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.

Two Poems

my first pastoral

There is no crisis averted
that it even existed means

of its gradual and unavoidable
magnetic yank towards encounter

which god knows what then happens
resultant confetti covers, confettis the room

space will be trod and left clumpy
to be torn among the amongst

down there here dire agon and ever anon
to be shorn free of illusion

is of course never any sort of—
the Letter which is inviting you out

(because there is some marker
demystifying your station)

it got lost on the way,
respond accordingly

I’m at a loss but
the newly silent scene

blanketed in it
basking in it this lost sense that

we will always and because of this
the feeling starts to coil around mid-air

the frayed Cable then wrapped itself for delivery
to any unintrusive presence

which turned out controlling.
anything lounging just waits

for its chance to assert on
its specialized scenario—

to be specialized and wonder why
one has dumped all their eggs

to sit waiting in the vestibule
only let further in by external interest

locked from one’s purpose or
maybe just maybe it’s not meant

many just so many hacks circling
kicking up great clouds of dust

to obscure with a coughing fit
that which we look for

under the latticing of
the trees’ general (dwindling) protection

that let in conspicuously encouraging rays
–seeing great things is not enough

there’s a walk away and off into
which takes a bit to stagger into

but once youre there
so excited because curtains

finally match the drapes
the silence of them

the rustle of them
business isn’t so important as advertised

I make a fiction to see if
well if it becomes as it’s supposed to

and if not we’ll walk away and off into
the ever-wetter wilds

Populist arthouse

Immediacy is a soup
I was being funny but it was just mean
Preclusive slurping a tad humbled
but still happy like an old shirt
Newness swayed in the gusts
Guston, everyone likes him these days
Shingles hammered back in
Stink of mildew and days
Sometimes... It’s nice

Driving uphill behind a bus and a contractor’s truck that looks like a municipal vehicle which drags a bed that holds a chained down minibulldozer

On the path
With the wrong acoustics, all chords are illegible
Shut that window. Inhale a little
Speaking precludes any motion
Gettimg myself into trouble
Any hierarchy is arranged
A gust a pause blowing onto the scene
Poetry is a urinal
Arrangement is a urinal

∩

Corey Qureshi is the author of four chapbooks of poetry. He runs the webpage/reading series/publisher BOXX Press. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and children, where he works as a baker. @q_boxo

Four Poems

from storm still

Attempts / The Storm (Maudlin)

Obviously the world is failing:

Obviously democracy is mediocre men in pools of shit, colliding, smudging shit on everybody’s heads:

Obviously the brambleberries picked along the riverside were falsely placed to navigate our day-blind carrying on instead:

Obviously the ankles that were growing in the place of palms:

Obviously the lowers that were sprouting from the crevices:

Obviously the buboes in the unthought reckoning of pits:

Obviously I widened as a fox that clenches teeth at birds:

Obviously beneath our heads the crinkling of a burning book:

Obviously beside our heads a storm sends thunder through our ears:

The third? The fourth? A hand? A lightning? Then a cold surrounding air—

What’s the point if yellow lowers grew where ankles used to be?

And if the cat sits on your head? And if the cat sits on your head?

And if you’ve folded up the loads of laundry left beside your bed?

And if it were for nothing, and for nothing you went on instead?

Attempts / The Storm (A Whisper)

Resist the will to disappear.

The trees are green.
The trees are green.

Resist the will to disappear
in order to appearance.

Attempts / The Storm (Flies)

There didn’t used to be flies.

There were always flies.

There were always flies.
There were always waters.

A ship was made of wood: a plank
was good enough: I

carried I across the lake; across
the sea; across the channel;

while, storm-still, bilge, its pulsing
world, became the mind,
defiled.

There were never flies.
There were never waters.

A ship was not a word: A gesture,
good enough: How

often could I—
could I—carry on?

How often
could this couldness carry on?

How soft is fleece
that softens in the sun?

How many times
can I get up? How many

times can I go on?

How many times the spilling on the
ache and you ache through them.

Spilling out and out and ache and
you and ache in falling do we?

Go? And do we go? And do we
all go with them? Do we are we going

on and on about this aching? Is our
quaking blatant disregard for your

confessed outbreaking?

Well?

Requiem, still

1

Holding off the end of day, I wake into the night.

2

I wake into the stillness of my sight.

3

The stillness of my sight looks upward, feels you looking down;

4

The night’s unmasking burrows into frown.

5

Still as stillness; stillness as again;

6

the body’s body fading; the fading body’s end;

7

the end of minerality, marauded or marooned;

8

we set forth for the frown of all-too-soon.

9

Still as windswept grasses; still as then;

10

still as night’s unmasking; day’s upend;

11

still as meekness; shaking; still as death;

12

still as lightning’s lightening intent.

∩

Aaron Lopatin is a poet and teacher living in Brooklyn. Recent work can be found at mercury firs, Black Sun Lit, Conjunctions and elsewhere.

