Painted Bride Quarterly’s Slush Pile

Episode 137: Collective Effervescence

Episode 137: Collective Effervescence

 

Don’t be jelly, but we’re having a blast with three poems from the poet Han VanderHart in this episode! You can join in on the fizzing of our collective effervescence by just tuning in. We find the conversation naturally turning towards John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, taking in the pipe as a fairly recent newcomer as a punctuation mark in poetry, and the concept of absolute zero, alongside much, much more. Poetic themes of truth, love, and the power of “No” sit at the center of our conversation. Oh, and Marion deftly keeps Kathy in the conversation when technology unexpectedly steals her voice! (Be sure to check out the painting Truth Coming Out of Her Well, the inspiration for the first poem, an ekphrastic, that we discuss. It’s a painting that has inspired some cool tattoo art!)

 

At the table: Marion Wrenn, Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Divina Boko, Lisa Zerkle, Dagne Forrest, Lillie Volpe (sound engineer)

 

 

Han VanderHart grew up on a small-scale farm in Virginia, and now lives in North Carolina, under the pines with their long term partner, two children, four cats, two dogs, and a Diva koi Beta fish named Caroline (long I). Their favorite flower is all of them, with the exception of the gerber daisy, which looks fake. Han is the author of Larks (Ohio, 2025) and What Pecan Light (BCP, 2021), and hosts Of Poetry Podcast and co-edits River River Books with Amorak Huey.

 

Insta: @han.vanderhart

Bluesky: @hanvanderhart.bsky.social

Website: hanvanderhart.com

Episode 136: Mapping Experience Part 2

Episode 136: Mapping Experience Part II

 

Here’s a first for PBQ, the second of a two-part series on a single poet! We’re calling this two-parter the The Maggie Wolff Experience. We delight in spending more time with Maggie’s exceptional series of abcedarians, “Surveys, Maps, and Mothers”, which share an unspooling narrative of intergenerational trauma. Kathy notes the similarity to experiencing an anthology series, with each of the four poems we’ve discussed offering a complete experience, while added depth and richness emerges from reading multiple poems (this makes Episode 135 or Part I optional but still recommended listening!). Jason calls attention to the skillfully created sonic waves that appear in sections of some of the poems, notably “S” in this episode. We touch on the “lore” of the people in our lives (thanks to Divina for the Gen Z lingo) and Sam makes the connection with Philip Larkin’s This Be the Verse (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”). All of that and even a quick moment referencing Billy Joel’s Movin' Out (Anthony’s Song) from 1977 – if you listen, you’ll know why!

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Samantha Neugebauer, Dagne Forrest, Lisa Zerkle, Jason Schneiderman, Divina Boko, Lillie Volpe (sound engineer)

Maggie Wolff is a poet, essayist, fiction writer, and Ph.D. student. She recently won an AWP Intro Journal Award for her poetry, and her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Juked, New Delta Review, and other publications. Her chapbook Haunted Daughters has just been released by Press 254. When she isn't spending her time stressing about Phd-ing, she enjoys long walks, horror movies, and hibernating at home.

 

Instagram @m_wolffwriter

Episode 135: Mapping Experience

Episode 135: Mapping Experience

Dive into the first of a two-part series (a first for us!) of what we’re calling The Maggie Wolff Experience. In this episode we dig into the first two of four poems from her exceptional series of abcedarians called “Surveys, Maps, and Mothers”. These plainspoken, unvarnished poems, which structure painful experiences in multiple dictionary-style entries within each poem, are skillfully crafted. We notice the calm sense of order the form brings to the experience of deconstructing this narrative of intergenerational trauma. We also appreciate the careful attention to lineation, which intensifies meaning, alongside the subtle layering of sound. You’ve got give it a listen!

 

Links you might like:

Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

Mercator Projections

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Divina Boko, Lillie Volpe (sound engineer)

Maggie Wolff is a poet, essayist, fiction writer, and Ph.D. student. She recently won an AWP Intro Journal Award for her poetry, and her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Juked, New Delta Review, and other publications. Her chapbook, Haunted Daughters, is forthcoming from Press 254. When she isn't spending her time stressing about Phd-ing, she enjoys long walks, horror movies, and hibernating at home.

 

Instagram @m_wolffwriter

Episode 134: Tidbits & Trolls

Episode 134: Tidbits & Trolls 

Join us for a conversation about new poems by Kelly Egan and a discussion about line breaks, image systems, and the surprise turns poems make. Keep your eyes and ears open, Slushies, the landscape is full of lore. Egan has us pondering possibilities. Once upon a time folks believed in Selkies, shapeshifting seals who make folks fall in love with them in their human form. Who knew it's bad luck to open the door on Christmas Eve for fear trolls will maraud your house? You've been warned. Check out Danish artist Thomas Dambo's mammoth sculpted trolls hidden in plain sight. And if you want to deep dive into another legendary landscape – aka a brick-and-mortar bookstore – be sure to check out Parker Posey's documentary The Booksellers. 

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Samantha Neugebauer, Dagne Forrest, Lisa Zerkle, Divina Boko, Jess Fielo (sound engineer) 

 

Kelly Egan writes from dream, reverie, and long drives. She is the author of two chapbooks—Millennial, from White Stag, and A Series of Septembers, from Dancing Girl Press. Her poems can also be found in Maiden Magazine, Interim, Colorado Review, Laurel Review, RHINO, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. Kelly has an MFA from Saint Mary’s College of CA and has participated in writing residencies in Iceland and the Peruvian Amazon. She lives in California’s Bay Area. Find her at kellyjeanegan.com.  

Episode 133: Delicious Disorientation

Episode 133: Delicious Disorientation 

 

Three poems by Christopher Brean Murray cleverly dropped us all into a wonderful sense of disorientation that we relished navigating. Our discussion touched on time travel, dreamscapes, masterful language and wordplay, and we explored the importance of trusting the speaker in poetry that leans into surrealism. Samantha pointed us to other texts that play with time, perception, and reality, and we spent a little time considering accessibility in poetry. Doom scrolling, misinformation, and disinformation all make appearances in conjured landscapes that brought pointillism to mind. Jason reminds us of the risk of expecting more of the same from a poet when as a reader you’ve fallen hard for an earlier work. It was hard to end our discussion as it was so rich and rewarding. After enthusiastically voting “yes” for the first two poems, we ended on a cliffhanger with the third. (Update: the third poem was ultimately a “no” for us, but the discussion will show how much we appreciated it.) 

 

Links you might like: 

Tobias Wolff "Bullet in the Brain" 

Tracy Chevalier, "The Glassmaker"  

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, Dagne Forrest, Lisa Zerkle, Divina Boko, Jess Fielo (sound engineer) 

Christopher Brean Murray’s book, Black Observatory (Milkweed Editions), was chosen by Dana Levin as the winner of the 2022 Jake Adam York Prize and was listed by The New York Public Library as one of the Best Books of 2023. Murray served as online poetry editor of Gulf Coast, and his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, New Ohio Review, and other journals. He lives in Houston, TX. 

 

Episode 132: Trust & Fear

Episode 132: Trust & Fear

 

Talking about fiction is our JAWN slushies. Join us as we discuss Terry Dubow's "The Q," a short story that sounds like it wants to be a crime novel: a murderer gets out of jail and asks to stay with his pen pal. The surprise is that the piece is also a gentle story of male friendship and compassion. We're drawn to the story's ability to showcase the odd-ball sincerity of letter writing, and the strange, retro experience of having to wait for a response. Can you imagine? Putting a letter in a mailbox? Waiting for a reply that has to make its way to you through actual space and time? Does anyone remember licking a stamp? We're here for it, Terry Dubow. Tell us a story. 

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, Dagne Forrest, Lisa Zerkle, Divina Boko, Jess Fielo (sound engineer)

Born outside of Los Angeles, Terry spent most of his adult life in the great city of Cleveland, Ohio. He is now in the middle of a planned mid-life crisis and living with his wife of 30 years in Marin County, California. While he works at a school that sits directly across from San Quentin, the origin of “The Q" comes directly from his uncle-in-law, Gary Weske, who 20 years ago told a version of it that stuck in Terry’s head ever since. Thanks, Gary! Over the last years, Terry has published more than 25 stories, most recently in The Meadow (upcoming), Litro, Clockhouse, and The New Ohio Review, which nominated his story “Bandits” for the Best of the Net. His frustratingly unpublished novels are represented by Lisa Grubka at the United Talent Agency.

 

 

Episode 83: Goodnight, Mary Magdalene (REISSUE)

Goodnight, Mary Magdalene first aired in June 2020 and features three poems by Vasiliki Katsarou, a poet and publisher. In 2023, Vasiliki published a short collection of poetry Three Sea Stones with Solitude Hill Press and a second collection, The Second Home, with Finishing Line Press. It’s a great time to revisit Vasiliki’s work.

Dear Slushies, join the PBQ crew (which includes a freshly-tenured Jason Schneiderman) for a pre-pandemic recording of our discussion of 3 poems by the wonderful Vasiliki Katsarou’s work. Be sure to read the poems on the page below as you listen.  They’ll require your eyes and ears– and “a decoder ring.” The team has a grand old time explicating these artful poems. The muses are sprung and singing in us as we read and decide on this submission. Katsarou’s poems teach us to read them without projecting too much of ourselves and our current preoccupations onto them. We’re reminded to pay attention to what’s happening on the page. But synchronicities abound! Before we know it we’re ricocheting off of the poems’ images and noting the wonderful convergences the poems trigger –  we hear traces of Wallace Stevens “Idea of Order of Key West” or Auden’s Musee de Beaux Arts. (But first we check in with each other, cracking each other up in a pre-pandemic moment of serious lightness. We’re heard that “Science” shows Arts & Humanities majors make major money in the long run. Kathy reports that “the data on success” shows that participation in Nativity Plays is a marker for career success. Samantha confesses she played Mary Magdalene in a Nativity Play. Marion might have been a Magi. And many of us were reindeer.. Also, Donkeys do better than sheep over time (which may or may not have been claimed on “Wait, wait… don’t tell me!”).  Editing a Lit Mag shouldn’t be this much fun, Slushies. Listen through to the discussion of the 3rd poem’s deep magic and craft. And listen to our editors’ cats chime in).

Addison Davis, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, Kathleen Volk Miller,  Marion Wrenn, and Joe Zang

Vasiliki Katsarou grew up Greek American in Jack Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. She has also lived in Paris, France, and Harvard, Mass. She is the author of a full-length poetry collection, Memento Tsunami, and co-editor of two contemporary poetry anthologies: Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems and Dark as a Hazel Eye: Coffee & Chocolate Poems. She holds an MFA from Boston University and an AB in comparative literature from Harvard University. She read her poetry at the 2014 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, and is a Teaching Artist at Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, New Jersey. Her poems have been published widely and internationally, including in NOON: Journal of the Short Poem (Japan), Corbel Stone Press’ Contemporary Poetry Series (U.K.), Regime Journal (Australia), as well as in Poetry Daily, Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature, Wild River Review, wicked alice, Literary Mama, La Vague Journal, Otoliths, and Contemporary American Voices.  She wrote and directed an award-winning 35mm short film, Fruitlands 1843, about a Transcendentalist utopian community in Massachusetts. Vasiliki’s website: https://onegoldbead.com/, Twitter: https://twitter.com/cineutopia , Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vasiliki.katsarou, and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cineutopia/

 

The Future Arrives as a Redhead

They talk of mothers in law
but not of outlaw daughters

her sun and her moon is our son
her cool paleness, reflected

in an eye that looks like mine,
follows her curves along the shoreline

her hair like copper coils
from beneath a straw hat

a Maisie or Daisy, a woman of Stem
for whom we stem talk of servers,

thumbprint keys, on an ancient island
now we are all code-changers

the future arrives as a redhead
green, green love lays a glove

on us, we no longer count
in threes, a quaver

sounds, and the future
all sharps and flats

 

*

 

Wedding, Key West

A stitch in throat saves time
Infernal cough
speaks through me
@ the bride and groom
On sand they stand
to create a sand souvenir
from this empty glass vessel
Sunset drips from the lips
of the bride
As the prey is plucked from the air
between her palms
In the gulf beyond
the photographer’s camera,
a capsized sailboat,
but no one’s looking–
The Key light bedazzles
and defeats us all
Mouth tightly shut
clench in the solar plexus

 

*

 

 

Waited

you waited with me as the house
next door emptied of its guests,
then its owners, fairy tale turned animal farm

minted with ash and wishes
you were my kitchen elf
my second thought

my echo’s echo
cocked ear, cracked oasis
your absorbent embered orbs

that morning of the supermoon
setting behind the barn
you were quiet, then quieter still

white fog settling into the hollows
and a thin coat of frost everywhere
and this, the simplest death

you trained me well, M.
I listen for your listening

Episode 62: Six Degrees of Separation (REISSUE)

While we’re on a brief recording hiatus, we have a re-issue of an episode from 2019, when our team took a rare look at a non-fiction piece by author Andrew Bertaina. It’s great timing to take a fresh look at this episode, as earlier this year Bertaina published a collection of essays called “The Body is a Temporary Gathering Place”. Enjoy the episode and check out Bertaina’s new collection!

 

Welcome back to another Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile. Today we have an excellent episode with a bit of something different. After a set of introductions in which Marion gets out her glue gun the gang dives right into a piece of non-fiction by Andrew Bertaina labeled “The Offering”.  

 

 

Andrew Bertaina's work has appeared or is forthcoming in many publications including: The Best American Poetry 2018, The ThreePenny Review, Tin House online, Redivider, Crab Orchard Review and Green Mountains Review. More of his work is available at www.andrewbertaina.com 

 

After an excellent reading by Kathleen, Tim describes how churches offer less of a sense of community these days; being more concerned with hellfire and crucifixion. Next, Marion describes how the piece offers a sense of timelessness while lamenting on her own exhaustion from various teaching duties. Marion contends that the piece allowed her to compose herself and gave her a sense of fulfillment. Samantha speaks a bit on curation, and how that differs from what is displayed on social media. Before voting Tim mentions how historically specific the piece is, and the idea of somebody that you used to know. Will this piece make the cut? Or will it fade into obscurity?

 

The Offering

 

At church this morning, I passed around a collection plate to gather up the scraps of all the people I have known. The bowl was silver and its size was like that of space. Inside, I found: a hike through a hailstorm in Colorado where blue jays where eating other bird’s babies; I found an evening spent from midnight till morning talking about the way that I dreamed of divinity; I found a piece of a tetherball string, still wound tightly around a silver pole; I found a pocket of gummi worms, unopened, thrown in the trash can at recess; I found a small side yard where I dug for dinosaur bones; I found a picture with the words I love you written across the top; I found tears and tears, until I was swimming through all the tears, trying to remember why we are all such bizarre puzzles; I found a slip of paper with someone’s e-mail on it that I threw in the trash; I found a cabin in the woods with a couch and a blanket; I found a picture of you standing with me in the same shirt I wore only two weeks ago, but it was more than a decade ago; I found that the years start to run together like water that you can’t separate out the moments that you used to; I found pictures of people in wedding dresses and tuxedos, people that I used to know, and I smiled at their happy faces, because they made me happy when I knew them; I found a picture of San Francisco, stiff breezes off the bay, always so damn cold, and inside the picture was another picture of a hospital, and inside that hospital a memory of people who are now dust; I found an evening in the mountains of Santa Barbara, and a sunrise too; I found a picture of five of us sitting in a room talking about the ways in which we had failed, the ways in which we’d like to succeed; I found a picture of a piano and green couches; I found a picture of a mountain trail, pine trees and old bear scat; I found a picture of the ocean, of your hand in mine, before we glided together. I found a picture of a tower in Italy, a winding staircase leading to a view of some ancient city.

 

I spent the evening afterward, sorting all these pictures into specific piles.

 

Afternoons that could have lasted forever.

 

Times I went to the ocean.

 

Women that I have loved.

 

Women that I did not have the time to get around to loving.

 

People that I once knew.

 

People that I used to know and wish I still knew.

 

Avenues that I have walked down.

 

Avenues that I wish I had walked down.

 

Pictures of places that I am not remembering properly.

 

After I was done organizing these moments, I wrote them all down on the computer screen, which flickered, in and out just like memory does. I know that thousands, millions, far more numerous than the stars, are still missing. I want you to know that I’m trying to remember all of you, despite the futility of it. I’m reaching out to the people I have known and the people I will know. I miss all of you already, so the next time you see me, let’s meet, not was if we were strangers, but as people who have, for longer than they can remember, been very much in love.

 

Episode 131: Catching Waves

Slushies, waves abound in this lively discussion of a poem by Martha Silano and two more by Jane Hilberry. The way stream of consciousness can crest and fall, sound waves, the missed and caught waves in real life (including runs of luck or the lack of it), not to mention the different ways in which we experience poetry– the gang rides wave after wave. We regularly find that our process of reading poetry aloud causes one or more of us to experience a poem anew. Sometimes it provides clarity that wasn’t there when it was confined to the silence of the page. Sometimes it brings up questions. As always, we were grateful to have the trust of two amazing poets willing to share our discussion of their work. (We were going to call this episode “In Bed with Marion & Kathy” and we’ll let you find out why by having a listen!)

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman, Angelique Massey, Lisa Zerkle, Dagne Forrest, Vivian Liu (sound engineer)

Martha Silano’s six books include This One We Call Ours, winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Poetry Prize, and available from Lynx House Press. She is also the author of Gravity Assist, Reckless Lovely, and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, all from Saturnalia Books. Martha’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She enjoys birdwatching, botanizing, and hanging out with her kids and cats. Learn more about her work at marthasilano.net.

 

The Luck of It

 

What counts is that my car, when it gets broken into, what’s gone 

is replaceable, like that leather jacket my friend Alison threw at me 

when she left for California. Please take it! (I got a new one for Christmas).

 

Once, when I left it unlocked, someone spent the night in my Hyundai. 

All in all, I was happy to offer a place of refuge, especially on account 

of nothing stolen, not the extra pair of socks, not my maroon hat or hand sani, 

 

the only tip off being the empty bottle of Sprite. Sprite!

I mean, you’re kidding me. My husband jokes how I get so excited 

about the crumb that drops on my plate from that giant chocolate croissant 

 

in the sky, tells me I’m like a housefly with a tiny chunk of pizza 

it can’t believe it’s had the good fortune to land on. And look! It’s even got a little dab 

 

of pepperoni juice! It seems I set the bar low, 

and maybe he’s right, though when I ran track, 

the field part kind of scared me. In tenth grade, when Suzanne Glester 

 

broke the state record in the high jump, 

I could barely keep myself from looking away 

as her contorted body landed in a heap on a thick mat 

 

that never seemed thick enough. Honestly, 

I’m just glad I’m not the guy on Next Door 

who posted about the lonely chicken: I see her wandering around. 

 

Seems like she need another little hen. 

Do any of you have one you’d like to re-home? 

Or the woman who shared someone’s been racing their car 

 

up Juneau. making a hair pin turn onto Seward Park Avenue. 

It literally rattles our windows. I’m tempted to respond I feel your pain, 

but having rattling windows means you live in a home? I guess what I’m trying to say 

 

is that when two guys were about to kick in 

our basement window, I happened to stroll by with a bag 

of dirty Huggies for the bin. Yep, a load of dirty diapers saved us. 

Jane Hilberry is just weeks into retirement after a happy 35-year teaching career at Colorado College that began with Medieval and Renaissance literature and ended up in Creativity & Innovation. So far retirement involves mostly sleeping and swimming, but she aspires to write poems, paint, and make small objects for sheer delight. Her books of poems include Still the Animals Enter and Body Painting (Red Hen Press) and a chapbook co-authored with her father, Conrad Hilberry, titled This Awkward Art:  Poems by a Father and Daughter (Mayapple Press). Paintings and small objects can be found on Instagram @jhilberry.

I might have planned badly

 

My friends are ga-ga over their grandkids, over the moon!  

Pictures on their phones of the toddler pushing the vacuum, 

the dog sleeping wrapped around the child.  

 

My god, I was driven.  I translated every word of Beowulf, 

working out each noun’s case ending, nominative, accusative, genitive, 

dative, or a vestigial instrumental.  I spent my twenties 

 

in a library carrel until 2 a.m. closing. I could regret it now, 

but there was no stopping that one, whoever she was. 

Baby, I’m going to be seventy soon, and eighty.   

Coastal Cali

 

At the intersection, a stream of newly washed 

Benzes and Bentleys.  A man in a camel coat surveys 

a café patio:  "I'm dressed inappropriately,” he says.

He’s crew for Hollywood Medium.  Against the roar 

of leaf blowers, Que tiempo hace hoy plays on someone’s radio. 

It's breezy, seventy-five. 

   Meanwhile, at the water, 

surfers lift and fall, surge and sink.  The dark triangles 

of their heads and shoulders move like fins 

in undulating circles, till one rises, twists and vees, 

rides the wave into a bloom of foam.  

 

What is this world?  wrote Chaucer, What asketh man to have? 

Xanax for the rough days.  I can't identify the flora—

Yarrow?  Ice plant? —or remember the gods of the sea.

Zephyr? Poseidon?  No one here calls it the sea.

Episode 130: Anthropomorphic Imagination

The natural world and human nature provide a variety of jumping off points for three poems that contrast the ego and experience of each poem’s speaker with other perspectives, both observed and imagined. The discussion touches on the use of a strong opening conceit, lineation that cannily reflects breathwork, and leaning into specificity as strong poetic moves. Let’s not forget the role that taste plays! Kathy’s internal sommelier springs to life twice to flag questionable taste in wine and a discussion of the third poem under discussion highlights the role that direct experience and cultural awareness can play in appreciating the landscape of a poem. The discussion also briefly lingers on the question of whether singer Dionne Warwick is still alive and well and performing. At the time of writing these notes, she most certainly is!

 

Some links we think you might like: 

 

The Spin Doctors

Dionne Warwick, Do You Know the Way to San Jose (YouTube)

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, Jason Schneiderman, Manuel López, Isabel Petry, Vivian Liu (sound engineer)

John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery and still lives in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey.” Currently, he teaches social work at Stockton University. He serves as the Local Lyrics contributor for the Mad Poet Society blog and has been featured on Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM. Recent publications include: Rattle, Split Rock Review, Soundings East, West Trade Review, and The Ekphrastic Review. He is the author of the chapbook, Roadside Attractions: a poetic guide to American oddities. Find out more at: www.johnwojtowicz.com

 

Kolyuchin Island 

 

Polar bears have taken up residence 

within the marmalade walls

of an abandoned weather station,

the lone dwelling 

on a small island in the Chukchi Sea.

This unexpected sanctuary, 

strategically located 

between Russia and Alaska, 

has a post-apocalyptic feel 

like the Statue of Liberty scene 

at the end of the first Planet of the Apes, but cuter.

White-coated inhabitants 

can be seen sunning themselves 

on the front porch, 

poking frosty heads from turquoise 

window frames, wandering 

their 2.8 mile yard littered with rusted tanks 

and construction debris.

Pierre Boulle never wrote 

a sequel to the Planet of the Apes. 

Man loses. The End. 

And with earth’s history of ruling classes

and our self-destructive tendencies,

this is the likely scenario.

If by some grace, we go out without taking 

every living thing with us, 

it gives me pleasure to picture 

a sleuth of grizzly bears 

as the heirs to Buckingham Palace. 

As a whole, extraterrestrial 

anthropologists will have to assume, 

we cared very little 

about the arctic fox, musk ox, and polar bear, 

dooming these lifeforms 

(and then ourselves).

And even though I didn’t do much to stop it, 

I hope they’ll find 

the remains of my glacial wall calendar 

and arctic-themed necktie 

or better yet the yellowed receipt 

from a donation I plan on making

to the World Wildlife Fund

and conclude that I was one of the good ones. 

 

 

Wild 

 

The rugs haven’t been cut in a long while

and the shag is starting to tickle

my chin. It’s up to my neck

which is sometimes 

how I feel navigating the jungle of my life 

which germinated

from the garden of my childhood

and went mostly untended 

for the first quarter or so.

Yes, it’s been some time 

since I backpacked through nightclubs,

traversed the landscape of closing time,

tossed the map on an LSD trip.

Right now, I am dead-heading petunias 

on my back deck. My two kids 

are sleeping. The dog is chasing 

lightning bugs. My wife is finishing a glass

of Moscato and will soon be 

waiting for me in our bed. Earlier today 

I added boat-tailed grackle 

to my backyard bird list.

My zucchini is starting to flower

and so is (for the first time) 

the southern magnolia 

planted a few springs back. 

The groundhog I nicknamed Big Orange

is on his hindlegs 

taking in the evening news.

And as the sun moves to give someone else

a turn with the light,

I consider that this

might be the wildest I’ve ever been.

