Clickbait Review: How To B*tch to Strangers on a Park Bench

Written by Nate Rosenfield

Each line in Popular Longing seems to drift up from the presence of a dear friend seated right beside you, laughing at how strange and sad life turned out to be. Published this year by Copper Canyon Press, Natalie Shapero’s new collection names the desires, fears, and inadequacies only those closest to us seem to understand, but all of us silently witness and endure. True to its name, Popular Longings is a study of what people want: “people'' observed in the broadest terms by the humdrum pastimes that ferry them through life (jobs, grocery stores, art galleries, tourist attractions, funerals) and “longings” presented in their crudest, most accessible forms—universal, sordid, and thoroughly commercialized (the new restaurant to try, the flowers he didn’t get you, the small town historical reenactment, the jewelry you’ll be buried in). Reading the collection feels like people-watching with a brilliant cynic who knows you better than yourself, and can effortlessly speak to the symbolic meaning of what surrounds you. Natalie Shapero is that stranger in the park you’re glad you happened to sit beside.   

Although the collection depicts the nuances of interiority, it’s main object is how our inner worlds react to social conventions, particularly the market-driven forces that dominate so much of our lives. Why do we go to museums? What does our garbage say about us? How did we interpret the branded blanket the company gave us as a reward for our hard work? These questions are anything but commonplace when Shapero asks them. 

Her observations possess many of the same qualities as a roadside bomb. What seemed perfectly ordinary suddenly becomes lethal under her gaze. With biting humor and insight, Shapero tallies all the ways our dreams have been bought and sold to us, obsessively rummaging through every dark corner of her thoughts in search of some unconscious urge left untouched. Her despair, her pessimism, her immaturity, her hatred, unsayable and unthinkable longings for death and blind retribution—every last item is flipped over and torn apart, but at every turn the market seems to have her cornered. 

The humor and honesty that colors the collection allows us to share in Shapero’s desperate search with a sense of amity, but what she uncovers is hardly reassuring. Each encounter with our collective desires begins to resemble an abiding lack we can never fill (“How to feign lust for whatever is on offer. / How the largest possible quantity / of anything is a lifetime”). When the paint and gloss are worn away, Shapero shows us that essentially what we want is to live as long as we can; yet this seems to be the worst possibility imaginable in the life we’ve built for ourselves—the bulk of which consists of producing and consuming what will ultimately become junk through quiet, unthinking acts of destruction. As Shapero says, “What are our choices [...] might I suggest / LESS IS MORE against MORE IS MORE?”. But what does Popular Longing suggest we do in a condition such as this? 

The answer you would expect from a poet—that art can uplift us into a life of meaning—is the object of Shapero’s sharpest criticism. Art is a running theme throughout Popular Longing. Shapero depicts it as an attempt to escape or destroy the conventions that restrain us through reflection and criticism, but one that inevitably fails—corrupted by the forces of commercialization that it seeks to destroy. In the poem “Man at His Bath” we see this state of entrapment boldly on display: 

Six years ago the big museum sold eight famous paintings

to purchase, for unspecified millions, 

Gustave Caillebotte’s MAN AT HIS BATH. 

Now it’s hip to have a print of it, 

and whenever I see one hung for decoration, 

I’m almost certain that this is what Caillebotte

had in mind when he broke out the oils

in 1884: some twenty-first-century bitch in Boston

catching a glimpse of a framed reproduction, 

recollecting a study about how washing oneself may induce

a sense of culpability[...]

What’s truly for sale in the metaphoric museums through which Shapero guides us is a mass longing for freedom, escape, and revolt. Shapero often associates artistic works with spectacular displays of violence, disfigurement, or suicide, but these acts of destruction are understood by everyone involved to be simply a playful exercise: harmless, lustful, fun. In the poem “Don’t Spend It All in One Place” destroying oneself or the art that claims to represent you is presented as the highest form of expression: the essence of the priceless objects draped across prestigious (high-security) gallery walls. Rather than escaping the monetization of life, however, these artworks simply recreate it—a theme Shapero splatters throughout Popular Longing in bold and terrifying colors:

[...] specific paintings

enter into cycles of finding themselves slashed

and restored, punched through and restored, effaced

by aerosol and then restored. Once a painting

gets famous for having absorbed some disturbance, 

everyone wants to have a go. It’s like the woods

where a few people killed themselves and then all

of a sudden all these tourists were planning

pilgrimages there to do the same.