Two Poems

ARS POETICA

I remember when it was acceptable for men to hide behind the veil of Isis
and name the indefinite stream
that brings down the print of a single blue sandal each day
before it’s corrupted by further clarification
or the affirming care I’m rummaging around for in here.

I’m honestly proud of everything I do
no matter what. Working out is happiness. Every collaboration
is blessed that brands have the trust in me to deliver.

Devastated like me by my ineptitude, clarity lays itself down
next to us, opening its cells to all manner of fluids.
Have some contaminated leeks, someone actually wearing argyle:

everything else is dead to me, only love can misbehave.

THE STAR

I’m already losing my voice, my inner voice.
Like Chagall I was touched by something
I felt happened — that’s Abel, he wants to sit outside,
not hear more of my pensive music — inching it forward
thanks to my power element. I’m having to deal with this
but I can’t be here after mall hours
watching through contact colored lenses

the point within which something
less than something, a shadow, stops you

but like I promised, I’ll be almost here for you
though going by really quickly.

∩

Tamas Panitz is the author of several poetry books, most recently The Mollusc (Copenhagen: 2025) and Lazy River (Creative Writing Department: 2024). @tamaspanitz.

Four Poems

A NEIGHBOR DRUMMING

A neighbor            drumming is a lover
or a likeness           a glossary
of the hard consonants keeping time

I too repeat myself        but don’t change

Replace my syllable with a snare
I am describing to no one the sound of

rain fall           footfall           a far off war

PAULINE OLIVEROS

Music of an other kind
                                            Pauline Oliveros

has heron wings
& whale teeth

A female animal lesbian for the revolution

                                            Place me in a cistern
Play an accordion             underneath the world
Watch it decay

Write your decibels onto a “pillar”

           Names I slowly say
           into the room

becoming not names becoming earth names

ROTARY TELEPHONE TURNED

Rotary telephone turned
weepy microphone

Favorite object to speak into amid
a war

Sound is in me
muscles loud static

Rip into my heart
a bloody tape deck of syllables

Wind it back
& run it through
the delay delay delay
signal path
to clear the present

When will things
improve

When will
when will

CLASSICAL

Classical record on the other room’s record player
with bells to ring over a bathtub floating big
dead bells

My first poem
was a tape I found
under my sister’s bed

Box of magnetic tapes Writing

Silence I spoke into the microphone
like the child I was

The poem answered decades later
Listen what lost

∩

Nathan Shipley is a poet currently in Santa Cruz, CA. He does work for Insert Press and publishes SUDS, an audiozine for poetry and sound. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in GROTTO, Recenter Press Journal, and Opt West.

Three Poems

from Vespers

THE GREATEST PHOTO IN AMERICA

is of little death and repeat, of
LED light-shift in the Taurus t-
square stellium, the pull of which
did disrupt that hour of phlox-color

over the couch, the lamps, edging
color wildflower on the heel, the self-
administering mirrors of purple
subulata, immaculata, I mean

my poise to the shade, so vivid
the bones in contort, so vivid
and windowless the scene. Unceded
inner sub-drop room, in-sync

for a change. Look:
the fore- and background remain
beautiful. The in completeness
is there. Meaning, the whole-of-the-record

the crisis and agony; the floret
of water, misting. The glisten of
everyone there, in complete. Along-
side the phrase I require clearer seeing.

PHILIA

Humor as rest as respite in
terms to excite a laugh

convulsively. A defeat of reason
in sub-zero climes, or in our here’s

oh, the many topics to consider
but we’ll riff on the conjoining of care

and play I have read your SOS
In our field, we urge towards

affirming care care care, plus
the body in deliberation, morally so

plus reasoning to & from particulars (i.e
should it matter I’m getting played?). Upshot

being – bit farfetched – that the cold will not
worry us too much, that due to

protectiveness & nurture-dom
to clean the sink is a lightness, as is

the wipe-down of fridge, ignoring the invite
stuck there. Are you coming to play?

For I am so far away. It is cold where I am
It is hot in the photographs that flitter & glitch

It’s such a chaos, a dream-ed role pattern split like grace

So, we tend towards play, or we tend
to our brattish ways, saying

I didn’t do ANYTHING I was told to
We tend towards the taking of care, & I

will divert from the bruise in my life, that
threatens to be apparent when thinking of it

LUDUS

In this early-though-enduring theme, I’ll
say that animals don’t tell their lives
as stories; no rain or blinding wit
no house ablaze, or god in the sky. No, a dog
would add, if you are inefficient at
correcting course, then stay where you are
amid non-production. Some-one will build
you a dungeon in the off-hours
Someone will design the civic ruins
as you gesture to sites of attention:
Devour me here, redeem me, rear me.
Plato points to the firmament, upward
as if commuting air or an idea.
With a punch aforethought, you’ll do the same
You’ll think (to yourself), stay where you are. The future
is mere breathed into existence. You’ll think, yes
I do enjoy jetplay, the tiny eruptions of the garden pool
as it rains rains rains. Paradoxically and posture
-wise, I only escape in one direction.
In this repertoire the mind extends.

