cool.
James Dean
cool.
Examining Natural History / Stan Galloway
Pliny claimed,
There is a wild beast,
the oryx, who steadfastly watches
Sirius rise, then sneezes, as in worship.
I’ve seen the oryx
a hundred at a time
in Kalahari grass
preparing for the dusk
– none watched the sky –
perhaps one watched
shadows underneath
acacia trees for lions
it’s pickaxe horns
formidable defense
when threatened as a herd.
Black-backed jackals
give scant concern.
The rare strandwolf
has not been seen
in generations.
The Dog Star holds
no secret lure or talisman
despite its brightness.
The sneezing is more likely
from the chaff and dust
stirred up by winter’s Cape Doctor
cold and dry.
*my paraphrase from Pliny’s Natural History, circa CE 77.
Forest / Ava Hu
after words from Waorani leader Nemonte Nenquimo
*
Stories are living beings.
We, the river, we
the river. The river
we wash with the ash
from burning trees.
Mother Earth
will
not be saved.
She does not need
to be saved.
Jaguars crisscross
asphalt.
Give back the blood of the land.
Bones of our elders.
Give it back.
Stories are living beings.
Whistle of the piha.
Chant of howler monkeys.
The highway accelerates
destruction.
A god wakes
in the trees.
Put your hands
over your ears.
*
End of the World / Kirsten Miles
narrow strip of resilience
a thin green blade
one hundred feet above the ocean’s
slow rhythmic exhale
air vibrates
a hummingbird rises
salt-stung vines in the hush
on the edge of this great, vertical silence
we gather on this precarious spine
without boundaries
strangers form
a small huddle of breath and expectation
low murmurs blend with the tide, whispers in fragments
inky slate blue sheet of the Salish Sea
lapping the bluff’s sheer base, shifting with
a slow, muscular inhale
ocean softens into pewter
we stretch our eyes, wait together in the star struck dark
for the first thin wash
ghost light across the sky
a pillar of light pulls itself down — pale shiver of violet
more like memory than color
the sky finally yields
vertical curtains of emerald drape across the horizon
a rhythmic spilling
waves of fuchsia gyrate and whorl above our upturned faces
silhouettes against a solar panoply of voices
older than the earth under our feet
Oh Brother Where Art Thou? / Sergiy Pustogarov
solo goose,
no v formation,
no honks,
a single speck
in the blue,
not a painting
across the
sky.
just shoot
from any
side.
the goose flies on.
you missed
the only target
in the sky,
and dropped lead
into mere liquid.
water.
ripples.
no wings.
even the
frogs
stay hidden.
nature knew
you
were shooting
something
into its world.
just lead,
sinking
down.
we never
found the
remains.
haiku for the one getting away / nat raum
you loved me like ash
loves a beige sofa cushion—
stains are permanent.
God B / Daniel Avery Weiss
less America!
Go Dbles Samerica!
Godble Ssamerica!
G Odblessa Merica!
Godbles Sam Erica!
L And Ofthe Free!
Landofthe Free!
Land ofthefree!
La Ndo Fth Efree!
Land
Ho Meoft He Brave!
Homeo Ft Hebr Ave!
H Omeofthebr Av E!
Home Oft He Brave!
Hom Eofth Eb Rave!
A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.
Awholeci vili za tion willdieto ni ght, n evertobe bro ughtba ckagai n.
Aw hole civiliz ationwi lldi eto ni g ht,ne v ert obebro ugh tbac kagain.
Awh olec iv il izat i onwilld iet on ig ht,n evertobe b r o u g htbackagain.
Awho leciv ili zat ionw ill diet onight, nevert obe brou ghtb ackagain.
who will die night, never to be brought back again.
on boundaries / MK Zariel
a text chain is a contained brutality, a collection
of sharp winds damaging each structure until
you can't even notice what's left and what remains—
logistical drift like the air slowly growing toxic,
like a thin layer of smog that remains unexplained. i have been
a people-pleaser for a long time—beware my verbal fillers
the award i'll likely win for a thousand repetitions of the accursed phrase
i'm fine with anything! a text chain is a poorly contained waterspout
and i an drenched in the remains of my dignity. did you know that "sure"
actually means "please don't"? did you know that i am somehow a
worse texter than ChatGPT? an email is a wind-swept plain full of
death traps buried under the sands, the rare oasis only found
when one procrastinates. do you love me anyway?
April - Poem 7
The Peace / Maureen Alsop
A ceaseless salve, the river’s light, a holy
spoken name—the sun’s
acidic touch.
At daybreak
the sea is an open mouth. Surf—
another language.
Ashlyn! / Bob Bradshaw
The moment I shuffle
out of this YMCA
I see Ashlyn
sprinting to me,
and my heart’s doors
start popping open!
My heart tosses aside
its keys. My arms
fly open like shutters
to take in
the morning sun
that is my granddaughter
once again.
Distillery / Stan Galloway
When we become fine wine
through ageing and confinement
our spirits strong as oak barrels
with mint or coriander splashed across us
the bitter almond of forsaken amaretto clinging
the sweet-sour rot in a strawberry daiquiri’s aftertaste
the aroma of the morning beside you,
then I know we have survived
life’s hangover
two hundred proof.
Forest / Ava Hu
The Amazon forest is nearly gone.
*
This is the burning season.
What once streamed runs dry.
Trees cut down
and raised as churches.
A man survives
with two hearts.
Spirits. Smoke.
Forgotten gods.
The hum of chainsaws
and gunshots keeps rising.
God comes
with mud.
God comes
as an outlaw.
Does God open
a seed in ash?
Who will remember
the names of trees?
