Two Poems

Inner Winter Solstice

Each year, I’m earth-
     bound. I keep falling
into it with my feet.

I’m not sure what
     I keep failing to see
between the long

shadows stretching
     north now that once
required such stone-

work to be believed.
     Unworshipped light,
I guess, moves on.

And what if where it’s
     going, I can’t imagine
that either? Maybe to

some other planet
      full of slimy fuckers
with dinner plates

for eyes? See what
     I mean? I haven’t
got the chops for it.

All my aliens are green.
     What if the best I can
do is a regular spaceship

to go chasing after in,
     only a little bit slower,
falling forever behind?

Until, one day, what?
     Getting to the end
of it, every known

thing in the rearview,
     finally in a position
to think of something

new, only, it’s just
     a sheetrock white
wall, gathering star-

light, which, when
     seen all together,
looks like nothing.

Going Public

“Landslide” is playing,
but just the getting older part.
I assume that’s almost
always true. A law of airwaves,
maybe, specific to coffee shops.
It’s summertimeishness
that brings me out here,
baring hairy thighs too much
in the boring sun, or maybe
it’s my boring reasons
that bore it warmly.
If I understand anything
it’s this, and almost always
without mercy: I’m tired
of selling myself short. 
On these nearly blinding
days, even the concrete
in bloom, I consider
my blending in a boutique
apology rounding out
the literal one I keep uttering
dumbly across counters,
registers, sidewalks, often
wirelessly, with space
doing the heavy lifting,
a thousand gigantic satellites
or more would seem to say.
I’m sorry for seeing it
this way, for however you
see me, auctioned off
by the particulars of angles,
lighting, the position
of my body in this chair.
It would be nice, I think, 
to be among those
so enamored with this idea
that they feel comfortable
wearing an interesting hat
or like they can dance
proudly at weddings
in a way that involves
moving their feet. Sometimes,
I forget my body so much
that when my wife touches
her hand gently to my spine,
a reminder to straighten up,
I wonder if I look like someone
who’s constantly cowering,
slouching into the planet.
I tell people that in another
life I must have been
a meerkat or a prairie dog,
always watching for hawk-
shaped shadows, scurrying
back down into my burrow
to prepare myself to worry
more, to worry better.
Just the other day, I told
our daughter’s pediatrician
that I thought if I wasn’t
worried, then I wasn’t
being a good parent, and she
looked at me for a long time.
I wanted to say my line about
meerkats, a joke back down
into my burrow, but it was
already too late. Soon enough,
another song is on, or
it’s a different place with
different kinds of lights. These,
hanging down from the ceiling,
attached to ornate bronze
chains, unclear if their purpose
is for our seeing, or if they
are here merely to be seen.

∩

Eric Kocher’s chapbook Sky Mall was selected as a winner of the 2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize. He teaches Environmental Studies at Wofford College, where he also serves as director of the Goodall Environmental Studies Center. His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, A Public Space, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, and Oversound, among others. He lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife and their two children.

Three Poems

Small God Shoes

i.

Gods were good
for utterance over entrails
or bone dice, foul
for the heat of summer,

cupped ears at need,
both mutter and shout—
we are stone and free,
this year of our lord.

Small god shoes
are filled easy by Number,
a dog who beckons well,
without a better offer

of either treat or play.
Happy Number, the true, the
good and, broken, the jolly;
we prophesy on Number, too,

and kill fewer beasts
to learn time. Number
explained this summer heat.
Yes, Number must hear us.

ii.

What he should have been was angry
at the rock. After all, it was a rock
and he was walking through, all legged
with purpose. His fingertips can curve
into dirt less fragile than themselves,
grit can slide between nail and nailbed,

into each wrinkle at the knuckles,
can give him protection against the light
and teach him to declare: here light, there
dark, there dim water—but half-dry mud
will dig through his skin as he climbs
the trailside hill, so that soil at once shields

and destroys him. And he will get above
the rock. But what a simpler world, anger.
So clear and strong in its swing of the sledge.
I only hope he does not forget, having risen
above this rock, that he can still go forward
and drop down again; I myself am buried high

into the clouds, too muddily
enthusiastic to walk, and now
I just toss my delirium about
like cobwebs on the highest branches
of a beech tree. Did I climb a beech,
and did I start from the same root?

Reaching for a trunk, he needs to wrap
his soft arm around the bark. He tumbles—
and did he clear it? I’m too high to see.
This mist is nice, keeping good count
of the birdcalls without the bodily distraction.
Humor me: did he land across the rock?

Did he break across the surface? Or did he
fall by chance beyond it? Did he choose
well, despite the fact that he has hair
and eyes and divots beside his kneecaps?
Someone, please—will he be angry
on the ground, now? Will he swing out clear?

Try to Imagine Celery

A snowman could live
for thirty years, and
start to grow
tired of smelling
carrot with each breath.

A snowman would find
the density of his torso
miraculous. A snowman
would never wonder
why his eyes are black,

only wonder at their
perfect blackness. As
tired of carrot as he
may become, he could not
imagine smelling celery as often.

Instead of the almost-
wounded feeling of a too-
short toenail, he would hate
the new snow he had to pack
beneath his armpit.

There is every chance
that voice, which means
self, is all there is.
Who will summon the density
to tell me celery is impossible?

Wren-Thinking

A wren hopped itself
into view. View me,
it said. I said no.

It hopped again, then
fluttered upward and returned.
I won’t give in.

I can’t be sure of you,
I said, you are either
vision only or a lesser mind.

No, it said, I am the mind
and you are something else.
I split the atom

the day after I fell
from the nest, but I could
not care. You can’t sing

when it would save your life,
just because you cannot prove
the meaning of “to save”—

or of life, for that matter.
No, I said. I have given
all of this to you.

Oh, said the wren. He
fluttered up again, back
down. He cocked his head.

∩

Charlie Ericson’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming at Aeon, JAKE, The Atlantic, Measure, Contemporary Literature, and elsewhere. He teaches at Oberlin College.

Five Poems

*

a rolled terrain cigarette burning
stamping bolls of despair
seeded in mid air
as fireworks’ tentacles
tightened for landing
on a graph ocean

half-sunk ships teeter
like see saws
cut through bottoms of relief

[onions in quartz tunics
ripen in rustled beds]

*

swallows nest in the mud-tonsils
peak hoarse carried along by a wind
eroding mountains
into chess pieces
being plied
simultaneously
to inhabit margins of possible moves
hatching as tuataras
scanning the spectrum with parietal eyes
that flash within infinite mirrored rooms
of a sequin coat
dragging thistles and thorns
scratched by silken surfaces
having engineered goggles
for examining swallows in midbreath

*

a run blurs into a black butterfly
derived by a meadow’s square root
in velvet halos of pollen
sifting through a cloud emerged
from a handshake’s collapse of a building

the potter’s wheel throws
a tornado of imprinted passers-by
on a storefront glass
as rub-on stickers of horror

{another story: tattoos
on jammed wrists of film rolls
measuring pulse rate by flashes
plowing through the skin’s surface}

a breath encircled by
migration trajectories outlining
an onion bulb with cubical parabolas

*

a dragon blows fire-breath chambers
into basalt layers of fig
juggling wasp sparks
fused by lightning injections

the fig tree’s poi jangle
on strung washing lines
dividing highway streams
into blurred red-white strokes
of prehistoric dawn yolk
whisked into tempera

a polyptych of elements
oxidized by hearths
whispering
in fluorescent cracks’ dialects

*

a flame framed in a double glazed window
as an onion bulb of fire
to burn vase scales with a roar

tilted trees of the horizon
printed in a quiver of artefacts
shimmering on canvases
like sharp feline glares

[fencers with green foils
drafting quick sketches of abrasion]

a fire peeling sparkling shells off
incrusting the topology of diamond
with shards of furrows
generated by light crumbs

∩

Ekaterina Derysheva is an interdisciplinary poet, born in 1994 in Melitopol, Ukraine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Poem-a-Day, Lana Turner, Asymptote, Four Way Review, Zerkalo, Tlen Literacki, Literaturportal Bayern, Volga, and Homo Legens, among others. She is the author of Starting Point (2018) and There Will Be No Installation (2023), and co-author of Earth Time (Romania, 2020). She is currently an Artist Protection Fund Fellow in residence at the University of Pennsylvania (2024–2025).