∩

Jane Lewty is the author of two poetry collections, In One Form To Find Another (CSU Poetry Center, 2017) and Bravura Cool (1913 Press, 2013). She teaches art history and creative writing in Baltimore.

Two Poems

One With Which I Open

Where my rage is listening
At the shoreline its form takes
The shape of an obvious fate
Hands plunged into the silt
Of the future retrospective
Alchemy, “me,” vomiting on a hill
Top heavy with shame in sunset’s
Righteous light, finding it honest
To cross with desire
My amplitude undoes the borders’
Haptic feedback through which I
Double, like being seen at a distance
I like being watched in this form
The only one with which I open
My own mouth to spit in it
And empty the first person
Trespassing in the dream of
My body going no place with a name

from The Streamers

//

There’s a problem with the stream
I mean my system’s problem is that
It’s both mimetic of its form and not
Allowed the means to strategically combat
Its meaning, reliant on the conditional
If it continues, the poem will not be
A science glittering in the dark
Cultivated style matching its shadow
Architecture I assembled against expression
Unwillingness to speak in the dopaminergic
Cloud signals flooding content at will
Analgesia formed in the hours whiled
Even prior to the drive they shape
Making the tongue hang limp
In the already insufficient mouth
Which I excuse myself with, sorry chat
Just one sec I’ll be back
Through light-by-light scattering

//

I woke at the break of dawn
And pressed play, a fleeting thing
A thread of time-bound light
Drained of a parallel inner life
The birds are singing falsely in
The eclipsed sky, signals out of time
An apparition, a ring, for what
Reason does the moon have at all
To make demands on me, move
Against inertia and with the tide
Rising steadily in cadence with
New opportunities for
Mental health app developers
Blink once for yes, twice for
Auto-erotic electrical pulsing
As stochastic interval
As formally undone property
Of the body stained by longing
In the temporal lobe, assume me
To be piecewise polynomial
Globally smooth, I guess, mostly just
Hanging out, as planes circle over
Gliding under trochaic night

//

Still, if not for you, I would give up
The essence of description, leaves
Trembling in the digital wind
Alike in kind and same as the price
Of real wind, it’s simple economics
That the unending flow of the words
Long to graft onto, a subject
Aches to mirror unnoticed
In the city we do it all the time
Simulated or otherwise, aimlessly I
Mimic the expression of your private
Sensations, progenitive POV we’re
Exhausting the limits of prose
To run ads where I’m wearing
Solitude as an outmoded form
Of dress nostalgia wrapped itself in
Sweating through the anachronism
To linger as a thumbnail
Replayable when the narrative needs
To link revenue with form
Between where the video ends
And criticism begins
Today I’m going live at 7 PM
Just for you, it’s all because of you, I must
Thank you for the Twitch Prime subscription

//

A weakness is a poetics.
This is the self-governing glow I now undress in,
illuminated in the Commons
the body can take anything
inside itself, though I’m too shy
to admit the lengths
I’ve gone to for my research
monograph, an auto-ethnography
of quivering at the psychic root
system, reviewed by esteemed peers
whose jaws soften at the sight
of phase changes, the pressure altering
method April bends the air
and my arms with, lying prone and
desalinated in my view count

But having been nowhere for so long
retreading the illegible buffering sunlight,
being rendered future continuous, I will be
waiting my only hours to begin the first line

∩

Daniel Baker is a poet from San Francisco. He is the author of The Streamers (forthcoming from Spiral Editions) and the co-editor of Topos Press. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Baffler, Annulet, Denver Quarterly, Works & Days, and other publications. He lives in New York.

Two Poems

The I Am Not a Robot

from The Poets

I am an admin named Lewis obvi
I am a shadow, dust-encrusted, head-to-toe
I am thinner than your “average” samurai
I do what my life coach tells me

I have left my body-of-work to a shell company
I am a coterie, lawyer-trustees, et al.
I am at once a minimum of 7 memories
I am a sentence without a clause

I am a *Leo from South Shore, Massachusetts
I cosplay as someone who could give good advice
I am a sad boi whose mom and dad divorced :(
I am just not a fan of Duran Duran

I am a Trekkie AND a Patriot
I am on a dating site called Dr. Jekyll
I write, and drink, and walk, and say, okay
I am allowed to continue vanishing

 for Etel Adnan

Down in My Notes

There’s a line I keep writing
down in my notes

night after night-ing
down in my notes

in the room where I wrote
down in my notes

sleepwalking the stairs
down in my notes

right through the front door
down in my notes

I waltz around town
down in my notes

and the surrounding countryside
down in my notes

to the end of the dock
down in my notes

into the deep
down in my notes

∩

Matthew Klane’s books of poetry include Of the Day (Publication Studio 2025), Hist (w/ James Belflower, Calamari 2022), Canyons (w/ James Belflower, Flimb Press 2016), Che (Stockport Flats 2013), and B (Stockport Flats 2008). An e-book My is online at FENCE. His debut record, Too Little Too Late, was released in January 2025.