Shapero doesn’t separate her work from this dilemma. Quite the opposite—Popular Longing actively entices this same lust for destruction, provoking us to mock, scorn and delight in our self-hatred with abandon. With the drive and sneering scorn of a thrashing punk song, Shapero’s lines pull you in just to pummel and toss you around. The exits unreachable, the sound blaring, each stanza leaves you trying desperately not to fall down, as the comforts you vaguely took for granted are dragged across the stage to be jeered at and kicked around: love (“We often ate late by flameless / candles and took turns choosing / how best to be disposed of”), family (“Don’t worry. Wars are like children— / you create one, offer scant / effort, then call it botched as the years / accrue, go off and make / a new one with somebody else. / A chance to finally get it right”), the future (“The future, with its color / palette of airport whites and its / unrushed glace, its involute / beckoning. I see it. I can see it. At least / somebody wants me”), the past (“I’m ready to stop remembering. The trouble is / there’s nobody else who can do it.”), and, god knows, the present (“it’s juvenile / to cry for the everyday—so get over / yourself, I say / to the rat, who squeaks each time the dog / bites down, sounding just like those rubber chew / toys, which I suddenly understand are made to make / the noise of something getting killed—”). 

Shapero draws you down into the pit at the center of Popular Longing through cold-blooded wit, torn up elegance, and entrancing ferocity. You’ll be glad to have been ripped apart by such practiced hands (well worth the ticket price of only $17).  But her most provocative act is that she never lets you forget what you paid for. Shapero designs her verses to constantly stimulate this collective craving for destruction, to remind you at every turn that when art plays this game—leading a person to imagine they’ve broken free from all restraint—it’s simply another lockspring clicking into place. She offers no way out. The René Magritte epigraph at the start of the collection stands like a warning over the entrance: I do not like money, neither for itself nor for what it can buy, as I want nothing we know about. 

But how seriously are we to take Shapero’s nihilistic leanings? Her humor often makes it difficult to tell. At times a hush falls over her verse, and you feel as if you’ve been allowed to walk into the quiet of her innermost fears. But irony always shoulders its way in somehow and disturbs the scene, like in the following lines from “And Stay Out”: 

Rough days I’m trying to live

as though dead, to satisfy

or at least dampen the inclination 

to actually die. I’m holding 

mainly still. I’m forming my face

into no specific expression. 

I’m lowering the lights

so I can’t see my poster

of one world leader grinning

and shattering, over the head

of another, a trick bottle 

of champagne—a dead person

wouldn’t be looking at that, 

or at anything. 

The one moment in the collection where she seems to reach out her hand, searching genuinely for an answer, is in the poem “Some Toxin.” After lambasting human life as essentially a pollutant and bantering about the benefits of different ways and times of dying, she says: 

[...]All I want is for someone

To understand me, but it seems my keenest friends

and I—we’ve scattered. We’ve struggled for peace,

for permanence, and somehow in that struggle, 

we’ve ventured far from each other.

Rather than presenting this longing as the seed of some solution, as one might expect,  she simply says “[...] this is what / we get. This is our penance.” There is no hope in hope it seems. 

Or if there is, it’s not of interest here. Popular Longing is concerned with where a certain brand of collective desire leads us.  There may be promise in a life understood in other terms, but Shapero’s focus here is the brutality and futility of our market-driven cravings—it’s their essence she’s after, not a life that exists apart from them. If you’re looking for uplift, try somewhere else. What Shapero does offer is the honesty and grit to show us how implicated we truly are in the mess we’ve made of this world—and to do so with the cleverness, craft, and poise of someone willing to account for themselves. Like a true friend, Shapero doesn’t try to prop you up with false promises. She simply assures you, with all of her artfulness and integrity, that to be understood for all you are is better than comforting yourself with lies, or drifting away into obscurity. To turn misery into a joke that invites and restores you—that’s Shapero’s gift, and it’s not easy to put a price on. 

How to Cross Bright Country

Written by Shari Caplan/Madam Betty Boom

Count street lights when you’re unsure

how far you’ve walked

under the fluorescent suns of cities

thinking you’re a coyote

which legs are your legs are your legs are you

how many times tall tragedy can repeat

Let the plane fall back from you

as the camera pans the present

as the camera forgets my scene

your eyes will find horizons in every passing skirt

in every passing horizon a present.

Drinks with names like Lemon Scorpion

served on silver delivered to you

will cover your mind with my lips like the curtain

will curtain your lips like night in the desert '

served on silver delivered by you

with a grimace

you grimace most charmingly and get away with this

get away

will sizzle hot as your nerves, hands in my shirt

you hand a horizon into my shirt

can I keep it?