*
Ode to a sun dog / Kirsten Miles
diamond dust flickers
suspended to the left
of a low hung sun
shattered rays slung
round her phantom halo
unbidden color a
smeared blur of ice filaments
flickers through leaves
yaws across the gloam
as Route 20 winds down
towards the James River
black lab wedged hard
and hot on the floorboard
brown eye rolls up
waiting for the mouth feel
of a stoney creek
The way his torso leans
head cocked gaze
holding me fast
as if knowing that wheel
can lure us into
a final curve
untethered
bright rays curtain across
the windshield
that time we turned into a
grassy hill sailed across
yellow tickseed
rolled
rolled rolled
each floating
object
A loose texture of
rarer bodies
In the blue air
Down by the Meadow / Sergiy Pustogarov
we danced through a meadow
down by the creek--
acting
like not a single care
could affect this
teenage heart.
we fished for minnows
thinking
our crackers
would turn into their favorite food
the second they bit our hooks.
we danced shirtless
among
the twigs and rocks.
teasing one another
if we would dare jump
in the freezing waters..
we were happy together
searching for fish that never
saw our
bareback strokes,
or dared to bite our clothesline
fishing poles.
that never happened:
but i dreamt it after
i cried myself to sleep
every night in the basement.
what a catch / nat raum
After “What A Catch, Donnie” by Fall Out Boy
my thoughts are nightmare fuel, metacognition
for insanity’s sake, and my self-esteem paints
itself the same shade. i am forced to believe i am
the protagonist, eventually—my raisined ego
resists it, but there is no other excuse to explain
the way in which things are constantly happening.
my body breaks down lactic acid, double-time. cracks
groan in the meat of my neck and shoulders. shhhh.
i goad myself to unlock my jaw, push posture
straighter than the parenthesis of early kyphosis.
it all adds up over time in the sense that nothing
is actively coming for me—it is already here. i don’t
do the therapy work during sessions. it happens
on the outside, day by day, convincing myself that soon,
things will be different. someone will see i am a catch.
Of my student's second class in pottery / Daniel Avery Weiss
Yes, sweetheart. I am really bald.
No, I have not always been bald.
Oh—yes, I am really—yes, very bald.
Yes, I can help you center. Can you try to do it yourself first?
That's okay. Effort is optional. No, I am not going to put my hat back on.
Yes! Excellent. The walls are great. Looking good.
Position your hands like this. Pressure between.
Slow the wheel down. Good.
Yes! I mean, what would you do if I said no? What if I simply said, “No, I'm not bald, actually.”
Touchè.
Pressure from the bottom of your hand.
Forward. Lean in. Yes! Yes!
No. I am not.
win condition / MK Zariel
gender is a TTRPG and i’m the problem player, says a meme—
and in some twisted way i find it accurate. i am transmasc as in
late on a weekly basis, as in responding to every conflict with some
version of well, actually. butch as in optimized, except when i’m not,
as in overwhelming and quiet all at once. i’m here to tell a story
until i break down and decide to troll everyone instead. to be trans\
is to never have had a gender role model beyond caricature
to be unmoored, unaligned, a changeling in human form—
bilateral dysphoria creeping like foreshadowing like an aura
like a warning. gender is a video game and i am a glitch in the system
ask me to make a character and i’ll choose
the pixelated edge of the screen. the three genders are
boy, girl, and NPC—and I have been all of the above—
and i have tried to flirt with all of the above—and i have never
broken character when i need to. i have minmaxed my pronouns
to hell and back, and still never found the one that feels
like a critical success. will someone make a name generator
for those whose genders are a mystery even to them?
April - Poem 6
The Bridge / Maureen Alsop
Everywhere are clouds and currawongs, pale rockeries
hung with pine shadow. The wind thickens the sky,
forgets winter. You speak as ally—she was lovely you said.
Openness Alma, the sun—a mutilated rose, galactic purple
at the seam—you bury the sky
in water, in bloodwood, in ironbark.
Or stringybark or grey.
The bridge collapses in purple fuzzweed, rosella and musk okra. It is not
in your time now. Sleep’s infused regalia, your fortress—
also gone. Your identity is exposed in this space
in crossing and uncrossing. And now
the force of the sun is a bridge
You are only figuring out its power, the pressure held between spaces—
continuous, fused. Sequestered sun
wreathed in blanched roses, Shakespearean sun—sweet, sagacious, tragic.
Why I Want To Be A Painter In My Next Life / Bob Bradshaw
What poet has a studio
bathed in sunlight?
Or canvases
lying about?
A poet’s murky room
offers what?
A gooseneck lamp?
Who wants to watch
a poet write?
But a painter?
Now we’re talking!
Isn’t it always the painter
who gets the Jill Clayburgh,
the Elsa Zylberstein?
Why shouldn’t I love
a Salma Hayek?
Pollock couldn’t draw,
or so his mentor
Thomas Hart Benton
claimed.
I can’t draw either!
But I can pour paint
and splatter it!
Like Manet’s Olympia
my favorite model will wear only
a red hibiscus.
Maybe I should frame
my poems, hanging them
on my walls?
Then would a painter—
or a poet like Frank O’Hara—
wander in to comment?
“This one…
could use some color…
orange maybe?
Or maybe add
SARDINES
to it!”
Thanks, I’ll say,
I’ll fix that. But, say,
do you know
a dark-haired waitress
or a can-can dancer looking
for extra pay?
All they’d have to do
is lie on that couch.
Naked, of course.
“Of course."
Night Hike / Stan Galloway
I turned the page and the river opened. –Maureen Alsop
When I read breadcrumbs dropped along the trail
I knew someone was crying out:
I can’t, alone!
crumbs shining bright enough by moonlight
for me to follow intermittently
until a perturbation of pigeons
probably as dusk fell
swallowed up that voice
and now lay sleeping in a spruce line
stomachs talking to each other.
I tried intuition – where would I have gone next?
guessed where each step felt sound
and listened for the whisper
unsure whether I now led or followed.
When I saw glimmers,
made out come join me between branches
smelled distant rain, I quickened to the riverbank
and heard my own voice echo.
untitled / Ava Hu
Humpback whales breach
the shoreline.
Turn toward your god.
Call the waves.
Humpback whales breach
the shoreline.
The sea recedes.
The sea races forward.
Humpback whales breach
the shoreline.
Underlined,
dog-eared pages:
you must change your life.
Driving to Hurricane Ridge contd / Kirsten Miles
Blue-black drupelets shine across
the peninsula Himalayan blackberries thrust
past native plants through every crevice swelling
drought ripened bounty pronounce
July in every vacant lot
moss and mycorrhizae sweep
brilliant greens fan
across lawns and rooftops
loam the throat
traces of rainforest once
a moist blanket caressing this hill
no to the silence of dust
clouds from the inside out
feathering our nostrils
flaked across fawns and hazelnuts
and lilyponds and spotted rabbits
under the truck on E street
next to the house whose yard has
disappeared into a sea of lavender
Icarus’s Reward / Sergiy Pustogarov
the sun reminds me that icarus never got his reward
for flying away from the rest of his brothers.
a pomegranate bleeds only when its home is ripped apart,
its siblings split across the dishes in my fridge.
maybe he should have tasted something first,
staining his face with an already broken family,
before lifting his wings into the sun.
the containers in my house sit
unopened
everything i save for hope
learns to rot.
i have neither pomegranate seeds
nor waxed wings.
let’s play a love game / nat raum
in the sense that i have never known
anything but pushing pawns around,
the morning after as my goal, and queenly
i am not. it’s all strategy—risk directly
proportionate to reward. i have never
claimed to be a saint. my voice rasps
at the first sign of spring and that’s when
i haven’t dragged an errant cigarette.
i’ll be lucky if i can breathe tomorrow
but that’s not the point. i’m the pawn.
i’m the embodiment of divided by zero,
so much nothing i am become void,
destroyer of romance. (if you keep pressing
the same buttons, they’ll go numb eventually.)