One Poem

WALK IT OFF

Do you remember when you said
I galloped, the geese finally
crowed hello? The lights went out,
if only as some signal that

 the idea is all the rage––a moment
of decision that has already
happened, so what, flung as I am,
there’s nothing lighter than a little

 light following us in return.
And when that ends, yes and no,
there we go again, sappy
at the moment when the sun

 falls right in front of you for
feigning the romance with anything
but. Forgive the mind that takes
between the first days

 and the last, the upright wish
to continuously scribble
in the margins,
and to remember there’s nowhere

            to be, plus the spider
in your hair, the names
we put on these in the winters
even when we don’t feel

 like it. What’s protecting the
community is all over the news
if you just look for it,
out there, growing at our expanse.

 Time picks a cluster, doesn’t it,
before wandering off
again, flicked out of range,
no longer a charming hush

 that waits out tomorrow.
And while you’re all here,
spread out
in the clarity of the next thing

 before we know it, let’s agree
this togetherness
is really something,
unlike anything

we’ll experience in the daylight
ever again.
It even includes my ex-
brother-in-law

who, I don’t know,
I see as someone who now walks
everywhere. A gollum
numbed in a hoodie,

 the bodies he’s re-
worked all around this town.
I follow my grandmother
endlessly and not enough, but

brothers are like humps
of graying snow melt outside
the Investment Center,
where who needs a chainsaw

when the day now means
forever, where creation
is so un-
assisted in its need for perfection.

 Otherwise, as indifferent
as a weather report
for some city,
far away from your home.

&

This morning, 3am, rot stomach,
a burnt gut wake up,
but just before in a dream,
a childhood friend

became strangely
affectionate—some sign
he’ll die soon?
Getting out of bed

 to read headlines of doom
in the other room, nauseated,
please no vomiting
before class

or long walk
in the rain.
This spare bedroom that feels
still foreign, a space

I wake in
and forget where I am,
I, who never go into strangers’
apartments these days.

But there were years,
almost every weekend,
that I’d end up in some not me
decorated place—this person

knows that person, and so
we’d end up in a surprisingly
elegant living room or a dump
with the scent of sweet

ripe leftovers
from months ago.
I wonder how these echoes
are mine,

 how they sound to other people
shared halfway through
a Tuesday morning
of the best slate gray sky,

not just more minimal
flattened surfaces or
this new era
that resembles a drug deal

gone bad.
Tonight, when you come home,
I’ll tell you that the lone pretzel
that survived the last forest fire

is only four hundred dollars.
And when you say,
what about the golden beaver
with the dead-eyed stare,

the one that I’d spend thousands
to save like a little rat
under the weather,
a toothy bird motioning

for more heavy rain? I’ll say,
I’d do anything for you
except just before tax season.
That’s just too much

to ask, you know?
Maybe a flight out west
for no reason, instead.
Maybe see where Cormac McCarthy

did the unspeakable,
but our focus, of course,
on the diners
and mesas, some border

experience, some broader take
we inch closer
by calling our own.
The weeks go by,

and thankfully we stay put,
eat bucatini
and anchovy lemon salad,
sending our mothers

these recipes
so they save
all their money and health
by doing the same.

&

Maybe the more intimate side,
all that work unaware,
is what we’re always after.
Like it’s funny how the one-inch

 darkness within some Baltic
ivy freaks me out,
Clive Barker’s Nightbreed,
a maw

of hell and humor,
some kingdom
that I belong to
better than I know:

two pigeons
up all night, making a nest
for a pregnant cat.
Such are the miracles, the milestones,

of being together
and then not.
So, as my friend, speak
slower and less often

than just about anyone else.
Be what’s in the room
when there’s nothing
attached

but the weight of wondering,
the patterns of natural gusts
just there.
Sometimes,

this is all it takes
to stay within
the wander,
the blue gone

 from the early
evening, ourselves gone
into the flush
of some other interior.

&

 If you set me aside
just for a moment
I’ll find a way
to survive

the upcoming evolution
intact.
Or if nothing that massive
maybe just a light

struggle
with myself or
some 24-hour zoo
where the midnight screeching

is its own kind
of forgiveness,
and all the other enclosures
are reserved only

for YOU
& YOU &
YOU & YOU.
But what really kills me

about this place
are the facts:
the neighbors
down the street that serve

saltwater
in the shape of the kitchen
we once called
home

or the aftershave
of slums
where I soaked
into the winding

gravel roads
nitpicking
one eviction
after another, asking,

who started this
more gently
than before, who
protects the flower bed

from all the rage,
the retained
for all the real
estate, some new river

not only a river
asking be become
more of home.
A right of change, renamed,

 in this way thinking
shelves
the head.
Let’s not say

I never tried
hard enough. Let’s say
you’ll be home soon,
withholding my unanswered

emails, my Wednesdays
left open not looking
for the hours of Autozone
but tomorrow I’ll behave,

for practice and delight,
for all the flung language
of people, the something
we are made of, the let

wandering that becomes us
as we find ourselves today.
Today, I’m being called
by the similar

and estranged at once.
The afternoon before
I thought about this future
afternoon, was still me, wasn’t it?