Stand in the cool grotto and press

your head to pink stucco

messages to me I’ll never read

because they’re sand-writ

because you mean nothing by them

because you mean nothing to me

except sunflower stalks shot through my ventricles, blue planets swinging backwards, frustration of pendulums, houses painted and ready for families who can’t find the key to what they’ve already mortgaged, red wax peeled from lucky cheese like lips from lips from my luck to your lips to you oh you oh you oh love oh too

But this is about your journey.

Strip naked in the ocean

an exercise in impermanence if someone (not me) steals your pants (though I would)

an exercise in feeling how cold you are

could you feel where you are

can you feel the limb you lost

which legs are your legs are your legs are you

where there are actresses in bikinis

you’ll never think of me again

there are actresses in bikinis you’ll never think of again.

Think of me again.

Write your movie

from a hill looking at plastic people.

from the hill of your un-climbable heart,

king of the mountain, with no attendants.

king of a mountain with only room for one.

not about impossible futures, but in the breath,

to bring you home wherever you take it, like a plane

You don’t know if you’re ready to board.

You’re ready

I am selfish.

I have no room.

Only for you.

Count street lights when you’re unsure

how far you’ve walked

under the fluorescent suns of cities

thinking you’re a coyote

Let the plane fall back from you

I am selfish.

Drinks with names like Lemon Scorpion

you hand a horizon into my shirt

can I keep it?

Stand in the cool grotto and press

except sunflower stalks shot through my ventricles, blue planets swinging

But this is about your journey.

Strip naked in the ocean

you’ll never think of me again

Write your movie

to bring you home wherever you take it, like a plane

You don’t know if you’re ready to board.

You’re ready.

THESE WORDS TOO COULD BE YOURS FOR A PRICE

Written by Stephanie Berger

Dearly beloved     I’ll be your host 

tonight     a very sassy ghost     your auctioneer

for we are gathered here     to celebrate 

the union of two     beautiful clauses     I’ll start 

the bidding at a hundred dollars     Just kidding!

At the low, low price     of a single single     I told him 

to say that     to put it in     those very words 

to auction off this sentence     which is not mine 

to keep locked inside     lady's gut causes 

truth decay    over time    shut down    

gets expensive    depreciates so   I would encourage you     

generally     of course     support your 

ectoplasmic lips       opening      thirsty skeletal              

but also     to divest      yourself of all       

belonging     to live with a pack    

of hungry street dogs     for once    in your life    

you could empty yourself    like a bucket      but of what     

do I know      really     about life?     

I am not Jesus      nor have I ever been      

hungry     I did not live     through the Black      

Death & become      modern     

with the rest of you    

Cedarwood

Written by Jackie Braje

At times and        away from           I

litter     my little words         along    the horizontal 

like crumbs     a             dumb distance.

Away  from        is   how  moss          extends from

oak.         Sidewalks  of      childhood        and women

breaching them.      They walk            away   from   

and back         again.                 Everything I say     now

is          away from       them.   My         idealism

concerns them       in that it          moves from   .

I already exist.             This, a child’s     predicament;

some pristine        thing opposite      its      dusty

origin.      Conditions      of this     fabulous

conflict         require walking.              Away from 

a white      dress      waits its           coffee stain 

runneth over.     Everything     remains to       be     

constructed          before arriving. 

I went             away from,              I’m sorry    . 

Even     sorry is a way           of getting         away from.   

In language     is a    full range   one      can walk      across ;

I   listen   and       I’m carried         away from. 

Grew up      in a house            built   over      a grand  collage. 

Furniture   legs             and stationary      things

push         away from .       When handing,         say,   a rose

to someone                  extend     it       away  from.

I’d       never   label     a form as             feminine            

but if I  did        plural    would be its  shape.         The rose

leaves     one hand            to join    another;     salt

takes      with pleasure    when   waves                     away from.

Voicemail for Christine

Written by Jane Brinkley

Could we be cruel in arms and like it?

You left last night, and, waking, still

in the velvet chair, I changed my mind.

I always liked your angle of gesture, its poke,

like a thermometer, like Vivaldi,

his first note, the rest of them rote,

I always liked those libertarian henchmen

in old Gothic yarns who will do or kill

anything for a buck–

pare the ribbon from the Duchess’ neck,

not exactly roast but certainly warm

the liver of some heiress

until it’s full like a trophy,

a new backyard for practice,

big enough to kick in,

“recite the Lord’s prayer,” they’d say,

their victim feeling funny, under

Frost Bridge, the ice growing runny,

Their favorite though not for function’s sake,

more as a matter of taste.

The Carps and Oscars, so nice,

the bridge bucolic.

“You get me,” one might say to the other,

before landing a punch,

the bruises pretty dark tomorrow,

and awfully nice to press at.

