#featured poem

[themerrytroll]

"Last night..." 12/04/18 PM 📷 by Svetlana Manic via Unsplash IG: https://www.instagram.com/p/BrABP8uBf_1/

[fred34543]

The Tree Stump

Outside sits a tree stump Where once a tree trunk stood Rot has charred the insides And spilt the shattered wood

The blossoms now lie sunken And sit in six feet graves Where once they’d have fallen In floating fragrant waves

Branches that touched the sun Now burning on the floor, Each snapped twice over, Each shattered once more.

The tree that scraped the sky Let its tears grace the ground And now all that lies there Is a broken tree stump mound

Outside sits a tree stump Beside two growing shoots Living off the death Of the broken tree stump roots

Thanks for reading — feel free to reblog or check out my blog, Fred’s Poetry Journal, for more poems and chances to promote your submissions.

[josephkravis]

We become the music of the universe— not in grandeur, but in unity.

For The Glass Orb On Water’s Edge

[coppernickelmag]

You’ve Been Swallowed by a Whale Only You Can Let Go

By Marc McKee

for Jamie Warren

It’s no surprise that I hate it when my friend is swallowed by a whale even if it is only a dream of being swallowed by a whale, the whale everything ever all at once and thus a stupefying brick of cloud borne by Manhattan’s swaying pallbearers

as I think of how to try to bring her out, and also thus whale after whale full of whales, all the coffins, the urns, the urns’ ins and outs, the white whale of the gone, the swallowed of all the nations, the ones we feel sawed off from singularly, grief, grief

as ever a creature with an obscure orbit and an appetite we are certain in our treacherous, ordinary valleys no light escapes nor can hope to contend with—but this is why some days, in some instants, in this instant, we must rise

and slip the cinematic tentacles and slap the needle off the face of the beloved record and charge into new dreams like fools that won’t quit singing. The record spools and loops and pools and floods into the air, the menacing atmosphere

a whale when a whale moves, an epic wave taking forever to build against what tiny forts we’ve made from pillows and purloined fencing, our cups empty and refilled a dozen times over, all our sheets in the wind, our cultivated and distant loves, our locals,

our air. It’s chased us so long we think we’re looking for it until we turn into the dark and understand we’ve been swallowed. It’s always so easy to steer out for those of them not in trouble. But do they know there is a part of each dark

that doesn’t go away and what to name it is forever on the tip of our tongues troubling the loose tooth of the heart? The way you suffer the landscapes with your eyes, here and then and next, arrives you in country of whales not yourself a whale, but sympathetic. History blooms

and blooms through the blooms its smoke and viscera, struck surely and surely too seldom with flashes of human kindness and sacrifice. You don’t have to kiss and apologize to that urn every second, you don’t have to shoulder history

every second, the shadow glides through Bloomington as though on skates, it knifes down all the interstates like a cloud of knives, the knife cloud a whale but sing it up, sing it gone, sing light and see it lift out of you where it had been all this time.

Like the man sings, If I see you struggle, I will not turn my back: sing that, sing it so aloft it’s a parade float: The Past, hovering, real and powerful but not so mighty it can keep you from the light waiting even now for your next waking, sweet

as the sweetness of water is sweet after a long walk out of the desert of the whale. Even as I write this, the sun converts long, sharp weapons into water that the earth will take in like your next deep breath.

[coppernickelmag]

Leo and Lance

By Randall Mann

for David Trinidad

I was seventeen in Orlando, heading toward

Orange Blossom Trail, where the porn was. Fairvilla Video,

its fried, freshened air. I was terrified but also thrilled,

on the edge. Can anyone even remember how hard-

won a little corner of sex was then, no internet,

no hope, no combination? I can’t; I can.

In an elaborate bid to convince

myself and the clerk I was bisexual, I bought a bisexual

video that I can’t recall, and a box

that made my heart stop: Leo & Lance. (VHS wasn’t cheap:

I spent all my allowance.) I can measure

this adventure in increments of shame:

tape loop, checkout, the run-walk

to my red Buick (no one could miss me), the peel out.

And the drive home, anticipation, cruel cellophane . . .

Leo Ford, born Leo John Hilgeford, looked like California

by way of Dayton. There was his tender love of Divine,

that rumored three-way on Fire Island with Calvin Klein.

Late in his career he raised rare birds, volunteered

at Project Angel Food. He was versatile: so much to give.

And Lance, David Alan Reis, from Santa Barbara,

or maybe Oklahoma. Poor orphan, the stints

in jail, IV drugs, and conversion.

Leo and Lance had the chance to work together

twice on film— Leo & Lance and Blonds Do It Best—

and more than once on the corner. Where have all

the hustlers gone, anyway? They died

weeks apart, in 1991. Lance first,

in May, in San Jose, of AIDS complications.