One Poem

and there is a STORM

AND IT’S LIKE
the flavor SUNSHINE is said 
to taste 
like white grape ?????
hot bother rot WATER
kai says would u 
say it tastes
like white grape 
no 
i wouldn’t
say anything tastes like 
white grape 
i don’t know what that 
IS 
even 
i am in the city 
that WORKS
i didn’t know
some people just 
worked HARD
there was a lack of PLAY
sun in the shiny shit
well 
it was fun while it was
FUNDED by chase 
travel
miles and miles i flit
for the sake of eeeeeeeeee
FRIENDS ?????
professional developers
ballet ballad again again again
imagine developée
was what i WROTE auto
matically corrected in the document
automatonically incorrigible in the SOUP
of the airplane’s upper deck
can i move yr bag pls
no BITCH
everyone on the airplane is apple JUICED
my dad is only not angry
for fifty minutes at a TIME she said
tiring way to tire
my dad is only dad 
imminent birthday
i am LYING
on the couch ha
sorry bout it
writhing in a notebook
that is virtual and inchoate
hello 
is that a KEY
i see up your nose 
oh well
better than a flower
yay it’s kai
bringing me a YEAR
bringing me a miso salad 
dressing for my 
WOUND i flew with
wafting whatever
in the midwest wash
i used soap
i am CLEAN
after alllllllllll
yay a door
is adorable my middle 
NAME 
sorry
teehee lots of those
slopping around
in the sauce of the
POEM ugh
not me naming the OBJECT
baby baby obsolescence 
i am getting OLDER
like almost thirty
like almost thrive
maybe tomorrow
let’s try that again
maybe TOMORROW
flirting with normalcy
snorting in a skort
i mean i’ll stand
at a podium WHENEVER
microphonically approbatory
one glass of ROSÉ pls
health springs nocturnal
the pope once came to 
PHILADELPHIA the city
i am absenteeing
i totally drink TEA
in kai’s house which tastes
not so tacitly
of brown RICE
slurp hard mattress imagine
me princess and the peeing
i got up to do that
yay a bathroom
ow my SLEEP
it’s totally apnea
just kidding that’s just
my biggest FEAR
(((((((death ??????????????))))))) ugh
what about a MONSTER
the vibe is like
i’m wearing a t shirt
drinking mojito FLAVORING
la la la
it’s HOT
and the flavor doesn’t go
to your throat 
i explained it’s
all the way in the FRONT
door? key
it’s like
i came here to read about WORK
and i didn’t do my JOB
it’s like i came to
the city that WORKS and 
WPA’d my ass
into some wifi
why fire someone
over lost TIME
pay me for my time OF
whatever oh DAY
thunder bowling in
and we discussed the
DERECHO of 2020
when the bone collector
laughed in his t shirt
and everyone was in IOWA
except the difference was
i never went BACK
it’s my first date
in chicago i am lying
on kai’s couch
commandeering a form
i remembered
ummm
i used to write 
so then i flew 
and what do u think
oh i was going to EXPLAIN
the flavor 
of the seltzer i’m sipping
in the i of 
a STORM
………………………
i’m crashing ?????

∩

Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo lives in Philadelphia, where she curates the reading series Spit Poetry. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks “Boring Eclipse” (The Year, 2026) and “DUH” (Bullshit Lit, 2022), and her work appears or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Joyland, The Offing, Poetry Northwest, and The Cleveland Review of Books, among others. She can be followed @tall.spy on instagram but she can never be caught.

Five Poems

ENCORE

No, I don’t; this is my eye
Blank stake, a green stare

The ocean remains off limits

It’s not doing me any
Good being good
At what I’m doing

Good lord, it was a terrible
Ticking

When the time comes
Know I don’t
I won’t reappear

NOTHING HALETHORPE

live in anything but this
shade that feels like

full sun, don’t, no tint or how
to see it reproduce

its effects on my mood and
interpretation of email suggestions

it’s a dramedy, it’s a satire
so I’ve started crying at my birth

-day, dumb holiday
I forget, eat cold noodles

in the kitchen when you paused
compassion, palm raised

single chocolate, empty card
single candle, lost wick

POEM

A red cat face in spray paint
on the locked-up shed
across the street.

Just ears and a scowl,
three whiskers a side
below a sketch of a pizza.

Capped stupid, scrawled tags,
all in black. Cat fills a small gap,
a red gash across the peeling
white of the door.

Lock and key,
half anger, half
grimace, hunger
and an opportunity.

EASTERN OUTDOOR

But I’m still the assassin,
I’m full classy,
at least gold,
at least sped up, speedy rush
on a herky-jerky public transit ride.

I’m killing,
or maybe dead,
a glamor god glamped down
into perennial party pooper.

I’m riding.
I’m the assassin plus.
I’m so tired from it, thus
I slip myself an allergy pill

to quell my well-earned sleep germs.
So speedy, so shameful. Tonight’s rest’ll
turn me husk, healthier.

∩

Thea Brown is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Loner Forensics (Northwestern University Press 2023). Recent or forthcoming poems can be found in Bennington Review, the tiny, Action, Spectacle, River Styx, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore and teaches creative writing at the George Washington University.

One Poem

(re)vision process (triptych)

∩

Nam Hoang Tran is a multidisciplinary artist living in New Orleans. Recent work appears in RESOURCES, bethh, Indefinite Space, Feral Dove, Action, Spectacle, and like a field, among others. W/ Henry Goldkamp, he co-edits TILT - a journal of intermedia poetics.

Two Poems

ACID FLASHBACK

Kids kicked rocks in potholes
Put everything on red
Lost it in Switzerland

Burnt out in the drive thru
This parking lot was my favorite
And I really love parking

Have to be emphatic
In the haze of destiny
The endgame was plural

Paucity and lapsed focus
The flowers and the flowers
The sunshine in the sunshine

Especially the sunshine at night
Institutionalized weed smoke
Epidemiologically garbage ideas

Drove humvees into the information
Watched the internal telecasts
Drank proverbial bong water

Projected onto walls of hearts
High octane anachronistic
Experiences and life events

Tickets at the meat counter

What the bad feeling meant
When the bad feeling meant
What the bad feeling meant

Grwm while the world ends
Shout out to the true souls
DJ at 5:30 Wednesdays 99.1

You know a small part of me
Never left the movie
And faded into light at the mall

PRECALC

Smoke cigarettes with me tonight
Stand in sunbeams with the gold
Like there will be no sun tomorrow
PS I don’t want to go through life
Handcuffed to some blasted notions
Feeling sad about the old light
Demons shut off after a minute
Screen’s never gonna load bro
Remembering has gotten so bad
I write the memories on my arm now
I’m unsure I can handle window
Please define “business”
I wanna hear that last song
I wanna hear you sing it

∩

Ian Fishman is a poet from Northampton, MA. He’s the author of CALM DOWN! (Factory Hollow Press) and Football Rockstar (illicit zines / blush). Recent writings can be found in Little Mirror and BOMB. He operates a poetry refrigerator named Press Brake.

One Poem

A few notes on a passage from Yasunari Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness

There are many forms of the present
tense. I can say, I am at the baths, on the phone
with my father, and my father knows I am

at the baths. Whereas, I can say, in writing:
I am at the baths, and the reader might suspect
that the present tense is substituting

for the past, especially as the narrative
continues into what happened then: I move
into the hotter water. A church group is here

with us, bathing in their heavy dark blue garments.
Whereas, I can say, in writing: I am born
prematurely, my lungs still a little suspended

in the hot water of my mother, and the reader
knows, without a doubt, that a substitution
has occurred, the present tense serving

as a translation of the past, translation
having occurred in my attempt to make
the past more urgent and continuous.

In writing, I can say, My paperback gets soaked
on one side from magnesium water
and on the other from light rain that falls in short

increments, the cover lamination resisting
saturation until it doesn’t––the rain like a line
repeated aloud, again and again, memorization

occurring, finally, like a death. And it is clear
to the reader that the rain has already fallen.
The book was already more or less ruined,

though I have finished reading it regardless,
on the train. I have already done the work
of comparing the poetic line to the rain.

∩

Jane Huffman’s (she/her) debut poetry collection, Public Abstract, won the 2023 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. She is a doctoral candidate in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver and has an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, and elsewhere. Jane was a 2019 recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Author’s note: Thanks to H.E. Fisher for inspiring this poem.