As I found it
I was moved.
And if the world begins
and ends

 by how we are taken in,
I promise you more gorgons less
sideburns, a love of nothingness
in between.

∩

Jordan Stempleman has published nine collections of poetry, including Cover Songs, Wallop, and No, Not Today. His forthcoming poetry collection, Spilt, won the 2025 Wishing Jewel Prize from Green Linden Press. Stempleman is an editor for The Continental Review, Windfall Room, and Sprung Formal. From 2011 to 2025, he curated the A Common Sense Reading Series in Kansas City, Missouri, and is an associate professor in the Liberal Arts Department and Creative Writing Program at the Kansas City Art Institute.

One Poem

POEM BY KAFKA

I have recovered informal pleasure
Struck as I was
By high-toned fantasy
A lumpish way of saying
The party foods were small and savory
The impeccable servants
Romping dogs
Constant martinis being suzzled
While I admired my escape
In my teens I was a terrible flower
To circulate without an excuse
Obtruding strangers
And even in absence that thin time
Of day where a party fits in
Dogs and children demanding
A little something after
The question is how to give up
The frazzling of oneself
Escape our thirties and forties
On a silver tray
In a closet lined with lace
The silent butler crosses a hall
Toward its own disposal
Less needed than a cigarette
Even in love I used to wonder
If they could act a scene without
To me the most notable thing
About the 20th century
A dip that started as a groundswell
And became a spread
Then toothpicks came into their own
You wore something off the shoulder
Pale and blue
Life slid like a meatball down the front
Of your décolletage
Leaving a hideous indelible stain
I have a dustpan and a whisk for a broom
I have a mandoline
It is hardly essential
I have always needed more than I have
You may be more provident
The table was chock full of ready-mades
We had only to dunk
And various condiments appeal to you
Friends would never admit
The greater the crush the less they will be noticed
People don’t go to the dip
It has to come to them
Get yourself a good walnut to crack
A small drawer stuffed with scraps
Spare some knives to avoid a death
Of the host in the instant of a herd
Remember the written word?
It has not died
Tell the people when the party will be over
I suppose we could feed them caviar
As this is probably a sad party
And everything eaten by the fingers
Down to the bone
In what used to be ashtrays
Your best-bought friends
Scatter the napkins which will be stuffed
Absurdly into pockets
In some bright color
I allow about three per person
And guests never seem to be without
Your assortment could surely feature
Bread and butter
A universal dunk
Who has time to be this desirable
Wanted and gross
You can buy a party
You can go out
Gussied up and ornamented
Take it on the bun
Taste around until you find
Well my world is not like that
My children have been placated
With sandwiches which seemed festive
And without much damage
How many hands can you count on
Overcrowded as teenagers
Crammed in the corner and dripping
Water down your back
Your tulips thoroughly trampled
You are not the only one
Formally determined
By a written invitation
A fear of frying
Bird and beast
Crimson menace
No party of mine

∩

Stella Corso wrote the poetry collections Green Knife and Tantrum along with several chapbooks including the people were lovely, but I was not. She currently teaches in the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University and co-hosts The Ritter podcast.

One Poem

Tabulation

from Tabloid Facts in A History of Rome and Floyd County by George Macruder Battey Jr. (1922)

Did you know that—John Hume brought
the first bath-tub in Rome, from Charleston,
about 1850? Daniel R. Mitchell owned the first piano?
Coosa Old Town was an Indian village on the Coosa
River near Rome, South Rome side, and was
destroyed on or about Oct. 17, 1793, by Gen. John
Sevier, ancestor of numerous Romans? An erratic
character known to the Cherokee Indians as the
“Widow Fool” operated a ferry in 1819 at the forks
of the Oostanaula and Hightower (Etowah) Rivers?
Miss Eliza Frances Andrews, botanist, has had
her habitat in Rome since 1911? Major Ridge’s ferry,
opposite his home on the Oostanaula, was seized in
1835 by a white man named Garrett, who claimed
that Ridge would not run it or let anybody else
run it? Father Ryan, Indiana poet, once visited Rome to
see about the Kane property in New York, and was the
guest of Mrs. Mary Adkins, mother of Wm. H. Adkins?
Thos. A. Wheat, of Ridge Valley, loaded the first ten-inch
Mortar cartridge fired at Fort Sumter in 1861? The Santa
Ana silver service, captured by Houston at the Battle of
San Jacinto, was once the property of Henry Pope at Pope’s
Ferry? Heavy guns furnished the Cherokee Artillery
by the Nobles were captured by Gen. Sherman at Resaca?
Rome once had thirteen whiskey saloons? Before
Barney Swimmer and Terrapin, Cherokees were
hung on Broad Street for robbing and murdering Ezekiel
Blatchford (or Braselton), of Hall County, a land
seeker, in 1837, they were allowed to take a last swim
under guard at the forks of the Etowah and the Oostanaula?
Are you saying you didn’t know, you didn’t know, how could you
have known? Each glint in river water? How will you atone?
At knowing’s nexus while lives are breaking in the dam?