O / Daniel Avery Weiss
k so it's 9
pm right and the lights
just died, be
cause of the storm, they
went to light heaven it's like
heaven plus or like
heaven lite the
free version or
something so the candles are
out you know and we
swear
like truckers when there is a
leak later but any
way he's in the dirt and a rock
has his name on it the wet's
got the urn all
wet
running on the process / MK Zariel
an erasure poem of college marketing emails
April - Poem 5
The Sun's Uneven Rays / Maureen Alsop
When I Was Your Age / Bob Bradshaw
my college was a Mustang,
and its radio schooled me
in surf music:
The Rip Chords, The Surfaris,
Ronny and the Daytonas,
The Astronauts,
The Rivieras,
The Breakers,
The Ventures!
In my beach town
romances collapsed
quickly,
the way a wave
knocks you off
your board.
A new kind of dance
popped up
every week:
The Jerk,
The Frug,
The Watusi!
Guys and girls
lined up--
in front of cafes
and surf shops—
like 45s on the jukebox
waiting to play
when I was your age.
Music was never
loud enough.
And like Louie Louie
love was in the air
everywhere.
There was no need
for a calendar;
summer was never ending,
sure to replace fall
winter, spring--
when I was
your age
Signature / Stan Galloway
And in my dream I practice cursive writing
as if I were in second grade again
but I am not because in dreams life whorls
instead of marching linear –
each S in uppercase stretched higher
as if growing into puberty
seeing girls trying out their B’s
new letters none of us had known
every letter hooking to the next
until a magic spark enlivened ignored places
mixing up our P’s and O’s in strange but pleasant ways
and suddenly I sign my name across the mortgage
knowing I will pay for this throughout my life.
Ceremony / Ava Hu
*
Holder of ceremony.
Cloud swallower.
Wielder of swords.
Eater of black oil.
You burn the grass
beneath our feet.
The memory of the sea
recedes.
The earth will turn
with or without you.
Do you know how to call
the spirits?
Barnacles crack open.
Mussels loosen from the rock.
The memory of the sea
recedes.
Do you know how to call
the spirits?
Who will remember
the names of trees?
*
Driving to Hurricane Ridge contd / Kirsten Miles
above the Juan de Fuca strait
otters dip in the curve of Ediz Hook and
the girl at Tongue Point sleuths
tide pools for orange and purple sea urchins
crimson sea stars, blackberry stains
on her hands her aunt pointing out tentacles
anemone reaching inside a mussel
on the high ridge
in the lower parking lot
faces turned to the star studded sky
the boy on his blanket slightly bored
between each Perseid streaking
between the screen of sky and void
Soft cries rising around him with each new spark
wondering which will open a world
he recognizes
or which he doesn’t recognize but falls
flaming from his lap
Simulation Garden Party / Sergiy Pustogarov
- After the showcase Simulation Garden by Anna Huff
crystal shatters.
boulders crack.
clay breaks.
insects burrow.
rotting smells.
nostrils furrow.
churches mourn.
blessings fail,
still chant,
hold hands,
walk softly,
to light.
the crystal flower
held in your hand
gives simple decadence in a solemn day.
the stars
no longer
blossom.
we
broken people
cast veils
over shaking
ancient shrines.
letting bugs
burrow into
cursed blessings.
in the back
computers clack.
games buzz buzz
simulation garden
hosted by the gods.
.
afterwards i sat in the grass
let does dig to grass and into soil.
let flies dance on my arms,
and a drone fly above.
i still didn’t know what to call
this deity i had stood within.
sprung / nat raum
we all surround the bradford pear spittoon
of pollen vomit and watch ochre dust percolate
while horseflies emerge from hides. this is to say
it’s april, and my eyes itch. i’ve decided i want
to be the movie theater popcorn machine—
seems like a good life to me. i’d like to be doused
in butter and grease and change kernels to fluff
at will, say this must be how jesus felt. instead,
i take Ls the way i used to down chilled shots
of tequila. let’s get one thing absolutely clear:
you’re in their dms. i’m pissing in a pitchblack
bar bathroom. we are not the same.
Doggy Dementia / Daniel Avery Weiss
to be seen / MK Zariel
i almost passed out in public today and looked
desperately awkward doing it. blurred spots, distorted faces,
and still i mostly wondered what everyone would remember of it.
the spots were blue-green like the inside of my eyes, pulsating
like a heat map. i thought i was going to die
for absolutely no reason—and that would be a weird way to go
passing out in the middle of a crowded indie bookstore
in a city to be loved and discarded. sometimes i feel like
one of the many worn-looking pins on the zine rack—
easily taken, easily lost—like a flyer for a punk show
that nobody actually went to, in the end. i didn’t realize
anarchists were regular people until i was one. i didn’t
realize i could stand normally until i was being told quietly
insistently to focus my eyes. what comes next is underwhelming:
a text chain, a flyer on a wall, a conversation over food, a series
of unspoken questions. there’s nothing so precarious as multiple
flavors of Midwest Nice converging. i’m too polite to ask for help
and you’re too polite to ignore me when you see that i need it.
April - Poem 4
The Day - contd / Maureen Alsop
The twilight is an abstract char in the mind of the sentinel.
Our Mission, Babe / Bob Bradshaw
I long for a future
as optimistic
as those early Sixties,
Alan Shepard
climbing into his
Mercury capsule
--and history.
Remember, babe,
how we watched
his capsule drop
by parachute
into waters off the Bahamas?
I wish we could book ourselves
on a Time Machine,
dropping back
into our early life
together, the splash
we made!
Watching old videos of us
I wonder how
our world
could have changed
so much in so short
a time?
Wasn’t love always
our life's mission?
Isn’t it still?
What’s the urgency?
Won’t our lives, babe,
soon pass too
into history--
like Shepard’s
15 minute
flight?