One Essay

There Is Not One Thing in a Thing: Three Things

Shusaku Endo’s The Sea and Poison

To be on the safe side, Kudo attached the envelope to the inside pocket of his jacket with a safety-pin. Every time he moved, the tip of the safety-pin caught his chest. When he dwelt on the fact that the money contained in that envelope had been contributed for his sake by the faithful of this country, he felt a vague sense of pain in his chest.

Shusaku Endo’s writing is an erotics of the nose. His Foreign Studies (1965) bookends Kudo/Tanaka: Kudo, a foreign exchange student in Rouen—post-war—a benefactory of a religious organization; Tanaka, a professor of French literature on a grant, in France, there to research Sade.
        Endo’s writing, largely contemplated, at least formally, for its content—religion, faith, war—east/west stuff—is, to me, a formal marvel. Watch him, up there, clamp his metaphor, about the position Kudo finds himself in, onto its literal double: the money (via its safety-pin clip affixed chest-approximate) causes a catch in the chest; the money, as it is thought about, catches his chest.
        I am immediately reminded about a scene from Claire Denis’ film 35 Shots of Rum (2008) in which Lionel, a train conducteur, sees himself on a horse galloping ahead on the tracks, he is riding the horse that carries him and his beloved daughter. It is a very close image to use, invoking his feelings of protection and conveyance around his daughter, as many shots in this film, in the lay of its reality, are of him driving his daughter on his motorcycle.
Endo tightens his metaphor, or image, like Denis, tight tight onto the nose, it becomes almost, these coincidences, insane.
        In his novel The Sea and Poison (1957)—

Underneath the poplar tree, the old man was still at it with his shovel.

Suguro, a medical student, is conscripted into participating in a series of human vivisections of American POWs, in World War II Japan. From inside the hospital, he at times observes an old man, an “odd jobs man,” digging a hole under a tree and he contemplates the purpose. None is ever apparent.
     A fruitless hole. A burial?
        Suguro’s odd, conscripted job will be the same.
        Endo is obvious, but nothing is, because there is horror everywhere and horror horroring here, now, west, east.
        It’s obvious but is it, because it’s never over, is it?
        I have never met a writer—Endo—so moral and stylish.
        The Sea and Poison cuts in time and narration—it reads like a new wave film—which disorients or excites the reality that you are on the nose, and that every metaphor, or image, is a scene of uncanny—so, so close—return. Reminds me of Isaac Babel—

The orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head—

who described the sky from a war. The image of the sun (severed head, rolling) is a literal double of what is actually going on, on Earth.

Reminds me of Conrad, who wrote Heart of Darkness (1899) within the time of its horrors, during Europe’s “scramble for Africa” (1885-1914). So close. Onto the nose. He spelled it out, wholly, and woolly (remember those two women, sitting out in the waiting room of the Belgian trading company’s offices, knitting interminably, purpose indeterminate, that black wool??). His novel is a description of this trade (genocide) as it was operating as Europe’s subconscious, in those very years of the establishment of that concept, the subconscious (est. 1893), Europe’s colonial incursions and genocides like something you wouldn’t be able to think about, having no reasonable access to it, on a rue.
           Endo, like Conrad, wrote about horror in, basically, real time, and both wrote from the perspectives of their fellow citizens, might as well have been them.

Tanaka, the professor in Foreign Studies who is sort of failing at becoming a meaningful Sadean scholar, visits the rue des Capucins in Marseille, where Sade stayed in 1772, in a house where he and his valet, Latour, have an all-night orgy with four young prostitutes, feeding them the aphrodisiacal Spanish fly extract; about this, he is to be procured (he’s on the run) and decapitated—

He wanted to grope around and lick those hollows in the stone upon which Sade and the women must have trampled. This was the most positive, the most honest of all his emotions concerning Sade.

 
He wants to lick the stone.
        He doesn’t—

Tanaka leant against the wall and began wondering what it was about those hollows in the stone which aroused in him that numbing sensation.

That is the Endoic tragedy. To have not licked it. Placed your image, your tongue, right there.

Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day

It is not a question of any particular kiss, but rather that the kiss, in itself, opens on to the bite, and the taste of blood. And consequently it is a question of another well known coupling, that of Eros and Thanatos: not in a dialectic of opposites, but in a mutual excitation and exasperation, each asking the other to go further, to go all the way to the end, to get completely lost. —Jean-Luc Nancy, “Icon of Fury,” 2008

In Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001), it is just like that.
        Like The Sea and Poison, it tells of medical experimentation, human subjects. Dr. Léo Sémeneau uses mosses, plants derived in colonized space—Guyana—to work on issues of the nervous system, the libido, on a fellow doctor, Dr. Shane Brown, and on his own wife, Coré. The treatment has gone thick. Béatrice Dalle and Vincent Gallo (uh oh) are so sick with interest in eating, actually, who they fuck. They can’t keep it down. It’s a human vivification.
        I read Nancy’s 2008 essay (his film criticism?) as pure fanfic—his desire to be inside of it, to be with this film, to enact the film in his bloodraving own sentences. I read it years before I saw Trouble Every Day.
        I felt I had seen it.
        I knew I could not see it.
        I’ve fainted at so many things, at, let’s see—
        Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts at La Colombe in Fishtown (Philly), I staggered to the bathroom and took off my shirt (hot) and crumpled on a toilet. It was the sink-top castration of Brad, I think.
        Under the Banner of Heaven, I was on a Greyhound bus to Seattle in 2009, thinking I’d move there, politely blacking out in my seat, coming to only to the interminable trip still. Krakauer’s depiction of knife-murder, quiet and certain, caused, in me, psychologically, tossed salad, scrambled eggs…
        Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, I was on the back patio at Good Karma (Philadelphia more), it was that combination of drinking blood and the whole intimated feeling of heroin addiction, plus pedophilia, it’s the combinations that make me faint. The Sea and Poison, in the back bedroom in North Adams, MA, 2020, its final vivisection scene where they cut into their patient’s lung in order to see how long cutting it would take to be a death. Blood is washing onto the floor. Drains will do it.
So one has to be careful, so I held Denis’ film, red, under my tongue for years, wrapped up in Nancy’s essay.
        I was sucking on it through the paper.

When I watched it, I could.
        I’ve watched it many times. I still close and squint and pass my eyes onto the ceiling, that waiting emollient of eyesight.
        I can’t watch it all.
        I listened to its soundtrack, in 2012, while writing my first novel, The University of Pennsylvania (2014), and only, too, while I was menstruating. I put myself in a Pavlovian situation for sure. You could play its soundtrack (by Tindersticks), and I would menstruate for you and I’d move to write the same story again about eternal bleeding. 

At the end of this film is a scene of rape and murder. Dr. Shane Brown cannot suppress his issue. About the fuck-eating. He corners a hotel maid in her hotel’s basement, and he rapes her, and he bites her vagina.
        The nose.
        It’s unlike the earlier parts of this movie. It’s not what you think the movie is doing, despite its previous violences which were more stylish, they had a milieu. It moves into a totally brutal third act.
        I think about Denis’ domination, and her collaboration, her dominocollaboration with Gallo and Florence Loiret Caille, who plays this maid, and with Agnes Godard, her cinematographer. She might have held Agnes’ back—she says she does this often in their work together—as it’s being filmed, holding her cinematographer’s back, beholding the rape, making rape with marigold wool.
        A color of extreme intensity, saturated. The rape is like the sun with its head ripped off. It is such an extreme scene. The director is driving this train, conductrice, she makes it so very violent, so furious and so worse, it is iconic, it is hers. She is the worst, the most. She refuses others the position. She removes the filming of rape, the making of rape, from the domain of others who would want to make it theirs, dominating Gallo, telling him what to do, how to act, when to stop, he is surrounded.