 

Episode 129: Chew on This

What's your love language, Slushies? Is it touch, or talk? Recipes or arithmetic? Join us for this episode devoted to poems by Jin Cordaro, whose work strikes an incantatory tone, draws us in, and gets us chewing on the riddles of the human predicament. How do our bodies know things before our minds do? How do other people's shopping lists make us ache for connection? We focus on the art of lists, the arc of poems, and the power of a poet's voice to invite and hold the reader's attention.

In post-production we discovered the poem “Flavor in the Hands” was accepted elsewhere. It will appear in Bacopa Literary Review in the future, and we’re delighted for Jin.

A link we think you might like:

 

Please Touch Museum, Philadelphia

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, Samantha Neugebauer, and Holly Messitt, as well as our briefly larger than normal tech team Heath Bailey, Jess Fielo, and Vivian Liu (without whom we’d be lost!)

At four feet seven inches, Jin Cordaro believes she holds the record for most petite living poet. Having had twins, she also believes she holds the record for most times people have asked, “They came from you?” Her work has appeared in The Sun, Faultline, Smartish Pace, and Bacopa Literary Review, and has been featured on the podcast The Slowdown. She and her family live in central New Jersey.

 

That Time You Stole Someone’s Shopping Cart

 

With their shopping list in the seat,

and a flower doodled in the corner – a sign

not a curse or a prayer, a devotion,

a singular language

to nourish and be nourished.

 

Familiar words, combined in a cipher,

you can only translate every third word –

paprika followed by shallots means

to put effort or caring.

Cranberries combined with pecans

and butternut squash means

to sustain, keep well.

 

What would this taste like?

This list a thin opaque crepe filled with

the soft, oozing breadth of someone’s attention

and time. You slip it into your jacket

keep your hand on your pocket as

you walk the store. Rush home

to unfold it, imagine it still warm,

slightly browned on a skillet,

sweet and bready with love.

You chew it slowly –

the only piece of food

to be found.

 

The Sum of One

 

1/3 parent + 1/3 employee + 1/3 spouse 

does not equal 1 whole you but

permutations of you.

Only one can execute its function

at any given time.

 

Requirements call for 

1 ½ parent you + 1 ½ work you + 1 ½ spouse you = 

invalid calculation. Insufficient source.

Multiply by a factor of

school concert x illness x hosting holiday = 

exponentially negative integer you. 

Divide this number by

the number of your children,

given age as a factor of x.

 

Write a proof that demonstrates

1 you – job + bills = increase in sanity? 

Or 1/3 parent you – cleaning toilets – cooking = 

increase in you? 

 

You are the product of division.

You ÷ x = disappearing you

reduced to null an imaginary unit 

when all you want is to be prime 

divisible by only 1 and yourself.

 

But 0 too can be divided by any number 

and still remain the same

 

Episode 128: Put Your Pants Back On!

We just had to start this episode with a reassurance that everyone was dressed, which you’ll understand as soon as you read or listen to “Pneuma”, the poem by BJ Soloy that kicks everything off. The bonkers energy of a country and a world overflowing with bad news and tragedy is juxtaposed with some very real tenderness and self reflection in two astounding pieces by Soloy. These astutely paced poems are brimming with the overwhelm of modern life while threading in historical references (Brown vs. Board of Education, Troost Avenue, and scud missiles, for starters).

 

Some other links we think you’ll like:

Sapphic stanzas

Marion's IMDB credit

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Samantha Neugebauer, Dagne Forrest, Jason Schneiderman, Lisa Zerkle, Isabel Petry

BJ Soloy is the author of Birth Center in Corporate Woods (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press), Our Pornography and other disaster songs (Slope Editions, 2019), and Selected Letters, a chapbook out with New Michigan Press. He lives and dies in Des Moines, home of the whatever.

 

Pneuma

 

Put your pants back on, America.

It’s four in the morning & also

 

five, three, & two, simultaneously,

you big lug. Plus, there’s snow. 

 

In this light, really any light,

my nose looks like a tired potato

 

got punched in its mute mouth.

With any light on, I want to see other people

 

when I look in the mirror, when I slouch

in this bathroom booth where I hope to die

 

on the shitter, like an American,

like one of yours. Clinton, TN is any other frowsy town

 

with a cock & balls scribbled on its playground slide

& square pitbulls straining at their chains. 

 

America, I came to bed late as always.

You roll over, softly surprised & then delighted, 

 

offering, “I forgot where I was.” I’m yawning,

breathing just to get oxygen on this fire. 

 

 

Well, tonight is not the only place I am

tonight. Beyond me & between me

light bulbs hiccup & burble 

 

& a frenzied squirrel loses its map

of maples & restarts. Maybe we ought to 

take what we’ve still got & laminate it in frost 

 

& then salt & then the gold leaf over spring’s pat rapture.

 

There are things I’ve learned already this young

soft year I don’t know what to do with: one 

gets a pregnancy test when in the ER

 

for their attempt on their own life. What to name that baby? 

 

I worry I’m doing this wrong. I’ve got beans soaking, sharps 

& meds hidden, the last dank well swill of our bank account 

miraculously transformed into boxed wine. Winter’s here 

 

with its expressive eyebrows & doomed neighborhood cats 

under every car. You yawn so I kiss you & you taste better 

than free food, but you can’t sleep & I try to stay up reading 

 

but layers of exhaustion—wet blankets on this piss whisper 

of a fire—keep accumulating. I worry you’ll do it right next time 

& I’m still attached to this day of ours, whatever day it is.

Benesh

 

It’s been a long night & your mouth already tasted like rain an hour ago. Writing

often of the sky instead of tasting it, I look to the sconces & the sconces

look fake & their light looks fake & I have authentic responses to both,

which is how storms start. As seasons

 

 

digest themselves (a short talk on short talks), holiday cards become

less applicable & so more affordable & Fox 8 or whatever news vans circle

the weather or immanent site of tragedy tourism. Some nights I go out & walk

the sidewalk in socks or bare feet

 

 

longer than I’d meant to & notice the crystal glass & homely bends

& feel deeply the Troost neighborhood. My ears circle in on themselves, stereo

sinkholes, by which I mean I’m eavesdropping & I’m sorry. I’ve had bad teeth forever

& so got online & bought God’s vibrator

 

 

as a toothbrush & sunburned my mirror & stood boldly before the middle-aged self.

White as I am, I trust most the islands that kill their first tourists. Three weeks’

swim away, a cargo ship full of luxury cars continues to burn in the Atlantic.

A mother about a mile from right here

 

 

killed her dog & decapitated her son after calling the cops on the devil. The news:

The snows. The Olympics. Rubble-crusted outskirts of Kiev. The soft snoring

of our toddler. What do we do? I dither. I stand numb before the light.

I look deeply. I look like Fabio

 

 

if, instead of an angular chin, his face flesh just sort of dangled & then if also 

that formless dangle continued on down the rest of the frame. My point is

I have long hair right now. A Hadean earth. A wobbling star. A thought floating in

like pickled nimbus, ghost fart. In the mirror, 

 

 

 

I am an amplified echo of my middle school self making muscles at himself, waiting

for hair to grow, SCUD missiles arcing across the nightly news downstairs. 

Tonight, I got news off Facebook, which makes me middle-aged again

& sad. You’d already gone to bed when I found out Robert died. I didn’t wake you up. I

didn’t even check you were asleep. You needed 

 

 

a night & this news is not the night you needed. A neighbor is yelling at something, 

maybe himself, & the still-lengthening night repeats. I rarely call in favors, but every 

time I do, I claim to do it rarely, but still, please sleep. Please go to sleep or 

keep sleeping. He was thirty-three. It’s later still & your mouth is full 

of rain. I’ll tell you in the morning.

Episode 127: Ecstatic Collapse

Our first order of business was debating lifestyle choices in NY vs. Philly, after which we dug into two wonderfully different poems by Glenn Shaheen. “Imago” plunged us into an elegaic interrogation of modern life, identity, and poetics framed by both the real world and open world gaming. With Glenn’s poem as our guide we roamed wide, touching on gaming terminology, Bey’s “Single Ladies” and 2008 as the last year of optimism, Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, Shakespeare’s “filthy” Sonnet 135, and the ageless concern over the shelf life of language in poems and artistic works. The circular format of short, interlinked stanzas in the second poem, “Power and Punish”, introduced a real change in tone in the discussion. Frankly, we wondered if the poem’s format and approach would allow us to discuss it. We were delighted to discover it was possible, if different – but hey, you be the judge!

 

Some links we think you’ll like:

 

NPC (Non Player Character) on WikiHow

 

Beyoncé - Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)

 

Michel Foucault on the Panopticon Effect, Farnham Street blog

 

At the table: Marion Wrenn, Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Dagne Forrest, Isabel Petry

Glenn Shaheen lives in Houston and is the biggest Star Trek fan you’ll ever meet.

Episode 126: Narrative Possibility

We kick off this episode with some riffing on Hallmark movies and a suspension of Jason’s voting rights. No worries, though! The two poems under discussion are by a former student of Jason’s and it comes clear pretty quickly that we’re all fans. Don’t listen to this episode for the suspense, but for the delicious delve into narrative possibility and how poetry is wonderfully suited to keeping the door open long after a poem ends. Indented lineation and how it can affect a poem’s pacing gets some attention, as does the sensory tease of wonderfully selected symbolism and imagery. We also touch on the implication of the reader in a poem where the speaker is still working things out. In this film-tinged discussion, Kathy reminds us that a sweet ending can hit the spot, Sam confesses to thinking a lot about “Baby Boom”, Dagne owns up to seeing Raiders of the Lost Art eleven times when it was first released, Jason pays homage to Diane Keaton and Liza Minelli, and Isabel poses a question that underscores our theme of narrative possibility.

 

Some links we think you’ll like:

Whisky & Rum in Raiders of the Lost Ark, ThirstMag.com

How Baby Boom Set the Template for Future Movies About Working Mothers, Vulture

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, Isabel Petry, Dagne Forrest

 

 

Georgia M. Brodsky is a recent graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives south of Boston, near the ocean, with her partner and their daughter.

 

The Tavern

 

After I cracked the 6-ball off the table,

he offered to teach me

to drive stick in the parking lot.

 

Before: whiskey

in no-one’s-joking-sized

shot glasses, the kind

 

the cool girl in Indiana Jones throws back

then stacks like a champ

while men fall off their stools

 

around her. Heavy glasses.

No windows. Just the door

to the lot, to the harbor

 

eventually, where earlier that day

I’d seen a girl my age

with a pocketknife, cleaning a fish.

 

She’d plucked the eyes out,

let them sit

on the ground staring up

 

like a figment in Charlie Kaufman’s

dreams. Every story is a version

of something else.

 

I followed him to his car. I didn’t.

I laughed and touched his arm. I balled

my hands into fists. My body

 

felt something was wrong. I felt

nothing. It always turns out alright

in the end. It never does.

 

I’m the girl who climbed

into the truck and the one

who got home safe. I taught myself

 

how to drive stick and how to run

the table. I’m the girl in the harbor.

All eyes.

 

At the Raw Bar, Housing Three Dozen Oysters for our Eighth Anniversary

 

We’re not in it for the sex,

if that’s what you’re thinking.

And besides, I’m not the kind

of person who shucks and tells.

That was a joke. But it’s exactly

what I’m talking about.

I’m the kind who makes jokes

when something matters too much.

 

We’re not in it for the sex.

It’s more about what happens

after the shell unlatches:

brine, salt, alive, pulling us in

by the shirt, shaking us

and putting us down as if

tentacles had launched out

from under the ice.

 

That wasn’t a metaphor

for our relationship. I’m honest

to God talking about oysters:

the knock-back, the vinegar zip,

extra lemon on the side.

A feeling like our bodies could turn

back into fish. A speedboat

revving from zero to sixty, that’s how

it felt to throw down my first

Mookie Blue after nine

pregnant months. Forget forks

or sauce or napkins. If every drop

of oyster liquor doesn’t make it

to your mouth, you shouldn’t

even be here, and by here,

I mean sitting across the bar,

gaping at us, saying, wow,

that’s a lot of oysters,

or standing on the shores

of an oyster farm, complaining

that the wind’s too cold.

 

Am I getting any closer

to explaining myself?

When we first met, he traced

his finger along the coves

of Maine’s coast, a chart

of waterways and kayak routes,

I swear, the only freshman

with a map of water pinned

to his dorm room wall, and

that was fourteen years ago,

but in that moment, I loved him.

We toast with a click of our shells—

he lifts one to his lips.

Marie Manilla Watchers

Watchers  

     Zany lies amid clutter on the floor beneath the dining room windows hugging her bandaged arm. She huffs loudly enough to reach the front porch where Mom and Aunt Vi imbibe scotch. Vi still isn’t used to afternoon drinking. They can’t hear Zany over the Krebbs’ crying baby on the other side of the duplex wall. Stupid baby. Plus Zany’s little sister overhead dancing to the transistor radio, rattling the light fixture dangling from the ceiling.  

     The fingertips on Zany’s bandaged arm are cold and maybe even blue. This is slightly alarming. She considers running to Mom but knows better. Take the damn thing off then, Mom will say.  

     There’s nothing wrong with Zany’s arm, but that isn’t the point. At breakfast, without preamble, she wound an Ace bandage from her palm to her armpit. The family no longer asks what she’s up to. Last week during Ed Sullivan she sat at her TV tray dripping candle wax over her fist. Aunt Vi blinked with every splat, but Mom only said: “If you get that on my rug I’ll take you across my knee. I don’t care how old you are.” Zany is thirteen.  

     Week before, Zany taped a string of two-inch penny nails around her throat at the kitchen table where Dad rewired one of Mom’s salvaged lamps. “Why don’t you do that in your room?”  Dad didn’t like sharing his workspace. Zany shrugged and the nail tips jabbed her collarbones.  She could have done it in her room, but doing the thing wasn’t the point. It was having someone watch that mattered. If no one watched, who would believe she could endure that much discomfort?  

     Nobody is watching now, so Zany grips a dining table leg and pulls it toward her, or tries to. It’s hard to budge through Mom’s junk piles, plus the weight of the extra leaf Dad inserted when Aunt Vi and Cousin Lester moved in after their apartment collapsed. Aunt Vi brought cans of flowery air freshener to hide the hoard smell—rotten food and cat piss. They don’t own a cat.  Lester, sixteen, bought a box of rubble-rescued books.  

     “You better be setting the table!” Mom calls through the screen.  

     Zany hates Mom’s manly haircut and has said so. “It’s Gig’s turn!”  

     Overhead, Gig stomps the floor in the bedroom they now share. Aunt Vi got Zany’s attic where Mom’s hoard had been disallowed, but it’s begun trickling up. “No, it’s not!” Gig’s transistor blares louder.  

     “Zany!” Mom calls. “I swear to God! And close those drapes!”  

     Mom can’t stand looking at the neighbor’s wall she could reach across and touch, but Zany craves fresh air, as fresh as Pittsburgh air can be. Plus, she likes counting the yellow bricks Andy Warhol surely counted when this was his childhood home, the dining room his make-shift sickroom when he suffered St. Vitus Dance. Zany is certain his bed would have been right here by the window where he could see a hint of sky if he cricked his neck just right. She lies in his echo and imagines the day she’ll appear at his Factory door in New York City and say: “I used to live in your house.” Andy will enfold her in his translucent arms before ushering her inside, not to act in his films or screen print his designs, but to be his equal. Partner, even. Zany just has to determine her own art form. It sure won’t be cutting fruit cans into flowers like Warhol’s mother did for chump change.  

     Zany’s legs start the herky-jerky Vitus dance as if she’s running toward that Factory dream. Her pelvis and hips quake. The one free arm. The back of her head jitters against the floor. It’s a familiar thrum even Aunt Vi and Lester are accustomed to now. Mom yells: “Stop that racket!” She mutters to Vi: “We never should have bought this place.” 

     A kitchen timer dings and Aunt Vi comes in to disarm it. Her cooking is better than Mom’s, and Vi wears an apron and dime store lipstick while she does it. Fresh peas instead of canned. Real mashed potatoes instead of instant. Vi is a better housekeeper, too, organizing Mom’s trash into four-foot piles that line the walls. Every day Mom trolls back alleys and neighbors’ garbage in dingy clothes that make her look like a hobo. That’s what the kids say:  Your mom looks like a hobo. She pulls a rickety cart and loads it with moldy linens, rolled-up rugs, dented wastebaskets. Zany wonders if Dad regrets marrying the wrong sister. She knows he regrets not having a son, a boy who could have been Lester if Dad had a different heart. Instead, Dad got Lester on at the blast furnace, because “No one sleeps under my roof for free.” Who needs a high school diploma?  

     In the kitchen, Aunt Vi lets out one of her sobs. She only does that in private after Mom’s third scolding: “He’s dead, Vi. Crying won’t bring him back.”  

     Zany misses Uncle Mo, too. His pocketful of peppermints. The trick coin he always plucked from Zany’s ear. The last time Zany’s family visited, she walked through their decrepit Franklin Arms apartment with its spongy floors and clanking pipes, but no maze of debris to negotiate. No cat piss smell or sister blaring the radio. She found Lester in his room at a child’s desk he’d outgrown, doughy boy that he then was, doing homework without being nagged.  Astounding. His room was spartan, plenty of space for a second bed if Zany asked Aunt Vi sweetly enough. But no. Zany couldn’t abandon Andy in his Dawson Street sickbed. Lester’s only wall decoration was a world map strung with red yarn radiating from Pittsburgh to France, China, the South Pole. She wanted to ask why those destinations, but didn’t, entranced as she was by all that fresh-aired openness, plus his feverishly scribbling hand. 

     Now, Aunt Vi leans in the dining room dabbing her face with a dishtowel. She’s aged a decade since moving here and it isn’t all due to grief. She targets Zany on the floor. “Everything all right in here?”  

     Zany has stopped breathing. Her eyes are glazed and her tongue lolls from her mouth.  She’s getting better at playing dead.  

     “All right then.” Aunt Vi is getting better at not reacting. The screen door slams behind her.  

     Zany pulls in her tongue and inhales. She starts counting bricks again until Aunt Vi calls: “There they are!” as she does every workday.  

     Zany pictures Dad and Lester padding up Dawson. Wet hair slicked back because they shower off the stench before coming home. Zany appreciates that. Their boots scrape the steps to the porch where Aunt Vi will take their lunchpails. And there she is coming through the door and dashing to rinse their thermoses at the kitchen sink. Mom will stay put and pour Dad a finger of scotch.  

     Lester bangs inside and pauses in the dining room entryway. He’s leaner now on account of the physical labor. Taller too. He eyes Zany’s bandaged arm, not with Aunt Vi’s alarm, but with the kind of baffled wonder Zany has always been after. Their eyes meet and it’s the same look he gave her the day she walked backward all the way to the Eliza Number Two—not  because Dad and Lester worked there, but because it was lunchtime, and a gaggle of men would  be eating beneath that pin oak by the furnace entrance. And there they were, her father among them, not easy to see having to crane her neck as Zany picked her way over the railroad tracks.  

     “What the hell is she doing?” said Tom Folsom. Zany recognized her neighbor’s voice.  “She’s off her nut,” said another worker. 

     Zany twisted fully around to see if her father would defend her, but he was already hustling back to the furnace.  

     “Something’s not right with that girl,” said Folsom.  

     “Nothing wrong with her,” said Lester from beneath a different tree where he ate his cheese sandwich alone.  

     Folsom spit in the grass. “Shut up, fairy boy.”  

     Lester wasn’t a fairy boy, Zany knew.  

     Today, leaning in the dining room, Lester looks as if he can see inside Zany’s skull to the conjured Factory room she and Andy will one day share: walls scrubbed clean and painted white.  Her drawings or paintings lining the walls in tidy rows. Maybe sculptures aligned on shelves. Or mobiles overhead spinning in the breeze. Lester nods at her fantasy as if it’s a good one. He has his own escapism. Zany knows that too, and she looks away first so her eyes won’t let him know that she knows.  

     Lester heads to the cellar where he spends most of his time. Mom partitioned off the back corner for him with clothesline and a bed sheet. Installed an army cot and gooseneck lamp on a crate. Andy Warhol holed up in the cellar when he was a kid developing film in a jerry-rigged darkroom. Zany constructed one from an oversized cardboard box she wedged into that shadowy space beneath the stairs. She cut a closable door in the box and regularly folds herself inside to catalogue her achievements in a notebook. Stood barefoot on a hot tar patch on Frazier Street for seventy-two seconds. Mr. Braddock called me a dolt, but I said: You’re the dolt!  

     From below, the sound of Lester falling onto his cot followed by a sigh so deep Zany’s lungs exhale, too. Whatever dreams he had got buried under apartment rubble along with Uncle Mo. 

     Outside, Dad has taken Aunt Vi’s creaky rocker. “He’s a strange one,” he says about Lester. “What’s he up to down there?”  

     Mom says, “Who the hell knows?”  

     Zany clamps her unbandaged hand over her mouth to keep that knowledge from spilling.  She saw what he was up to the day she was tucked in her box and forgot time until footsteps pounded the stairs above her. She peeked through the peephole she’d punched into her cardboard door as Lester peeled off his shirt, his pants. He left on his boxers and socks. Didn’t bother to draw his sheet curtain, just plopped on the cot and lit a cigarette. His smoking still surprised her. The boy he once was was also buried under rubble. Zany regretted not making her presence known, but then it was too late with Lester in his underwear, and all. Plus, she was captivated by his fingers pulling the cigarette to his lips. The little smoke rings he sent up to the floor joists. She wondered if he was dreaming of China or the South Pole, or just sitting quietly at his too-small desk back in his apartment inhaling all that fresh air. Finally, he snubbed out the cigarette in an empty tuna can. Zany hoped he would roll over for sleep, but he slid a much-abused magazine from beneath his pillow and turned pages. Even in the scant light Zany made out the naked lady on the cover. Zany’s heart thudded, even more so when Lester’s hand slipped beneath his waistband and started moving up and down, up and down. She told her eyes to close but they wouldn’t, both entranced and nauseated by what she shouldn’t be seeing. She knew what he was up to, having done her own exploring when she had her own room. She’d conjure Andy Warhol’s face and mouth and delicate hands—because those rumors weren’t true. They just weren’t. Harder to explore in the bed she now shared with Gig. Stupid Aunt Vi, and stupid collapsed Franklin Arms. 

     What Lester was up to looked angry. Violent, even. A jittery burn galloped beneath Zany’s skin and she bit her lip, drawing blood. But she couldn’t look away from Lester’s furious hand, his eyes ogling that magazine until they squeezed shut and his mouth pressed into a grimace that did not look like joy. The magazine collapsed onto his chest and his belly shuddered. Only then did Zany close her eyes as the burn leaked through her skin. When Lester’s snores came, she tiptoed upstairs to collapse on Andy’s echo. She caught Lester seven more times, if caught is the right word, lying in wait as she was, hoping to see, hoping not to.  “You better be setting the table!” Mom yells now from the porch.  

     Zany grunts and makes her way to the kitchen where Aunt Vi pulls a roast from the oven.  Zany heaves a stack of plates to the dining room and deals them out like playing cards.  “Don’t break my dishes!” Mom calls. I hate your hair, Zany wants to say.  There is a crash, but it’s not dishes. It comes from overhead where Gig screams.  Thumping on the stairs as she thunders down, transistor in hand. “Zany!”  Gig rushes into the dining room, ponytail swaying, eyes landing on her sister. “He’s been shot!”  

     Zany’s mind hurtles back two months to when Martin Luther King was killed. Riots erupted in Pittsburgh’s Black neighborhoods: The Hill District and Homewood and Manchester.  “Who?” Zany says, conjuring possibilities: LBJ, Sidney Portier. But to Zany, it’s much worse.  

     “Andy Warhol!”  

     Zany counts this as the meanest lie Gig’s ever told. “He was not.”  

     “Yes, he was!” Gig turns up the radio and the announcer confirms it: a crazed woman shot Warhol in his Factory. 

     Aunt Vi comes at Zany with her arms wide, because she understands loss. “Oh, honey.”  Zany bats her hands away. “It’s not true.”  

     Vi backs into Mom’s hoard. “Is he dead?”  

     Gig says: “They don’t know.”  

     Zany can’t stomach the smug look on Gig’s face, as if she holds Andy’s life or death between her teeth. Zany wants to slap that look off, so she does.  

     Gig screams.  

     “What the hell’s going on in there?” Mom calls.  

     “Zany hit me!” Gig says at the very moment Aunt Vi says: “Andy Warhol’s been shot!”  “No he wasn’t!” Zany says again, wanting to slap them both.  

     Mom and Dad hustle inside where Gig cups her reddening cheek and bawls louder.  “It’s nothing,” Mom says at the sight of her sniveling daughter, but Dad enfolds Gig in his arms. “There, there.”  

     “Don’t coddle that child,” says Mom, and for once Zany agrees.  

     “Now, Mae.” Dad cups the back of Gig’s head and there’s a different look on her face.  Triumph, maybe.  

     Pounding on the shared duplex wall, Evie Krebbs, who never could shush that wailing baby. “Andy Warhol’s been shot!” she calls to them. “Did you all hear?”  