Helen Advises Infant Hermione / Stan Galloway
Sleep now
Ignore the swords of men clanging
against each other in one hallway
after the next
Men think swords rule
But here’s the secret –
that little tickle where you pee –
that has more power than
the Harpe of Perseus
than great Xiphos swinging in Achilles’ hand,
or any dozen swords together here in Sparta.
Men will cross oceans for what you hold,
slay harpies, change themselves into
another man or
woman or
beast or
coin just to taste
the pleasure you hold
between your thighs.
Such is the blessing and curse of
being born a woman.
Don’t let it trip you.
Use it to turn men like a top and leave them
dizzy laughing crying out for more.
Remember, it belongs to no one
but yourself.
Pay attention as you grow.
I’ll show you how it works.
Revelation / Ava Hu
From mid-February through early April about a million migrating sandhill cranes stop at the Platte River.
*
Path, revelation,
embodiment.
When sea ice melts
we lose reflectivity.
The sandhill crane moves north
at the onset of spring.
Dogwood, star-faced,
cherry in bloom.
When the ice melts
we can no longer reflect.
They lean in wetlands,
one leg, then two.
We lose reflectivity,
the ability to let go.
Some turn their heads
or tuck them beneath a wing.
Some stand in a creek
while they sleep.
No compass.
No path.
Changes in sea ice
become extreme weather.
Lilacs loosen
and sway.
Some birds wander
or settle on the ground.
How big are you
compared to the moon?
*
Driving to Hurricane Ridge - cntd / Kirsten Miles
Her
young crown
cones upward ninety feet
an evergreen furrow into pale blue skies
shallow roots slip twenty feet across the street
to a curb edging an immaculate manicured lawn where
in a chair on a porch underneath thickly forested mountains
His slow drawl finds my ear a receptacle for nostalgia
reminiscing at seventy nine —there were no jobs
when I graduated here from high school
I was afraid to go into the forest. People
didn’t come back, most people didn’t want to send
their boys to work in logging, so many deaths in the trees—
At the library, three local women from the
Lower Elwah Sklallam tribe rise before us to debut
a book celebrating the cedar forests of the park
share their first fishing trip to the river since
the dam came down, their children
dip cedar canoes in tribal rivers
for the first time in their lives
their deep radiance and joy
drawing water from
all our
eyes
sonnet beginning with a line by 3OH!3 / nat raum
just another girl alone at the bar
is my actual gender; stop the tape.
it is thursday and i’m genderless,
sexless—still better than fridays in love.
and lust takes me places i wouldn’t go
with a gun. i am back where i started
without even a fraction of my youthful
glow, and still i expect history not to
repeat itself. i think of the owens’ suitors
in practical magic (1995), doomed
to something sinister. i think there must
be a version of the same curse placed
on me, where i am the cause of death
every time. test it at your own risk.
Search of a Mole Rat / Sergiy Pustogarov
no one understood why she crawled
with her head buried in the sand,
snorting like an anteater
after every five steps.
constantly gazing forward,
just under the cusp of the living.
she went on for years like this,
forgetting life kept going.
the feet of a thousand people above
stomped all over the tunnels
she had created to bypass
boundaries made by others.
crack went the sticks under their feet,
pop went the soil around her,
until there was no more movement
underneath their feet.
no more air pockets formed
in the wake of her journey.
she had fallen still that day.
her face buried in the dirt,
bones eroding into dust.
she had never quit the search.
never stopped mourning
until her body sank into her lover.
Sub / Daniel Avery Weiss
The backpacks trundle in packs of mom-kid-mom-kid.
Eyes meander to the steel manufactory, the windows,
the brown drips of essenced age, all the things
that silently mythologize life in the context of steel.
Oil swims in pools of yesterday’s rainfall in the parking lot,
separating into ribbons of chrome rainbow,
and an ambiguous imports warehouse assures
Donde importamos nostalgia
and by that they mean
there is no there there.
In class, they throw pencils and tease the sub and,
as if bespectacled, steal glimpses of knowledge.
There is one flag in the room, sore with
the total stillness of the air. Oppressive.
They sneak little loves through snickers at the
pledge of their silly, no uproariously funny, allegiance.
There is so, so much here here. The children steel themselves.
O, how a flag weeps at the disembodying chaos
of a paper airplane
flying right there,
right past it,
right there and beyond.
self-portrait as a preschool art project / MK Zariel
paint me in cut-out yarn for people who can't yet
use glue without spilling something. i am a crushed & battered
yet meticulously folded piece of cardboard here. i have
no small parts, sharp edges, inherent hazards—just monochromatic neon
and the as-yet-unknown. i had an identity in the way a plastic gem does:
a self-in-quotes, a radiance in the sun, a gleam
that dulls, that falls, affixed to a shaky foundation—fabric scraps
from someone's unused napkins, recycled cardboard, wasted time,
elaborate masks. i am an origami swan with charred edges. i am the
prettiest goddamn modeling clay you've ever seen. i am a medical
incident waiting to happen when somebody swallows nonfood—i don't know how i feel
about medical help anymore. i don't know if i am who i was
when i was five. they say life is what you pay attention to, but it might be closer
to what you consume, what you deny.
April - Poem 3
The Day contd / Maureen Alsop
I turned the page and the river opened. Thin pages, subaqueous and fetid, a
continuum. The eye of the storm crosses the bay at midday.
The trees remain unsettled. Buttercup blue waters collect beneath the roving papers,
an inconclusive thesis. The tyrant sun. A revolting sun. Navigation itself is research,
trial and error, a means of breaking and returning.
A cloud is a misappropriation of desire, a subtext and sometimes a desire.
The spirits here were woeful. Absolutely woeful. The reflection of ideas rather than
choices.
I am writing a series of postcards to you. A mindless compass without stamps,
seriously, I am getting these together.
Kidney Stone Blues / Bob Bradshaw
My CT shows a stone
teetering on the edge
of my uretha canal.
I obsess over it.
Like a monster in a fairy tale,
it grows bigger,
--every night-- till it’s a boulder
rolled down from a glacier,
stuck in a ditch.
“It can be painful—
like giving birth,”
my doctor says.
So, shouldn’t my wife
be the one carrying
this damn stone? I ask.
“You’re funny.
Women must love you,”
my doctor says.
What do you mean? I ask.
“You have a tiny stone.
Yet the thought of it
wandering down
your uretha
inflicting pain
keeps you
from sleeping!
But your wife
is looking at pushing
a boulder
out a straw
when she delivers!
When she screams
what will you
advise her?
To man up?“
My urologist
shakes her head.
“If you feel pain,
you can’t bear,
maybe you should
ask your wife
what she would do.