On the death certificate, his job is listed as “model of clothing.”

That July, Leo on his motorcycle was struck by a truck

on Sunset. “Chillingly, Leo had played a motorcycle accident

victim in Games,” says IMDB, so those who knew

his oeuvre might have seen it coming. After the wake at Josie’s,

his ashes were scattered by the Golden Gate Bridge. A tree in India—

IMDB again, as if the truth matters— was planted in his name . . .

As I try to get this right, I pull up my cache

of scanned porn. Leo & Lance: it begins in synth,

Cali melancholy canyon light, and here’s Leo,

shirtless, running up a hill in tight denim,

letterman jacket thrown over his shoulder— now the tinkling

piano; now’s a good time to jerk off by the last of the snow.

God, bottle-blond Leo. But wait, who is that loping up the hill,

gawky, rugged, also blond, a dumbfounded wow uttered as he watches

Leo shoot? Of course: it’s Lance. Before they formally meet,

before they go back to the lodge and do what they do

better than life, they have a little snowball fight, brief, unexpectedly sweet—

like children in the street.

[coppernickelmag]

Epistemic Love Poem

By Jaswinder Bolina 

If there were a verb meaning “to believe falsely,” it would not have any significant first-person present indicative.                                                        —Ludwig Wittgenstein,                                                        Philosophical Investigations

In Crimea now the larks might be muzzled by artillery and crap weather, how should I know? In Haifa now the guns must be running, I have no idea. In Kobani, a boy is waxing a Kalashnikov. A boy is waning in a blood puddle, I don’t know. I’m not in Missouri. I’m not in Humboldt Park or Harlem. I’m here with you, wrought simple and plain happy. The only city I know is your city, is your city block, your boulevard between the German bar and the orthodontist’s. The only city I know is the square of sidewalk your shadow paints. Everywhere else is switched off now, every current stilled, the Gulf Stream is in sleep mode, its porpoises unplugged, its seagulls powered down now dangling from clouds that are stuck static in their full upright and locked positions. No carbon is there baking the human sky, no Ebola, no typhoon churning. No Obama is there in his white office, no Mitch McConnell in the garret of his own braincase, no pope infallible, no lama enlightened, no ayatollah knows what I know now I know you, and no, I don’t call you darling. I don’t call you honey or sugar or babe, those names made for other bodies, those noises made lame by other people, and the other bodies are switched off now slack mannequins on trolley cars, in Hondas, in jets stopped over Crimea, over Kobani and Haifa, everyone dumbstruck everywhere still as a book on a shelf. If it isn’t written by you, I won’t read it. If it isn’t about you, I won’t know it, and I won’t call you bunny or sweetheart or pumpkin now I know you are my wild earthquake, my ontological kazoo, my dizzy robin of ghost feathers, your voice is a brontosaur. It’s bigger than everything. Your mind is bigger than mine, it frightens me, but I kiss your shins and shoulders now, I kiss your hips, it’s like kissing rainwater though I know now no rain exists if it isn’t kissing your face. I’m being ridiculous, I know! But my chest is a rowboat rolled over and over. My chest is a boulder, the boulder crashed through the floodlight of my chest, and I believe falsely now no horror exists. I believe falsely no other joy exists. I believe now in every love song. Every love song is wrong that doesn’t know you, my transcendental tea cup, my butter knife in a light socket, you are my space plane, my only space plane. I do dare to eat a peach. I do dare disturb the universe, and if the universe turns out to be a simulation, if the universe is a false front or a figment of a dog’s eye in another universe, I don’t need to know now I know you I don’t know and I don’t need know.

[coppernickelmag]

You Know I’m Right to Do So

By Hannah Craig

This week I realized that I’d forgotten the names of everyone I ever knew who made meth. Cooked it, like it was a curry.

Like it was broth or marrow. I forgot their names and what I was doing with them, those chemists in plaid shirts and jeans.

I forgot their names and their quiet dissipation, how they went from names into shadows and from there, into chairs

in the cooling November courtyard at the university. Which is where I had gone to live. Which was already between us

and changing everything. I forget that saying goodbye seemed for sure like the last time and was.

O I was vicious with all that indifference and felt it. And now I forget.

How it feels to turn out of the Enchanted Hills trailer park onto the county road. The negative space of a trillion uncounted

organisms, riding the rods of heat and light, spitting out electrons with amazing fury. And the pickling smell on that plaid shirt, the odor

of adhesion and dilution. The hairline fracture between car window and nightlight into which my breath

would go, carrying out all its dire smoke. And now, to use them, the makers of meth, the Indiana boys,

the kings of hard-science that I could not fathom. To use them after having bested them. And still, somehow, to lose them.

[nathensurman]

Shbdyvhiffivfysv! Hello little blue box! Thankyou poetry editor for diggin' my groove <3 Consider the fog lifted for today :)