     “We heard,” Mom answers as the baby cries louder, and so does Gig, who won’t be upstaged. Mom says: “That’s the price of fame I guess.”  

     “Being shot?” says Aunt Vi.  

     “Put yourself in the public eye and anything’s liable to happen. Lotta kooks in this world.” 

     The neighbor kids’ chant sounds in Zany’s head: Your mother’s a hobo.  

     “I’d rather be shot than a hobo,” says Zany.  

     Mom’s head snaps back. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”  

     Zany doesn’t fully know what she means, or maybe she does.  

     Dad says, “Turn up the radio and see if he’s dead.”  

     Zany doesn’t want to know the answer, and to keep him alive she runs to the basement where Andy will always be a sickly boy developing film. Never mind Lester in his bed sending smoke rings up to the floor joists. Never mind her family still jabbering overhead. 

     Zany dashes to her cardboard box and closes the door, her body shaking, but not from any disease. Andy can’t be dead. He just can’t, because if he is Zany will never make it to New York. Will never pound on his Factory door. She will never be famous enough for someone to shoot.  

     She doesn’t know she’s sobbing until Lester’s voice drifts over. “Zany?”  

     It’s hard to speak with that hand gripping her throat and her father overhead still babbling: “Turn it up, Gig.” All Zany eeks out is a sob.  

     Lester’s skinny voice slips through that slit in her door. “Zany?”  

     The grip loosens and Zany puts her eye to the peephole.  

     There he is, Lester, on his narrow cot in the windowless cellar where he now lives. He slides his hand into his waistband and he tilts his head toward her. “Are you watching?”  Zany’s breathing settles, and the overhead voices disappear taking with them the possibility of Andy’s death. Her eyes widens so she can take it all in, the violent strokes, his contorting face, because she won’t look away from Lester’s pain, or hers.  Finally, she answers him: “Yes.” 

Episode 125: Voyeurs Apply Within

Well, this could be awkward: when we last featured a story on the podcast a year ago, it also focused on parasocial relationships and included masturbation! This time around, we are again in deft hands. Marie Manilla’s short story “Watchers”, set in 1968 Pittsburgh with both the steel mills and Andy Warhol as vital elements, is replete with narrative and thematic echoes that satisfy and leave us wanting more at the same time. Tune in for this lively discussion which touches on budding creative and identity-based aspirations, celebrity, performance art, pain in public and private, and much more. Give it a listen -- you know you want to! (Remember you can read or listen to the full story first, as there are spoilers! Just scroll down the page for the episode on our website.)

 

(We also welcome editor Lisa Zerkle to the table for her first show!)

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, Jason Schneiderman, Dagne Forrest

 

Listen to the story Watchers in its entirety (separate from podcast reading)

 

Parasocial relationships

https://mashable.com/article/parasocial-relationships-definition-meaning

 

Andy Warhol’s childhood home in Pittsburgh (the setting of this story)

http://www.warhola.com/warholahouse.html

 

“History” article about Andy Warhol’s shooting by Valerie Solanas

https://www.history.com/news/andy-warhol-shot-valerie-solanas-the-factory 

 

I Shot Andy Warhol, 1996 film

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Shot_Andy_Warhol   

 

** Fun Fact 1: the original poster for the 1996 film hangs in Jason's apartment.

 

** Fun Fact 2: the actor who portrayed Valerie Solanas in “I Shot Andy Warhol”, Lili Taylor, is married to three-time PBQ-published author Nick Flynn.

 

Nick Flynn’s author page on PBQ

http://pbqmag.org/tag/nick-flynn/

 

Dangerous Art: The Weapons of Performance Artist Chris Burden

https://www.theartstory.org/blog/dangerous-art-the-weapons-of-performance-artist-chris-burden/

In her fiction and essays, West Virginia writer Marie Manilla delights in presenting fuller, perhaps unexpected, portraits of Appalachians, especially those who live in urban areas. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Marie’s books include The Patron Saint of Ugly, Shrapnel, and Still Life with Plums: Short Stories. She lives in Huntington, her hometown, with her Pittsburgh-born husband, Don.

 

Instagram and Facebook: @MarieManilla, Author website 

 

Watchers  

     Zany lies amid clutter on the floor beneath the dining room windows hugging her bandaged arm. She huffs loudly enough to reach the front porch where Mom and Aunt Vi imbibe scotch. Vi still isn’t used to afternoon drinking. They can’t hear Zany over the Krebbs’ crying baby on the other side of the duplex wall. Stupid baby. Plus Zany’s little sister overhead dancing to the transistor radio, rattling the light fixture dangling from the ceiling.  

     The fingertips on Zany’s bandaged arm are cold and maybe even blue. This is slightly alarming. She considers running to Mom but knows better. Take the damn thing off then, Mom will say.  

     There’s nothing wrong with Zany’s arm, but that isn’t the point. At breakfast, without preamble, she wound an Ace bandage from her palm to her armpit. The family no longer asks what she’s up to. Last week during Ed Sullivan she sat at her TV tray dripping candle wax over her fist. Aunt Vi blinked with every splat, but Mom only said: “If you get that on my rug I’ll take you across my knee. I don’t care how old you are.” Zany is thirteen.  

     Week before, Zany taped a string of two-inch penny nails around her throat at the kitchen table where Dad rewired one of Mom’s salvaged lamps. “Why don’t you do that in your room?”  Dad didn’t like sharing his workspace. Zany shrugged and the nail tips jabbed her collarbones.  She could have done it in her room, but doing the thing wasn’t the point. It was having someone watch that mattered. If no one watched, who would believe she could endure that much discomfort?  

     Nobody is watching now, so Zany grips a dining table leg and pulls it toward her, or tries to. It’s hard to budge through Mom’s junk piles, plus the weight of the extra leaf Dad inserted when Aunt Vi and Cousin Lester moved in after their apartment collapsed. Aunt Vi brought cans of flowery air freshener to hide the hoard smell—rotten food and cat piss. They don’t own a cat.  Lester, sixteen, bought a box of rubble-rescued books.  

     “You better be setting the table!” Mom calls through the screen.  

     Zany hates Mom’s manly haircut and has said so. “It’s Gig’s turn!”  

     Overhead, Gig stomps the floor in the bedroom they now share. Aunt Vi got Zany’s attic where Mom’s hoard had been disallowed, but it’s begun trickling up. “No, it’s not!” Gig’s transistor blares louder.  

     “Zany!” Mom calls. “I swear to God! And close those drapes!”  

     Mom can’t stand looking at the neighbor’s wall she could reach across and touch, but Zany craves fresh air, as fresh as Pittsburgh air can be. Plus, she likes counting the yellow bricks Andy Warhol surely counted when this was his childhood home, the dining room his make-shift sickroom when he suffered St. Vitus Dance. Zany is certain his bed would have been right here by the window where he could see a hint of sky if he cricked his neck just right. She lies in his echo and imagines the day she’ll appear at his Factory door in New York City and say: “I used to live in your house.” Andy will enfold her in his translucent arms before ushering her inside, not to act in his films or screen print his designs, but to be his equal. Partner, even. Zany just has to determine her own art form. It sure won’t be cutting fruit cans into flowers like Warhol’s mother did for chump change.  

     Zany’s legs start the herky-jerky Vitus dance as if she’s running toward that Factory dream. Her pelvis and hips quake. The one free arm. The back of her head jitters against the floor. It’s a familiar thrum even Aunt Vi and Lester are accustomed to now. Mom yells: “Stop that racket!” She mutters to Vi: “We never should have bought this place.” 

     A kitchen timer dings and Aunt Vi comes in to disarm it. Her cooking is better than Mom’s, and Vi wears an apron and dime store lipstick while she does it. Fresh peas instead of canned. Real mashed potatoes instead of instant. Vi is a better housekeeper, too, organizing Mom’s trash into four-foot piles that line the walls. Every day Mom trolls back alleys and neighbors’ garbage in dingy clothes that make her look like a hobo. That’s what the kids say:  Your mom looks like a hobo. She pulls a rickety cart and loads it with moldy linens, rolled-up rugs, dented wastebaskets. Zany wonders if Dad regrets marrying the wrong sister. She knows he regrets not having a son, a boy who could have been Lester if Dad had a different heart. Instead, Dad got Lester on at the blast furnace, because “No one sleeps under my roof for free.” Who needs a high school diploma?  

     In the kitchen, Aunt Vi lets out one of her sobs. She only does that in private after Mom’s third scolding: “He’s dead, Vi. Crying won’t bring him back.”  

     Zany misses Uncle Mo, too. His pocketful of peppermints. The trick coin he always plucked from Zany’s ear. The last time Zany’s family visited, she walked through their decrepit Franklin Arms apartment with its spongy floors and clanking pipes, but no maze of debris to negotiate. No cat piss smell or sister blaring the radio. She found Lester in his room at a child’s desk he’d outgrown, doughy boy that he then was, doing homework without being nagged.  Astounding. His room was spartan, plenty of space for a second bed if Zany asked Aunt Vi sweetly enough. But no. Zany couldn’t abandon Andy in his Dawson Street sickbed. Lester’s only wall decoration was a world map strung with red yarn radiating from Pittsburgh to France, China, the South Pole. She wanted to ask why those destinations, but didn’t, entranced as she was by all that fresh-aired openness, plus his feverishly scribbling hand. 

     Now, Aunt Vi leans in the dining room dabbing her face with a dishtowel. She’s aged a decade since moving here and it isn’t all due to grief. She targets Zany on the floor. “Everything all right in here?”  

     Zany has stopped breathing. Her eyes are glazed and her tongue lolls from her mouth.  She’s getting better at playing dead.  

     “All right then.” Aunt Vi is getting better at not reacting. The screen door slams behind her.  

     Zany pulls in her tongue and inhales. She starts counting bricks again until Aunt Vi calls: “There they are!” as she does every workday.  

     Zany pictures Dad and Lester padding up Dawson. Wet hair slicked back because they shower off the stench before coming home. Zany appreciates that. Their boots scrape the steps to the porch where Aunt Vi will take their lunchpails. And there she is coming through the door and dashing to rinse their thermoses at the kitchen sink. Mom will stay put and pour Dad a finger of scotch.  

     Lester bangs inside and pauses in the dining room entryway. He’s leaner now on account of the physical labor. Taller too. He eyes Zany’s bandaged arm, not with Aunt Vi’s alarm, but with the kind of baffled wonder Zany has always been after. Their eyes meet and it’s the same look he gave her the day she walked backward all the way to the Eliza Number Two—not  because Dad and Lester worked there, but because it was lunchtime, and a gaggle of men would  be eating beneath that pin oak by the furnace entrance. And there they were, her father among them, not easy to see having to crane her neck as Zany picked her way over the railroad tracks.  

     “What the hell is she doing?” said Tom Folsom. Zany recognized her neighbor’s voice.  “She’s off her nut,” said another worker. 

     Zany twisted fully around to see if her father would defend her, but he was already hustling back to the furnace.  

     “Something’s not right with that girl,” said Folsom.  

     “Nothing wrong with her,” said Lester from beneath a different tree where he ate his cheese sandwich alone.  

     Folsom spit in the grass. “Shut up, fairy boy.”  

     Lester wasn’t a fairy boy, Zany knew.  

     Today, leaning in the dining room, Lester looks as if he can see inside Zany’s skull to the conjured Factory room she and Andy will one day share: walls scrubbed clean and painted white.  Her drawings or paintings lining the walls in tidy rows. Maybe sculptures aligned on shelves. Or mobiles overhead spinning in the breeze. Lester nods at her fantasy as if it’s a good one. He has his own escapism. Zany knows that too, and she looks away first so her eyes won’t let him know that she knows.  

     Lester heads to the cellar where he spends most of his time. Mom partitioned off the back corner for him with clothesline and a bed sheet. Installed an army cot and gooseneck lamp on a crate. Andy Warhol holed up in the cellar when he was a kid developing film in a jerry-rigged darkroom. Zany constructed one from an oversized cardboard box she wedged into that shadowy space beneath the stairs. She cut a closable door in the box and regularly folds herself inside to catalogue her achievements in a notebook. Stood barefoot on a hot tar patch on Frazier Street for seventy-two seconds. Mr. Braddock called me a dolt, but I said: You’re the dolt!  

     From below, the sound of Lester falling onto his cot followed by a sigh so deep Zany’s lungs exhale, too. Whatever dreams he had got buried under apartment rubble along with Uncle Mo. 

     Outside, Dad has taken Aunt Vi’s creaky rocker. “He’s a strange one,” he says about Lester. “What’s he up to down there?”  

     Mom says, “Who the hell knows?”  

     Zany clamps her unbandaged hand over her mouth to keep that knowledge from spilling.  She saw what he was up to the day she was tucked in her box and forgot time until footsteps pounded the stairs above her. She peeked through the peephole she’d punched into her cardboard door as Lester peeled off his shirt, his pants. He left on his boxers and socks. Didn’t bother to draw his sheet curtain, just plopped on the cot and lit a cigarette. His smoking still surprised her. The boy he once was was also buried under rubble. Zany regretted not making her presence known, but then it was too late with Lester in his underwear, and all. Plus, she was captivated by his fingers pulling the cigarette to his lips. The little smoke rings he sent up to the floor joists. She wondered if he was dreaming of China or the South Pole, or just sitting quietly at his too-small desk back in his apartment inhaling all that fresh air. Finally, he snubbed out the cigarette in an empty tuna can. Zany hoped he would roll over for sleep, but he slid a much-abused magazine from beneath his pillow and turned pages. Even in the scant light Zany made out the naked lady on the cover. Zany’s heart thudded, even more so when Lester’s hand slipped beneath his waistband and started moving up and down, up and down. She told her eyes to close but they wouldn’t, both entranced and nauseated by what she shouldn’t be seeing. She knew what he was up to, having done her own exploring when she had her own room. She’d conjure Andy Warhol’s face and mouth and delicate hands—because those rumors weren’t true. They just weren’t. Harder to explore in the bed she now shared with Gig. Stupid Aunt Vi, and stupid collapsed Franklin Arms. 

     What Lester was up to looked angry. Violent, even. A jittery burn galloped beneath Zany’s skin and she bit her lip, drawing blood. But she couldn’t look away from Lester’s furious hand, his eyes ogling that magazine until they squeezed shut and his mouth pressed into a grimace that did not look like joy. The magazine collapsed onto his chest and his belly shuddered. Only then did Zany close her eyes as the burn leaked through her skin. When Lester’s snores came, she tiptoed upstairs to collapse on Andy’s echo. She caught Lester seven more times, if caught is the right word, lying in wait as she was, hoping to see, hoping not to.  “You better be setting the table!” Mom yells now from the porch.  

     Zany grunts and makes her way to the kitchen where Aunt Vi pulls a roast from the oven.  Zany heaves a stack of plates to the dining room and deals them out like playing cards.  “Don’t break my dishes!” Mom calls. I hate your hair, Zany wants to say.  There is a crash, but it’s not dishes. It comes from overhead where Gig screams.  Thumping on the stairs as she thunders down, transistor in hand. “Zany!”  Gig rushes into the dining room, ponytail swaying, eyes landing on her sister. “He’s been shot!”  

     Zany’s mind hurtles back two months to when Martin Luther King was killed. Riots erupted in Pittsburgh’s Black neighborhoods: The Hill District and Homewood and Manchester.  “Who?” Zany says, conjuring possibilities: LBJ, Sidney Portier. But to Zany, it’s much worse.  

     “Andy Warhol!”  

     Zany counts this as the meanest lie Gig’s ever told. “He was not.”  

     “Yes, he was!” Gig turns up the radio and the announcer confirms it: a crazed woman shot Warhol in his Factory. 

     Aunt Vi comes at Zany with her arms wide, because she understands loss. “Oh, honey.”  Zany bats her hands away. “It’s not true.”  

     Vi backs into Mom’s hoard. “Is he dead?”  

     Gig says: “They don’t know.”  

     Zany can’t stomach the smug look on Gig’s face, as if she holds Andy’s life or death between her teeth. Zany wants to slap that look off, so she does.  

     Gig screams.  

     “What the hell’s going on in there?” Mom calls.  

     “Zany hit me!” Gig says at the very moment Aunt Vi says: “Andy Warhol’s been shot!”  “No he wasn’t!” Zany says again, wanting to slap them both.  

     Mom and Dad hustle inside where Gig cups her reddening cheek and bawls louder.  “It’s nothing,” Mom says at the sight of her sniveling daughter, but Dad enfolds Gig in his arms. “There, there.”  

     “Don’t coddle that child,” says Mom, and for once Zany agrees.  

     “Now, Mae.” Dad cups the back of Gig’s head and there’s a different look on her face.  Triumph, maybe.  

     Pounding on the shared duplex wall, Evie Krebbs, who never could shush that wailing baby. “Andy Warhol’s been shot!” she calls to them. “Did you all hear?”  

     “We heard,” Mom answers as the baby cries louder, and so does Gig, who won’t be upstaged. Mom says: “That’s the price of fame I guess.”  

     “Being shot?” says Aunt Vi.  

     “Put yourself in the public eye and anything’s liable to happen. Lotta kooks in this world.” 

     The neighbor kids’ chant sounds in Zany’s head: Your mother’s a hobo.  

     “I’d rather be shot than a hobo,” says Zany.  

     Mom’s head snaps back. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”  

     Zany doesn’t fully know what she means, or maybe she does.  

     Dad says, “Turn up the radio and see if he’s dead.”  

     Zany doesn’t want to know the answer, and to keep him alive she runs to the basement where Andy will always be a sickly boy developing film. Never mind Lester in his bed sending smoke rings up to the floor joists. Never mind her family still jabbering overhead. 

     Zany dashes to her cardboard box and closes the door, her body shaking, but not from any disease. Andy can’t be dead. He just can’t, because if he is Zany will never make it to New York. Will never pound on his Factory door. She will never be famous enough for someone to shoot.  

     She doesn’t know she’s sobbing until Lester’s voice drifts over. “Zany?”  

     It’s hard to speak with that hand gripping her throat and her father overhead still babbling: “Turn it up, Gig.” All Zany eeks out is a sob.  

     Lester’s skinny voice slips through that slit in her door. “Zany?”  

     The grip loosens and Zany puts her eye to the peephole.  

     There he is, Lester, on his narrow cot in the windowless cellar where he now lives. He slides his hand into his waistband and he tilts his head toward her. “Are you watching?”  Zany’s breathing settles, and the overhead voices disappear taking with them the possibility of Andy’s death. Her eyes widens so she can take it all in, the violent strokes, his contorting face, because she won’t look away from Lester’s pain, or hers.  Finally, she answers him: “Yes.” 

Episode 124: Pinpricks of Process

Dear Slushies, we have a confession. The first draft of these show notes included references to Wawa, Jason's sweet tooth, the relative repulsiveness of hot milk shakes, and professional wrestling. But then we realized that approach eclipsed what this episode illuminates: the poetic trend of self-reflexive gestures like the one we just made, confessing that this isn't the first draft! Listen in as we discuss Krysten Hill's poem "Are We Still Good?" The poem challenges us to think about analogy, metaphor, and narrativity. How poets can stage the occasion for a speaker's confessional reflection via the spark of a story plucked from our information dense mediascape -- revealing what it means to feel terror when that terror might otherwise be dismissed. How does she do this? Manatees and memes, silence, and a meta-textual turn. Enjoy!

 

PS Samantha also references this great essay by John Shoptaw on eco poetry. Dig in!

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Dagne Forrest, Jason Schneiderman, Samanatha Neugebauer

 

Krysten Hill is the author of How Her Spirit Got Out (Aforementioned Productions, 2016), which received the 2017 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Her work has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day Series, Poetry Magazine, PANK, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Winter Tangerine Review,Rust + Moth and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the 2020 Mass Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship, 2023 Vermont Studio Center Residency, and 2024 SWWIM Residency.

Author website

 

Are We Still Good?

 

According to officials, the animal does not appear to be seriously injured.

Someone adds in the comments that, Obviously, it was just a joke. 

Calm down, Liberals. Highlights the part in the article where 

the man’s name was scraped onto algae growing on its skin.

From what they could see, nothing was truly threatened. 

The sea cow was probably too dumb and fat to feel anything. 

I think of all the ways cruelty begins as a joke until 

it chooses to finish what it started. The friend I’d known for years

didn’t stop when I asked and asked again. I thought maybe he didn’t hear me.

Later, he told our mutual friend that, Things just got out of hand.

I thought she knew I was just playing. I remember when I was sure he heard me, 

I recognized  it was my fear that made him smile so loud. Still, I attempt 

to explain the surprise. At least I didn’t die there, I tell myself. Even here, 

I wrote that as the first line of this poem and buried it. Anyways,

he had work in the morning, offered to drive me home.

I didn’t have to walk back to my dorm in the snow. I laughed 

at everything he said on the way and tried not to let him see 

my hands shake when I took the gum he offered me. He asked, 

Are we still good? I chewed my tongue, relieved that I could

do something else with my mouth until he parked, unlocked 

the door to let me out. I thanked him. I was so scared that I didn’t run.

Episode 123: The Catholic Episode

Episode 123: The Catholic Episode

 

Dear Slushies, we have a confession. We love being close readers as much as we love being close listeners. And if you are a fan of this podcast, we know the same is true for you. We’re delighted to consider Charlie Peck’s poems “Cowboy Dreams” and “Bully in the Trees” in this episode. We’re talking about unreliable narrators, homeric epithets, dramatic enjambments, and the difference between small “c” catholicism and capital “C” Catholicism. Confession and exultation, Slushies! Floating signifiers and The Sopranos. It’s a doozy! We hope you love listening in as much as we loved considering Charlie Peck’s poems for PBQ. 

 

(Oh, and we excitedly celebrate Jason’s fifth collection launching in April, Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire!)

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman, Samanatha Neugebauer

 

Charlie Peck is from Omaha, Nebraska and received his MFA from Purdue University. His poetry has appeared previously in Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, Massachusetts Review, and Best New Poets 2019, among others. His first collection, World’s Largest Ball of Paint, is the winner of the 2022 St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press and is forthcoming April 2024.

 

Twitter: @chip_nutter

 

Cowboy Dreams

 

Winedrunk along the river on a Tuesday,

boy howdy, my life. I ignore another

call from my mother because today 

is about the matted grass and the skipping trout.

When my brother jumps companies

after the Christmas bonus, it’s Ruthless.

When I pillage the family silver

to slick forty bucks at a pawn shop, 

It’s time you start thinking about recovery.

Instinct makes me wreck anyone who comes 

too close. You ever snapped a dog’s

stick just to watch his ears drop? I’m Catholic

with how quick I loose my tongue to confess, 

my guilt just a frequency my ears quit hearing. 

One snowy May in the Colorado mountains, I stripped 

to my underwear and raised my pack to wade

the glacial river. Dried by a fire with a pot

of beans. All night I dreamt of my lasso

and revolver, riding the hot-blooded horse

alone across the plains, no one in sight to hurt.

Bully in the Trees

 

Indiana cornfields leave so much 

   to be desired, and lately I’ve desired nothing

 

but clean sheets and pretzel bread. For a decade

   I was ruthless, took whatever I wanted:

 

last donut in the office breakroom, merged

   lanes out of turn. I stole my roommate’s 

 

change jar, sat on the floor of a Wells Fargo

   rolling quarters to buy an eighth. In this new year,

 

I promise I’ll stop being the loudest in the room

   like a bear ravaging a campsite just to be the bully

 

in the trees. For so long I thought my cruelty

   was the world’s fault, my stubbed toe blamed

 

on the coffee table’s leg, not my stumbling in the dark.

   Throwing every fish back to the river 

 

doesn’t forgive the hooked hole I caused.

   Once, I undressed a woman in the giraffe enclosure,

 

but maybe that was a Soprano’s episode. Once,

   my life was so ordinary I replaced it

 

with the things I saw on television. I ate fifty

   hard-boiled eggs. I robbed the bank and screamed

 

Attica! I stood in the trees cuffing the Nebraska

   suburb and watched my mother set the table

 

through the window. A porcelain plate at each chair.

   My ordinary life stranged by the window frame.

 

If I fall asleep before the credits, let me dream the rest.

   My pockets are empty, but the metal detector still shrieks.

Episode 122: Concrete Poetry & Champagne

Dearest Slushies, we’re so happy to be back in the saddle! We took a mini-hiatus and return with this episode devoted to the poems of Jodi Balas. You’ll hear us mull over her artful use of concrete poetry and dive deep into her thinking about poetry, the body, and NFTs. How does a poem’s form entwine with its image system in order to serve its sense? How is taste also (always) about power? All of these questions are wrapped in a glittering cascade of editorial acumen and quirky dishing: Listen as Dagne explains the difference between NFTs and Cryptocurrency, reminding us of Rattle’s prescient issue dedicated to NFT poets. Or let us know what you think: should “mini cocktails” ever be a thing for happy hours? Is “drinkable” ever a compliment? Can we make a meme of Jason’s seductive eyebrow skills? In addition to the following links you might dig–  NFTs explained in 5 Minutes & Brit Bennett’s “Ain't That Good News”-- we invite you to contemplate the ritual of champagne sabering (if you try this in your backyard, shout “Poetry!”) With best wishes for a happy new year from the Slush Pile Crew.