Don’t be surprised
if she offers
helpful words like
Push!
Push!”
Tenth Birthday / Stan Galloway
Sunday nights we’d race home from church
to catch the end of It’s About Time,
or Land of the Giants
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
or Time Tunnel –
shows about astronauts and science
in a topsy-turvy world.
At 10, it was no different than at 9 or 8,
except my birthday was a Sunday,
and Apollo put a module on the moon.
Human history hit a high-water mark
and I was blowing out ten rocket engines
on a cake that lasted maybe for a day.
The Mountain / Ava Hu
*
Quickly, a bobcat darts.
Mist closes after it.
Everything broken
mends
if your mind believes
there is no mind.
Do you become invisible
in the mist?
Do you hold
what disappears?
The evening star
breaks open.
You break open
a brush of light
across the purple
mountain.
*
Driving to Hurricane Ridge / Kirsten Miles
I
4:00am, immersed, posting a poem by an interpreter
for asylum cases, still lingering in warm sheets
hygge rising around pattering fingers
a wooden crack breaking the hush
under the window a yearling spike
rubs felt off his finger-
sized horn on a fallen
branch under the pear tree
a watchful six point tries to lock
racks then wanders off
unable to get a purchase on the
one slight point
A doe and her twin fawns seek shade
under the cave of the western red cedar
boughs draping a massive sward around
the picket fence, just past the mailbox
one lone root gently lifting
a ridge on West 11th street
Morning News / Sergiy Pustogarov
in the morning dew drops kiss my feet as i dance with the golden butterflies.
in the morning
i dance with
dew drops
my feet
kiss
golden butterflies
dew drops
kiss
butterflies
i am not a monsoon, but a summer storm / nat raum
ire takes over dusk. bruise-grey
clouds replace chalked orange
skyscape. this is a fraction
of what surges veins, anger
spiking adrenaline like lightning
zips its way through a cloud.
i’m a cliché. disrespect marked
my forehead, bastard child of ash
wednesday and carrie (1976).
i no longer believe in honorable
shades of grey. you either bleed
or you’re dead.
The Raccoon / Daniel Avery Weiss
The headlights unfurl from the blackness
one thick, suspicious glare. Pupilless and very near to rabies
not being a metaphor. I have seen them
wild and hungry, clawing at each other,
a scattered family in a marsh on the Gulf, snapping turtles clad
in a zebra's disposition. This is
not that: this is in the garbage,
equal parts frozen and furious,
and bewitched by my sad, untrashed life on this earth.
You are right.
There is more trash than I know what to do with.
I eat it every day. Do share.
They skitter away, spitting
primal squeal and swearing vengeance against
every wall and all the grass. Perhaps I will join.
fluctuations / MK Zariel
a text message poem
my anarchism stems in part from a hatred of imposed order.
i hope this wasn't too weird to talk about.
she kept getting flustered when i complimented her
he is on the board of a fucking startup. it is terrifying.
i've gotten to the point of asking everyone i know if they know people in milwaukee.
we all have our contributions.
this may sound strange but you're really good at explaining this stuff
can i send you a poem?
i love being your resident anarchist friend
this is less about logic and more about how my bodymind responds to things.
your fight scene was iconic
i know casting decisions are final, it just worries me.
he wrote it in 3 minutes and didn't care
i could create a homebrew flashback condition
the discord is nuts right now
i hope you get chosen
April - Poem 2
The Day ctd / Maureen Alsop
Below the equator above the 26th parallel and the Brisbane Line[1], I live in a space of my own choosing.
I’m working through a “third state”[2] of consciousness, organically seeking subtext, solitude. Working between image and experimentation. I expose myself. In this, I expose betrayal.
An anatomy with
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
[1] The Brisbane Line was a division designed in WW2 wherein the whole of the northern region of Australia would be abandoned in the face of catastrophic attack. Comforting for one living in Far North Queensland right?! I don’t want so plainly to announce my who and where, but suffice it, I am both American and Australian. Though in both countries, I’m confident, I would be most obviously considered as an American. I will try not to judge this. To introduce myself to one “why” I am here in this situation of 30/30, I’d like to thank Tupelo for their support. Tupelo kindly published some visual poems some years ago:
https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Alsop-Witness.compressed-copy.pdf
I like to support those who support me. I’ll leave it at that for now.
[2] The idea of a “third state,” here described through a found reference to a war ship; “war ship” and “worship” are two continuums of American heritage. To me, the “third state” is better defined by the theta, or dream state, also possibly that momentary decomposition shortly after death. At the moment, as at every moment, there are many destructions afoot. I am human, thus wounded, let’s go with that, hey?
My Father Shaves / Bob Bradshaw
An early memory of my father?
A towel around his waist,
he holds a shaving brush,
as he stands in front
of the bathroom mirror.
The walls crawl
with droplets of water.
And Dad’s cheeks?
They are slopes
lathered in clouds
of foam.
With his brush he dabs
a dollop of cloud-stuff
on my left cheek,
then stands back, like an artist admiring
his morning’s work.
His index finger
draws a cloud-trail of foam
down my right cheek.
Shall I shave you, son?
I nod, yes! And carefully
(blade closed) he scrapes
the cloud-surf from my face
with his blade.
Go show your mom.
She’ll be proud to see
how much you’ve grown up!
and I race off with
the good news.
One Sock / Stan Galloway
between washer
and dryer
lies unfound
for weeks
missed but
looked for
in wrong places
mate set aside
unable to cry out
also lost
because alone.
The Widening Field / Ava Hu
Make it stand out
*
Who am I
a witness
to green entering
everything
dervish of myth
and pollen
we fingerprnt canyons
dust climbing light
we fngerprint the bruise
of rain on white jasmine
belly of a cloud
expanding with breath
which line unsettles
the field?
Who will be the water
who lifts the boat?