∩

Alicia Wright is the author of You’re Called By The Same Sound (Thirdhand Books) and A Coin, A Moth, A Literary Journal (DoubleCross Press), both forthcoming in 2025. She lives in Iowa City, where she serves as editor of Annulet, publisher of Annulet Editions, and host of the poetry reading series Normie Creep in the Sacred Grove. She works as Managing Editor of The Iowa Review.

One Poem

The Angriest Dog in the World

Forgot to lock front door—again. Left car keys in an old coat. Dropped mail down recycling chute. Carved the wrong turkey. Stepped in chewing gum. Flossed too hard. Neglected to cancel online therapy session. Broke handle off ceramic mug. Spilled chili oil on carpet. Cut hand trying to open package of batteries. Checked autorenew by mistake. Cordless mouse stopped clicking.

Lightbulb dimming. Ants around the bed. Bird shit on bedroom window. Arugula turned black. Neighbor took up flute. Dryer malfunctioning. Torn Achilles tendon. Umbrella in fragments. Reprimanded on work slack. Pothos looks a little wilty. Bumped head. “Delivered” yet gone missing. Train not running after 9pm on weekends. Card cancelled due to suspicious activity.

Stolen bike tire. Stolen bike seat. Smudged earwax on brand new book page. Hole in sock. Sink clogged with coconut oil. Unknown blot on camera lens. Last page on calendar. Kicked a dead rat. Ate a bad orange. Bit the dust. Bought the farm. Passed over for second interview. Empty ice tray. Decapitated by collapsing scaffold. Street debris flung in eye.

Missing tomatoes from the market. Discovered wire-tapping. Gangstalking. Skull crunched by bear. Surf trip cancelled. Unflattering profile in regional magazine. Ingrown hair. Leaky transmission. Toenail broke off. Ass carbuncle. Ran the corner too quickly. Credit score dropped seven points. Stepmom’s fish died. Salmon patties freezer burned. Got lost on the trail when supposed to be leading.

Wolves chewed legs off. Beanie in puddle. Neglected to attach email attachment. Ear infection. Last match. Chapped lips. Ghosted when they joined the ashram. Allergic reaction to date’s cat. Bloody cuticles—can’t stop biting. Flu after flu shot. Rank sink sponge. Left eye stopped working. Brains hanging out. Crushed by falling deck chair. Scared of my own shadow.

Claustrophobic episode at the planetarium. Vertigo at the skating rink. Suicidal ideation in the hall of miniatures. Pee shy. Unshakeable halitosis. Ash on slacks. Bad trip sitter. Not streaming in my country. Sibling says she hates me. Worryingly high cortisol. Soy sensitivity. Friend break up. Text left as read. Letter from the tax service. Low balance notice. Chased by irate uber driver.

Boss calling for the third time. Recycling can overflowing again. Record scratched. Misread invoice. Illegible PDF. Beaten in a van. Author bio filled with typos. Child screaming on the bus. 101.3 fever. Right ear swollen. Failed state. Lapsed loan payment. Joke ignored at happy hour. Pen leaked. Monitor flickering. Trapped in tanning booth. Tongue lobbed off with katana.

Botched fraud. Fell into bottomless pit. Fell into pit of snakes. Fell into pit of syringes. Jaw ripped off by torture device. Flattened by zamboni. Spaghettified in a black hole. Boiled in a geyser. Little scratch on eyeglass lens. Eyebrows shaved off while sleeping. Xbox run over by dad’s lawnmower. Hoodie bleached at laundromat. Revenge porn racket—again. Slapdash enema. Memecoin crash. Foot run over by cab.

Bad kisser on third date. Dirty bomb terrorist attack. Lost in the woods until starvation. Caught jumping turnstiles. Caught drinking on the job. Late for important work meeting. Disregarded final exam. Sold shares too soon. Shot to death. Burned to death. Slipped on ice. Overcharged at the bodega. Quiz timed out. Frayed cord. Grey pube. Butt dial. Pecker turning blue. Bacne.

Promotion overlooked. Raise denied. Claim denied. Groped by assistant manager. Knifed in the back. Overdosed dying patient with liquid morphine. Fender bender—again. Underwhelming birthday. Invisible paper cut. All limbs amputated. Kept in a bag. Lived in a bucket. Wore a curtain. Entire family exploded in front of me. Self-immolated to protest government corruption but no one “got it”.