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman, Dagne Forrest, Samanatha Neugebauer

 

Jodi Balas is a neurodivergent poet from Northeast Pennsylvania. A lover of words (salacious, being a favorite – it just rolls off the tongue), her poetry has been accepted in Hole in the Head Review, Wild Roof Journal, Humana Obscura, Pinch Journal, and elsewhere. Jodi’s poem, “His mouth, mine” was selected as a finalist for the 2023 River Heron Review poetry prize and her poem, “Bone Density” won the 2023 Comstock Review Muriel Craft Bailey Award judged by Danusha Lameris. Jodi is in the process of developing her first chapbook to market to the poetry world. You could follow her musings on Instagram @jodibalas_

WALKING TO SURRENDER

 

The ghost at my side,
  the knife in my coat pocket
      hanging on the coat rack. I
        yield to morning in apprehension
            almost every morning. I’m
              hardening, becoming the
                  weight of two dead trees. A
                    spool of thread wound so tight,
                        it’s hard to find the starting
                          point - the dull tip of a needle is
                        useless. I try and unknot the
                    shoelace from yesterday, the
                  muscle of memory below the ribs
              and figure out which direction I’m
            headed or which route is correct for
        my mental state I’ve been trying
      to correct but cannot correct
  until I surrender entirely to the
blinding wave of fear.

MY BODY AS AN NFT

Allow me to unshackle
your wrists, bring you
up off your knees & up to
speed. Call me a good
investment, the original
copy. Non-refundable,
metallic over bone, wire
over skin – untethered,
the virtual sin. You cannot
use me in some side hustle,
sleight of hand deal. I am
my own creator. Watch
how I catapult through
your veins and rush you
faster than a thief with a
shank. Electric/cryptic
#mytongueisdigitalweight
Begging for a bit of action
you’re not sure how to
obtain. Tell me, is there
mutual interest? I can
tell you that I’m priceless.
Watch closely before I
become a liability, before
your pockets explode,
before the scales begin
to re-balance themselves.

Episode 121: The Tie Breakers Episode

In this episode we discussed three very different poems by Oregon poet Lorna Rose, all three resulting in juicy conversation and resulting in three tie-breakers (none of them involving the same voting configurations amongst our team!). This was a big first for us. The episode was kicked off by a larger discussion (prompted by the first poem) around aspects of cultural appropriation and touched on facets of trauma and language. This wide-ranging discussion and the split in our voting pointed to the power and ambiguity of various elements in these poems.  In the end, a tie-breaking editor helped deliver two of these poems into PBQ’s pages! Have a listen! 

Note: This episode was recorded in December 2021, so there will be a bit of time travel involved. 

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show.  

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman, Alex Tunney 

Absentee voter for the tie-breakers: Samanatha Neugebauer 

 

Links to things we discuss you might like to check out: 

 

"Declaration" by Tracy K. Smith, an erasure poem of the Declaration of Independence 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147468/declaration-5b5a286052461 

 

"Native Son" by Richard Wright 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/07/20/the-hammer-and-the-nail 

 

"Appropriate: A Provocation" by Paisley Rekdal 

https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324003588 

 

"How-To" by Anders Carlson Wee and retraction by The Nation 

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-to/ 

 

"Inside Kate Winlset's Mare of Easttown" Pennsylvania Accent, Vanity Fair 

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/04/kate-winslet-mare-of-easttown-accent 

 

 

Lorna is a Pacific Northwest writer and speaker. Her narrative nonfiction and poetry have been recognized by Pacific Northwest Writers Association and the Oregon Poetry Association, and have appeared or are forthcoming in Scary Mommy, Jellyfish Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Writers Resist, and elsewhere. She's also a speaker and workshop leader. When not wrangling her two small children, she fantasizes about being interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air.  

 

Author website 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leaving Libya 

 

I flood my lungs  

with the wet stench of fish and bodies and fuel.  

Dinghy motor whines against the night.  

  

Salt air grinds my skin ‘til it’s threadbare and  

there’s no sitting since leaving Sabratha.  

Body clenches tight to its bones  

  

and shrill muscles shriek and weep and lock up.  

Damp t-shirt clings to goosebumped flesh under a  

tattered orange life jacket. But what life?  

  

Next to me a shaking woman holds her boney baby  

and cries. She has shit herself.  

Behind me a man mumbles and mumbles for water.  

  

His eyes roll hollow,  

mouth slacks open.  

From his breath  

  

I smell the thick stink of rot,  

the gray smell of  

forgotten humanity.  

  

Lights of the Italian coastline appear and  

my heart races,  

vision blurs. 

From somewhere behind there’s a jolt.  

Yelling.  

Floor tilts.  

  

And the lights of Lampedusa go black. 

 

 

 

Surviving the Rush 

 

No music plays in  

the general store in Circle, Alaska,  

which is full of mukluks and  

  

Wonder Bread.  

  

Villagers fish the Yukon,  

memorize river rise,  

bet on  

  

breakup.  

  

Long ago miners arrived from Outside 

to sift, chip  

rip fortunes 

  

from earth.  

  

Stilts were drilled into permafrost and  

structures were imposed and  

all bustle and  

  

rage.  

  

Then claims fell dry and  

no patience and Circle started to 

  

wither. 

  

The locals  

picked up pieces of buildings, tried to  

heal the  

  

pock-marked ground.  

  

Today a tourist’s crisp dollar might  

mean something,  

except the locals would have to tolerate  

  

the perfumey tourist.  

  

Villagers fish the Yukon,  

memorize river rise,  

bet on breakup. The soil smells of  

  

fool’s gold and blood. 

Episode 120: On Seeing & Being Seen

Slushies, in this episode we consider two poems by C. Fausto Cabrera, both of which speak, in very different ways, to the imagination in building our sense of self. The notion of being seen, a topic of universal relevance to any writer or artist, is explored in the first poem, which ends with the line “stuck in between the covers wondering when you’ll be back”, simultaneously exploring themes of incarceration or imprisonment. This discussion leads us to consider the many layers of being seen and Jason takes a moment to appreciate the “sexy time” of having a book tucked in your pocket. The second poem takes us on a related yet palpably different journey and reveals one of the paths our editorial discussions can take us to. Take a listen, you won’t be disappointed!

 

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show. 

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, and Dagne Forrest.

 

C. Fausto Cabrera is a multi-genre artist and writer currently incarcerated since 2003. His work has appeared in: The Colorado Review, The Antioch Review, Puerto del Sol, The American Literary Review, The Water~Stone Review, The Woodward Review, among others. "The Parameters of Our Cage" is his prose collaboration with photographer Alec Soth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

To Be Seen at All ,

"What makes us so deserving of space

 in other people' s minds?"

   -Daniel Ruiz

 

 

My boss in the kitchen asks me how it felt to be famous

after looking up my Washington Post Magazine

essay & cover art online. The question left me stuck

I didn't feel famous. I hadn't received much mail in years.

What does celebrity mean separate from saturation, fame to

the incarcerated— but infamy?

 

I question the value of telling people about accomplishments,

about publishing at all— in a place where your spades

game gets more respect, & swagger's stuck in the last time you punched a

muthafucker in the face, what' s the point? I just felt petty

for wanting to be seen at all. Guards are more concerned

with how many towels I have than who I become.

 

I'm being heard— & that should be the focus, right?

Is the nobility of a thing in or on purpose? Or the other

way around? Cause who ever does anything for nobility—

I'm starving to be objectified: stripped  down by the new young blond

guard like a Skinamax late nite B-movie, why else do hundreds

of burpees if not to play into the bad boy fantasies of anyone watching?

 

I went away before social media, but had my Lil’ cousin Artesia build

me a platform to stand upon, thinkin' it'd present me

somehow, someway, maybe keep me present— be on someone's mind or

wall, admired even for a moment. The Past says they miss me, but

since they never reach past the screen it's not the real me,

only their memory. It’s not about me at all—and neither should the work be.

 

There is a point to this poem, in its lack of trust. & none of it is an answer.

How can I count on anything through a 2-way mirror? I am just

a writer, the world through my eyes glows different due to the depths of my

damage. When you close this book & move on

I'll still be stuck in-between the covers,

   wondering                                                when you'll be back.

 

 

 

 

In the Sun that Seeps from the Dungeons/ Window/ Everything is Bright 

  

  

          Because God is in an algorithm I hear through the toggle of my shuffle button/ from a playlist I                                               

            composed/ I tell myself/ that if I listen, while the TV projects a pretty face to see when I look up 

               from what I'm reading of poetry, mechanical pencil, click, click, underlining & taking notes in  

                 the margins— sipping a mug of French vanilla creamer laden coffee w/thoughts swirling in my 

                     cinnamon head/ the sheer alchemy of it all should/ naturally combust! What butterfly wings must 

                        taste like/embers floating/escape the chaos, wondering west to set fires/troublesome/I 

                           want blood in the cut, I want noise/they made me something vicious. Will I burn out or fade

                              away? The man in black speaks for me & reminds me I'm not alone. A rainbow in 

                                 the dark, I'll take death before dishonor, bet I bomb on them first/ it's just the life of an

                                     outlaw. 

                                        I am an amalgamation of influences, intricate in their darkness, complex in their

                                           origins, some speak integrable nostalgic, others spark dumb & rash/& I gave 

                                             away my youth to sit & listen to all at once/hopeful/ saying something of a future I'

                                               II forget/ I longed for/ once /it arrives. I read my poetry book, circle a 

                                                 word or phrase to slow down, hoping to see something I can lift/ above a drawn

                                                   line or jot in the margins that can change the way I see or say. 

                                                     Words & wonder/ pour into my ears, my eyes catch/ images I pull into my

                                                        heart while I swallow the sweetness of an appreciation. In these 

                                                          moments I am alive. Then God says, through The City of Prague' s

                                                          Philharmonic Orchestra that the path isn't interchangeable. 

There's no other person I'd rather be. 

 

Episode 119: Line Breaks & The Iambic Lilt

When to break a line, Slushies. And why? What’s the shape your poem takes, and how does the poem’s form serve its complexities, subtleties, and heart? Three poems by Karl Meade are up for consideration in this episode of The Slush Pile, and they call the editors into conversation about trauma in literature, narrative (in)coherence as craft, and the pleasurable risks of stair-stepped stanzas. Poet L.J. Sysko joins the conversation on this  episode  of The Slush Pile as we discuss “Beach Fall,” “Christmas Break,” and “Doom Eager.” (If a tree falls in the woods, Slushies. Ammiright?)

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, L. J. Sysko, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, Alex J. Tunney

 

Karl Meade’s work been published in many literary magazines, a few of which he didn’t even donate heavily to, or previously serve as editor—including Literary Review of Canada, Tusculum Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, Grain Magazine, Chronogram, Umbrella Factory Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, Event Magazine, The Fiddlehead, Open Letter, Under the Sun, and Dandelion. His work has also been mistakenly longlisted for four CBC Literary Prizes, shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Creative Nonfiction Award, and Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year. His novel, Odd Jobs, written as a solemn literary manifesto, was a finalist for the Foreword Reviews Book of the Year for Humor, and an iTunes Top 20 Arts and Literature podcast—“Laugh Out Loud,” one listener said of this grave work.

 

Karl’s chapbook “Doom Eager” has just been released in September 2023 by Raven Chapbooks, just in time for us to publish this podcast, which has waited longer than it should for release! 

 

Author website: www.karlmeade.com

Guest Editor: L.J. Sysko

 

L.J. Sysko's work has been published in Voicemail Poems, The Pinch, Ploughshares, Rattle, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, BATTLEDORE (Finishing Line Press, New Women's Voices series). Poetry honors include several Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg awards, two fellowships from Delaware's Division of the Arts, and poetry finalist recognition from The Fourth River, The Pinch, and Soundings East. Sysko holds an MFA in poetry from New England College.

 

X: @lj_sysko

Instagram: @lesliesysko

Facebook: @lesliesysko

Author website: http://www.ljsysko.com

 

beach fall

for Holli and Terry

 

Mountain to stone, prairie to sand, redwood to ash,

from here I can see the heart of the sea, but not the beach

 

he fell on. I can see the picture

window you sit in—waiting, watching the shore, iPad in lap, short-haired

 

Flossy at your side, the one who dug your dad’s

water bottle from under him. I don’t know why

 

you brought his suitcase to his wake

empty—what it was between you. Only he knew the words

 

you could not say. The doctors’ words for you—non-verbal, spectral—sent him

back to rage. He said they weren’t worth the hair

 

on a dead chicken, that aut-ism was just too much self for them to take

from you. He knew what his raging

 

love could do: four hours a night on the couch, talking

through your iPad. He called himself Manitoban, the prairie farm-boy

 

who watched his dog run away for three days, the rain-man

to lead you out, teach you how to mouth the O, the awe

 

in Holli. Yes, from here I can see the redwoods

fall, the mountains decay, his sea-bed—

 

they say all the big hearts of the earth

love where they fall, that his heart stopped

 

before he hit the beach. But we both know

why his mouth was full of sand.

 

 

Christmas break

for Doug and Arlene

 

The earth heaves, the ice cleaves. Erosion

cuts the heart from every stone, while every night

 

I watch you drive your family past a starving glacier, turn

from a truck laden with salt. You head off

 

the head on, take the bumper to the heart, leave

your family straining your lungs’ last

 

words from the floor of the minivan.

I’m on the floor beneath my desk, straining

 

to plug in the phone that I will blame for years: why

did I plug it in? Every night

 

I watch the driver’s stoned eyes, petrified as your broken

daughters in the back. Every night

 

I piece you all back together: brake, I say, turn

over and over while the glacier leaves

 

its terminal moraine. I gather the stones,

offer them to the moon, last witness

 

to your last turn. I turn

to your wife, try to face her head on

 

with what the earth knows:

core to crust, mouth to lung

 

the rupture comes, the rupture

stays. Every Christmas

 

she wakes to the words

brake, turn.

 

 

doom eager^*

 

 

 

because one of us

took a spike to the lung

              a minivan to the chest

                           hit the beach with his heart

                                         to say nothing of the one

                                                      whose only breath was broken water

 

because I believe

              the hand, the wound, the moon

                            is how I show you where I fell

                                         through the hole I thought I was

                                                      diving for pearls through the green

                                                                    fuse of ice in my dream of you

 

                          because I run naked

                                        through the forest on a moonless night

                                                       with a penlight in the hand that broke

                                                       my mother’s heart waning at the seed

                                                                    of light the moon won’t show me

                                                                                   because its dark side calls all of us

 

                          because I believe

                                        I’ll find your heart in the east

                                                     your marrow in the moon

                                                                    fever just before the sun rises

                                                                                  I’ll swim for it all day forgetting

                                                                                               how the earth turns east south west

                                                                                                                       circling all night forgetting

                                                                                                                                                                                there is no moon

                                                                                                                                                                                in the new moon

 

                                                    because the only way out

                                                                  is my hand on your chest

                                                                                 I walk the shore all night

                                                                                              dream back the back of the moon

                                                                                                                                                              because the only cure

                                                                                                                                                                                  for the wound

                                                                                                                                                                                     is the wound

 

 

^*after Ibsen, Graham, Moore: an Icelandic term for the isolation, restlessness, caughtness an artist experiences when sick with an idea

Episode 118: Making Words New

A wonderful sense of wordplay permeates the poems we were able to discuss from Barbara Diehl. Sadly, one of three poems we’d flagged for the podcast was snapped up before our discussion was recorded, and we talk a bit at the start of this episode about our process and timelines. Barbara’s work gave us space to consider how word choices, sequencing, and combining can lead to new experiences in a poem, as well as a debate over the roles of joy and darkness in poetry, including the balance we seek as readers in the world we find ourselves living in these days. 

 

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show.  

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer and Dagne Forrest. 

Barbara Westwood Diehl is senior editor of The Baltimore Review. Her fiction and poetry appear in a variety of journals, including Quiddity, Potomac Review (Best of the 50), SmokeLong Quarterly, Gargoyle, Superstition Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, Atticus Review, The MacGuffin, The Shore, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Raleigh Review, Ponder, Fractured Lit, South Florida Poetry Journal, Five South, Allium, The Inflectionist Review, Switch, Split Rock Review, and Free State Review. 

 

Socials: Twitter @BarbaraWestwood, Facebook @ barbara.w.diehl.3, Poets & Writers listing 

 

 

December Goodnight 

 

it’s sunfall, and the papersky is grayed 

with erasures of bestlaid plans 

 

all the daymistakes  

forgiven 

 

the brokenpencil points of planes  

thumbsmudged away 

 

their grumblechatter 

hushed 

 

the blackening windows 

shuttered 

 

* 

 

so sleep in the nightsee  

in the skylisten 

 

so dream a planetdance 

breathe a metronome  

 

so keep time to a ticktock moon  

to evening’s pocketwatch 

 

its face a dozing chaperone  

so humfade, so eyes closed 

 

nothing to shudderfret 

allsafe 

 

Episode 27: Suicides and Skeleton Jazz (REISSUE)

In the midst of excitedly preparing for AWP 2017, we record this episode in which we discuss two poems by Rita Banerjee, “The Suicide Rag” and “Georgia Brown”

This week’s discussion both took us back and made sure that none of us would see the world the same way again. With images of breakdancing, gospel choir, and the not-so-innocent Georgia Brown, we were in it. Whether we’re distinguishing jazz from jazz or figuring out what a clapper is, this episode is filled with risky moves.

Join us in the campaign to have your local library carry lesser-known authors and small presses. Let us know what books you’ll be requesting with #getsomebooks! Let’s support libraries, small presses, and the authors who write for them.

Make sure you follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and let us know what you think of this episode with #longandskinny! Stay tuned to hear about our AWP 2017 experience–we hope to see you there!
And of course, most importantly, read on!

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman, Tim Fitts, and Sara Aykit

Rita Banerjee is the author of Echo in Four Beats, CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps, and Cracklers at Night. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA from the University of Washington, and her work appears in Hunger Mountain, PANK, Tupelo Quarterly, Isele Magazine, Nat. Brut., Poets & Writers, Academy of American Poets, Los Angeles Review of Books, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is the co-writer of Burning Down the Louvre, a forthcoming documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France, and serves as Senior Editor of the South Asian Avant-Garde and Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. She received a 2021-2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto on female cool, and one of the opening chapters of this memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. 

 

The Suicide Rag

Billy played ragtime

on the church

organ but we

lunch hour kids,

kept time by another

name.  Behind St. Augustine’s

we learned to hit

the pavement, sound

like an anvil

crack

hammers hitting

steel, Billy playing

skeletons

on the fifth,

we arpeggioed

haloed, froze

on the black

top.  Learning

to cakewalk

This was our

battle—

tar-mat babies

doing handsprung

suicides

for the girls

standing ’round

with knife-like eyes

That’s all

we needed—

a rolling

beat, a firing squad

and schoolyard

skirts

scouring the lot

as we fell

face forward

hands locked

& stiff, the only

thing

that could’ve

come between

us was a kiss.

 

Georgia Brown

Harlem had yet to be born,

the globe had not been spun,

but we knew how to whistle,

how to call clappers and skirts on cue:

That summer, we first met Georgia,

she was an echo in four beats,

we learned to hum her story.

Mike played her with a licked reed

but she was all brass, sharp

like an abandoned railroad cutting through

wild wood, and when she took stage,

she made those trombone boys whisper,

“Sweet Georgia, Sweet.”

Episode 19: The Dinosaur-Robot Episode (REISSUE)

July 2023 Update: Sarah is preparing to appear at the New York City Poetry Festival at the end of July. Sarah will read a poem and be interviewed as part of an appearance with the monthly poetry show "There's a Lot to Unpack Here". Sarah also has a new book of poetry, “The Familiar”, coming out from Texas Review Press in Spring 2024.

Welcome to Episode 19 of Slush Pile! For this episode, we have two “creepy” poems submitted for our Monsters Issue by Sarah Kain Gutowski.

While these poems, part of a suite, did not get unanimous votes, we all felt they enveloped us into a universe of magical realism. True to the tradition of scary stories, these poems demand to be read slowly, deliberately, and out loud. Additionally, Gutowski’s work is more than simply scary. Like Kathy says, “Sometimes freaky shit happens,” and these poems force our team to consider the ambiguities of life, or pre-death, as Tim puts it.

Listen to the outcome, but one thing is for sure: these poems are stronger together.

Comment on our Facebook event page or on Twitter with #frogtongue and sign for our email list if you’re in the area, and even if you’re not! Read on!

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Lauren Patterson, Tim Fitts, Caitlin McLaughlin, Jason Schneiderman, and Marion Wrenn

 

Sarah Kain Gutowski is the author of two books, The Familiar (forthcoming) and Fabulous Beast: Poems, winner of the 14th annual National Indies Excellence Award for Poetry. With interdisciplinary artist Meredith Starr, she is co-creator of Every Second Feels Like Theft, a conversation in cyanotypes and poetry, and It's All Too Much, a limited edition audio project. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Threepenny Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and The Southern Review, and her criticism has been published by Colorado Review, Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, and the New York Journal of Books.

 

Chapter VI: The Children Have a Request

The season stretched itself thin, weakened by storms and heat.

Inside the damp, shadowy space of the children’s fort,

the woman with the frog tongue wove baskets and bowls

with tight, interlocked laces, while her silk stitches

began to fray and lengthen. The gap between her lips

widened to where the children could see the white of her teeth.

They stared at her, sometimes; she saw them clench their jaws

and try to speak to each other without moving their mouths.

Before long they’d begin to laugh, and she’d shake with relief at the sound.

Then one day, when the trees broke into glittering shards

of gold and red and green, and light spun pinwheels above

their heads as they walked together between the falling leaves,

the girl looked at the woman and asked if she had a name.

At this, the woman jerked to a stop. The old surge,

the impulse to speak that rose within her belly and chest,

overwhelmed. She wanted the girl and boy to know her name.

Her tongue, rolled tightly and barred from moving inside its cage,

strained against her teeth and cheeks, contorting her face with its rage.

The boy stepped back when he saw the change on the woman’s face.

The girl moved closer, though, to pat the hand she held

like she might a frightened kitten or skittish, fallen bird.

Let’s guess your name, she said. The woman’s jaw fell slack,

as much as the stitches allowed. Her panic passed away.

The boy saw her relax and began to hop around.

A game, a game, he chanted. Across her eyes the sun

sliced its blade, and though her vision bled with its light,

she felt cheered by the girl’s hand and the boy’s excitement.

Aurora. Jezebel. Serafina, guessed the girl.

Her brother laughed and grabbed a fallen branch, whacking

the moss-covered roots of the trees surrounding them.

The woman laughed, too, short bursts of air through her nose.

Her happiness shocked them all. The boy laughed again,

a raucous sound, and she looked the little girl in the eye.

A curve tested her mouth’s seams, more grimace than grin,

but the girl smiled back and sighed with some relief. Then she reached

toward the woman and pulled her close, until they were cheek to cheek.

The girl’s face, cold and smooth, smelled of the moss and earth

her brother lashed and whipped with vigor into the air.

The woman with the frog tongue hugged the girl loosely,

as if those little shoulder blades were planes of cloud,

a shifting mist she could see and feel between her arms

but couldn’t collect, or hold, or keep for her very own.

The girl stepped back yet kept her hands by the woman’s face.

Her small, thin fingers hovered before the fraying threads.

Why don’t you take these out? she asked, as she touched each ragged end.

At this the boy stopped his joyful assault of the trees

and ran to see for himself what they discussed each night

when walking home: her muffled, choked murmurings,

the gray lattice unraveling across her mouth.

He peered closely at each loose stitch, searching beyond

her lips for whatever monster she’d locked so poorly inside.

He found no monster, just a hint of pink tongue.

So he shrugged, said Yes, and spun on his heel to resume his game.

The girl jumped up and down, shouting: And then you’ll tell us your name!

The woman watched the boy whip tree roots free of moss,

the tufts spinning into the air and separating,

becoming dust, the dark green spores like beaks of birds

that plummet toward the rocky earth without fear.

She watched the girl’s hair lift and fly away from her head,

the wind dividing its strands, the way it hung, suspended

like dust in the sun, then sank like spores: a sudden drop.

She worked her mouth from side to side, and by degrees

opened her lips enough to burble a sound that said: Maybe.

 

Chapter VII: She Grows a Second Heart

That night she woke to find another oddity:

during sleep her heart had split or twinned itself,

and where one muscle pumped before, now beat two.

Her blood coursed through her veins twice as fast as before,

and over those paths her skin buzzed and stammered, like wire

strung tautly between two poles and charged with load.