Though they won’t talk about it like this.

narc support group #1

Written by tova g.

Inspired by Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

you rummaged through our mother’s house like a raccoon in a dumpster behind a westchester

diner & ran 

away with memories of me, my hummed autobiography in disjointed colors like maya angelou’s 

caged bird.

since the month i considered you dead i’ve been thinking about how you never taught me how to

mourn the living.

(you did think yourself the aristotle of death. your relationship became intimate when you 

fucked him 

with his black sweatshirt & scythe necklace in the back of a prius in a burger king parking lot.)

i remember when i 

was eleven i dissected a cow eye & my friend hid it in her mom’s car. how can i gauge the

time of last 

breath if there’s no nearly-warm body splayed on a cold autopsy table. if i could i would hold

the same rusty knife 

as in my sixth grade classroom & like michelangelo crafting david (with poise &

godliness) etch 

your skull until what you stole from me spilled out onto the unforgiving steel. i wonder how i

would feel seeing 

my love for myself bloodied & undulating for the first time. maybe it would be like reuniting

with a long lost lover

after twenty years. (the only thing i know about jewish kabbalah is that there’s a divine spark  

of god in everything, 

including us. i’ve been searching for it in myself for six months but i’ve had a nagging feeling

that it’s in a box 

under your bed wherever you are, a nightlight that burns a little too bright to let you sleep, &

unknowingly

keeps us both awake at two a.m., your own dorian grey portrait you hope one day 

no one will find.)

I'll Still Be a Bitch in Hell

Written by Lisette Bower

What if I never fell from heaven?

Maybe I crawled out of hell before

anyone could drag me back under.

Always full of heartburn and spite

that holy water just can’t put out.

I’ll drown in the sins of your God

and take you down with me.

I’m not here for redemption or

what you call salvation. I’m just

looking for a shitty guardian angel

and enough nails to dig a grave.

Paint them in red shellac and

peel them off one by one. We

can gift them to the devil then

revel in our wild deliverance.

I don’t want higher sanctity, if

it means always wearing white

and never making love in wildfires.

Ablaze, my body will be as I knew it

nasty, unhinged, and unrestrained.

fields of haystacks.

Written by Sadhika Ganguli

I saw a Rothko in person

and it felt like an enlarged part

of something Monet

would paint.

my eyes saw the two hues

of magenta and royal blue

and suddenly without warning,

i was taken to

a field of haystacks on a

summer morning.

5am and my barefoot feet

are

sinking

into

dew

i’ve been whisked away into

a light blue garden of peace

where the haystacks and i meet.

i’ve always adored serene

and quiet scenes,

not like a loud film on a screen,

but a place where i can greet the

green blades of grass that

Whitman once praised!

i wish that one of these days

i can be in

my own quiet haze:

where my only divide

is the nose between my eyes

the spaces in between the lines

and the blades of grass in the dew.

for a moment i was there

(dawn’s mist still felt in my hair)

but now my feet are covered

with socks and shoes

and i am in a crowded room

surrounded by absent-minded

people in an art museum.

Not Invincible but Alive

Written by Esther Eidenberg-Noppe

After Ross Gay

i dreamt of the hesitantly slammed door giving way to a ripped open wrist / mom saying “now would be the worst time to go / to the hospital” for the bleeding to stop (whether or not it comes with the breath) / i dreamt the racing heart / finally caught up with the freight train speeding past / of plotting claws mistaken for softness, eyes of I.V. drip snake venom and radium / i remembered yesterday they left heaping piles of toilet paper on the doorstep / that i must first have wiped down the plastic with thick layers of tide / that even goodness could poison this sickness / i dreamt an entire lifetime of waiting: for the dam to break, floods to evaporate / knowing which was more likely (even if unfair,) the water knows how to get where it is going (even the lungs.) / i dreamt of eyelids as unhinged door knobs / waiting to be ripped from their sockets, / (meaningless) apologies dangling (like the legs of school children on seat edges / tapping toes to clock ticks before recess,) from the tips of meaningless tongues / saying they are sorry: knowing it is no white flag or red cross for the hurricane of the chest / for what is growing next to the heart: analogies simply also excuses to pretend love out of fear / always waiting for the blood which must spill eventually (somewhere...)

but biking along the beach,

watched a crow drink from a public-use dog water bowl chained to a spigot

remembered water could not only kill but quench a thirst

saw the elderly monk sitting every day atop the same picnic table

facing the waving (puget) sound,

waved and he waved back

(whispered) thank you

passed by a middle aged man roller skating in a closed-off parking lot

watched my mother place childhood stuffed animals in the windows

for neighbor kids on quarantine scavenger-hunts

saw little free libraries stuffed with groceries, string lights hanging in the backyards of strangers,

twelve year old boys shooting hoops in the middle of the streets, neighbors talking from adjacent

garden beds, wind chimes singing from front porches, seafoam sprouting from contented waters,

lungs being lungs

(kept breathing)

i woke to the mercy of the sun

preyed in my wordless way to the wind

with grateful goosebumps and eyes, ears, lips,

drank from the spigot

(whispered) thank you

again.