Portable Shrine

I wrote this whole book, The University of Pennsylvania, about a college student who menstruates a lot out of a double womb (“womb duplicatum”) at that esteemed, perennial school in Philadelphia. I wrote it in Montana, then in Utah. And I wrote a second novel (in Massachusetts) that takes place at Good Karma, a coffee shop of this city I was born in, and, two days before I was, my mother’s OB rapes her in his office at the hospital, where I was born two days later, growing up to write a third novel, a comedy about gynecological crime set in Philadelphia and in homage to Shusaku Endo’s The Sea and Poison. But I haven’t managed to be gainfully employed in the city.
I didn’t even know that when I was writing it. I told my mother what I was up to (I said, “Don’t worry, I’m not writing about you this time,” to which she said, “You are writing about me. Funny thing.” She hadn’t said it to anyone ever before). Later—I’d been walking around in a bludgeoned manner, with this news—she said, “Include what happened in your novel.”
In Philadelphia, my jobs have only been odd. I’ve made some money as the official underwear-washer of the long-running show Menopause the Musical, and at a movie theater, and at a fucked-up bookstore. I got $5 per theatre review once for something called The Philadelphia Theatre Review, from a man named something like Frank who sent me checks, sweet Frank, and I adjuncted at the now closed (dubiously) University of the Arts, 3200/class, which is, frankly, like a $5 check. I interviewed, once, to work at a different fucked up bookstore. I was implored by its owner to write a review of Philip Roth’s Everyman, which I did promptly, it was published, I saw it there, in his bookstore’s newsletter, I guess he published job applications there, never again contacting the applicants, the women, I’m sure, the young everywomen, I’m sure he had a scheme to traffic all of our generous, job-wanting thoughts about Roth, without pay or notice.

I live in Cleveland, where I have found a job. Cleveland has given me some things I have long been searching for.
It’s a shame.
Because in Philadelphia, I am comfortable and confident, knowledgeable about interaction and being. My usual experience of overwhelming amounts of disorientation in space, and about what is happening, recedes lushly in my living-in-Philadelphia system. I know where I am in that grid. I believe I stand somewhat, affectively, on the shoulders of my mom’s work as a paralegal at Community Legal Services for over 30 years. In my interactions at, say, Rittenhouse Market, buying a kombucha and a banana, I am confident in part (eye-contact, joking, knowing where I fucking am) because of my mom’s public service in the city, her contributions to its social fabric, her workaday determination to believe and stand, before judges, for people who were in need of disability assistance from the city, herself disabled, so, sitting—her tiny apartment in South Philadelphia, the pottery that is there.
In Cleveland, my office is nearby the Cleveland Museum of Art (world class and free, it’s extremely nice) and in a novel middle age (42), I’m fastened rapturously to its vast wing of antiquities. I’ve never felt this way before about them.

A Tibetan portable shrine from 1500 is on the younger side. The oldest thing here is from 3000 BC, a potentially Western Anatolian “stargazer” of translucent marble. Tiny. The portable shrine from Tibet is diminutive, as well, and carved from a single log of wood, with mineral and metal elements.
        Its figures practice Tantric Buddhism, its details—detailing is—are so so tantric. The minutest toe, arm, figures of prayer and action, one might be biting a leather strap, in what seems the lush overhangs of forest stuff, these details and arms coming from the wet, wood-dark depths of this miniaturish space. You could close it up. It has hinges. You can’t. It’s within glass.
        And yes I feel I want to lick it. To feel my tongue going in the grooves of the many bodies positioned in the forest in the log in three rows going across three panels that can close. Blackish. I would like to feel the ridges of the details, and this extremely exquisite corrugation of these protectors therein of Tantric Buddhism, rippling in a millioness of knobs, toes, strap, on my tongue, completely lost.
        Writing to a friend about it all: Maybe we are all just very very young, very silly. Maybe humanity is just silly string, David. But that can’t be true—look at antiquities. 
        I want to lose my face in this shrine, in Cleveland. Its name suggests I could take it with me. But the glass. Propriety. There’s respect. The closest I would get is if I accidentally, coming so very close to look, bump my nose on this glass. Would, I’ve long held, is a warbling word.

∩

Caren Beilin is the author of the novel Sea, Poison (New Directions, 2025). Her previous books include Revenge of the Scapegoat (Dorothy, 2022)—winner of the Vermont Book Award for Fiction—Blackfishing the IUD (Wolfman Books, 2019), Spain (Rescue Press, 2018), The University of Pennsylvania (Noemi Press, 2014), and the chapbook Americans, Guests, or Us (Diagram/New Michigan Press, 2012). Some of these titles have been published abroad with The Last Books (Amsterdam) and los tres editores (Madrid). She lives in Cleveland and is an Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University.

One Story

Inter-Species Solutions

I

A friend of mine from the West Coast once mentioned that he had a purebred family living in his guesthouse. Before I could even ask him what he meant, his daughter also moved into his guesthouse and I quickly realized that they too were ‘integrated’ animal-human hybrids or ‘coyote people,’ complete with hind legs, feral eyes, and even a skinny tail. I was offered a ‘traditional hybrid meal’ which consists of boiled carrion, an assortment of mosquitoes and flies, and French onion soup ‘for good measure,’ I was told. The meal was meticulously prepared and not a moment was wasted as this was not just mealtime; it was a strategic refueling. We drank puddle water out of pint glasses. It had rained the night before. After supper, we all discussed the Federal Reserve. My friend’s daughter began diving into future interest rates and fiscal mismanagement. Future paths must include balance sheets. She knew more than my friend and I combined. I wasn’t surprised. Unlike other hybrids, human coyotes can speak perfect English and often have a surprising vocabulary. A human-coyote hybrid usually possesses the ability to manage finances for the rest of the hybrid community. Soon enough, when you go to H&R Block to do your taxes, you will see a feral coyote-human eager to take on the job! Just remember that every human coyote is different, so don’t expect every one of them to have such a keen eye for numbers.

II

I have a super clean graduate student currently living in my fire escape. Well, technically two, counting myself. We are both down here. Both of us are non-matriculated but course-intensive. We like what we like and that’s what we do. Enough of the silky stuff. Real talk. Gamers only. We play war games. We have long talks. We talk forever. There’s no conflict. There’s no cause for alarm. We’re still in school. What are the chances you’ve seen us? How do you expect us to care if you think we aren’t doing what we should be? How could we become what we were if we weren’t likely to become what we could be? The choices, although our very own, are miscalculated and without purpose. The purposes are convenient, untroubled, and always expected. Check your privilege. Check the place you last checked. My grievance is with the place, not what happened there. Feel your hands within the place they should have been. There is a milky place you can’t personify. A likely place you came to become immersed in. My graduation ceremony wasn’t canceled, it was postponed to a later date. The date was today so here you are celebrating my graduation with me. We did it. The three of us. Let’s drink. Let’s have drinks. Let’s raise the roof! Let’s have a toast! Raise your glass to the place you came from, and go back! Let’s go celebrate on the roof because it won’t be another fiscal year until we can go back inside.

III

A decent roommate is a rare species, most often an inconvenience, in my case no exception. My options and time were limited so I looked to the hybrid community for answers. The first detail I noticed about hybrids is that contrary to popular belief they do not prefer to live among each other and instead prefer thoroughbred humans for company. C’est la vie. As far as I am concerned, I do not have any coyote lineage, but you never know. Sometimes surprises exist where we least expect them. I was surprised to learn there were two coyote-hybrids on the board of trustees at my alma-mater. There were three initially, but one went to work for the coast guard after growing tired of the academic life. I get it. I’ve had to move around, which is why it’s been so hard to find someone dependable who isn’t just a random off Craigslist or Friendfinder. No, someone like that would not work at all. Also, I do not have the luxury of living on the West Coast or in New England, so options vary. Sometimes one has to cut their losses as an effort towards practicality. My friend from the West Coast introduced me to the surrogate coyote humans he knew via Skype and through their resources I met a coyote human who was living a mere fifteen miles away right by the Civic Center. “Love can never die,” was tattooed on their forearm in cursive script. We were off to an OK start.

IV

My new rule is no grad students in my fire escape or anywhere in my building. I have spoken to the superintendent and she agrees with me; hybrids work both smarter and harder than grad students. The super clean one who was living in my fire escape is now aware of the fact that he has to leave and he is admittedly scorned. I told him that I had taken him and his studies seriously and he merely replied, “Why do you think you can control the narrative?” Too much education. Every time I lay out the primary issue with him staying here he says I have “coopted the narrative” or I am attempting to bring in the more interesting hybrid character before I have made a proper introduction or resolution for his whiny antics. Every evening there are Sutter Home bottles in the hallway and he has been requesting to use the hallway supply closet to take sponge baths which he knows is both unacceptable and unsanitary. When he offers to share his Sutter Home with me I try to explain to him it isn’t even his wine! He has taken the supplies for the superintendent’s daughter’s spring jubilee, an event planned for several months. No more war games. No more sleeping on the fire escape. No more dialectic arguments with the day laborers who have been trying to fix the roof for over a year now despite this layabout in the fire escape, enough is enough. Time to clean up shop and circle back to the blonde district near the Science Center.