Forgot PIN. Grass stains. End of foil roll. End of deadline extension. Cessation of benefits. Curtain rod keeps falling. Adblocker blocked. Union busted. Crabs. Loose tooth. Hanging on by a thread. Stripped screw. Assembly instructions not included. Tickets sold out. Reassigned to the nosebleed section. Stuffed in the back of the plane like a sardine. Projectile baby vomit. Bet on wrong horse.

Kicked in the face by soccer player. Torn crotch in jeans. Grease splotch on cashmere sweater. Discovered adoption papers. Banned from the casino. Tied up and stabbed with hot pokers. Damned to hell by street preacher. Scammed by one-armed locksmith—again. CTE after years of professional play. Bluff called. Mind blanked. Nurse talked so quietly had to ask “what” three times.

Behavioral center burned. Christmas market arsoned. Conveniently-located ATM molotoved. Second favorite essayist cancelled. Another legacy sequel. Screenplay draft rotting on shelf. Didn’t mean to buy lowfat. Overlooked for prize nomination. Absent from guest list. Castrated by the pope in a nightmare. Sliced like a ham. Slapped in a daydream. Punched in kidney by parkour artist.

Blast waves—again. Cooking rut. Collapsed lung. First round in the negative. Mangled tennis racket. Ossified pinky. Endless leg cramp. Spasms. Sneezing fits. Little blood in cough. Jumped the curb. Curbstomped. Dragged into the sewers. Allergic to stone fruit. Out of paperclips. One-ply toilet paper. Ice sculpture melted before finishing. Rube Goldberg machine lacking one crucial domino.

∩

Barrett White edited Tagvverk. Frantic Gesture, a new publishing project, will debut this year.

One Poem

the shit eaters

“a mess of cockroaches that shun the light” “or the dreaded moth” an enclosure and spurge laurel, which may be the wrong plant, but Daphne is a suggestive name
nonetheless, a stuffed cavity: “strange animals appear” then whirring clouds   

and a housefly comes to eat my shit
and to eat my stomach and to eat me all over

I hear Franco Battiato
in her chewing and flying

I can watch her work me into the Chicago river
they will never find me there and never find my gold molar there

I grow into “a hot afternoon, a foamy wave or a scent of lilac,” a thing that sleeps in your long dark hair, a twilit head at the edge of a field, a head in a round attic window, a sea snail, a boy who heaves under a mound of turquoise beads;

“There is the time of the speaking body and the time of writing . . .”; there is the nurse who says that I have a bladder infection; there is the phone call two days later telling me I don’t have an infection and there is my penis still hurts—it’s one process; there is the flight from history into an uneconomic memory, aestheticizing wood smoke and a brown glove and a blue hand and a clearing that was over the road and also thirty-five years ago and just as it is now, in the sky and light making me expel my insides like a flower does or a gentle sea-thing that’s doing its soft fucking or soft eating like the gray midday light bewitching the clearing and the shed full of tools, the windows of which were installed sometime in the first decades of the twentieth century, beehives,

but fogged glass frames the vines and leaves

a nail head &
morning glories: pearly gates and heavenly blue

I see them in turned-purple and turned-red blackberry bushes full of moths
that I have just recalled while swallowing a capsule
an extra cube of space

another full room: a snail’s motherly folds

∩

Philip Sorenson is the author of three full-length collections: Of Embodies (Rescue Press, 2012), Solar Trauma (Rescue Press, 2018), and Work Is Hard Vore (Schism Neuronics, 2020). He lives and teaches in Chicago. 

Editor’s Note: One Year

Friends,

Community Mausoleum is one year old today. I don’t know what to do about it other can keep going, but I’m writing to say thanks and to think for a minute on the occassion. You can read about that below if you want. Or stop here. Thanks. It’s stupid to throw yourself a birthday, but I really believe in being embarrassed.

When I started this project last year I only knew that I wanted to start a press. I knew that I wanted, and saw there was a need (I know, I know, define “need”—read the first Editor’s Note for that), for yet another disaffected and idealistic fool to decide to start publishing yet more writing that would never be published through the otherwise established and respectable channels of literary publication and distribution. I wanted to make a living in death, which is to say a defined area of small press activity, focused and serious in effluvial spite of the known non-ROI, and I was curious about whether a network could form in the multi-bodied orbit of emergent and conflicting thought-feelings I was having about time and money vis-a-vis literary production, encapsulated best in a single syllable I still can’t find a convincing way around: Doom. I was and am that fool.

In those first days I felt a lot and knew a whole lot less. Still, in spite of knowing, and knowing better, feelings are what define and continue to guide this project’s procession. If certain aspects have seemed unseemly or less than legible that may be because feelings, real as they are to us, the ones who feel them, are also, in my own experiences at least, hardly ever seemly and barely even legible. Is this an apology? No, sorry.