As if she’d run for miles across rolling hills,

as if inside her chest two fists beat time all day,

beneath the bone she sped at death in the most alive way.

The day crawled while her two hearts raced. Above the fire

she set a series of clocks to ticking. She watched the flames,

sometimes leaning close enough to feel the heat

singe her stitches a deeper shade, their fibers scorching

until they curled, like dark froth spilling from her mouth.

But when her hearts began to flicker more, and faster

than she could stand, she turned her eyes to the clocks’ marked faces

and drew comfort from the second hands’ neurotic twitch.

Every minute witnessed meant another minute lived.

Beneath her breastbone her strange second heart pulsed harder.

She sensed the muscle, like her tongue, would leap and fly

away from her body if her body let it go.

She took the silver-handled knife and incised a cross

above the cavity where her hearts ballooned together,

jostling for room and dominance. The flaps of skin,

pale as egg shell, trembled slightly. A head appeared.

A bird with obsidian eyes emerged wet with her blood,

shook to shed its burden, and leapt toward the rafters above.

She watched the bird and felt air seep into the space

it left behind, her single heart unrivaled but lonely

in its great room. The wound bled slowly, healing fast

to a pale silver scar, flaps falling back to close

neatly over the bone, which laid itself again

like lines of track or scaffolding across her chest.

The bird flew to the window’s sill, and ticked its head

to look back at the woman. A slight breeze, cool and calm,

caressed its dark wings, and it leapt for the steady branch of that arm.

PBQ Summer Teaser Episode

In this short trailer, we tease the next three poets to be featured on the Slushpile: C. Fausto Cabrera, Barbara Westwood Diehl, and Jodi Balas. We are so excited to be featuring poetry from these three very diverse writers. Have a quick listen for a taste of each poetic voice! (And remember – we pull our featured poets and writers from our submissions slushpile – polish up your work and submit it to Painted Bride Quarterly, knowing we might choose to feature it here!)

 

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show. 

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller and Dagne Forrest

Episode 117: This Episode Smells Delicious

What were you wearing in the ‘90s, Slushies? Sleeveless flannel and crochet? Paco Rabanne? We’re beguiled by Emily Pulfer-Terino’s poems on this episode as we discuss how she slides us back to the ‘90s. She has us sniffing magazine perfume inserts and marveling at the properly cranky voice she invokes for an epigraph, borrowed from Vogue’s letters to the editor. What were we thinking wearing all those shreds? Only the girls on those glossy pages know for sure. For more context, check out Karina Longworth’s excellent podcast, You Must Remember This, and her recent deep dive into the bonkers eroticism of the 1990s. Plus, Sentimental Garbage’s episode on Dirty Dancing featuring Curtis Sittenfeld. 

For a great collection of poems that draws its title from grunge-era jargon (kinda, sorta, wink, wink), we recommend a book we love by our pal Daniel Nester:  Harsh Realm: My 1990s.

 

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show. 

 

At the table: Jason Schneiderman, Marion Wrenn, Kathleen Volk Miller, Samantha Neugebauer, and Dagne Forrest

 

 

Emily Pulfer-Terino is a poet and writer whose work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Hunger Mountain, The Collagist, The Southeast Review, Poetry Northwest, Stone Canoe, The Louisville Review, Juked, and other journals and anthologies. Her poetry chapbook, Stays the Heart, is published by Finishing Line Press. She has been a Tennessee Williams Poetry Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and has been granted a fellowship for creative nonfiction at the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University, and she lives in Western Massachusetts.

 

Author website: http://emilypulferterino.com/

Instagram: @epulferterino

Grunge & Glory

“You’re kidding. Tell me you’re kidding. At least I’ll know where to find my new wardrobe this year...in the nearest dumpster…talk about the Emperor’s New Clothes. Tsk, tsk.”—(Letter to the Editor)^[1]

 

What’s more glorious than a girl in a field, 

curled in the whorl of a deer bed, alfalfa 

 

haloing her dreams of fashion magazines

while she plies matted hay, untatting her world?

 

Bales score the landscape, parceling

endlessness, parsing this solo tableau,

 

while her heroes wrench their music 

into being in Seattle, gray, time zones away.

 

What’s grunge if not her dense crochet

of castoff couture curated from dumpsters

 

and worn with a frisson of pride and shame: 

flowering nightgown, old ski boots, sweater 

 

turned lace in places by moths and age?

And this field like where models pose

 

in Vogue, each page itself a piece of land

and an ethos framed inside a storyboard.

 

 

Scala Naturae

 

Like prying pods of milkweed 

 

            so those astral seeds effuse—

 

unseaming magazine ads for perfume. 

 

            Anointing my wrists with scented glue, 

 

running each over the edge of a page, 

 

            testing scents I aspired to buy

 

and classifying my olfactory taxonomy.

 

            Grass evoked the world I’d known

 

with hints of rain and magnolia

 

            slight as fog above an unmown field.

 

DNA’s rosemary, oakmoss, and mint,

 

            ancient and clear as purpose; glass 

 

spiraled bottle signifying sentience 

 

            and enduring iteration. Both 

 

ethereal and hyperreal, Destiny 

 

            offered apricots, orchids, and roses--

 

bottle opaque as an eyelid, 

 

            veil of petals sheer as promise.

 

Samsara was amber, sandalwood, 

 

            ylang ylang, peach. Syllabically lulling, 

 

its s and a extending, repeating, suggesting

 

            endlessness. Cycle of birth and death

 

rebranded as serenity in ongoingness. 

 

            Angel’s burst of praline and patchouli

 

lit the crystal facets of that star,

 

            making heaven of my pulse and ordinary air.

 

^[1]  Wynne Bittlinger, letter to the editor in Vogue US, February 1993

 

Episode 116: Finding Flow

Finding flow in modern life is increasingly challenging, Slushies, but we sure found it here in two poems by Erica Wright. Loosely defined as the melting of action and consciousness into a single state, flow in poetry allows us to fully inhabit the world or experience conjured up by the poet. Nothing serves to distract or pull the reader out of the poem. How do we get there? There isn’t just one way. It helps when the poem’s form is attuned to the pacing required by the subject matter or focus. Strong beginnings always help -- and there are two fantastic ones here -- as well as a system of imagery that’s both relatable and unexpected. In “Marine Biology”, we see a conversational style used in parts of the poem that’s deeply grounding, and in “Too Many Animal Stories” the poem’s form supports its dense mosaic of images and moments.  

 

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show.  

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, and Dagne Forrest. 

 

 

Erica Wright's latest poetry collection is All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned (Black Lawrence Press). She lives in Knoxville, Tennessee with her family where she enjoys looking at the mountains and not camping in them. 

 

Socials: Twitter @eawright, Instagram @ericawrightwrites, Facebook @ericawrightauthor, Author website 

 

Marine Biology 

 

Not even my dog knows me, hovers 

outside the bathroom as I wash blood 

from the porcelain, wipe up the floors. 

 

I feel more at ease with the mess 

than the pain. We’re not supposed to 

talk about that anyway, my fleet 

 

of would-be mothers who never labored 

but birthed something too.  

Mine half-seahorse, half-anemone 

 

like something you’d find in an off-season  

coastal gift shop after looking for whales 

and not finding any whales. 

 

And now my skin turns blue  

as if my veins are submarines  

surfacing after too long underwater. 

 

Did you know the Navy studies sharks 

in hopes of making better ships? 

Can you imagine? Mariners on megalodons. 
 

Let’s name them after our ancestors. 

Let’s hold the notion of them 

inside our heads until they’re real.  

 

 

Too Many Animal Stories 

 

In the same town where a man’s gun discharged, 

killing a woman across the street, we ordered  

 

sandwiches and watched tourists rent inner tubes 

to hold their bodies up in the river below. 

 

I’ve been sick for weeks now, bad sick 

at first, and now I can hold myself up. 

 

You started grinding your teeth at night, 

and it hurts to move your jaw in the morning. 

 

We joke about low points. We joke  

about how we’ll never leave this house again. 

 

Of all the days to miss, I can’t say why 

I latched onto that one in Helen, Georgia. 

 

We find a movie about the Trans Am Bike Race, 

and I make a joke about my dad’s old car 

 

with a phoenix on the hood, its wings 

spread with such precision that they never spilled 

 

over the sides. Sometimes a snake hid underneath  

and was so long it could stretch its body  

 

from one side of the two-lane road to the other— 

tail in one ditch, head in the other— 

 

a perversion of that joke about the chicken. 

The thing about being sick while the world has stopped  

 

is that I start to wonder if it’s all a carousel game, 

and we’re being punished for trying to jump off. 

 

When I push myself off the bathroom floor again,  

the tiles won’t stop spinning. Asbestos.  

 

I remember the real estate agent warned  

us about asbestos and not to take them out ourselves. 

 

I like the bathroom. The porcelain tub feels like ice 

when I rest my head against the side, wait for stillness. 

 

You take out the trash for us because of the rats. 

I don’t mind them, but once when one ran  

 

across my foot, I couldn’t get clean enough after.  

The neighbors coo over our new dog,  

 

leave chicken bones for her, which we pry from her teeth.  

Sometimes the incisors scrape my skin, and she never  

 

apologizes for her nature. I apologize for mine  

all the time. I’d prefer to be hearty, the kind of traveler  

 

who could take a cross-country train alone  

and sleep sitting up, living on trail mix and Coke. 

 

Not the one who needs sea bands. They sound like 

the bracelets of some strong-willed mermaid 

 

who doesn’t care what anybody thinks of her, 

but they’re cheap elastic with plastic eyes. 

 

Outside my window, the wind harasses the trees 

and their new leaves, which are less impressive  

 

than the old ones. Last year, a grim lived there,  

and I’d make up stories for him before bed.  

 

Not that he slept. Not that I know of. 

There once was a hellhound who loathed  

 

the predator rigamarole. He disliked 

the rending of flesh and gnawing of bones. 

 

The howling he could take or leave. 

One day sheep wandered below him. 

 

They smelled of honeysuckle and dirt. 

They didn’t bite each other then pretend  

 

they were joking. He sewed his costume right away.  

There’s not much more I can say about the rat 

 

from earlier. He fell from a trash bag  

and leapt at me, tiny claws digging into my shoe. 

 

A medium-sized rat. They say they’re more  

afraid of us than we are of dying.  

Episode 115: We’re Obsessed

For a really fresh take on obsession, take a look here Slushies! Lisa Gordon’s short story is a masterclass in taking a popular form and quietly exploding it (pun intended). By turns deeply human, comical, sad, and just a little bit “out there”, Gordon’s story sweeps alongside a protagonist whose undying love for civilian astronaut Christa McAuliffe drives a story with the hallmarks of space exploration. NASA’s obsessive attention to detail, understanding of real world factors, and commitment to thinking outside the box are shared by Gordon, who tells a surprising and rewarding story. You might want to jump down the page and read or listen to it in full first, as there are spoilers in our discussion!

Listen to the story Paul on Earth in its entirety (separate from podcast reading)

 

And in the spirit of confession that permeates this story, our team is confessing their obsessions:

• Kathleen Volk Miller – podcasts and keeping her wine racks full (purely for aesthetic reasons!)
• Jason Schneiderman – the original Doctor Who series (1963-1989), keeping it old school!
• Marion Wrenn – onion dip (very hard to find in Abu Dhabi, so it’s her go-to when she’s Stateside!)
• Samantha Neugebauer – old tin boxes
• Dagne Forrest – space exploration and marzipan

You might want to read these related links:

All Addicts Anonymous

Christa McAuliffe and the 1986 Challenger explosion

Parasocial relationships

The Week in Longing, Dagne Forrest on Rust+ Moth (a recent poem by one of our editors that references the Challenger explosion and the late 2022 recovery of a piece of the shuttle off the Florida coast)

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show. 

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Marion Wrenn, Dagne Forrest, and Samantha Neugebauer, as well as technical team Ta’Liyah Thomas, Anthony Luong, and Sebastian Remetta

 

Lisa Gordon's short fiction has been published in Paper Darts, ANMLY, Hypertext, Storychord and elsewhere. She lives in the Boston area and is working on two novels.

 

Paul on Earth
              Paul had a hard time concentrating on the wedding. Maybeth had tears in her eyes, but then again, she cried at everything. The rabbi was saying words about how important trust is when it comes to love. Maybeth took his hands. She had nice, soft, small hands—Paul always liked that about her. She could do a lot with those hands: not least of which, much earlier in the morning, even though they weren’t supposed to see each other until the wedding (Maybeth had wanted it that way) he knocked on the door of her hotel room. Tap tap, tap tap, tap tap, so she would know it was him. He needed her, he said. He needed her to touch him. And she did. And he’d felt better, but only for a moment.  

              He still couldn’t get Christa out of his mind. 

              He still looked her up. Often. All the time, you might say. It had been years since 1986, but still—she was a household name. Christa McAuliffe. The whole thing had affected everyone, especially school children. It was one of Ronald Reagan’s most celebrated speeches, and he’d been a former movie star! Not that most people remember that. Now, there’s a show about it on Netflix. He still hadn’t watched it. He couldn’t bring himself to do it.  

              She was still alive inside him like a constellation, burning layers through his skin. And now he was getting married, again, to another very, very nice lady. She knew everything, and she forgave him. He was getting a chance to start over. 

              “Paul, Maybeth, do you take one another?” the rabbi said. 

              “I do,” Maybeth said, squeezing his hands. 

              “Yes,” Paul said. “I mean, I do. Yes.”

              Little lines crinkled adoringly around Maybeth’s eyes. Her eyes were the color of limestone.

              “Then it is my honor. To announce. You as husband and wife, to one another.”

              The guests roared as ceremoniously as a small crowd can, gathering to their feet, a wave of low thundering applause ebbed and flowed as they kissed. Paul knew next to none of them, but luckily, Maybeth had many friends. She was liked by many people, unlike Paul. It was one of the things Paul told her when they first met: I won’t bring much to your life. I’ve tried to change but—

              She had interrupted him. “That’s for me to decide.”

              Maybeth’s lips were slick with lipstick and he worried, for a moment, he’d look like a clown. But he could feel her smiling through her mouth, through her kissing, and she kissed him with abandon, and he let her. He loved her. He really wanted to love her.

 

* * * 

 

              Paul was 15 when Christa McAuliffe was his teacher, and he fell for her like a rocket burning through the universe. (It was a cheap analogy, he knew that. It was cliché, obvious. But it was how he felt.) She was so pretty—! Just so, so pretty. All the school boys seemed to like the girls with big hips and big hair and pink mouths, always open. It was the early 80s, after all. 

              But not Paul. It was Mrs. McAuliffe, with her brown eyes wide as planets, her tall teeth, her curly hair, she was—well, she was a lot of things, but mostly, she was the mother figure he’d needed at the same time his sexuality was burgeoning, so she represented the classic oedipal complex, except a little inverted, for Paul. At least, that’s what he was told in therapy, later in life. It seemed true enough. He accepted it. But he couldn’t change his behavior. 

              His behavior didn’t take hold until after the explosion. She wasn’t even his teacher then—she’d moved on to another school, and Paul was floundering without her presence to steady him. To give him something to look forward to. But it was after that when his obsession really bloomed. He was devastated for her two children. Of her husband, he was fiercely jealous—jealous that he got to be the husband, even after she’d died. Jealous that he could mourn, really mourn. He called their house often, back then. He’s not proud of it, but he did it. He got to know the sounds of all of their voices: the little girl’s, the young boy’s, the husband’s. Lots of people were calling then, obviously. It wasn’t too invasive. But they did change their phone number, later. Unlisted, of course. Paul was saddened. Deeply.

              Back then—then being, before the internet—there was only so much he could do. Newspapers stopped reporting. He kept copies of some of the ones he could find, the issue of People Magazine with her face on it, and the like. He kept them in a notebook. He went to college. He went to class. He tried to connect his obsession with the idea that maybe he was obsessed with space—! Yes, that had to be it! He majored in astronomy, but he just couldn’t take to it. It was too mathematical. Too science-oriented. Christa had been his English teacher. It was escapism, he preferred. He graduated with a degree in Literature and asked Sandy to marry him. It was what you were supposed to do. She expected it, but she was happy, very happy. They lived in a little apartment in Boston for a few years, while she finished her Masters’ degree at BU. He took a teaching job in a small town called Concord, west of Boston, in—what else? English. It was not lost on him that Concord—albeit, New Hampshire—was where Christa was from. And he’d learned that she’d lived for some time in Framingham, Massachusetts. It was not far from Concord, not far at all. He spent his days driving around strange neighborhoods, aimlessly, wandering, or in the parking lot of the high school she’d attended, which was still there. He told Sandy he’d started a chess club for his students. He’d never played chess in his life, but she believed him. 

              That was all for a long, long time. He was happy enough. He enjoyed teaching, though he feared he wasn’t very good at it. When he closed his eyes, he could still see Christa’s back, the way her arm would raise to the chalkboard, how her writing made a pleasant sound. Tap tap, tap tap. He’d developed some decent cooking skills, and Sandy baked, and they ate well. They made love occasionally, and then frequently, because Sandy wanted badly to have children. Paul was thankful that they were inexperienced lovers—they’d only really had each other—and didn’t know that he didn’t touch her the way a man does when he loves a woman. When he’s in love with her. But after a year or so, the test results came back with bad news: she wouldn’t be able to bear children. And she stopped turning to him in bed. And Paul found that he was pleased. It allowed space in his mind for the obsession to grow. And grow, grow it did. It was like a whole other place in his mind he could turn to, retreat into: he could go into different parts of Christa’s body and inhabit them, and they were in love in a way that didn’t exist on Earth—it was unique to them, and them only, and it was everything; it was his world. 

              Years passed. Years upon years. Until finally, one day, he was arrested. A little girl in the town of Framingham, Mass. had been abducted. She’d been missing for three days and discovered later, in the conservation land lining the towns’ perimeter, murdered, sexually abused. Such an awful, tragic thing. Paul had been seen too often in her neighborhood, and others nearby, idling around in his brown Pontiac, a stranger. His likeness matched the description of the abductor: tall, glasses, a non-descript male. He was taken to the station and questioned for hours.

              He was bewildered. Truly and simply bewildered. He wouldn’t have known where to begin, is what he said. 

              “Where to begin with what?” the detective had said. 

              “With stealing a child,” Paul had whispered. “With touching a child.” He clasped and unclasped his hands. 

              Yes, he’d been around the neighborhood. Often, on and off, for years. No, he had no business there, knew no one, not a soul who lived there. No, he had no alibi—he had, indeed, been driving around that very night. He’d been lying to his wife for so long he’d begun to believe there was a chess club. The only way out was the truth. 

              “McAuliffe,” they’d said. “The teacher astronaut lady? The one who got blown up?” The detective. A lawyer. Repeated it, as if they hadn’t heard him right. Couldn’t have possibly heard him right. 

              “Yes,” Paul said. “That’s the one.” He told them about the file he kept in the magazine in the downstairs bathroom. They sent a squad to get it, and his wife followed behind, hysterical. The questioning was relentless. He was shoved in a cell for 14 hours. Eventually, they found the right man. He’d committed a similar crime in Western Mass., in the Berkshires. They opened the door to his cell and he was free to go. But they recommended he get therapy. 

              “We think you’re a little nutso,” one of the policeman said, on his way out. Behind him, echos of laughter. He started his car—it sputtered and died. It was a freezing, gray day in November. Sandy wouldn’t pick him up. He tried to hitch, but no one would stop for a man who looked like the man who abducted children. Eventually, he called a cab. It cost him $143 to get home, and, not having that kind of money on him, the cabbie had to drive him to a bank. He watched the cabbie eying him in the rearview mirror as he peeled away.

              Sandy left, which didn’t surprise Paul in the slightest. What did surprise Paul was how little he cared. Somehow, they didn’t fire him. He’d thought they would have, but they didn’t. (“You didn’t commit the crime, Paul,” the principal said, disapprovingly. As if he’d wanted him to have been the criminal.) 

              His time was his own, finally. He couldn’t drive around the way he used to, which left a void in his life he wasn’t sure how he’d fill. But it turned out, it wasn’t as hard as he thought. He grocery shopped and cooked elaborate meals, gaining weight, filling out in places he didn’t think could grow. He masturbated on the couch as he pleased. He read different books and grew excited by new lesson plans. He even became energized by teaching in new ways. His life, it seemed, was changing. Christa was there—she would always be there—but he needed her less and less. 

              But then, as if out of nowhere, the internet became faster and stronger and more ubiquitous, and suddenly, the world was at his fingertips—anything he wanted could be his, information of any kind—and, well. Life took on new meaning. He bought a printer. He printed everything. He posted the photos, the articles, up around his house, a shrine. He was scared of himself. His teaching suffered. He stopped eating. He was fired. He’d hit rock bottom. And then, one day—it really was like that, just one day—he saw an advertisement for Addicts Anonymous. Whatever you’re addicted to, we can help, is what it said.  

              Paul went. He didn’t know what his life had become and he didn’t want to give up, not yet. He was 40 years old. His father had died long ago. Sandy had moved to Virginia, adopted a daughter, gotten a dog. He drove to the meeting, concentrating on the way the cold winter air felt in his lungs. And at the meeting, he met Maybeth. She was addicted to painkillers. She was a tiny, cute thing. Sprightly. Energetic. “But I have a dark side,” she said, when she spoke to the room. She’d been watching Paul carefully. He could feel it, even when he turned away. After the session, she approached him. “I’m looking for a new boyfriend,” she said. “Addictions don’t bother me.”

              “Even mine?” Paul had said. 

              “Even yours,” she had said. 

              He’d addressed the room—all 27 of them (he’d counted) and he’d said, “Hi, I’m Paul. And I don’t know why. Or maybe I do. But—and sorry if this freaks anyone out—I’m addicted to Christa McAuliffe.” 

              There’d been chatter, a couple of laughs. Some of them looked at him quizzically. He heard someone whisper to someone else “Challenger”. And he’d felt very much like crying. It was the first time he’d felt like crying in—well, maybe ever. Since he could remember. And it felt like being opened, like a present. 

              When he told that to Maybeth, she cried. “I’m your present,” she’d said. “And you’re mine.” She smiled into his neck and curled up in his lap like a little dog. Paul held her. Never had his arms been so full. He closed his eyes and tunneled through space, slowly at first, just exploring, until he was rocketing through her again, ready to find what he was looking for.

Episode 114: The Swirl

We are enswirled in this episode, Slushies, enswirled! We discuss three poems by John Sibley Willliams, two of which are ghazals. Williams’ poems are the gravitational force around which our conversation about craft, form, fluidity, identity, and the flux and spaciousness found inside poetry spirals. Williams’ poems draw the swirl of our attention not only to the choices he makes on the page but to Agha Shahad Ali’s rules for real ghazals, Williams’ poetic conversation with Tarfia Faizullah, and his nod to Kavek Akbar’s “Gloves”. There is a pun these show notes want to make about guzzling ghazals, Slushies, but we are trying hard to resist it… 

 

At the table: Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Dagne Forrest, Samantha Neugebauer 

 

This episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist  A.M.Mills, whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show.  

 

 

John Sibley Williams is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Poetry Award) and The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award). He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review, Poetry Editor at Kelson Books, and founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his partner, twin biracial six-year-olds (one of whom is beautifully transgender), a boisterous Boston Terrier, and a basement full of horror movie memorabilia. 

 

Author website, Facebook @ john.sibleywilliams 

 

Ghazal for Transparency / for Reflection 

  

My ghosts breathe accusingly—a winter mass, a mirror’s impermanent 

erasure—again shaving I’m sorry from the face over my face in the glass. 

  

It’s not just the birds—their abridged flight, the stains the sky wears today 

through this washable window—but my children’s tiny hands absolving the glass. 

  

Of guilt? Of shame? Is it his blood raging generations through my veins or this white- 

washed silence compelling me to pull our history, face-by-face, from its frames of glass? 

  

All this uneaten grain filling silo after silo—always at dusk, in my mind—swarmed now 

with mealworms & mites & someone else’s hunger. How it cuts the tongue like shards of glass. 

  

& those goddamned honeycombs, failing again. How our neighbor’s unable to keep his bees

close enough to cultivate. Our house too is a small box of dust & wing & against the glass 

  

separating us from the world curtains blur our reflections like rain. Like stars cutting through

cloud, a sustainable song. May my girls never be dead enough to fear themselves in our glass. 

  

 

Ghazal Beginning & Ending with Lines from Tarfia Faizullah 

  

Let me break free from these lace-frail microscopic bodies. 

My breath (always shared); trace it back to unmasked foreign bodies. 

  

Taking that last winter deep into her lungs. Breathe, I remind her. 

& remember me a child, Mom, not this unrecognizable foreign body. 

  

The sky’s aperture widens. Sight ≠ witness. The organ’s rusty song catches 

in the rafters (unascended). & all this rain leaking down on us like foreign bodies. 

  

Grey fox. White cells. Families fleeing one home for (hopes of) another. 