*
untitled / Sergiy Pustogarov
i have started planning my morning around my time on the toilet.
i know it will take me anywhere from five to thirty minutes
every morning when i get up to do my business,
and so i wake up thirty minutes earlier than i want to;
just because i know that my body doesn’t always love me, and somewhere
inside my bosom, the gears are not completely turning in synchrony.
i know this isn’t normal, and every two years i know it will get much worse--
throwing me into a housebound fit of nausea and constant pain, but it’s life.
and i’m too scared to go to the doctor to figure out what could be wrong
with me, and my anxiety is too high to get the tests they want of my insides,
just to be able to say what’s wrong, and what my final verdict will be. what medication
they say that i should shove down my throat to let me get up thirty minutes later in the day.
so i just tell myself that it must be ibs, because it’s a magical little thing that
cannot be easily identified; and it kind of fits all the symptoms that i’m having;
and it’s not as bad as colon cancer. well, wait it could be that, i guess.
and i’m sorry, but i have so many issues running through my mind.
you see the thing i didn’t tell you at the beginning is that i am a medical student--
i know more things that could go wrong with your body than the average person.
and somehow that sometimes sends me into a tailspin, wondering what i’m struggling
with today when i wake up thirty minutes earlier, just to sit on a cold porcelain throne.
and i guess it could be colon cancer, because i do vape-- and there have been a hundred
different studies that show the tobacco i’m slowly inhaling into my lungs
is somehow connected to the rest of my cells; causing them to turn all beserk,
and never really know what they are doing inside my body
it could also be some other disease like crohns, making every meal i eat a dance
with the devil. never knowing how it will affect the rest of my day, and how long
i will be sent back to the seat of durge, to pay my respects for simply eating.
but i’m still too scared to get that colonoscopy that in the end could show nothing.
so today i end the day by telling myself it’s ibs all along,
and plan to get up thirty minutes earlier tomorrow.
--this is ibs—
blacking out at my first phillies game/nat raum
scarlet and powder blue are now phanatic-shaped
blurs in the back of my retinae. surfside tastes
like stevia so i stomach the whole can in sacrifice.
i know i’m a good friend—that’s not the point.
i giggle from behind the phils’ dugout and pray
they dig themselves out from five runs down
despite my loyalty to baltimore’s baseball birds.
we take the train back up broad, take fishtown
iced teas to the face and shots of beef broth
to boot. sometimes i still don’t believe myself
when i run it all back, and i’m not just talking
about this afternoon, chilly but sunspeckled,
shitfaced in a way that doesn’t burn the house
down. i watch thereal housewives of new york
and everyone says ramona’s an angry drunk.
i watch southern charm and they say craig’s problem
is not the booze, but the fury which lies closer
to the surface than most of us are comfortable
with. i also mean myself, my own disdains
and demons once gasping like goldfish, begging
for their fair share of oxygen. the last oracle card
i bought said dance with your shadows; they are a part
of you. i sip dirty martinis with mine now, certain
dark and light are close enough to hold each
others’ hair back, if it came to it. i smoke mystery
blunts outside the bar. i come to bent over a toilet,
more mess than pillar, but still alive. sometimes
i have to remind myself that i am still alive.
Bison Gallivanting in South Dakota / Daniel Avery Weiss
He is as breath
on fire
a sort of fan
a shovel into some
thing seeking
a soul
oh,
what dirt
reconcile / MK Zariel
i’ll leave it to you to see me
in the cold yet glowing light of a Wisconsin winter,
in the reflections we ignore, in the way
neither of us feel a single thing without
questioning it first. come and make small talk
at the edge of a cliff with me—update me
on your transition goals while we watch the world burn—
make me wonder if we have original characters
or just shadow selves. you feel like safety
and home to me, a person for whom safety
and home are mixed bags at best. i can’t decide
how to feel about that. i’ll extend a casual
invitation, a shy smile, nothing more than an
ill fated event and a gossip session after,
soft light, quirky memes, the infinity of time.
you don’t like to talk about the future. you don’t
talk about things you don’t respect. i’ll move on
or pretend to—watch your smile like a curated
cottagecore aesthetic, watch your selfhood like
a beautiful fortress, watch you build walls
made of desires as-yet-noticed. you once told me
i was your only real friend, and i was equal parts
horrified and impressed.
April - Poem 1
The Day / Maureen Alsop
the dream cut into the heart of her belonging, she entered the
lagoon, welcoming a rose—blossoming at the ocean’s depth—
she entered the sea and survived the dockyard hands /the dockyard men /the hands of
men
her sister survived by war paint
seen to be unseen
My Black-capped Chickadee / Bob Bradshaw
She’s more welcome
than the Golden Oldies
flying from a radio
into my yard.
A little scholar
she sports
a black cap
as if she’s
graduating today
from kindergarten.
Put out a box
of wood shavings
and she’s happy
like a toddler
discovering
LEGO.
And she’s always
ready to snack,
her black bib
tucked under
her white
cheeks.
I leave a seed
by the bird bath.
Like my daughter
she watches,
cocks her head
as if I’m tutoring her
in French.
Voila!
I say to her and her heart
flutters wildly
in a burst
of wind
and she’s off!
singing
“Hey Sweetie!” “Hey Sweetie!”
—as if even
at her
young age
she knows life
is short!
Batu Khan / Stan Galloway
ancient voice
beside the Dnipro
soughs through
silver birch
insists this dirt
this rain
each breath
is hexed
always will be
coveted by
outsiders.
*Batu Khan led the siege of Kyiv in 1240.
Revisit / Ava Hu
*
The earth shakes her memories
into the shapes of falling flowers:
folded wing of chrysanthemum,
hooded iris unfurls.
The dark universe
we open and close
the burn of wildflowers,
the glacier melt.
We are the black-ribboned
song of Orpheus descending,
the ascent all depends
on how you hear it.
A Day for Fools Like Me in April. / Sergiy Pustogarov
I close the front gate,
The warm wind cajoling around my shoulders.
It’s ninety degrees outside
With blazing sun.
The summer crock of toads meets my ears
As the world sheds its winter coat
And leaves start to peer around the doors.
April fools!
Tomorrow will be thirty degrees again.
A lizard runs out in front of my foot,
I pounce to grab it and admire all its beauty.
The tail comes off,
He keeps running.
April fools!
The mystery always seems to get away.
I get in the car,
Turn on the racket under the hood
And start driving.
I turn onto the freeway
And past the sparkling water,
Its glisten reflecting back through my eye.
A spark of hope finally awakening,
The world will finally keep on healing,
And the light will keep on shining.
April fools!
We started another war today.
Ahead I see a puddle
A reminder of the soft raindrops
That watered the earth the morning before
Granting passage to this beauty now
April fools!
It’s just a mirage on a hot day.
It just keeps going on,
Every day a new horror.
The world somehow isn’t awakening in joy,
It’s still in pain like all along.
April fools!