What I knew I felt then and still feel today is that literature and literary-cultural production, at least in the small corners of these ideas where I find myself lucky enough to work and get to exist, did not have to feel the reductive ways it so often can, did not have to be as hopeless in the ways it so often is. Even in our liveliest and most inviting sub-corners, down the reverberant if narrow halls of independent small press. It did not have to be so boring, did not have to be a race, did not have to be so special, did not have to be correct, did not have to be a job. Each person who realizes this is the last person to realize it. But I am noticing now and might be becoming more adept at understanding as I age into deeper states of befuddlement how feeling and being are such dear cohabitants, becoming virtually identical states. We already know the stakes in this negative economy. We can calculate all the probabilities. We can all bet on the futures. What if we embrace the doom?

As best as I can still articulate, the thinking-feeling-being-doing of Community Mausoleum and Coma is an ongoing experiment: To find possibility in entertaining both of literature and its production’s (are they friends?) dual and dueling impulses to hurry and go slow. To balance opposing instincts of urgency and deliberation, rejecting the idea that any of us need to rush this shit while simultaneously finding ways to be quicker and more ablaze than the better-regarded and -resourced channels can ever afford to be. It is also an experiment with money, stemming from an ambient sense (which may just be informed by my own personal experiences with literary projects and institutions, and should thus be regarded as a matter of thoroughly subjective opinion; though if you feel me feel free to holler) that money usually finds ways of limiting the prospects of an idea before it expands anything truly worthwhile. Perhaps too simply, Coma wants writing that wants to be written. It does not want writing that wants to be paid for. I remain curious about where this petulance and its attendant questions can lead, because, just in case you’re asking or thinking about it now, no, writing in this context is not work. That’s what makes it interesting. The press on the other hand pays royalties to its authors because Community Mausoleum titles are made objects—not data hosted on a server where I purchase space once a year using a debit card linked to my bank account which is periodically replenished through a variety of part-time editing and adjunct teaching jobs. Community Mausoleum books have a cover price because they cost money to print. When a book is sold, half the cover price goes to its author and half goes back to the press’s print budget for future books. There is no other overhead. That’s econo-nomics. Just in case you were wondering.

On May 1, 2024, I was wondering two things. The first was if I could publish my friend Eric’s chapbook Icewalker & Dirtworm. The second was if I could publish one thing at Coma every week for a year. In the days since, Community Mausoleum has produced three chapbooks—Icewalker & Dirtworm by Eric Wallgren, Important Groups by Hilary Plum, and demonstration forest by Kelly Clare—and one site-specific performance-text zine thingy tied to a public reading called “Find Your Ontological Center” which occurred in a Cleveland parking lot a week ago. On May 1, 2025, I am not wondering but can tell you with certainty that this summer the press will release its first full-length collection, a perfect-bound book of poetry with a spine called Study for Swimming Hole by Maxwell Gontarek. More books are planned, and they’ll be announced soon. Coma remains ever-open. Send some work if you haven’t yet. Look out for replies if you have. Be in touch if you want to. None of this is required. None of it is going anywhere. You can read all 54 of Coma’s year-one publications on the website: Poems, stories, essays, and reviews of small press books by Austin Miles, Eric Wallgren, Joshua Wilkerson, Jon Conley, Jenkin Benson, Christian Wessels, TR Brady, Walt Hunter, Brianna Di Monda, Henry Goldkamp, Joe Hall, Ben Roylance, Delilah McCrae, John Trefry, Evan Williams, Sarah Edwards, Glenn Bach, Carrie George, Matt Hart, Brandan Griffin, Philip Harris, Umang Kalra, Alex Benedict, Maxwell Gontarek, Alyssa Perry, Conor Bracken, Nick Greer, Olga Mikolaivna, Zoe Darsee, Emiliano Gomez, Kelly Clare, Cameron Mcleod Martin, L Scully, Andrew Judson Stoughton, Alex Tretbar, Angelo Maneage, Rob McLennan, Miri Karraker, Eric Tyler Benick, Alexandra Salata, Madeleine Schmidt, Calean Ernest, Zach Savich, Yuyi Chen, Tom Branfoot, Dominic Dulin, Ann Pedone, Jon Woodward, Daisuke Shen, Nate Logan, Jace Brittain, PJ Lombardo, Sam Heaps, and J. Arthur Boyle, in chronological order.

There are better ways to end whatever this note has been, but in the spirit of the above assemblage, and feelings, and the vague warmth with which we now turn toward our doom, I’ll just say thank you, friends. It’s been a sheer and staggeringly brilliant delight to get to work on this stuff over the past year, to collaborate and connect during our bravest moments of these increasingly bravery-requiring times. It is heartening to see so many other new publishing projects and experiments continuing to emerge alongside, to read them and to know them and you, and it is exciting to think about where we are all headed, what’s being dreamed and what’s getting better, despite.

So here’s to the next year, then another and another, whenever that is. Let’s go together. Not too fast. I’ll hurry if you will. See you there. No rush.

Time is on your side.

Zach Peckham
May 1, 2025

∩