Some borders, perhaps, are meant to be trespassed by unforeign bodies. 

 

Row after perfect row = harvest. Harvest ≠ everyone is fed. Sated. Breaking 

up from the earth beneath, star thistle & bindweed. To us, foreign bodies. 

  

The day an autumn orphan, & we’re yanking roots. My daughter’s tiny 

misgendered fingers in mine, (pulling. Together), no body is foreign. 

  

  

Field of Anchors 

                    —   for Kaveh Akbar 

  

Darkness on both sides. 

& wild grasses. Sun-hurt. 

Browning. So as not to drift. 

Too far from shore. A man. 

Palms the tiny church inside. 

The warm casing. Inside a god. 

Prays to another god. For more. 

Of himself. More devotion. 

One more detonation. Of roses. 

Less blood next time. Less field. 

Without end. Or is it more. 

That’s required to make a mirror. 

Of each window. All that untilled light. 

All that goddamn reflection. 

The old maple out back. No longer. 

A noose swinging from it. Lifts its arms. 

In praise of its leaves. Fallen & otherwise. 

Only a god. My grandmother promised. 

Can beat the trees. Of its birds. Can lullaby. 

The field into paradise. Only fear can. 

Halleluiah the anchors from their green. 

Deerless. Wolf-filled. Moorings. Or is it. 

Love. When I open the front gate. Rusting. 

Still. Despite drought. Despite me. I hear. 

My children playing with. The blood inside. 

The roses. Inside the bullet. An impossible anchor. 

A darkness. That gives a people. Its name. 

Episode 113: The Call of the Wild

Are you ready to get primal, Slushies? We look at poems of birth and mothering that call on the senses as they shift between what’s animal and what’s human in us. Kathy celebrates the pure, messy pleasure of a classic tomato sandwich and Jason reminds us why an irregular opening line can be the hook a poem needs, while we all marvel at a poem’s ability to dazzle us with changing perspectives, locations, and personas. Oh, and strong titles get some much deserved love too.

 

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show. 

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, and Dagne Forrest

 

Sarah Elkins lives in southern West Virginia where she is rounding the final curve of a four-year term as a councilperson in the City of Lewisburg, population 3,700ish. She is also chair of the Parks Commission (Yes, you should be thinking Leslie Knope). Sarah and her husband Max run Hammer Cycles, a bicycle shop in White Sulphur Springs, WV. She and Max founded and coach the Greenbrier Valley Hellbenders Youth Mountain Bike Team and work tirelessly on trail advocacy and mountain bike initiatives throughout the region. Sarah’s son, Tad, is a high school freshman and loves hearing poems about his birth and progression through puberty. Oh, yeah, Sarah writes poetry. That’s what she loves to do most. Therefore, she fills her time with all the aforementioned stuff to remain at an appropriate level of disequilibrium from which the poetry springs. 

 

Website: SarahElkins.com

 

Birthing

 

The summer before my son was born, I ate tomato sandwiches

with mayonnaise, salt and pepper.

The rain was so heavy in June, the fruit

swelled on the vines and their skins ripped.

I took big bites holding thick bread with two hands,

pink rainwater running down both forearms

to my elbows—everything reduced, then,

to hunger. At night, curled on my side

in the un-airconditioned dark

I dreamt of big cats’ razor tongues

dragging the length of my back,

saber teeth at my throat, not tearing

the skin but feeling for pulse,

their muscled hips coaxing me 

into the sweaty delirium of my final weeks.

 

The cats returned every night until

twenty-six hours before I howled him into being,

I opened. All the rain of June, and July

leaving me for the hardwood floor

where I crouched on all fours looking

for flecks of vernix, tasting my wet fingers,

sniffing the sweet water for signs it was time.

The cats slunk away until now, eating

this tomato sandwich, my first in twelve years—

I recall I was a panther once.

 

From the Tall Grass

 

I floss at night after steak and butter.

My house: unguarded range, bison huffing,

ice-faced, hooves stamping an echo stutter.

I do nothing in this boundless nothing.

No thought, no synapse firing. Still hands still

stained—berry juice of an empty morning.

This room-less space, a translucent thin will

through which I, good sow, whiff my boy’s homing.

His trek complete, except for the recount—

bighorn sheep, bull moose, near miss, eagle plume.

I toss one sleek mink to the catamount.

The grass lies down; walls rise around my room.

            Ursa fades. A house cat lurks in willow.

            I sip gin, smooth the pelt of my pillows.

Episode 112: Letting Go of Meaning

Can you lean into experience without always needing meaning, Slushies? The psalm is a Christian form similar to a song or poem where meaning is often elusive unless the reader is prepared to put in the work. Sometimes, though, things just are, and we certainly encounter that here in some very satisfying ways. We talk about the importance of the pause or caesura in poetry, proofreading, and powerful image systems. We also just enjoy the experience of reading two gorgeously rendered poems full of both the specific and the mysterious. 

 

Links to things we discuss that you may dig:  

 

Poetry Foundation: Caesura definition 

 

Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away 

 

Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays 

 

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show.  

 

At the table: Marion Wrenn, Kathleen Volk Miller, Samantha Neugebauer, and Dagne Forrest 

 

John T. Leonard is a writer, educator, and poetry editor for Twyckenham Notes and The Glacier. He holds an M.A. in English from Indiana University. His previous works have appeared in Chiron Review, December Magazine, North Dakota Review, Ethel Zine, Louisiana Literature, Jelly Bucket, Mud Season Review, Nimrod International Journal, The Indianapolis Review, Genre: Urban Arts, and Trailer Park Quarterly among others. He lives in Elkhart, Indiana with his wife, three cats, and two dogs. 

 

Socials: Twitter @jotyleon and @TwyckenhamNotes 

 

 Psalm 

 

Prone to wonder.  Lord, I feel it.  

Nomad, no man, no son, father, sun. 

I am bright, rusted, and wretched. 

You turned the doorknob right, 

hot shower and cold bathroom tile. 

I was wrapped in that small, soaked rug. 

A place that filled the garden of our souls, 

superior and sewn, stones dancing across a lake. 

Look how Christian a puddle of vomit can be.   

You held me, let me breathe into your arm. 

You forked my tongue and sewed a map to  

North Dakota with that black medical lace. 

For Hell’s sake, I am holy, holy, calm, and true.  

Be escaped. Be fallen, black, and blue. 

My call to evaporate, pulled upwards to 

the real adventure.  Wide awake now, 

bruised vanity, summer of head colds 

and bodies washed up on the pebbled shore. 

If I took it back, my sunglassed future glance, 

my walk of muses, my pacing lonely apartments,  

spitting on each and every brick.  If I took it back, 

but not what I’ve suddenly become: a contrail 

of promises, sci-fi crimes, Saturn in the traffic. 

I’m chasing altars to the daylight of you. 

Feels like I feel it, prone to rip the husk of your lips. 

Still, the rusted son of red starlight, gospel music 

touching lovers in the limo behind the hearse. 

I am lime, let moonlight citrus me further. 

Then Sunday will come and sweep it all away, 

back into the rose quartz river of a psalm.  

 

Fledgling  

 

Waking up to the white bone of dawn; 

memory of light, half-life of darkness,  

a daily prophecy of frozen floorboards.  

This cold, fading silence of Sunday morning,  

falling like the ash of a thirty-year volcanic winter. 

The way all of our merit would vanish, if we gave up  

a moment of the day to plunge back into our dreams. 

Light, now imagined as radiant cloud or burning crown. 

The slow trudge outside, curse and prayer of woodpile.  

Eastern red cedar still asleep: erasure of termites, 

black snake of phone line limp with snow, sick fledgling  

whose eyes didn’t close, not even once throughout the night; 

who waited out the insectile buzz of street lamps, waited 

for one final glimpse of flame.  Moments now, moments, 

and the flick of my lighter will catch its eye. The soft glow  

of cherry, the ritual of my ignorance, the weeks of feeling 

watched—so full of myself that I thought it must be God. 

By dusk, one of us dead and the other, none the wiser.  

 

Episode 111: What Lingers

There’s a lot packed into this episode, Slushies, including sibilance and balancing gravity with a light touch. Differing perspectives and the resonance of history, both real and mythical, cascade through a trio of poems by Danielle Roberts. Jason worries that his erudition has collapsed momentarily, Kathy loves the rush of wanting to immediately re-read a poem, and Samantha reminds us of an Anne Carson line: “Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.” Oh, and Marion brings to life the idea of hearing a baby’s cries in the ceiling when she recounts living in the apartment below a family with newborn triplets!

 

Links to things we discuss that you may dig:

Jeanann Verlee’s Helen Considers Leaving Troy

George Eliot’s Middlemarch

Anne Carson’s Essay on What I Think About Most

Elizabeth Bishop’s Collected Letters

Jason Schneiderman’s How the Sonnet Turns: From a Fold to a Helix, APR Volume 49, Issue 3

British Antarctic Survey: Ice cores and climate change

The Norton Reader

Smartless Podcast (Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, Will Arnett)

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show. 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Samantha Neugebauer, and Jason Schneiderman

   

Danielle Roberts is a queer poet from California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, DMQ Review, Okay Donkey, Prairie Schooner, Reed Magazine & others. When not writing poetry, she can be found drinking too much tea & pestering the nearest cat. Read more of her at sonnetscribbler.com.

Socials: Instagram: @sonnetscribbler

   

How can I leave this behind?

after Jeanann Verlee’s Helen Considers Leaving Troy

 

after a floral gin cocktail

              Do I want to live and die my whole life here—

              buried in county lines—or is it time

              to stretch the map? There’s more

              to plan than simply running away.

while holding my niece

              Picking up the baby doesn’t help:

              I smell her hair & wonder if she thinks

              of me when I’m out of sight. Will she know?

              Her eyes stare into the distance

              along with mine. Maybe she travels

              in her dreams. Maybe she lives

              elsewhere.

while eating dinner

              Gorging myself on routine, I chew bread & think

              about the bagels in New York. I live these sour-

              dough rituals—oven baked in centuries

              of families. A young tradition bound by water

              on all sides. They say it’s in the water.

              Doubtful, I gnaw on my nails.

when people ask if I’ll have kids

              Come on, Karen—I just blew up

              my life & you’re asking if I’m ready

              to be a sacred vessel? The only answer

              I can give is to flee far away

              from anyone who had dreams

              for me or thought I could be

              marriage material. Go where

              all folks care about is which street

              I live above in the gridlocked graph

              or whether I’m walking fast enough. Blend.

              It would be easier than questions of barreness.

when my ex wants to get back together

              Absolutely not.

from the freeway exit

              Behind the wheel of my car, I carve trenches

              again—circle and retrace my path—map

              the small universe on foot, pace my cage.

              Maybe I take to the night sky

              or simply head east until I hit water.

              Gorges and grooves heal, scarred

              cutting board life. Do I keep driving?

              Where do I even go from here?

              These dreams that weren’t mine

              festering in my wake. What city takes

              such hazardous rot? How do I leave

              my family behind? How

              do I tell them I’m already gone?

 

Extracting memories^[1]

Speak to me in layered tongues of bitten snow, slow

molars carved with frost collected in the valleys between your teeth. The scientist bores a core—

plucks the long memory from each glacier—this meter holds your first bicycle ride, this

a bridal veil of volcanic ash from Pompeii, six cylinders of centuries trespass

the sterile air—blink at the unforgiving sun. From the dentist chair, you look

up at the light and this persistent body shrinks—cracked with age

and use. Our indestructible jaws crumble with heat, losing

enameled eons to inaction, forgetting to stitch our gums

with floss. It’s far too late to mend our habits

now: best to preserve what we can. Each

line, a thought pulled out of context—

precious archive of time before tales.

We transcribe the answers to

our final test without

any chance of

knowing the

questions.

 

Reassurance

1—

My cat startles & I tell her nothing

bad is happening, but

we both know that’s a lie

on a large enough scale.

She hears the neighbors’ doors

slam, the child in the ceiling crying

like an injured mouse. She knows footfalls

on the landing lead to the uninvited

lead to us coaxing her to accept

strangers in her home. She knows

the rush of sirens down Oak or shouts

from the narrow park must mean something

in the same way we all know

that one thing always leads

to another.

She turns a pale eye towards me as if to say

just because it’s not happening to me

doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

2—

As we wade into the cold mountain

lake, my sister promises me

nothing’s going to touch your feet—maybe

some grass or a fish, but I’ve never seen anything bad

here. She shifts the baby to her other hip & walks

deeper. Her husband rows away from the widening rings

of sunscreen filming the top of the swampy water, oil slick

of caution. I know she loves me.

Later, I scramble onto the inflatable raft & hold

the baby & my breath. My sister stays rooted

in the water—extracting the implanted

leeches from between my toes—doesn’t

glance down at her own feet. Not even once.

Her husband saw the signposts on the shore & told

no one. He thought they didn’t apply anymore:

he’s never noticed anything in the waters.

3—

My boss sends a message before an important meeting

to ask if I can still lead in light of the news. I reassure him

yes, I’m in California—I’m not affected for now.

In the crowded room,

the men make small talk,

but have nothing to say.

 

^[1] Ice cores and climate change - British Antarctic Survey

Episode 110: The Logic of Heartbreak (or Caveats Rock)

Slushies, get ready for some trailblazing poems in the form of mathematical proofs, theorems, and other types of mathematical reasoning that level their gaze at heartbreak. One poem even embeds a second poem as a footnote. Alex reminds us all of the hermit crab essay/poem format, prompting Sam to recall Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, in which the end of a powerful love is likened to the experience of shedding yet still living with an abandoned skin or shell. Come along for a ride with some poetic work that’s furious and logical in equal measure! 

 

Links to things we discuss that you may dig:  

 

Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s

 

Samantha Hunt’s The Seas 

 

Maggie Nelson’s Bluets 

 

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show.  

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Samantha Neugebauer, Alex J Tunney, and Dagne Forrest 

Rei Alta is a black writer, disciple of science, artist, and proud supernerd. She resides in Massachusetts where she was born and raised. Rei spends most of her time supporting brilliant young people from historically marginalized communities in their exploration of science and engineering. 

 

Socials: Instagram: @reialtaspeak 

 

 

Inflection Point 1b

 

Theorem 1.1.  The pain, longing, and ambivalence I feel related to this particular past lover (hereafter “him”, “he” or “you”) is not unhealthy.

 

Proof:  By definition, “Time heals all wounds.”  Suppose for all purposes, 11 years is considered to be ‘Time’.    It is true that 11 years have passed, however I am not healed.  Thus, this thing I feel is not really a wound.   

 

Theorem 1.2. There exists a value in this lover that I use to cope with a deficiency in my current state of being. 

 

Proof:  By Theorem 1.1, this lover does not represent some larger, unresolved issue.   It is true, however, that I still have been unable to let him go.   Therefore, he must be notable for a different reason.   By supposition, that different reason is that he and I had an unrivaled connection. I.e. While there is no such thing as soulmates, our cognitive compatibility was substantially higher than that of my previously observed matches.  Hence, I feel an intensity through recollecting him such that most other things pale in comparison.  Therefore, I remember him in order to feel something when I don’t.   

 

Theorem 2.1.  There exists an absolute truth about why I loved him and why I haven't been able to let go. 

 

Proof:  By definition, “All things happen for a reason.”   Since it is true that loving him and being unable to let go has happened, there must be a reason that caused it.   This reason must be the truth. Suppose not; i.e., suppose this reason was not the truth. Then it would not have possessed the power necessary to cause such a consequential thing to happen.  Such a consequential thing did happen. Thus, there is an attributable reason that is the truth.   

 

Theorem 2.2. I must understand why I have not been able to let go—in order to let go. 

 

Proof:  By my own definition, I am a finder of truth.   By Theorem 2.1, there is a truth to be found. If there is a truth I have not yet found, then I must find it in order to exist since finding truth defines me.  Thus, I have no path forward but to find the truth.   

 

____________________________________________________________________________

CAVEAT: Due to the following factors, the validity of the proofs outlined above is questionable: 

1. Invalid underlying assumptions
2. Faulty reasoning
3. Insufficient information  

As a result, extrapolation based on the conclusions laid out in the preceding section is not advised.  

 

Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 109: The Gigue is Up

If your story had a sound, Slushies. What would it be? A rush, a zuzz, a sizzle? David Landon’s “Bach, Onomatopoeia, and the Wreck” triggers a discussion of stories and sounds, and poems that resist narrative closure. Shane Chergosky’s “Headwind” takes us down a different path. Erasures, Slushies. Ammi right? Listen to us puzzle over the way erasures “make it new” and simultaneously obliterate and conjure the from which they’re made. Special note: Jason reads the erasure twice. First as a robot, then as a human. We love both versions-- of the poem, and Jason. And if you are hungry for more: take this and this and this.

 

At the table: Marion Wrenn, Alex Tunney, Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, Larissa Morgano

 

This episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist A.M.Mills, whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show. 

 

 

David is never quite sure whether he is an actor who writes poetry or a poet who acts. And perhaps he can be forgiven his obsession with iambic pentameter: he has done a lifetime of Shakespeare, as an actor (New York, Nashville, and Alabama Festivals), director, and coach. His poetry—all iambic pentameter—has been published in Able Muse (Write Prize, winner), Georgia Review (Williams Prize, featured finalist), Southwest Review (Marr Prize, runner-up), the Dark House, Think Journal, and elsewhere. Officially, he is the Bishop Frank A. Juhan Professor of Theatre Emeritus at Sewanee, the University of the South.

 

 

Bach, Onomatopoeia, and the Wreck

 

For all we knew, it was a random chunk

of interstellar rock, the rear-end crash

that brought us to a halt. Dinner was out,

of course, and the Bach too, I realized,

feeling it in my neck, and standing there

in the rain, examining my totaled car,

the guilty driver soaked, in tears. The cops

were nice enough, did what they had to do

efficiently. The wrecker did show up,

eventually, and we began to cope.

And since it’s now collision story time,

the word I’m hearing in my head is ‘thud’.

 

There’s ‘clunk’, of course, or ‘jolt’, ‘wham-bang’, or ‘thwack’.

‘Thwack’ has that sudden, can’t-be-happening feel,

as in, “I was just sitting, reading Kant,

when suddenly, inside my head, I felt

this ‘thwack’, and everything went blank.” But no!

The word that truly bongs the knell is ‘thud’,

essence—onomatopoetically—

of impact, ‘thud’, from dice, to hand-grenade,

to asteroid. We need the stupid ‘d’

of ‘doo-doo’, ‘dodo’, ’dude’, or ‘dud’, or ‘dead’.

‘You’re-done-for-d’ is what we’re up against;

you never know when out of nowhere, ‘thud’!

 

But on the other hand, there’s Bach: the Bach

we missed, the works for cello solo. Bach:

initial ‘b’, a kind of plosive bump,

terminal ‘ch’, a bit of friction in

the throat, but in between the ‘b’ and ‘ch’,

the ‘ah’, release: sustained and open, ‘ah’.

Think of the bow colliding with the string,

a subtle thud, a scrape, and out floats Bach,

genial Bach-analia of dark

and light, a theory of the universe

as music: bang, and then the sarabande,

the minuet, the allemande, the gigue.

 

 

Shane Chergosky was born in Minnesota where he was raised on stuffed cabbage and heavy metal. His work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, HASH Journal, Juke Joint, and is forthcoming in Adirondack Review. He holds an MFA from George Mason University and lives in Washington, D.C.

 

 

Headwind

 

? When I think about the story she told me

about that I don’t even wanna hurt the guy. I don’t

know if I could meet that person and act normal.

I remember I did that when I was about 20,21.

I didn’t go into CVS with Xunaxi to

What a bastard I was . And      

 

 

 

//

 

 

ith what courses I take.Luckily I can only take two (!!!). Maybe a lit course

and…an elective? It’d be SO cool to do screen-

writing. Finally would have a chance to write that

SciFi…I ordered “The Art of Syntax” after Phebe

brought it over. I honestly get so self-conscious talking

with her about sentence-level stuff. She’s so smart and

her recall is so good (regardless of what she says re: her        

 

 

 

//

 

 

I want to sleep in a crappy hotel and make

jokes hold her after we kill a pint of ice cream.

something feels right about her, about the way I feel  

 

around her. I want her attention. I want her to

pay attention to me. She does! but I don’t know it’s

different when you’re with what I have a

hard time with imagining her with her ex, though they’re      

 

 

 

//

 

 

I feel like fragments could be a part of

my work/thesis. It’d be cool to take a finished

poem of mine, print copies, and do some Christian

Hawkey-type process with it/them. The 19^th and 20^th

days had that feel to them because I tore a bit

from the top of the page, forcing me to write around

the tear. Now, if I had a finished poem, and shot

it with a gun, or let an animal chew on I, or

let a human chew on it even, the parts that survive      

 

 

 

//arrative time no time

 

 

 

feeling of the trout throat closing odd breathing

but accepting that I have limits I deserve to feel

OK, to take a break I’m OK I’m doing everything      

 

 

 

//

 

 

 

I’m afraid of telling her how strong my feelings are

I think it wise to simply show her and not ask about

sex for a few more months.

She said we’re dating and that makes me feel

secure.      

 

 

 

//

 

 

Canal 

a cane smoothed

orchard

backlogged

beggar concrete

daisy a                   conquest    

 

 

 

//

 

 

not together I guess I’m having a hard time NOT

imagining them together. How could he treat her

that way? I mean no relationship is a cakewalk

but like how could someone tell a woman they’ve

been with for over a year that they’d rather

keep driving and make it (home?) on time than

stop for a tampon, to let the woman you supposedly

love (did he even tell her?) that you’d rather her sit

in her own blood, in discomfort and shame than

do everything in your power to relieve her? to actually

act? to perform an act of humanity? of care?

concern    

 

 

 

//

 

 

 

subcultural history. I feel like (and I’m probs

stating the obvious) thagt the niches of already niche

are erased by the dominant cultural narrative/  

 

the narrative(s) that are hoisted up by capitalist/

supremacist ideals and/or organizations. I can’t 

write organization without thinking about grant writing      

 

 

 

//

 

 

 

I can, I’m doing a lot. Teaching is a lot. I’m 

going to apply for the fellowship. It’s not that I

don’t want to teach, I just want time to

focus on my work. I keep feeling its really getting

somewhere. A chapbook at the least and a

publishable one too! I want it. This semester is

just wearing

 

 

 

//

 

 

 

Where only a portion of the whole survives. Then,

I could make the other parts appear elsewhere?

Maybe it’s too on the nose but I’ve been thinking

about the fragmented texts of the Anglo-Saxons

(and probs other traditions) in association

with incomplete narratives    

 

 

 

//

 

 

 

raging satin page paginate vagina labia vulva

intestinal contested protest regress transgress

shake Shakespeare a knight made of feathers

stuffed w/ feathers feathers on the doorstep

rich lumber in heaps full pools of yellow

beer getting warm in the kitchen

the glow of the microwave the suran wrap

melting on the still-cold lasagna, the color

of waiting. Not even a color. Page page again

wait know confound botch rip slap chirp

girder serve elastic teeth cold    

 

 

 

//

 

 

 

I’m so glad I’m not that way. Maybe I

am and don’t know it until it happens?

Maybe thinking about

Phebe’s ex reminds me

of that, that’s why it

makes me so disgusted

and maybe it’s good

that I’m disgusted  

 

 

 

//

 

 

 

to do. But you live and learn. I

want to love again and make it right, or do it

effectively, the way that makes us both feel whole or

more whole/full than empty. I will get an A in

grant writing. I will succeed. I know I’ll get an

extension and be able to make the internship    

 

 

   

//

 

 

 

I want to

make love to her real bad she d r ive s me crazy.

She’s sensual , and erotic, and really    

 

 

It was a terrible, immature thing

 

 

 

//

 

 

 

Intelligent ran runaways kept barking on. A sub miss ion

hold putting entire cities into head

-shirt void a void you can buy a void that becomes

armor, a subculture, an agreed upon set of

val u es in t elligent lights through a crispy gauze

of hair swollen blue halo widening behind them

like a wedding band. Overblown evening leather

charms hanging on the door handle, on the bedpost.

Literally                      thieves war paint corpse paint

a mouth like a root system      spreading, fragmenting

branching diverging at both ends a worry

squirrely ratchet odor smolder controller

recover withdraw sheath hearth bust bent

bruised lashed fixate lack lax creation Bonneville

cruiser a loose ruining  

Episode 108: #Mood (or the Murmurations)

How much meaning do you need, Slushies? When language lingers, when images form a spiral, a murmuration, might a poem’s mood hold meaning close to its heart and simultaneously at bay? And, also, how do you pronounce ‘ichor’? All this and more in a rollicking conversation about poet Nick Visconti’s new work, “Burial” and “Unmake These Things.” And speaking of things, listen for Samantha on Anne Carson’s zen koan dollop of insight from Red Doc>: “To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.” Or for Kathy and Marion confessing their North Carolina ritual groping of the Dale Earnhardt statue in Kannapolis, NC. And finally: geese. Nick Visconti’s poem triggered a reverie-- that time when we accidentally stumbled into the annual Snow Geese migration in Eastern Pennsylvania.