V

Hybrid living is sort of like van life; not all it is cracked up to be. My new hybrid roommate had a few ideas that made me even more uncomfortable than my last roommate. I was under the impression hybrids have ways to “cover up” their exposed areas with a loin cloth or a harness. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Within the first few hours, I was a mere inches away from my new hybrid roommate’s family jewels as he insisted on doing pilates in the common space while watching Nip/Tuck. Every morning the drain was also clogged because of the coarse hair from his tail. Each shower was over an hour long. The smell was too much. The water bill became unreasonable and I tried not to make a big deal at first but suddenly I found myself wading through inches of gray bathwater. Out of a strange passive-aggressive impulse, one day I allowed the water backflow to flood the entire bathroom while he was focused on his pilates. I scampered down my private balcony and watched from street view. He did nothing! The whole place flooded and this was completely normal to him. Up until this moment I hadn’t realized every mammal has a learning curve. Inter-special relations are not as simple as they appear from a tertiary glance. Property damage is very serious and can be held over your head for the rest of your life! Before making the same mistake I did, be sure to do some serious research and don’t just go along with the trends.

VI

Now that I have graduated, I can take some time to reflect. Through alumni services I have managed to stay in touch with the culture on campus and I have attended several functions. There was recently an adaptation of “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof,” that was full of some of the finest young coyote-hybrid castmates I have ever seen. They all shined in their different roles. Maggie was more beautiful than I ever remember, she hid her tail, while Brick just let his proudly flow. Of course, I have forgiven my old roommate for the damages he caused in our old living space. It turns out, having a skinny tail can be a hinderence no matter where you live, which you can watch in great detail on “Coyote Home Remodeling,” weeknights on HGTV. It turns out there are much bigger problems out there than a couple fixable holes in the wall. I wish I wasn’t so uptight back then. Live and learn, I guess. The world is so different from what it was when I began my degree. Hybrid studies are now all the rage! There is a whole program now focused on the future of human-hybrid relations—it’s history in the making. Support is finally here. That’s right! There are now several endowment programs set in place to put an emphasis for new coyote-friendly resources on campus. There is an option for eating “small mammals” in the cafeteria. There are also puddle water and river water options at the soda fountain. Yes, I have tried both, and I still prefer birch beer. Old habits die hard.

COYOTE-HYBRID CAST STUNS AUDIENCE IN UNIVERSITY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS ADAPTATION

The cast and crew of “Cat On A
Hot Tin Roof,” comprised of six
all coyote-human hybrid cast-
mates, brought tears and standing
ovation to audiences this Saturday.
‘We’re extremely proud of the way
this show turned out, but this
group always seems to impress us
and remind us why we are here,’
said Faculty Advisor Betty Preston.
The production took place at
Tribunal University, and was
directed by former student actor
and current drama instructor
Justin House (52) who recently
accepted a Jimmy award for last
year’s outstanding production of
Neil Simon’s “Sweet Charity.”
This is the first fully “Hybrid”
stage production we have seen
so far from the team at Tribunal.
“It’s only left us wanting more,”
remarked sophomore Julian SMITH.”

THEATRE REVIEW 9-18-25, AP

∩

Alex Hampshire (born 1985) is a coyote enthusiast as well as the author of Furniture Activism (hysterically real), Techno Pest Management, Law Culture, Charity/Extortion, National Water (Lunar Chandelier), Red Light Camera Ahead (CWD), Appreciate The Pre-Decisions (New Books), and the upcoming full-length Have Fun Pretending, which will be available later this month from The Creative Writing Department. He oversees the newly established imprint Waste Management. His work has appeared in Fence, Clock, Boxx, DaisyWorld, Gerry Mulligan, Death and Life of American Cities, Elective Affinities, Baited Area, New Hunter’s Review, Gauss PDF, and other publications.

One Poem

∩

Mike Corrao is the author of several books including Being Towards Death, Gut Text, and Surface Studies. He lives in the Midwest.

What Occurs Outside the Proscenium: On Henry Goldkamp’s Joybuzzer

Henry Goldkamp, JOY BUZZER: A Clown Show, Ricochet Editions, September 2025, 76 Pages

“Hi, I’m Henry!”

I don’t remember how Henry and I met—only that it wasn’t via his performance. I did not meet Henry this way, no. This is not how Henry Goldkamp introduced himself to me. We met in New Orleans while he was a part of the audience; he was tempered, almost shy, a quiet presence taking photographs. Not the clown-ish demeanor he usually displays in the world, the clown poetics showcase that is his work. Henry was not performing that day, he was there to watch me read, he was there to watch Olivia Muenz read. This work was not about him.

Later, I watched Henry perform Joy Buzzer in a Kansas City brewery while a basketball game flashed on the multiple TVs. Later, Henry read in Philadelphia inside a smashed basement of a bookstore wearing a suit; he brought his clown antics, his name tags, his energy. 

Imagine a troupe of clowns. Imagine many Henrys: “Hi, I’m Henry.” By engaging the audience in dialogue, a performance of everyday life, Henry is duplicating himself through time, twisting the spectators’ minds into thinking through how they show up every day. I was given a nametag. Everyone was given a name tag—we are now in the performance whether we like it or not. He is engaging the body, duplicating what occurs outside the proscenium. 

Joy Buzzer, Henry Goldkamp’s debut full-length collection of poetry, published by Ricochet Editions, cannot exist without the body, without the physical performative act. Henry Goldkamp cannot exist without the input of those surrounding him. The poetics we see on the page are only possible through the daily interactions the poet participates in with his friends, family, and larger poetic community. The book is a collection of friendship. Just see the “acknowledgements” page. It is an ode to being a part of something, a testimony constructing disparate nodes into a freakish, exciting entirety. 

“BUZZ,” there’s my phone. We are both in our offices, mine is at Temple University, Henry’s is at LSU in Baton Rouge. I am an adjunct, Henry has more of a permanent position. We make some jokes about having windows. Har har. I look out onto the academic horizon, windows encased in, made of Brutalism. We talk about the Russian Constructivists. We are both indebted to the Soviet Modernists. Henry’s office does not have a window. 

Joy Buzzer is also the phone call. 

I’m on the train back to Philly from a reading I traveled to Pittsburgh for—“BUZZ,” there’s my phone, the connection again. Only if I’m willing to pick up. “Hahhh,” I am in Harrisburgh, Henry is in Old City. A disjunction until that evening. Henry is on a book tour. Philadelphia is his last stop. We smoke cigarettes. I apologize for a life lived well and stupidly. I do not need to apologize. Yet. A necessity of friendship—discord in language, our previous choices. Clown poetics, clowning around, cloning. Our contact zone: the parking lot before Dahlak. 

Henry, Juliet, and I are around a pool. We are at a pool party in New Orleans—a backyard. Henry wears a robe, some Playboy Mansion slippies. I have to say goodbye: it’s 1 am. I must fly back to Philadelphia the next day. I circumambulate the pool hugging my farewells with everyone who’s left: the poets from Cleveland, the poets from New Orleans, the poets from Massachusetts, the poets from Denver. This is taking me a long time. I do not leave for another half hour. There’s always a delay with care, a change in logical attitude and plans. Our contact zone: the heated pool. 

We drove to the backyard from the Poetry Festival—Juliet, Mike, Henry, myself. We are us. We are who we say we are. Yet—we were performing as readers, academics, experts, audience members, contributors to the haptics of meeting for the duration of the day. Earlier in the festival, Henry and I were sitting on the sidewalk smoking cigs—two of his former students walked by. Who’s Henry? Who am I? Who’s Juliet? 

The performance continues. 

By giving a nametag to the audience member, Henry allows for the individual to briefly break their own identity by assuming a new fixture, an outlandish impossibility to be the moon. But are we not the moon? The body’s watery crescendos. The phases of the moon in the daily tussle. 