I thought humanity would do better,
It seems we never learn.
instructions for fortification via upcycling the body / nat raum
A haibun after Sadee Bee
bloat lungs like steaming balloons which float through the late
summer skyscape. tie esophagus at the top and allow to collapse
inward. wipe crusted sleep from corners of eye sockets; cut feet at
the ankles and replace with wheels. submerge fingers in the gristle
of grey matter. begin to sculpt. cast a spell across the night, stars
shuddering in both anticipation and supernova. smolder brighter,
soar higher.
the city can only
see you before you’re about
to die, recycle into dust.
The Kidney Stone / Daniel Avery Weiss
I consulted my dog yesterday about the weather.
In his old age, his legs have shifted
purpose: no longer for walking, now only for the ache
of incoming rain, premonitions of petrichor
twitching his inky black knob of a nose. He will not go outside now
if the great oracle of his musculature simmers
clouds into raindrops. How very omnipotent, I wonder,
that perhaps his legs themselves demand rain, a gift earned with age
and so exhausting to wield that he can only spend his days
lounging, unmoving, on the couch. Gods need their rest, after all
is said and done, what remains is a drenched backyard, grass
like wilted spinach, the life cycle of dirt to mud made manifest,
and he is right. My dog is right, and I, too, feel futures
in my gut, each step closer to them less premonition
and more kidney stone assassinating its way through
me—oh, to be Merlin, missileless mut, blind, deaf, head in the sand
by virtue of age alone—is this his superpower? Flight
from it all? Stupefying glare of his mortality
holding him fast and hard to whatever home, home,
home this is? Something rotten haunts
our days, you and I, whose bones we
frantically teethe.
How our bodies hurt that we face a future
that faces us, looking back at its dismal birth and howling,
How did we ever let that happen? It was in our bones, we
poor dogs, and we could not stay inside.
My dog—he has cataracts, eyes like frosted glass—and
when our eyes meet, uncertainty flails between us
until something bites—he looks away, or huffs, or I hear the news.
To tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, glaring steadfast at the blood and iron,
Hello.
My name is Daniel, and my world is ending.
Shake my hand.
Let's talk.
a politician posted on Bluesky / MK Zariel
for Trans Day Of Visibility. i was supposed to feel seen,
i think, but i shrugged and kept scrolling.
i don’t feel visible so much as in-progress, a forgotten footnote
in the drafts folder of my brain. social media screams out
a resonance for trans survival, for the way we will likely all venmo one another
the same tired chunk of money, for the mutual aid graphics, for the
pithy quotes, for nobody, for the small talk
we’ll make with a well-meaning cis friend, asking
what they can do to support us. it’s grey and desperate
here in the midwest, the sky changing hues like the pronouns
in my bio—snow melting and reforming only to blossom
into a short-lived false spring. today i reached out to an ex
asking if she felt visible yet. she didn’t respond. today i woke up
feeling resolutely normal. today i was trans, but i wasn’t
entirely sure what that meant anymore. since when did the simple fact
of having never felt like a girl create a void to be filled
with labels, with litanies, with the question of whether i should just
be the first person alive to transition in both directions at once.
transmasculine lesbian fits like the new outfit you buy
at the peak of summer, wondering if maybe you’ll feel
like a different person. being visible makes it hard
to be anything else.
March - Poem 31
IF WE KISSED, WE COULD TAKE OUT THE PAST FROM EACH OTHER’S TONGUES / A Cento composed by Susan Hankla
With lines from and by Kathleen Bednarek, Myoma Bibi, Susan Hankla, Amy Haworth, Christina McCleanhan, Elizabeth McGraw, and Alexis Wolfe.
The shades are drawn on the work,
after trying on the silver of a night.
I'm sat in my little kid closet;
the dog's barking begs a long story.
Poverty chickens squawk; by all accounts
there were no worms anymore.
Awake at the spark, my friends always talk of tomorrow
What does yesterday melt into?
There's a line of ladies released from lies.
Was the sunset that spotless like really pure peach,
when the sea is filled with wrappers glinting in the light?
I miss keeping company with cleanliness, unbuttoned cuff
holding snot. I am all mouth stuffed with sky, and hardtack prayer.
There is rarely applause for the girl who colors her cat blue.
I'll make of you a sorryfish, a photo of a ripped photo;
grass painted in shades of prozak, I'll sing the scripture of my grief.
Think about something else: I'll put peas in the orzo.
I am from bridesmaids' dresses. Shalimar on pure cotton cloth.
I am a monkey near the out-of-tune piano.
Rewild your soul: there is a prayer between your thighs.
We are mountains, my lips in your hair: A taste of the feast that was promised.
It's not about what you wear, but how. Dandyism is a thing, Y'all.
I used to walk into a new city, feet clad in jelly shoes, but now I carry
a wicker basket of hot pepper jellies, the only one to take the story with me.
March - Poem 30
A Closing Prayer / Kathleen Bednarek
Prayer survives in the mouth.
It survives despite the book
being partially burned.
And blooms back in muddy ash
from a mistake of fallen tears.
A patchwork of pages,
known by its ply
of edges and shadows.
Words spoken in.
A hand upon the cover—
peace—you are beloved.
Incantations pressed
by repetition upon sand
from the Indian Ocean.
All I can give you is finite.
Grains of continent flung back
to the emptiness of space.
This hymn of a star’s collapse.
Shared with time,
desire falling in on itself.
Encouraging our passage
to be sung, let us complete
silence taken in, heard through
a window in the heart.
Black Grief / Mymona Bibi
I'm at that stage of grief
where black lakes spill
out into black land
on black days and under black moons.
Once upon a time
there was a line between sky
and water - I remember wading
through blue bodies.
Now the world is darkened
with ravens and sinking
is easier,
my voice is dying,
becoming another black sound.
As loud as the last time
I sobbed in the back
of a taxi,
as loud as the dog
barking at the rising tides.
I want what he wants.
To make art from swallowed pride.
To find stars in the black sky
Every few years I make a list of jobs / Susan Hankla
people have that no one would ever imagine existed.
1. The people hired to carry the trains of heavy designer gowns
at such places as the Met Gala, or on the Red Carpet the night of Academy Awards.
2. The people who wash all the cat and dog dishes at SPCA.
3. The person or persons who assemble things you buy online:
such as the under-the-desk printer caddy, or the teak shower bench
which weighs close to three-hundred pounds.
4. The person or persons who knits sweaters for Teddy bears for Etsy.
It's time for the dance-break for words: whoever invented this phrase deserves a medal:
"You can't dance to every record." It's a real stress-reliever to hear it.
An ekphrastic for poems that are classics, such as "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop,
or E.D.’s "Because I Could Not Stop for Death."
A public service announcement: stop using the word "iconic". Please just stop using it.