 

At the table: Dagne Forrest, Kathleen Volk Miller, Alex Tunney, Samantha Neugebauer, Marion Wrenn.

 

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show. 

 

Nick Visconti is a writer living with an artist and a cat in Brooklyn. He plays softball on Sundays.

Burial

It is love,

not grief, which inters

the deceased

in a hill made of clay.

 

                 Sod embraces

crossed arms, legs, eyes shut

looking forever

 

                       at nothing

beneath our feet—a container

for men unmade,

no boat to speak of.

 

                No oars

darkly dipped

in water as we pictured

it would be. Instead,

     

a single shred of light

piercing every lens

it catches. Instead,

 

a pathway none cross,

just follow through

 

                            and up

and up—the cusp of ending,

nothing at all like the end.

 

He isn’t in this yard when

his children roam. Still,

 

                     they dig,

 

they expect to find him:

braided leather, steel-wound aglets,

his black opal intact.

 

Unmake these things

The sand before me like water, fluid and holy

under the cratered crown nearly

half-awake, circling

 

as I draw the one way I know—stick

figures in a backdrop scenery, thick-

headed and content, wheeling

 

psalms of birds, wide-sloping M’s

grouped in permanent murmur. I don’t bother

with the sun’s face, bare in the upper

 

left corner of the page. I’ve made

a habit out of hoarding ornaments,

given them their own orbit like the russet

 

ichor dashed with cinnamon

I choke down every morning and afternoon.

The city’s puncture-prone underbite nips

 

the sky, consuming the bodies

above—thunderheads, billboards

notched, alive in the glow of that always-

 

diurnal square. There’s been talk lately of

irreversible chemistry, an acceptable stand-in

for cure among believers and experts

 

in and on the subject of Zoloft-sponsored

serotonin. A first weaning is possible.

Do not bother with a second.

 

Episode 104: Accents and Human Remains

We have a special treat, Slushies!! In today's episode, you’ll get a duet from Nancy T and Rachael Philipps. Starting with the accents of Long Island, T’s poem makes Alex think of Nassau and Suffolk County while Marion recalls Billy Joel's music. The language also leaves the crew thinking about Tracey J Smith’s, “Solstice.” The tables turn when the crew reads, Philipp’s “After you left us,” going from jargon about the sounds of the world to the description of human remains. With cremation on the rise, the crew ponders the process being described in this not-so-sentimental poem.

Alex mentioned that he is able to do a full SNL Skit, which one do you think it is?

This episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist A.M.Mills, whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show.

Nancy T is a high school teacher, poet, artist from NY, currently living down south.

Rachael Philipps is a poet, journalist, and a properly misanthropic Welsh woman with an
unhealthy dependency on caffeine and marmalade. She is constantly chastened by her iPhone’s audio settings for playing LCD Soundsystem too loud whilst out on her regular jogs around the mean streets of Westchester. Rachael’s poem “Perfect Little Houseguests” was published by Swwim Every Day in August 2022, she was awarded a Bethany Arts Poetry Residency in 2021 and was the recipient of an AWP Writer to Writer mentorship for poetry in 2020. Her journalism spans broadcasting for the BBC plus writing and editorial work for print titles including Time Out London, The New York Times and Food and Wine magazine. She is currently at work on her first chapbook.

Nancy T
Long Island Sound

The chop on the sound
nearly drowns the clubbing
you deal bluefish on deck.
Red slicks beneath one bold bastard
flipping you silvered
curses, straining for water

or flesh, some end. Then wind
surprises, cracks you a backhand,
a cleat bruise begins darkening your rose tattoo.

They suspend at depth, hit
and hit until sated and free,
or iced under gray. The bow

begs a turning back
we know you’ll refuse. Tired, still
for a time not long, never long,
you swear when the inboard coughs
taunts and seizes,

and the rain, the rain dares spit
on your back in the hold
under gulls striking near,
the siren water sounds
gone unlovely, steady long gone,
just the sound of metal striking struck
metal, like metal resisting your forge hard and hot and bent and

The gulls cry over diesel on waves
sheening a sad iridescence, like soap on tongue.

 

Rachael Philipps
After you left us

After you left us, I got the call
Her cremains are ready, she said.
The what? I said

The cremains...cremated remains.
She explained, testily. Like... duh.
Oh, I say Her ashes.

What I wanted to say –
She, should
never be called cremains.

Of course I angry-Googled it –
industry term, euphemism,
first found in a newspaper obituary in 1947.

Discovered that her body,
once incinerated, was swept from
the furnace with a metal broom

and looked nothing like ashes (or cremains)
but like sand and bleached sticks.
A desiccated high-tide at the beach.

I found myself admiring our stubborn
big bones which apparently
always refuse to yield to 1800 degrees.

Yet even they must
submit to process,
get pulverized

in a Cremulator
to a uniform grind
to fit the urn.

to make the gone,
and their place inside us,
take up the least space possible.

 

Nancy T

Rachel Phillipps

 

Episode 103: Strange Complicities and Confessions

It’s okay to be somber, Slushies! Don't let the poetic gestures confuse you as the rhythm and pacing contribute to a starburst of flash fiction by Maria McLeod. The obligation to help the writer leaves the crew thinking, as Kathy recalls Dubus’s “A Fathers Story” and Marion thinking of “The Defeated” on Netflix. “The Eternal Fall Backwards” will have you captured in the stream of the writer's thoughts and deeply invested in remaining there. 

What piece of media did you recall while reading “The Eternal Fall Backwards”? 

This episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist A.M.Mills, whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show.

 

Maria McLeod writes poetry and prose. Honors include the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, the Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Prize, and three Pushcart Prize nominations. She was named the 2020 WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Contest winner, judged by Oregon State Poet Laureate Kim Stafford, for “Mother Want,” published in 2021. Her second poetry chapbook, "Skin. Hair. Bones.," will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2022. Her poetry and prose has appeared in leading literary journals such as Puerto Del Sol, The Brooklyn Rail, Critical Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Sonora Review and others. Originally from the Detroit area, she currently resides in Bellingham, Washington where she works as a professor of journalism for Western Washington University. 

The Eternal Fall Backwards 

I hold his head in my hands, pull it to my chest. O. O of his mouth. Eyes glazed. It's dark and he didn't mean to do it. Make out the words, hit and run, man run over. Wanted to kill him. Words of the mouth: pathetic, half human, why don't I die, why not dead. Words slide one after another, into each other, slur, collapse, run down, run out.

There are tears and, sorry, I'm so sorry, drinking, always too much drinking. How an evening progresses, regresses. There are his two bodies: one ferocious, to be feared, a man afire; the other, a boy's, a fetal position, a thumb to his lips. There are nights like this when I am the mother. When I cradle his head in my lap, smooth his hair and say, it’s okay, you're okay now.

I have gone to the jail tonight to pay them to release him, because, drunk, he tried to kill a man. Drunk and stoned or hallucinating, he had run over a man, but missed his body and only hit his leg and the man fell down in the night and someone thought they heard a deep, deep moan but all were sure they had seen him fall backward in that eternal fall backwards that happens in slow motion. And someone said the man's body flailed and twitched after the car drove too fast and right at the man who didn't have time to run but looked up to see the face of a driver already afraid of what he had done.

There are days when I am not the mother. There are days when I am small, when I am the girl, when his hands are too large and his arms too strong. Days when my death comes too soon and then not soon enough, when he drinks too much and finds me in his bathroom seeing myself in his mirror and he's angry; my face is too much in his house and he cannot stand it there and pushes me quick into the mirror and the mirror cracks and my face is cut. These are the days I am not in my body, and so I walk and walk away and down the street afloat above myself, waiting for him to come. But first, he must hit me so it's my voice calling us back from the street, my screaming that draws us from the dark, saying look, look what you have done.

Night again. I bathe him and he is crying into the bath. On this night, he has pushed his best friend through a storefront and has cut himself trying to save him, deciding, after the glass shattered, he didn't mean it. It is like this for him, the before and the after: the anger behind the headlights followed by the fear of the body fallen backwards. Collision of two moments: hit and run. He bleeds into the bath, and I worry that I will need to take him to the doctors and they will see that he has taken drugs and has been drinking. I fear they’ll send him away, or keep him for themselves, thinking I won’t know how to heal him.

I am good at giving the bath. I rub circles at the sides of his head. I know to scoop hands full of warm water over his shoulders so they run down his chest. When I do this, my mother appears in my head, angry and not allowing my brothers to bathe because they make a mess she is sick of cleaning up. Instead she drinks and sleeps on the couch with her own hair greasy and stuck to her head. My brothers would go to school stained, unwashed, and the others would hold their noses and laugh and point. So I would wait until my mother fell into the deep sleep she does not easily wake from and I would gather my two brothers into the bathroom and tell them to take their clothes off. And I would fill the tub with water and the oldest one would refuse to take off his underwear because he didn't want me to see him. And I would say to get in anyway and I won't look at you. And this time he would do what I said.

I know his sickness. I know that what is left looks like him, but is not him. When I bathe him, he stops my hand from scooping the water and pulls me to him. He sees that I have been crying, too. He says that he did this. And I say yes, but that moment is past and now we are in another. He is crying the tears that come after the screaming and the hitting, tears that ask forgive me. I am closing my eyes and whispering that I have a room where a bed waits for him, where the walls give way and the light is a soft, cloudy white. I am circling him with my arms and he is crying into my belly. I am taking him, guiding him down the cold hallway into the warmth of the room where I cover him and keep watch, waiting for what is yet to come.

 

Episode 102: Aging Tantric Pornstars

Join us as we consider a pack of poems by Pier Wright, and the complexities of pacing, prosody, and narrative poems with strange and powerful images: memory, tenderness, a “magnificent young moose,” & the magic of being caught in the act. Kathleen “Gratitude” Volk Miller, champion explicator and advocate for gratitude and neuroplasticity, analyzes the “small pointy hats of hope” as lovers entwine. Jason “Gorgeous Vectors” Schneiderman loves sticky collisions. Gabby and Alex and the crew ponder happy endings and surprises that feel like “Objective correlatives,” slushies. Spoiler: Marion “Sunshine” Wrenn makes an appearance from future past, or future perfect, or…something like that. It all makes a great story. 

Slushies, what is your “embarrassing at the moment but will be funny later” story? 

 

This episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist  A.M.Mills, whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show. 

Pier Wright attended Kalamazoo College where he was influenced by the poetry of Con Hilberry and later by that of Diane Seuss. The first poetry reading he ever attended, and has never forgotten, was Robert Bly reading from Silence In The Snowy Fields. He received a Post-Baccalaureate & Masters degree from The Art Institute of Chicago. As a student he discovered Fairfield Porter, Monet’s large Water Lilly paintings at at Musée de l'Orangerie, Terry Winters, Mary Heilmann, Philip Guston’s late paintings, Giotto, Noguchi, etc.. Influences include Prayer Wheels, Marie Howe, Chris Martin, Peter Matthiessen, Stephen Dunn, John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Joni Mitchell, Phyllida Barlow, the ceramic work of Toshiko Takaezu, and, most recently, the writings of C.D. Wright. While living as a hermit for several years at the end of a peninsula in N Michigan he began working with Michael Delp. He has been the director of Wright Gallery since 2002 and is recently married.

Socials:  Instagram is pierdwright, Facebook is Pier Wright, and website is pierwright.net (paintings)

 

 

Driveway Poem

 

we arrived early at the house by the subshop

after the bar closed

it was cold and being new at love

the only way we thought to keep warm

was by undressing completely, with great urgency

in the front seat of the Ford

then my foot got stuck in the horn

just as our friends began arriving

we couldn’t have left even if we’d wanted to

with all the cars having parked behind us

so we went to the party anyway

me with my shoes untied

you unfolding yourself from the car like a magnificent young moose

the night sky on one side of you and the stars over there

the way you had of entering a room back then

as though by just walking the muddy path to the stoop

a lotus popped out

 

Gratitude

 

what was once impotent in me

remains in this fiery house

on a small lot, crap lawn

every roughed grief

the small pointy hats of hope

red hibiscus bushes wilting in a row

the heat slicked fur of a sleeping hound

a house made not of things

but the relationship between things

such as the desire two bodies have

when flying blindly toward each other

at incredible speed

so, when I ask if I can make you breakfast

what I mean is, I am thankful you are finally here

 

The Hibiscus, Key West

 

we shared thin, raw, slices of tuna,

conch salad, cracked stone crab claws,

drank dark rum, tripped over the noisy chickens

on our way to your room.

drank more rum from plastic cups,

then a table broke, the matching chair in pieces,

waltzing together across worn linoleum

like aging Tantric porn stars.

waking to Cuban coffee, I remember eggs,

while waiting for a bus to Miami

you wrote your number on a napkin.

I tried calling several times,

a memory persistent as the fly banging

on this kitchen door screen.

 

Mother’s Day

 

what a day in the garden

pulling out the knotweed

the clover and spurge

forgiving you for leaving so soon

the way they cut your head open

I recall a dream

I find you in a dumpster it’s hot

your bones are missing

and you can’t get out

just now before dark

beside the thistle and burdock

your cheeks wet I ask if you are hungry

I chop potatoes eggs olives

how tender the early dandelion greens

are tossed with sea salt

bitter with lemon

drizzled with the good oil

I keep for company

Episode 101: The Anti-Efficiency Episode

Slushies, what are some ways a writer may gain your trust? Kathy lifts a brow at poems including questions. Marion looks side ways at pop-cultural references. (Check out this favorite of ours from issues past.) But these poems may make them think otherwise. In “Diving For Pearls” the imagery pulls us into the world of Bedouin and sea-faring cultural economy. Or how “Tidying up with Marie Kondo” may trivialize the idea of the context of curiosity.

Speaking of sparking your joy— or not— what was an item that you loved but had to get rid of?

This episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show.

Rasha Alduwaisan is an oral historian from Kuwait. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Willow Springs and The Common. She earned an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University.

 

 

Diving for Pearls

My body is a sack of bones,
feet bound, heavy with stone,
I plunge and sand shatters
without a sound, tongue-
tied, this sea is breathless,
rope & leather & lead,
I grasp what I can see,
rough shells, round shells,
hollow shells,
I mouth your name
and something stirs –
I pry myself open to find it.

 

Tidying Up with Marie Kondo

Marie, I drove to the landfill yesterday    to find my wedding dress    the one    
I couldn’t bear to give to anyone else    I know I shouldn’t have    but I followed
the truck down the beach road and into the desert    tried to plead at the gates
you know    the way they do in the movies    but security was so tight, Marie    
so I watched from the car  and it looked like a mound of bodies  lace wrapped
around denim around plastic around mulch    and there were so many toys,
Marie dolls without stuffing    bikes without wheels    so many fridges    
torn at the hinge    and the truck I followed could have been any truck    
my dress any dress    so I left    drove deeper into the desert    until all I could
see were seagulls    dipping in and out of the heap    nothing on their backs 
but feathers    and they looked so happy, Marie    they really did

 

Agarwood

I dab oud on my wrists, my neck,
the gap between my breasts,

the way the Agar pours sap into its
wounds, the tender scent filling the room.

In Cambodia, they strip down trees
to find it, the infected bark, the salve.

My throat is dry from shouting, this time
about you smoking inside the house,

the stove I left on all night,
the text we cannot translate.

I want you to kiss me, but all I can do
is tell you I would be better off without you.

Tell me, how long does a bruised tongue
take to heal? How sweet does it taste?

Episode 100: A Steady Lub Dub

How do you pronounce “San Gorgonio,” Slushies? How do you say “Schuylkill?” We talk regional accents, local knowledge, and artistic craft-- from the risks of the pathetic fallacy to the unknowability of metaphor, the art of ambiguity, and, of course, the golden shovel. Join us for an episode devoted to poems by Marko Capoferri where we discuss poetic craft, resonant symbols, and the peculiar power of telephone poles. 

What can’t you pronounce where you live? 

 

Links to things we discuss that you may dig:  

Eula Biss’s “Time and Distance Overcome” 

Jennifer L. Knox’s “Irwin Allen Vs. The Lion Tamer” 

 

At the table: Katheleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, Larissa Morgano & Kate Wagner 

 

 

This episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show.  

 

Marko Capoferri has lived and worked in eight US states, including Montana, where he currently resides. He is an incoming MFA candidate at the University of Montana in Missoula. He is desperately seeking fellow Italian-Americans in Montana for good pasta and raised voices. 

Instagram: Instagram.com/markocapoferri 

 

San Gorgonio 

 

White paper coffee cups collect in drifts 

by the freeway exit ramp—the hearts of ghosts 

once held tight then tossed out the window 

of a car speeding across the desert at four a.m. 

  

trying to stay awake to see, when the light 

came back, what the battered face of the land 

could tell us about ourselves: how the mountains 

were stark and risen; how we were sunk dumb 

  

in between, a scathing plain of wind turbines 

resonating unearthly as Amelia Earhart's flooded engines 

chugging their final gasp on the ocean floor;   

how the sea was here once and swallowed heights, 

  

long since yawned and pulled away paving 

this desert with a tired yellow dirt now blown 

through our teeth, through our beating pistons, 

and a few black rounded stones as souvenirs 

  

from lost time; how thistle-studded towns 

were hardly refuge; how the many stones 

we had gathered were bright and jagged, 

too young by design to tell any real story; 

  

how lust and lost became an exchange in glances 

through a motel’s cracked facade; how these roads 

kept on dressing down like lightning on a postcard 

running fingers in the hot mouth of experience. 

  

Self-portrait with Elegy 

  

Just like we were on the Great Plains 

in 1949, my father and I would gather 

summer nights with neighbors 

lining our country road to watch 

constellations disbanding. Whether tragedy 

or a tragic lack of imagination, it’s hard 

to say—he and I simply could not see 

any threads or their severing. Then, 

as now, telephone wires also lined the road 

linking the night one lighted island 

at a time, though the wires are now dead 

gestures, props to a faded empire 

of distant voices made close but never 

close enough to turn that light 

into warmth. What’s left—sinking 

into my own humidity, my own 

expanse of darkness, and he 

to his own. As you read this 

it is surely a summer night some place 

the land extends forever 

until it gives up where the visible 

begins to visibly waver, either 

from the heat or from the failure 

of the possibilities of sight. 

 

Episode 99: Greek Mythos and Labyrinths

Hello Slushies. Do you see the string? Past the blooming peonies and fungus gnats? Follow us into the labyrinth of our minds as we discuss the work of Eric Stiefel. You may need to brush up on your Greek mythology and Italian literature as a guide. A discussion about various versions of ourselves turns into discussion of an app that animates photographs of faces and National Mason Jar Day (November 30th). And, maybe, the only way out of the labyrinth of the mind is to open your mouth only to forget what you were going to say. 

 

If there was a national day to celebrate you, what would you want people to do that day? 

This episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist A.M.Mills, whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show. 

Eric Stiefel is a poet and critic living in Athens, Ohio with his dog, Violet. He teaches at Ohio University, where he is also pursuing a PhD. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Apple Valley Review, Prism Review, The Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere.

At This Point, I’d Take Anything 

A claw of thread’s all it takes to follow one thought to the next— 

when West killed himself I didn’t say his name out loud for months,

though most days I still lean forward and pull my head back as if some spectral hand pulls my chin taut and points my gaze to the life 

he abandoned inside this house of chaos we call everyday or otherwise inscrutable, my shoulders trembling like stained glass, the same way, 

I imagine, Theseus trembled as his father threw himself to the rocks, not long after he left Ariadne sleeping on a beach made of coral and grit, 

the mind displaced while the body stays behind, the breath clipped short and calcified, strung up in the overgrown garden Dante held back for suicides, 

while, in some version of the myth, Ariadne became a god, goddess of serpents and twine and everything tangled, winged beasts hovering on the fringe 

of knowing one way or the other, gloating on the worn-out roots of the trees we’ll be burdened to, until I’m sitting on the floor in front of a coffee table 

pleading first with myself and then everything else, this skeleton of history and an infinity of arrangements of the stars for an answer of some kind— 

at this point, I’d take anything that masquerades as understanding like a barrel to my chest, something to cradle off into the murk and the shadows of the night. 

 

Phantasmagoric 

Each time I kill one of my old selves—or more often let him loose into the static—I stumble on his shade sometime later, often when the seasons have changed and the lilacs have withered so that they, too, no longer resemble their former selves— 

He was there, right there, standing in front of the meat market, with a ring of brass keys in his hand, just watching 

as the pedestrians idled by— 

and I start to ask if I would recognize myself if seen 

from any real distance, or would it all just blur, terribly,

so that there could be no gesture, no omen or ominous figure lurking in the corner of one’s eye, and what 

would I do then, what jar would I keep the days in, and how would I order them or else unravel further into a blizzard of ideas, and then what sense could I make of this before suddenly drifting away? 

 

If It’s True of Human Nature 

Actually, I hate the flowers— 

now that the birds have vanished, as the last clouds drain away and a thin light winnows down where a grove of bees used to flourish— 

and if you spoke to me of cruelty, I’d think about primrose in winter, lying dormant in the dirt, holding itself frozen, while the leaves left on the surface lose themself to rot— 

I’ve been bestial and cunning, the way

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤa troop of foxes conspires to survive the snow, 

as winter moths lay havoc on landscapes of white trees— 

and if you spoke softly, I might learn to trust you, even fold as a feathered wing, knowing that you might hurt me 

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤand that that hurt might be a kind of devotion 

that we couldn’t explain, as the roof dulls the raindrops above us into something bearable, 

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤas if we could know 

the limits of what we could bear—

Episode 98: The Skin is Where the Body Stops

Slushies, are you ready to take a deep dive into some fiction? Listen to “Benefitting Positions,” at the link below, or read it here. Would you ever hire a professional hugger, or would you want to be one? Listen in as the group discusses the concept of professional snuggling and what the drive is behind good fiction. In this time of social distancing, the topic of touch has become more pignant than ever, and very much so in Jac Smith's piece.

Maybe you’ll be a different kind of touched when you listen to how proud the group is of Jonathan. Maybe you’ll feel even another kind of touched when you hear about Jason’s academic journey, followed by Larissa's journey in the VCap Department, which has helped acclimate an ungodly 30,000 zoom users. 

Send us your thoughts on the piece, and what you think of Jane’s anger, and we'll leave you Slushies with one last question. There isn’t a right or wrong, although we are side-eyeing you, do you read a book’s ending first? Or are you NORMAL and read the book from the beginning to end?

 

Listen to Benefitting Positions

 

This episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist  A.M.Mills, whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show. 

Jac Smith is a MFA graduate from the University of Notre Dame and a recipient of the Studios of Key West Fellowship. She is currently seeking representation for her novel, The Loose, which explores grief as a form of addiction and is set in the Florida Keys. She lives in the mountains of Southern California with her wife. Her work can be found at Hypertrophic Literary and Santa Ana River Review.

Episode 97: Navigating Dirtbags & Oracles

We’re thrilled to consider new poems and flash fiction by Dr. Emily Kingery on this episode. Subtle and specific and utterly compelling, these poems make us ponder and pause and praise. We’re global as ever, Slushies: from Lititz, PA, to the KGB Bar, Gabby is somewhere in Powelton, it’s last year’s Ramadan (Ramadan Kareem!), Samantha hasn’t gotten married yet, and Kingery’s got us thinking about the trouble we got into in high school basements. Time warps and shapes shift! Listen in & enjoy. 

 

This episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist A.M.Mills, whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show. 

 

At the table: Addison, Alex, Gabby, Jason, Kate, Kathy, Larissa, Marion, & Samantha 

 

Emily Kingery is an English professor at a small university in Iowa and the author of Invasives (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming), a semi-finalist in the New Women’s Voices Series. Her work appears widely in journals, including Birdcoat Quarterly, Blood Orange Review, GASHER, The Madison Review, Midwest Review, New Ohio Review, Plainsongs, Raleigh Review, and Sidereal, among others. She has been a chapbook finalist at Harbor Editions and Thirty West Publishing House, as well as the recipient of honors and awards in both poetry and prose at Eastern Iowa Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Midway Journal, Quarter After Eight, and Small Orange Journal. She serves on the Board of Directors at the Midwest Writing Center, a non-profit supporting writers in the Quad Cities community (mwcqc.org), and you can follow her on facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/ekingery/

Dirtbag Wilderness

Our dirtbags, our dirtbags

were medicine men.

 

They spoke as oracles,

capped bottles, skated

 

razorblades across

the glass of pictures.

 

It’s just like shoveling snow,

laughed our dirtbags

 

as they unburied

their parents’ faces.

 

Like raking leaves,

want to try?

 

We watched their hands

swap bills, our eyes

 

the wrong kind of wild.

Our dirtbags laughed:

 

You can sit with us

while we finish.