Henry walks around the room, shakes your hand, looks you in the eyes, introduces himself. Responds, moves on. The joy buzzer is the handshake, the buzz, electrifieeddddd. The contact. 

The moon is repeated throughout the book and the performance—the nametag, the moon, the choice to be the moon. Where is the moon? The moon comes in many phases—no wonder it continues to appear. 

“Hi I’m Henry.”

“Hello my name is the Moon,”

“Night doesn’t need your stupid beauty mark, you shit-bum balloon. Fuck your little boots – and fuck your walk, too.”

The performance and the name tags, anew throughout his work and clown exterior, ulterior, motives, alterior, motives, movies…

“Hello my name is the Moon.”

“You strike me as the type of person to put a twenty in the laundromat changer machine just to hear the sound of a jackpot.”

This book cannot exist without the embodiment of Henry’s performance. It is a script. It is also a score—how to break up the 2D existences of what poetry is and can do. How to follow the thread or the lead. I tell my students that poetry is physical. I introduce the line, “To piss is to make poetry.” I do not know nor remember who wrote it. Poetry lives in the physical world. To piss is to make poetry. To piss. The quotidian action. The seemingly base act of pissing or introducing oneself turns into the performativity that affects the audience. I think of the encounter with a server behind the scenes, in the kitchen, or back, and then how they behave in the dining room. Does Henry Goldkamp wear a suit at home? 

The business and the clown. 

The business of being a clown. Is what we do not a business tactic? Our jobs and dreams: academia and poetry, the success and the accolades we seek. Henry teaches poetry and clowning at LSU. Henry teaches composition and first year writing. The joy of interaction. The joy of naming one’s kids Hart and Crane. The joy of communing—“buzzzzz” there goes my phone. “Buzzzz” there go the: 

“Hello my name is getting old.”

“I never anymore say no to children asking me for cigarettes, even if it’s my last.”

Henry’s responses do not make logical sense. That’s the beauty, or the catch. Recently many people around me, myself included, have been impulsively making relational decisions, as though a virulence. This does not make practical sense. Getting old does not prevent anyone from giving children cigarettes—in fact, according to Henry, it is encouraged. We are constantly introduced to the backwards nature of logic, the backwards nature of the contact zone unrelated to narrative.

Yet. 

This is living in the world, being of the world and a community intact with other humans. We make choices. The response to the introduction can go in any direction; that’s the mobility of communication. Henry asks the reader-audience to consider how we are within ourselves. Our spectrum. What does the surrounding space tell us? How are we in space? What is being produced? The feeling—where does it lead us? Reminding me of Eve Kosofky Sedwig’s comment in Touching Feelings on the affect of a-hard-to-articulate book: “it conveys an affective and aesthetic fullness that can attach even to the experiences of cognitive frustration.” Henry produces a cognitive frustration laying the groundwork for asideness, besideness, touching, in connection with what’s beyond. Joy Buzzer doesn’t look to continue nor progress, but touch, connect, find the contact zone, the contact point—what can happen with a bunch of strangers in a room who expect a traditional poetry reading? 

What happens when a book is scripted for your interpretation? 

“Hello my name is the moon.”

“Oh fuck you. You couldn’t write a poem out of a wet paper bag. You don’t even have hands.”

My hands are writing this review. Hello, my name is Olga. Hello, I’m looking out on the moon. Hello, the moon is gone, it’s new. Hello, today is the eclipse. Hi, I’m Henry. The connection is in the handshake. The demand. The other. The world.

∩

olga mikolaivna was born in Kyiv and works in the (intersectional/textual) liminal space of photography, word, translation, and installation. She has multiple publications out with Tilted House and a forthcoming chapbook, “our monuments to California,” she calls them, with Ursus Americanus. Her translation of Stanislav Belsky’s first full length collection in English will be out with Dialogos / Lavender Ink. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Temple University.

Four Poems

For Sarah

Any soft place to rest your head a miracle.
Impatience is understandable, given
the lack of breaths remaining.
Sheepish & frantic, going from room to room,
but the house empty. Nowhere
to sit inside. Or out.
Outside the future furniture awaits,
like us hoping the forces
contorting us thru the days
are benevolent. Unlike sheep,
we’re untrustable. Unable
to adjust our eyes to benevolence.
No furniture is miraculous. A glossary. But
from miracles, we’re able to rearrange.

For Bertram

To wake up in tears is no way to wake up
& meet the day, already up & ready & hungry
for any meat that fills its plate. We serve
Ourselves into the day’s chomping feet first—

happy to be free of dreams extending
our terror into rest & making unrestful
Any shut-eye we’re lucky to steal from waking,
from our head-sad body-anxious days,
strung together like an infinite string of xmas
Lights, pulling together every terrible holiday
we’ve ever survived into the future, waiting
w/ a mouth filled w/ bloody mornings—

To wake up in tears to a day as sick as every other day,
tears tasting like nickels. A tear in our dreaming.

For Ford (Heist Movie)

Transition not a comfort, no choice but
To continue. Leave on your hands
If you must. Transmissions incoming
Always—the trick is listening to them &
Letting them listen to you. It’s a band—
A collection of bandits transitioning from
Breach to score to getaway to anonymity.

No one should know what you’re doing,
Especially you. No surprise for the writer,
No soup & no ladle. A bowl to swirl tears.
Transition from hunger to satisfaction &
See what else improves for every animal
You know. For the ones you don’t, who are
More important & who won’t snitch on you.

For Benjamin (Take Me To Feel)

Nine tiny red blooms candle the empty
Room into a particular set of atmospheric
Conditions where the beat licks off the
Magnets & forms shapes in the air a dance
B/t tables the air turning bends & folds
Like it’s feeling. Sensitive as a loose speaker
Wire & alive as much as any dust once was,
Before being shed. We were once alive,
Before being shed by friends & strangers.

Forgetting how to talk. Forgetting the beat
& how to be kept. A feral electricity. I feel
More social in spirit than I remember being.
I don’t remember being. My hands remember
Red & warm by candle & shot & pressure drop.

∩

Ryan Collins is the author of A New American Field Guide & Song Book and several chapbooks. Recently he was a finalist in the DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press Chapbook Contest and the Sixth Finch Chapbook Contest. His work has appeared in Apartment, The Biscuit Hill, Ninth Letter, Past Ten, Sink Review, swamp pink, and many other places. He hosts the SPECTRA Reading Series in Rock Island, IL, where he lives.