Certainly, everything can't be iconic. A couple years earlier, in overuse was the word, "ironic."
And FYI: Dandyism is a thing, y'all. Look it up. Try it on if you are male identified.
We women need to smile.
A poioumenon is a written work that tells the story of its own making, such as
"I May Destroy You" by Michaela Coel.
I'll keep you posted when I think of more things I think you need to know.
Conclusion / Amy Haworth
(A cento from my March poetry)
A boy on his bike
won’t be shut down, torn down, talked down
by majority votes won
I weep for the girls
healed
with shadowed lines
And I realize how easy it could have been to say
“I see what you are, you rodeo clown”
rolling it over, tasting it, teaching my mouth to say it
I am from sea shore and man 'o war
when I was your everything
Today could go either way
but the spring, when it comes, tastes like sunshine
We were made to forge trails
immersed in beauty so loud
you’ll notice it tickle your back
Gen tle
Ghosts or angels — who would know?
I hope you live next door,
(No one here will I know in a year)
As if I knew,
Mother of Good,
the ladders are being burned.
Here's What Makes Sense to Me / Christina McCleanhan
Grief sleeps in the throat.
rouses…peeks…
ragged breath passing—
a golden witness turning darkness
Joy lives in the eyes.
Self as writing prompt / Alexis Wolfe
imagine you are falling
place a penny under your furred tongue
marry a liberal Jeep Cherokee at the local courthouse
sing Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart into a spinning
orbital sander, shatter your grandmother’s Churchill china watch
their baby blue rosettes fly, spit cherry jello down a goose’s
throat, kitefly a tumbleweed on your bichon frisé leash,
crawl on hands and knees the reeking leek fields
adjacent the Auvers-sur-Oise cemetery,
vandalize red the grand canyon
change your tax-filing status to Derelict
ding-dong-ditch Marina Abramović
March - Poem 29
Lyric to Goodbye #1 / Kathleen Bednarek
It sounds like spy code,
but here’s how the song went:
Yellow mailbox, this is redrose bush.
& these are your blue eyes
& your idea about tomorrow.
I have a surprise, it's behind my back.
They’re closed tomorrow
& yesterday.
So I can’t remember
how to return it.
Where there's a surprise, there’s something
completely unknown—
what is it?
I’ve returned the outline of that moment.
In the shape of what you
could only make—
(Tape ends)
By accident / Mymona Bibi
I left the door unlocked and the keys
on the floor by accident.
I thought we were free with our
toes in the water, free from accidents.
There is a scar you forgot to touch
and a story I forgot to tell about that accident.
This birth between the night and day
was to be a miracle, always an accident.
I slipped in a puddle and saw your face
in the clouds, all by accident.
A fear of drowning is a fear of playing
and these fears were not built by accident.
Let us kiss beneath stars until they fall and burn
my skin, we are not the last accident.
FROM THEIR JOURNEYS / Susan Hankla
World tilts on its axis / Amy Haworth
Second world war could have gone either way
A matter of days, hours of difference
Today could go either way
A matter of decisions, powers of difference.
Yesterday was currents of people
marching as one, a
Calibrating force
A matter of unity, none cower in deference.
In Longing, I Root / Christina McCleanhan
Poetry is juiced from the orneriness of our gut.
Today, I drove a road I learned to miss yesterday…Kinniconick was pooled at the place where March always visits... hands on the wheel… air softened by old bark and dried leaves…I drove by instinct… I went to my grandmother’s cemetery… sat on her tombstone, to be close to her plot of earth. I willed her to speak… scold my disrespect…waited for her to claim me as her own…cleared sticks, stepped on soft ground…it’s good the ticks are not hungry this early in the season...I forgot to wear socks.
Our history got caught in the river tide.
On the way, I passed through my grandfather’s town…there was no music…at the four-way stop, I found a voicemail…played it until the tires bounced onto the railroad tracks. His death made my bones ache… for the first time in six years, the summoning to visit ghosts was louder than my fatigue…I was prepared to sit in silence…Instead, I spoke to the one who designs my days. I asked Him to love me…let me be useful…show me what to build with the sorrow I hold…His answer was a symphony of lawnmower, birds, and wind.
In silence, what is carried rests.
March - Poem 28
Feel vs. am / Kathleen Bednarek
Everything is changing.
The tangerine is softening.
The tangerine is softening there.
Pulling from the waxed light of its porous
surface so much like still life. Pulling
moisture reserves inward,
into the cellular structure of its white
threads and pith.
Fibrous, elsewhere split apart
by the teeth of expressive monkeys
and a separate catbird.
Taken in
and cast aside, the bitter rind
rolled in dust
skin up.
FOUR INSTANCES OF CELESTIAL INTERVENTION / Susan Hankla
On that flight to the manuscript conference
in the Berkshires, the red sweater
featured on the cover of my poetry book
sits down and flies beside me. We arrive
to see Yankee Candle's HQ, "The Scenter
of the Universe."
Christmas one year after Mother died,
on December 26 I call suicide hotline
just to talk, but no one answers, so I call
the number for vets, and Dreama picks up.
Hearing her Appalachian voice slows
my racing pulse.
When I see the male lead's distinctively thick
mustache in the movie Chicken with Plums,
I email Lincoln Labs at MIT and my lover
answers it after forty years. A connection never
broken, because of the red thread that binds us.
Waiting outside an Italian restaurant,
in a downpour in Littleton, our first sunset
at Frost Place, like the magician's dollar bill
centered in an orange, folded typing paper in a bush
catches my eye; it's the poem I've been looking for
so very long. Eight poets gather to eat, each served
one at a time, as if there's but 1 plate, 1 fork,
1 knife, 1 spoon.
Broken Sleep / Christina McCleanhan
Raise a glass of milk,
cry out, “here here,”
go to bed.
She was taught to barter by
strangers seeking commodities
sculpted by her personality and flesh.
In the beginning, lived her smile.
In her smile lived the truth.
As she ran, the panting wind
left her parched.
Good water left by tepid people
trailed sediment along her throat.
Once, twice, she coughed.
When her throat did not clear,
their hands were still
out of reach.
She understood.
Ugliness made them
feel helpless. What is
seen in the dark is not often
forgotten in the light.
Can I be enough, she thought.
Stay calm, stay still
have the wisdom
to wait.
I still can't speak for the wreck / Alexis Wolfe
I still can’t speak for the wreck / windless field / closed window against worn sky —
I want to lick creek bed
after creek bed after creek
bed dry, until
little red flowers sprouting
into brightness