 

This was intimacy:

our sitting; their finishing.

 

We laughed; we returned

frames to their shelves.

 

We bought shadows dark

and lip stains darker. Darker,

 

said our dirtbags, damp

on basement couches.

 

We envied in secret

the laughs of bright girls,

 

high as their hair

pinned in hard, slick curls.

 

They spun like acrobats

in the high school gym,

 

strobing in glitz

we were disallowed.

 

Bitches, spat our dirtbags,

skanks, whichever

 

words coaxed our laughter.

We swallowed them

 

like expectorant

and laughed in wet coughs

 

under canopies

of parking lot trees,

 

our arms crossed as though

coffined already.

 

We rolled in our dirtbags’ scent

like hunting dogs,

 

napped in stuffy rooms

as their hands, their hands

 

blessed guns, made backpacks

heavy with Ziploc holy.

 

It’s all good, laughed our dirtbags.

Our hips, our ponytails

 

swayed easy as leaves.

By summer, our dirtbags

 

wore sly, deep pockets,

weighed powders,

 

held capsules to the light

under a jeweler’s loupe.

 

The car windows glided,

phones lit up like lightning

 

bugs on the shoulders

of gravel roads. Such soft light,

 

light of vigils, light the yellow

of a forgiven bruise.

 

We rode to neighboring towns

of missing teeth and needles.

 

We cried in bathrooms

far from home. We were home

 

when we laughed, when we laughed

we laughed Everclear vomit.

 

But our dirtbags, our dirtbags

let us sit while they finished,

 

and their hands were warm

as stones pressing us to sleep.

 

Funeral for a Cat

When the cat was killed by a driver in a tragic hit-and-run, the dirt bike kid watched it happen. He screamed to gather us to her carcass: Pumpkin! He pedaled hard around the block. Pumpkin is dead!

I was afraid to tell Dad, at first. He went outside, shoveled Pumpkin into a grocery bag and dug a hole under a lilac bush. It was too late in the season for flowers, but he said they would bloom next year: a small truth sounding like kindness.

The kids begged him for a real funeral to say goodbye. He smiled a little, but not at them, and had us circle the grave and hold each other’s sweaty hands while he prayed. It was a test.

The dirt bike kid and the girls with yards of upside-down toys wept for the cat, loose with their sadness. The streetlights flickered on, and I was afraid of Dad again. I tried not to picture Pumpkin with a halo and wings, but I failed. I begged God to forgive me for it, then tried not to picture God as a cat shaking its head at my blasphemy, then prayed not to cry as the cats kept coming. I missed the amen, but I held out. I passed.

After the funeral, Dad said I was so grown-up, not weeping over a cat that didn’t belong to anyone. Not to the neighborhood, not even to God.

He prayed over hamsters in the years to follow, maybe a second cat. He prayed, and I grew into a tragic, feral thing.

 

 

 

 

 

Episode 96: Larissa‘s Philly Hoagie Mouth

Slushies, do you know your shades and types of blue? Do you know how to say blue in Russian? When we talk of St. Petersburg, are we talking about Russia? Or Florida? When we discuss Max Lasky’s poems we discuss what we call things and how we write things and what to call the things we write. (Discuss what ‘lyric’ means amongst yourselves.) “Come Here” takes the table to a scene in Maryland, once home to Jason and his long “O,” and is heavy in Hikmet. After reading “Prothalamion Poured from a Copper Cezve,” a love poem or a poem about love, we continue to praise Lasky’s juggling of images and figurative tight-rope walking.

This episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist A.M.Mills, whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show.

At the table: Samantha Neugebauer, Alex J. Tunney, Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, and Marion Wrenn

Max Lasky is a poet from New Jersey, currently living in Maryland with his fiancé where they are raising two plant children: a hardy mum named Thomas, and a basil plant named Bunting. Max is finishing up his final year in the MFA program at the University of Maryland and earned his B.A. from Ramapo College. His poems have been published by Trillium and Frontier Poetry, and he is the co-founder and editor of the literary magazine Leavings. He lives in and for the slush.

Come Here

We read Hikmet during what she called
a picnic, though we brought no wicker basket,
no plaid blanket, we rolled our jeans up
under our knees to wade across the river,
wide and knee high, the entire riverbed
bedded with sharp rocks covered in moss,
slick enough beneath our bare feet to make us
walk slow, half cautious, as a group of five men
flyfishing spoke Spanish, reeling in fish
too small to keep, taking swigs from warm
beer cans at the shore when they turned bored,
wanting us to leave. We stayed. As did the birds
pitching in a nearby thicket, almost inaudible
near the pop blaring from a portable speaker,
and a quiet drone flew high above the water.
Which is to say nature’s no more, at least
not there in Catonsville, Maryland, mid August,
where the Patapsco flowing toward the Chesapeake
could double as the sound of traffic passing
on a highway. All the plastic, all the tin cans
and wrappers littered across the rocks, the sand—
and yet hopeless is not something to be,
not for me or Hikmet or my love, who smirks
when I say a new Turkish word correctly.
My love, what are we to do? We lounged
on that ripped towel, smoking, when we should’ve
scoured the shoreline picking up trash. In masks
because of a pandemic, not one person
walking past on the trail looked us in the eye
or said hi, how are you? I lose a little hope…
I hope a little less and learn a new language,
or try. I learn how the river was commandeered
from Native American tribes by dead men, white men
who wanted to fuel their new plants and mills,
men who never imagined the future here,
hundreds of years later, or else just didn’t care,
not for us or the two women who walked
hand in hand, a leashed dog barking at their feet,
not the men who spoke Spanish and looked at me
confused when I asked what kind of fish is that?
I already knew it was a trout. I already knew
Hikmet was a communist who loved Marx and Lenin
and each of his three wives. Some of us strive
to better the world, some strive to better ourselves,
and the striving sometimes transcends joy.
Hikmet tried both not long ago when he wrote
“My strength is that I’m not alone in this big world.
The world and its people are no secret in my heart,
no mystery in my science. Calmly and openly,
I took my place in the great struggle.” I turned
to face a warm wind that laced my face with sand,
for the future’s everchanging, before it even happens…
Come here and change me, you whose tongue
on my tongue tastes of Turkish tobacco, and sun,
you who say the unsayable. Come here, aşkım,
lend me your hope, teach me how to grin again
after two decades of elegy and a broken language
rife with misogyny, and god. We took Nazım
to the water’s edge and read the translations
energetically, sweating, as the park closed
and the sun lowered, and for a few moments,
it seemed as if it was just us three and the river,
carving through the earth like the blood through
our veins, I learned a new word for landscape.

 

Prothalamion Poured from a Copper Cezve

Zuleyha read my fortune
in the dried coffee grinds

and tossed the saucer toward
the future, its arc across

left a chem trail renting
the sky, and I didn’t ask why,

I didn’t point it out or make
a scene about the vision

I’d been led to believe, as if
with a shovel in a lame novel,

as if my ears were a septic chute
that accepted every story,

no matter how far from true.
I didn’t mention my nomad past

or how my brain’s forced from place
to place in caravans, canal boats,

tents reeking of frankincense, pine,
or how that’s just another story

I’d been fed with a shovel.
I realized somewhat early on

in this early life that most people
are eager to live their lives

like stars beyond a projector,
a drive in, seemingly unaware

of the dark screen, and willing
to wrong anyone if it means

someone lifts the loose noose
from their own bowed necks—

they almost sprint down the steps.
I crawl up the steps to every

bad decision I’ve let happen,
happy to say I’ve changed,

took notes on each mistake
and if I ever turned back

I was sure to take a different path.
When I go home to the house

I grew up in, it’s not to stay.
As for the story, neither one of us

could say if it was imagined.
I wake some mornings to find

signs that don’t make sense,
suspicious of my own breath

and the sunlight through the slats,
because the world’s senseless

and nonsensical and tense.
A paranoiac and a high priestess

make for one hell of a couple,
our studio’s more like a circus,

we’re trapeze swingers swooping
from corner to corner, blowing

clown horns as we paint our faces
in a shattered mirror. Our strict

schedule requires us to weep
all day and dance at night,

saying I’m so fucking lucky
I met you. I’m so fucking lucky…

I rejoice, I digress, I paint two
red lines under each of our eyes

and step in line, waiting stone like.
I’m well aware it could be me

paranoid and schizophrenic
on the side of the street, paranoid

past repair, not knowing where
the self ends and society begins,

it could easily be me if not
for five or six good people.

As for the lover, I’m damn sure.
I put a poem around her finger

because I couldn’t afford a ring,
which means I’m always already

all in. I push the stack of chips
to the center of the table. I grin.

Episode 95: Sweet! Poems by Hillary Adler

Slushies! We’re excited to release this episode featuring three poems by Hillary Adler: "Did You Google that or Shake a Magic 8 Ball?"; "We Must Be Animals"; and "Letter to Erika from a Bench on Christopher St." Recorded in the spring of 2020, our crew is well locked down but looking up, delighted to be reading poems together from afar. We’re down with “dirty words,” Slushies, and the ontology of the self, despite Marion’s broken thumb. It’s animality and the annoyingness of humans in “We Must Be Animals.” “Letter to Erika” brings the Big Gay Ice Cream back to us, and Jason talks about football while Marion tries to imitate Charles Bukowski, badly. Adler’s poems invite us into reverie, meditation, frank images, syntactical pleasures, and the challenge of sweetness. 

This episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist  A.M.Mills, whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show. 

At the Table: Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Addison Davis, & Samantha Neugebauer.

Hillary Adler is poet and journalist, and is currently the Director of Marketing for Topl, an impact technology company that enables digital and sustainable transformation across value chains and empowers the monetization of impact verified on the Topl Blockchain.  She is from New York City, and holds an MFA from The New School. Her work has appeared in The Huffington Post, The Poetry Foundation, BuzzFeed, Rolling Stone and elsewhere. Her first completed book of poems, We Must Be Animals, has been in a drawer for over a year. Maybe one day it will see daylight. Until then, she can be found on Twitter and IG @HillaryAdler.

Episode 94: Two Authors, One Episode

Featuring Sarah St. Vincent & Karolina Zapal

How many times can we reference the 90’s before you actually start believing that we can time travel? Are hairspray bangs enough (specifically Kirsten Dunst’s lack of them in On Becoming a God in Central Florida)? As the editorial table moves through space-time in our usual fashion, starting off in 1991, Sarah St. Vincent gives us a feeling of the WWE moments of intimacy which make, as Jason says with some Hulk Hogan gusto, YOUR BODY SING WITH PAIN! The spectacle of boxing and the compelling stillness of combat reminds Marion of Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s poetry book, “Apocalyptic Swing.” If you’re hearing the poem twice, that’s not ringing in your cauliflower ears! This episode, we take some cues from Pádraig Ó Tuama’s “Poetry Unbound” series by reading, discussing, and then reading again. Repetition, both in words and time loops, seems to be the theme here with Karolina Zapal sliding in more than a few ‘I love you’s into her poem. Calling all Grammar Slushies: What is the term for doubling up on words?

This episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show. 

Sarah St. Vincent

Sarah St.Vincent is a human rights lawyer by day and poet by night (or very early morning). Her debut novel, Ways to Hide in Winter, was published in 2018, and she currently directs a clinic at Cornell University that provides computer security advice to domestic violence survivors. She's originally from that swingin'-est of swing states, Pennsylvania, and lives in Brooklyn.

Sarah’s Twitter handle is @Sarah_StVincent. 

Karolina Zapal

Karolina Zapal is an itinerant poet, essayist, translator, and author of two books: Notes for Mid-Birth (Inside the Castle, 2019) and Polalka (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018). As an immigrant and activist writer, she writes frequently about her native Poland, languages, borders, and women’s rights. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Rumpus, Inverted Syntax, Tupelo Quarterly, The Seventh Wave, Mantis, Posit, and others. She has completed three artist residencies: Greywood Arts in Killeagh, Ireland; Brashnar Creative Project in Skopje, Macedonia; and Bridge Guard in Štúrovo, Slovakia. She works at the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts & Humanities.

Website: karolinazapal.com

Facebook: karolina.zapal

Instagram: Karoissunshine

Twitter: KarolinaZapal

At the Table: Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Samantha Neugebauer, Marion Wrenn, & Alex Tunney

Episode 93: Go Away & Come Home

In anticipation of the Collingswood Book Festival, we thought it might be nice to have some of our senior editors and a couple of festival participants sit down for a proper chat about poetry and community, the anonymity of sending work out into the void and the anonymity of masks, and of course, bears and bathrobes.

Enjoy and let us know what you think! Has the pandemic made writing more universal or melted our minds so terribly that our relationship to literature has changed? Will readings stay virtual and/or can we find a happy relationship between Zoom and IRL?

This episode includes these special guests:

Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Fire Is Not a Country (2021) and Salvage (2017) from Northwestern University Press, and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (2016) from Thread Makes Blanket Press. A recipient of the Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize and the Leeway Transformation Award, her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, The Rumpus, PANK, Guernica, ESPNW, and elsewhere. In collaboration with Philadelphia Contemporary, Friends of the Rail Park, and Asian Arts Initiative, her experimental poem, Future Revisions, was exhibited at the Rail Park billboard in Philadelphia from July to August 2021. She has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College and is a 2021-2022 Poet in Residence at the Amy Clampitt House in Lenox, MA. She is originally from Bali, Indonesia. 

Rogan Kelly is the author of Demolition in the Tropics (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019). His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in New Orleans Review, The Penn Review, Plume, RHINO, and elsewhere. He is the editor of The Night Heron Barks and Ran Off With the Star Bassoon.

We thought we’d include our bio’s here, since we never do:

Jason Schneiderman is the author of four books of poems, most recently Hold Me Tight (Red Hen 2020) and Primary Source (Red Hen 2016). He edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford UP 2016). His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, VQR, The Believer, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet; he is a co-host of the podcast Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile. His awards include the Shestack Award and a Fulbright Fellowship. He is an Associate Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. 

Kathleen Volk Miller has written for LitHub, NYT Modern Love, O, the Oprah magazine, Salon, the NYTimes, Huffington Post, Washington Post, Family Circle, Philadelphia Magazine and other venues. “How We Want to Live,” an essay, was chosen as the penultimate piece in Oprah’s Book of Starting Over (Flat Iron Books, Hearst Publications, 2016). She is co-editor of the anthology, Humor: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press, 2014). She is co-editor of The Painted Bride Quarterly and co-host of PBQ’s podcast, Slush Pile. She has also published in literary magazines, such as Drunken Boat, Opium, and other venues. She holds “Healing through Writing” and “Writing and Neuroplasticity” workshops, and other memoir classes. She consults on literary magazine start up, working with college students, and getting published in literary magazines.  She is a professor at Drexel University. 

Marion Wrenn is Director of the Writing Program; Senior Lecturer of Writing and Literature and Creative Writing at NYU Abu Dhabi. Marion C. Wrenn is a media critic, cultural historian, and literary editor who writes essays and creative non-fiction. She earned her PhD from NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and has received grants and awards from NYU, the AAUW, and the Rockefeller Archive Center.  Recent work on satirical news and citizen audiences have appeared in Poetics. Her essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, South Loop Review, and elsewhere. She co-edits the literary journal Painted Bride Quarterly (pbqmag.org) and has taught writing at NYU, Parsons, and the Princeton Writing Program. 

This episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist  A.M.Mills, whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show. 

Episode 92: American Literature

This episode is about allusions, Slushies. How do poems gain dimension by relying on references? Where is that ekphrastic sweet spot?  Listen in as we focus on the poems of July Westhale. Under the influence of her work, we talk glass flowers, ghost towns, road trips, and snow. Here are links to a few of the references and allusion we make on the show, inspired by Westhale’s way of seeing the world:  This is America; “My Mother is a Fish”; Teresa Leo’s Junkie; and ee cumminings [i carry your heart with me]

 

With thanks to one of our sponsors,  Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Lorraine” now opens our show. 

At the table:

Samantha Neugebauer, Alex Tunney, Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, and Marion Wrenn

 

July Westhale is an essayist, translator, and the award-winning author of Trailer Trash, and Via Negativa, which Publishers Weekly called "stunning" in a starred review. Her most recent work can be found in McSweeney’s, The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Huffington Post, among others. She also has an inventively-named collection of salty chapbooks. When she’s not teaching, she works as a co-founding editor of PULP Magazine. www.julywesthale.com

 

 

Rotten Apples Return to Harvard's Glass Flowers Exhibition

 

What you have heard is true—

something rotten once got us

from our houses, from our beds

where what was there may

or may not have been.

 

Remember, my darling, my sweet,

that a blistered and blackened

thing, a thing representing life/

sin itself, was a cause for art.

Gave a man, many men,

a lineage of pride.

 

The moon rose tonight as usual,

no spore-filled scab. As ivory

as the cut belly of an apple

sliced to share. Nothing noxious

to point to, say you.

 

The world of museums and love

are, as it turns out, through the machinations

and designations of man-made things,

defined by abstractions: Security,

beauty, even, in our worst days.

 

One day, Blaschka told his son, yes—

 

American Literature

 

for Joey

 

“the silver lamp,--the ravishment, --the wonder--the darkness,--loneliness, the fearful thunder” John Keats

 

There’s a billboard with the route 66’s version of June Cleaver, holding a pie underneath block letters HO-MADE PIES, which is how dry towns get their jollies, I guess.

 

We buy coffee in cups so thin the joe becomes us and we never regain our human shapes, and I say to you I wonder where they keep the half-bull man and you shotgun back I’ve spent my life asking that like the sharp shooter you are.

 

Who wouldn’t want to be the son of a bull and a damned woman

we are all sons of bull and damn

 

     you’ve gone West to find everything or me

 

and look at girls the way I look at girls who are bad for me. Like a desert

through slatternly windows. This is America: the big-pricked statues statuary in their old-growth knowing:

in the end--spoiler alert--we’re both after the wrong bandit, the bank gets robbed, the two women who should be lovers but aren’t arc their Caddie like a rainbow into the lavish vaginal canyon at the last moment, the whale gets away, Faulkner’s pretend mother doesn’t get the burial she deserves, we have to choose between Liz Taylor in a kerchief or James Dean with his shirt stuttered open, and we can’t---

 

moon moon

 

Now there’s snow on the ocean, which is meant to confuse us

and does, though not because we are unprepared for it

but rather because the sight of it reminds us

of the static-hearted parts of our bodies as they prostrate

themselves in years-over-yonder: exploratory attempts

to find warmth—not unlike a surefooted expedition—,

in the disappearance of everything ripe—now covered

with snow’s annihilating speeches—, in the blank stares

of our children as they amputate themselves

from us, in the cloudscape of come forgotten to be enjoyed,

on the snow of a down comforter at which we’d first begun

(circle back to exhibit A), in the cold expanse following

the question am I like winter to you, in the unspooling

that happens when we, I, I mean I play a memory

over again for the too-many-ith time, in the television’s

convex and prudish eye, in the snowy sound of over-use,

in the way empty feels like brain-freeze, in the brilliant

and nearly-neon white of the sign which mourns vacancy

even if everyone around us says off-season, says they love

 

the snow, the way it makes well-conquered land possible again.

 

earthling

 

You’d never guess it (oh, good, a game!),

but here we are many days without our bouncing

blue ball, our terrestrial ball and chain, our baby

planet—not even a note as it slipped from the rearview.

Now a footnote in a book that, were we on said earth,

a man would walk door to door to sell as a collection:

The History of Aquamarine, Abridged. But we are not earthlings

any longer, with no taxonomical replacement in sights. Stars

coronate the endless black, winging it, and here we are:

the most select, the most tourist. The most inclined

to shoot the earth for the moon’s moon, to go nil,

to bankrupt because it is the most American thing to do,

though America was left behind, no matter nationality—

only the home, the journey to and from.

  Let us not

seek solace from the callousness of quietude, for it is what exiled us.

Episode 91: Daydream Believer

Daydream Believer

 

Listen in as pop culture, nostalgia, and formal craft converge in a discussion of poems by Jeff Royce. As of this recording “we are not the epicenter,” but it feels as if we have all the time in the world as the pandemic spirals on just outside the sound of our voices. Royce has us remembering The Monkeys and Lava Lamps, recalling Larkin’s famous insight that “They F&^% you up, your mum and dad,” and imagining angel trumpets and panthers (both Rilke’s famous panther poem and Teju Cole “On The Blackness of the Panther”). It’s all about resonances and craft, slushies. (Or resonances and interventions:  Dear Queer Eye crew, Kathleen needs a home-office resurrection!). If you are looking for more fabulousness, Kathleen recommends two podcasts, Jonathan Van Ness’ “Getting Curious” and Sam Sanders’ “It’s Been a Minute.” Samantha suggests the film Now and Then. Jason is loving Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. 

 

This episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist A.M.Mills. The song “Spaghetti with Lorraine” opens our show. 

BIO

Jeff Royce lives and teaches in South Florida. He is elaborately married with two refreshingly complicated daughters, though he is less enthusiastic about the two dogs and fat lizard who also live with him.  Jeff was social distancing before it was cool.

 

At the Table:  Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, Kathleen Volk Miller, & Marion Wrenn

 

 

WATCHING A PANTHER

AT THE PALM BEACH ZOO

 

 

Her chirps and caterwauling are

the echoes of an empty sanctuary.

She lowers her stare, pulls back

the fat of her mouth, but the growl

 

rumbles in from another pen.

Thunderheads build on backs

of roseate spoonbills, restless

in the next enclosure.

 

Their pink shadows and the stink

of flamingo shit are enough to remind me

my heart is a muscle.

 

Near the reptile house, wooden manatees

drift on an ocean of organs.

The music is coming from somewhere else.

 

 

LINEAGE

 

Man hands on misery to man.

  It deepens like a coastal shelf.

                                                   --Phillip Larkin

 

It began with horseradish in her mashed potatoes,

her father slipping it in before dinner.

(It began much earlier I suppose.

 

But this is my mother we’re talking about, younger and thinner

and unaware that fathers can be cruel.)

She dove in without sniffing, and since that day something within her

 

grew guarded and deep. They met in high school--

my father and she, I mean. She let him kiss her breasts

only through her shirt, so he imagined each one a jewel.

 

Think of the let down when he saw them undressed,

not cut as he’d expected them to be,

not flawless as the ones he had caressed

 

under her blouse. He learned to live with them, though; he

learned how not to ask for very much,

to ignore her responsibly.

 

Her body arched, in dark, under his touch.

They fumbled dutifully until it hurt.

My brother soon was born, a crutch

 

to hold my mother up. But he wouldn’t wear a skirt.

She cried until her shoes were damp,

and my father taught him how to play in dirt.

 

Let’s try again, she begged--words pressing like a stamp

on my brother’s soft head--and I, too,

was pushed into this world like a rudderless tramp.

 

I’ll never know for sure if this is true.

 

 

ANGEL TRUMPETS

 

I have this 1960’s sitcom desire

to frolic on the back lawn.

Our shirts will be fashioned after white sides

of ranch style houses.

Our hearts will take shapes

of plastic Adirondack chairs.

The kids can blow bubbles that’ll satellite the shed

like little acrylic space shuttles.

In the linen-scented afternoon, the backward-stumbling sunlight

will brighten angel trumpets,

drooping polished shuttlecocks

swinging like clean sheets in the here-&-there breeze.

& I’ll pick one for you, & you’ll remark

that the day has smelled just like a fresh haircut,

then you’ll kiss my cheek with the same precision

with which you clip coupons

& the girls, giddy from so much Frisbee,

will roll their eyes & mock our tenderness,

& we’ll chase them & they will feign terror

& scream like they mean it,

& we’ll prolong their terror by pretending to just miss them,

but eventually we’ll tackle them & splash onto the lawn

which has always been just weeds.

We’ll lie there breathing for a while, the four of us,

our heads forming a circle in a way

I imagine might have made an excellent cover for a Monkeys album,

before one of us, probably me, will spot the vultures circling,

not menacingly, but in a shiftless, existential sort of way,

drifting on lava-lamp currents, & I’ll note

how they resemble jets, not in shape

but in the way how we feel about them flies out in front of our voices.

& then someone, probably you, will say,

We are, after all, sitting in weeds, & I’ll say,

What? & the girls will squeal & scramble to the badly cracked patio

where they’ll pick beggar ticks from one another’s backs,

& by now it’s dusk dark

& a fat tarantula moon is crawling up over purplish clouds.

Then, Shit, what’ll we do about dinner?

&, Papa, I still have homework to finish!

& Goddamnit, why are you crying? Stop crying!

& you tell me we don’t even have an angel trumpet tree,

& your breath smells like sparklers,

& the sparklers, in the black air, are scrawling something

that vanishes before I can get it.

I don’t get it, I say, & you say,

You never get it, & I say,

Just go to bed, you can do it in the morning.

& I put a movie on so we can all sleep

& we eat popcorn & freezer pops for dinner, & I tell the kids,

That’s life, & they’re like,

                                       Great!