One Story

Graduate School

In the year when Roberto Bolaño passed away, my lover, who studied in the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Iowa, read the Chilean writer aloud to me, in the original Spanish, right before bed as we lay on his twin mattress. There, he would be holding The Savage Detectives in one hand and me in the other. He had been translating it into Vietnamese for the master’s program. “How about English first?” I said, with a grin. “Someday,” he said, laughing. Most nights, then, he would read to me, in Spanish, or sometimes whatever Vietnamese he had come with, and I would be there with him, lying down with my hand on his chest, and simply listening to him speak. Just like that, we learned of Mexico City and its Visceral Realists, wishing to ourselves that we could be just like them, after which we fell asleep at some indeterminate time, well late in the night, and then, by a morning just as overdue, knew not of where we had left off on his tattered paperback before having entered into that solitary space where our dreams must have been. By the daytime, whenever we weren’t making love in his bedroom, or mine, we put ourselves to the Work. We thought about our dreams here. We sailed in the wake of where Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano had gone, were going, and would go. We were graduate students, trying to prove our parents wrong about what we had set ourselves out to do here. My lover thus worked on his translation in our mother tongue slowly, but surely, while I went to the Workshop every week to turn in chapters which no one liked, short stories which would end up having no future, at all, with any magazine in America that people knew. Still, however, my lover liked everything I was writing back in those days. He must have been the only one who did. On those rare days when I all of a sudden felt inspired to write, as if by some kind of miracle, I would find myself having gotten up early, hours before him, to pick my clothes up from his floor and then head down to Clinton Street, to the Reading Room, where I would try to write something and then later, as always, show it to him first before anyone else. “It sounds like Roberto Bolaño, if he were ever in English,” my lover would often say, with a laugh. “Maybe you should be translating him to English, then,” I would say back, grinning. Most evenings, after classes, he and I would take long, meandering walks down the lonesome, empty streets of Iowa City, discuss the movements or lack thereof to our lives before rows of empty German beer bottles piled up atop the bartops of those local dives lining Downtown, and then head back to his place, or mine, in those old dormitories meant for graduate students like us where we would oftentimes throw on a record of the Carpenters, make some kind of love, and then simply lay there afterward, naked and still ensnared with one another, to talk about how the Work was going, supposing that it had been for the either of us. We would then dream our dreams, out loud, and eventually come up with one, together, for when we would finally be done with graduate school. It was such a pathetic dream, the one we had, but it would have been enough, or so I still think. Some dreams end up being very simple ones. I loved him, and he loved me. Even when we weren’t making love, or falling asleep together, his door was only ever a floor away from mine in those two years we were in Iowa City. Whenever I needed him, I could always go up to him, and he would be there, and whenever he needed me, he could come down whenever he wanted, and I would do anything for him. Our years of graduate school thus went by in that mundane, oftentimes hapless, way—the translating, the writing, the loving and lovemaking. Barely, we graduated, and even barer, what we had to show for it. My lover never managed to sell his Vietnamese translation, and in the thick of those years when he had worked on it, everything belonging to Roberto Bolaño was slowly, but surely, finding its way into English already, without his help, and getting published everywhere, by New Directions Publishing, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, by The New Yorker, all the while my novel, the one about a Vietnamese family living in my hometown, in Orange County, was pitched for several years to dozens of publishing houses until my agent finally let me go, telling me over a phone call that it would never, ever be acquired by any publisher in America. My lover and I then separated, partly because of how the Work had gotten the better of us, partly because we didn’t really know, anymore, who we were, whether to ourselves and to each other, without it. Thus, we moved on, and took on jobs in the real world—him, at the Department of State, in Washington, and me, not too far away, at Random House, in Midtown Manhattan, both to Work on someone else’s dreams and never our own, nor the one we once had in common, the one I have never, ever told anyone about because it makes me feel pathetic. I wonder if you still remember it. It’s the one we were talking about, one of those nights, back in Iowa, where we are living in a Brooklyn apartment, with one bedroom so small that it drives us absolutely insane, even, but still, amid the gray, dreary mornings, when we can hear all of the cars racing underneath our window, we are leaning on the countertop where a phin is slowly brewing our coffee into a glass cup, and we are sitting on the couch as we try to Work on something worth selling to someone else, and we are listening to each other speak, like always, during those nights when we still have no idea who we are, or what we should be doing with our lives, or why we are burning so much of our advances to buy all of those books, Roberto Bolaño finally translated to English, just to pile them on a windowsill and never, ever crack them open to read from them even just once. O, why is it so, do you think? Is it because we are scared that we will never, ever be good enough at the Work, not even in our wildest dreams? I’m asking you a question now. You will then say something comforting to me—which I still can’t imagine the words of, whenever I try to imagine this particular dream—and then you will lie down here with me until tonight gives way to tomorrow, and then I will, like always, end up feeling better about everything, even if for just a moment: and, of course, it’s only because you are here with me, after all, or at least you would have been, in the end, supposing that everything in our lives could have just turned out a little differently.

∩

Binh Do is a writer of both Northern and Southern Vietnamese descent. They are currently based in New York City.

Three Poems

from Plane2

/.

in every stance a vocabulary
transcends elation

you winter on foment vocabulary

if a describe sunset there will never be s

one
poet has a feeling of gut

life sciences explain wisdom
thought
training vocabulary
to be free in orderliness
like trees on crab gravity

horseshoe domain slitness
cadaver wisdom tooth
ancient money brain tooth
slitness, bereaved

clandestine figures, blue stalks, tall, gathered
in text
blood of blue dream

floating upward auto next to wanting code
screaming upside down the fiber trim

how fashionable to be Zen, completely
irrevocable
understanding
sweetness of a threat

/.

when someone has to read against rhythm of a dynamite sky
then
there is no poem

when someone has to tell excellent
switchings of a fiery brain stem
then
clouds gather rain

when the feather has no size

when your mantra is to be feather

then
Sinatra

when the covered bridge
time has escaped my serene attention

in the basement
time has slept underneath my breathing anus

water crest has black black black
resonance
Stanley make it black black
resonance field black black

/.

this paper feels very nice
like an image
of vertigo

no logic
no more of that

it was like there had been a line
in print
in the museum

stairs like tundra
elephants
with spear and grizzle

lemonade of the nights
turns on the hallway
water fountain
and there goes that lizard again

I wonder if that makes me eligible to enter the museum
on account of the fact
that at age 2
I saw my parents
through the fog of something else

a koi pond

this is true
they were there with blurry hands-on-knees
and I thought
I used to know people
kind of like those people

∩

Michael Watkins is a poet from Pennsylvania. Under the pseudonym Ricky Salmonhunter, he has published two chapbooks: Underbellies of the Ancient Cube Trick (Spiral Editions, 2023) and PASTORALLLL (2022). Online, his work has also appeared in Cleveland Review of Books and Keith, LLC. He lives in Philadelphia.

from SEXYRUBIES666

What’s left after work and after school
The half-froze sandwich in a minifridge stuck
~ w e  e m b r a  c e ~  our middles around percolating
Love for soup or fat fucking snowflakes
Flaking the fuck down we are butternut squashed
Slept & fucked all day to be inside you
Or gently lilt from sweaty outlined sheets butter
Fly a surgical tube from my head rubbering
I AM GOING THRU ~sOMeTHiNG~
Yr kidney runs intertwined in the silvery mess
Of lily cylinders move upwards to fall in love above
A bike bar in Arkansas or by a superfund site
On South Hill in Ithaca when you wake
I will wake I will wear your collar

~~~

I will wake I will wear your collar
I will swallow elderfinger at opium fisting dawn
Sobs rupture the tender crest of driveway
Hold my sweating hand to please with ferns
Swallow ~ w e  a r e  b i r  d s ~ to peel you
Cried loudly having not seen stars
Grow lines inside a Zyn pouch left behind
Words swum like a maggot into mine ear
My toe turned purple when I woke
A TELEPHOTO LENS ADORNED WITH CUM
And clouds were real on the other side
The glass frosts over I hear you rumble
Ice loudly expands when you open your mouth
I swam happily naked in the backyard pool

~~~

I swam happily naked in the backyard pool
Held the rope of time spooling / Emptied Itself
Like a takeout container refracting blue microplastic
Bound your body to mirrorteeth of nipple gently swaying
Ankles shaking felt dyed black fibers
DISEMBOWELED WATER MY EYE SHUDDER’D
BOUND the stairwell opened moon of seaglass mounds
~ f e l  t ~ interior water ~ f E L t ~ your cervix city pulsing
BOUND sauna of anguish after work is more
Unending orgasm of work archival urban dirt
I want to fuck you in the supply closet
Of a five-star restaurant
I love you on private property’s margin
By a pool of blood and pig’s fresh head

~~~

By a pool of blood and pig’s fresh head
I hold the rope I give myself sloppy head
Swiss cheese of head lettuce smushed
Sofa cerebellum reflecting oracular emptiness or else
Vanilla yoghurt spilled the rope I lick
The lily blossoms fast from my monolithic spine
I’m in control I’m in my mouth
Of granite anal star distends I hold the rope
Thickening winter fibrous goo of sound
I drip herpetic fingers outspreaded tender
Swampish movement head in mossy sheets
I’M IN CONTROL I HOLD THE ROPE a room hollowed
Swallowing raw beef in glassy life of movement
Spectre of love hanging held your body

~~~

Spectre of love hanging held your body
When I hold the rope the meadow opened
Forearm leaks wingbeat rain brought fresh coffee
Hairs interlocking Latinate yolksak contraction
IN MY HEAD I’M AT HOME INSIDE YR HOLES
Sing bristled scoop or starlingsewn to the bathroom wall
Or snowy window seminal sac of bratty VHS static
To hold you down or else be held in optical nerve
Hanging hung tetanic gem-like contraction
A SYNTAX OF FREEDOM rain & fingering crime
Swallow’d hindgut sexting rectal head I sing the reflex
Cites open, pigeons beat through snow
I love you am thirsty & deliriously sick
The password to the meadow was SexyRubies666

~~~

The password to the meadow was SexyRubies666
My love was an international luxury lifestyle brand
With furious investors, sucked off the server farm
Vultures swallowed firebrats are “wingless, soft-bodied insects”
BEING / BOUND / / A / WAY / OUT it was fetid crime! menace! rats!
Bloodpus infesting carhood chest sternal undone chassis
Fish morphology rectal insect physiology
Unbound from time & bound to you
Unbound from time & bound to love internal princess
Dresses tactile letters cosmic Lego detritus
Love underfoot suffering underfoot lung failure to
Sustain anything more than a vibrant minute I can’t
Keep it with me for ecstasy alcoholism or suicide
For I can’t keep it with me

~~~

I can’t keep it with me I will be soon
Thirty-four and fucking hot fucking
Addicted to fucking and alcohol feeling
Blue thicket of pigeon behavior feeding thumbs
Of ORNERY LOVEEEE gonadal secretion ribs loveeee press constantly
Poetry is time theft of pressing loss in my own body
Ennui of fluorescent light depleted fluid
Shitting one ring backward flick destabilized internal
Temporal fingers throbbing inside feeding
Rewarded with grain induced aggression
Separating dimensional folds in chronically orange light
My labial fern my discharge pattern
Eyes leak cum I’m a fucking baby
Took a picture of myself I saw my self

~~~

Took a picture of myself I saw my self
Disentangle OPENING OF THE FEELD forgot
My daughter’s pink snowboots at daycare
Again it’s so fucking hard I PICK IT UP to write
For milky colostrum plate glass transparent
Food system neon light of PLEASURE FOR EVERYONE
IMMEDIATELY NOW panicking FIRE
Of what’s on the other side of a manic episode
Fewer poems stuck in the thicket licking weed
We can’t get out of latex silk milk or leather trying
I LOVE YOU SO MUCH I COULD JUST DIE
I love you more than the squirrels eating
Each other puking freaking copulating fast
In the corrupting light of the morning moon

∩

Marty Cain is the author of three books of poetry and hybrid writing—most recently, The Prelude (Action Books, 2023). Individual works appear in Denver Quarterly, Best American Experimental Writing, Poetry Daily, Annulet, mercury firs, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi and a PhD from Cornell University. Currently, he is at work on a scholarly monograph about rural poetic community. He co-edits Garden-Door Press and works for Cornell University Library in Ithaca, New York.

Five Poems

Corridor

Corridors of grassland
kept incommunicado
somewhere where the reckless moon is 
berthed only in sun’s oratory

Son of a bitch with syncopated smile
to spike across the raking black
die-gray dust splaying nighty pattycake
the light that laughs in its linty pockets                  

What sucked at the throat’s rivulets  
spends with songbird’s glissading specie
sparse lumen with barter’s keep
pealing at its own vacuumed din

Splendor

Fit is occasioned of splendor

Laugh and pacify
where the sky, catalyzing
is a safe house
paying the passengers
for their balcony
of finished world ardor

what of exposure, governs
to hear itself
to seethe by winter’s
mottled traits

Ignition

Gray ignition rings the horizon
in paranoid style of mother nature
a bath of Permian gunmetal

Here your sky
a long emergency shear ravishing the strata

Learning
its agile eye thrown
primitive against living

Stride

The looker
gives the furniture its

Gunboat stride

A thing of alchemized global night

Next in line
the cotton from the sapper’s mouth

Collapsed
of the nearly beneficial

to have bundled their tithes
in nocturn’s press

Sweep

This is an ad hoc step
add millions
sweep its surface
a seamstress makes an oil slick gulf
with temper of antecedents

Lucidly
luck is depth
lucid is death
stitcher asks for its timing to share
the deft use of momentum
defusing over the jutted truss

What is it to drag out a victim
with the plump sutures
and the structure of state
the marrow of grammar listing in port
sky’d berth slept foregrounded ashen
to run in the toiling charade of delay

∩

Geoffrey Detrani is a visual artist and writer. His artwork is in private, public and museum collections. He is the recipient of multiple artists grants and residencies. He is a two-time recipient of the State of Connecticut Artists Fellowship award. He was the recipient of a World Views residency with a studio on the 91st floor of the former World Trade Center in New York City. His poems have been included in Fence, Aufgabe, Action Yes, New Orleans Review, Black Warrior Review, Parthenon West Review, Grotto, Broken Antler Magazine and Antiphony Press, among other publications, and are forthcoming in Ballast.

Nine Poems

Invention Wanted

I am a basic circuit. I have a good earth connection.

Standby crystal. Standby punched chassis, punched manual.

Bring your finger closer to the oscillator. Slip your tool under the inner conductor.

This is much faster than the usual procedure.

Iron Core or Choke

Fluid may be inserted and allowed to slide down the shaft. Center tapped. Double backed. Off axis. Ribbed or split.

Touch the bare tips to the test. I feel inventive.

Axial Lead

I prevent your relay from staying, from unravelling across contacts.

Build Your Own Enclosure

There is nothing critical in this circuit. The coil is scramble-wound with enamel wire. I can’t think entirely by myself.

If the thought of trying to align an operation to an alarm bell couples the signal, throw the switch. Couple the signal. Signal is not alignment is not magic from your hand or body.

A Very Small Air Variable

We can learn something about ourselves by following the curving paths of certain sounds.

Here is an instrument that has no antenna: heart sounds picked up and fed into a large mirror. The purpose of the mirror is to enable you to see what’s marked off. For example, persistence. Halfwave field strength.

A very small air variable and you keep your hand from tuning. You cut the curved current.

A Note on Drift

I want you to slow down the cutting off.

I drilled a hole carefully by eye. Kept it hot enough to prevent the drill from walking.

We’re in such a position that connection causes a very decided chirp. Like chasing a key over a slippery tabletop. Like keying in the lengths.

A Kink for the Workbench

How many times have you wished for a third hand?

The wedge slid toward one end.

Click Elimination

Hot enough, deep enough, I find the right length to fit. Hum in the receiver, a shift in the main spring.

Getting Results

I ground the ground side of the power line. You touch me without stopping. My unused turns shorten: tuned-plate, tuned-grid, the low-drift self-excited plate-current.

Go easy. I’ve just finished clearing up a source of noise.

∩

Kelly Krumrie reads radio repair manuals. She is the author of the books No Measure and Math Class, both published by Calamari Archive.

from wheel of fortune

∩

Danika Stegeman is the author of Ablation (11:11 Press, 2023) and Pilot (Spork Press, 2020). She’s an assistant editor for Conduit and currently serves as treasurer on Fonograf Editions’s board of directors. Along with Jace Brittain, she co-curates the online collaborative reading series It’s Copperhead Season. She lives in St. Paul, MN. Her website is danikastegeman.com.

Five Poems

from Helene or / Dont x baby

1.

Dont x baby x die on the Road
though I am not running

fast enough, although I cant run
or cant like the
fourwheel,
cut, I cant rise

through, cant your
bright eyes my
Boy my, apple
tree I cant

like noahs
dove, fly
cant uncast
cant mother, fly

the hill to you, baby
Im sorry baby
Im sorry my
love

2.

Dont x Pat, rise the x Fall
Dont lift the terre dont, x
black flower the, x little box
that plays
the wedding Song

Though I am not running
I run the creek water
running past,
the property river

Though I am not running
I run x the Yard river
stairs river
down the floodwater
river x Dada cant run

dada is running x
dada cant run, is running

3.

I see you up the hill
I see you in the car x
I see the forest breaking

I see you through
the door, bear wallow
the Tempest tossing the x
windshear the wind,
cutting x
dada sees a Kite

4.

Though dada shirt whipping
the blue ridge
dancing your blue
eyes Dancing
dadas aware
of not but

The Tom Forrd sun on snow the, terre
of Hermes the, x black orchid, the comedy
of Fragrance in the, fragrant, x

Limb, battering through
the house door the x door
pinned and
scattershot Daylight and, x
water on the alphabets, and x
the Elephants and, x
the book case and,
the tables, and x
the Wind on the names my x love
the

Wind that encounters,
you x must
change direction

The Wind made landfall
and was x land,
fall x the Autumn wild
was, the line
running

5.

In the running
Joke the trauma is x there,
in the word trauma
there is, aroma

∩

Brendan Sherry is a poet based in Duluth, MN. His most recent work appears in Tyger Quarterly, Always Crashing, and Nat. Brut. He is currently completing his first manuscript, which explores climate displacement, leave-taking, and communal grief. More work can be found at brendansherry.com.