Step 9 Retrograde

Written by Allegra Parks

I forgive you for dying

A little inside when the fantasy withered

For not having the working memory

To cook eggs and waffles concurrently

I forgive you for plunging your hands

Into the hill of perfect flour

Before baking

For “Stop! I want it!”

your favorite slogan

I forgive you for dreaming of more bloody

Childbirths, slow mo all

You ever needed

Symbiosis separation reunion, repeat

For painting

His nails while he slept

For forgetting to put oil in the car

It burst into flames on route 29

I forgive you for not fathoming

Suicide threats can be fatal

Despite your mother, her deadness clear

I forgive you your brightness

Its shine accidentally blinding children

I forgive you

For using Jameson to quit

Heroin and heroin to quit

Jameson

For failing

To simply listen

To birds

Wishes

To the slick loop of time itself

To a Woman Carrying a Full-Bloomed Orchid on the Subway Platform

Written by Brandon James O’Neil

Heaven, perhaps, is

a push of petals through

the bud skin

The afterlife a

flowering of

something rare but

something common too

An orchid

bought at

a drugstore florist

When I die, will

my flowers be full, like

yours astounding too

subway grime and smell

of piss exhaust heading

home from work?

Who like you

embraces my bursting

soul flower eagerly

envisioning the hall

table or countertop where

against a mirror my beauty

will be admired?

Is there even an

embrace? Is there a

mirror? Or is there only

buds retreating and

collapse and never-

again blooming?

Heaven, I hope

is a push of petals but

my dear I do not know

if the petals will ever

open much less if the A train

arrive to carry you home

Of Living and Dying

Written by Kevin Farrell

Haven’t been cutting my nails as often,

cut my own face,

she caught me chewing on a nail,

“when did you start doing that?”

Didn’t know what “that” was until it was pointed out I had a finger in my mouth.

Heard someone say something about “our time in quarantine...”

and I thought of my grandmother,

visiting her window,

talking to her on the phone,

I hear her voice.

I see her face.

Not the face I saw last,

but closer to the face I saw Christmas mornings,

the face I saw when she smiled and shook her head at some whack job bullshit I said.

“Nan, I feel like this is all a dream and I can use a remote to change the channels if I want...”

“Kevin, you can do whatever you put your mind to.”

And if I really could, I would have taken away her suffering,

but I couldn’t,

so instead I dream we are talking one last time,

I’m caught in mid conversation with what looks like myself,

I guess it’s better than biting my nails.

Trump's Twitter Erased!

by Will Pewitt

Five haikus made from erasures of supposedly “presidential” tweets.

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letter for my lover on pesach

Written by Ash Freeman

I usually sugar my lips so they’re sweet for you but tonight i am coated in salt. kiss me bitter. I have never liked the taste of parsley so this year we use cilantro (it’s all we had in our fridge, anyway). when we sing i move my lips and hum because i’ve never liked the sound of my own voice and yours is so pretty it floods my throat. i want to drink it like manischewitz. let elijah in through the porch door but keep the screen door shut so the bugs don’t get in. i crush a critter with my finger as we talk about the plagues. it twitches for a moment and i try not to look at it as you pour another glass of wine for me. my family does a quick seder so together we’ve had a full bottle of cheap sangria by the time we get to eat.

(i can handle it, the first time i met your family i was so nervous i didn’t realize i was drunk till i got up to pee and almost fell over)

the truth is, i have fallen in love with prose poetry since taking a fiction class, almost like i’ve forgotten the power of a line break. but when i read you my poems you cry and i collect your tears for next year. they remind me of cilantro now (at least that’s better than parsley).

we lasted five days into passover without bread before we made sandwiches. it was just an egg smushed between two pieces of bread, if that makes it any better.

Frequently Asked Questions: A Checklist

Written by Sharon Mesmer

The Checklist is a form that was shared with me by poet and artist Fork Burke. She discovered it through Robert Wallace, who wrote, "In the end, the Checklist is perhaps nothing more than a vain and futile attempt to capture in writing the tiny details of one's life as they speed by too quickly and in too great a volume to ever grasp." A Checklist contains 33 items, the last of which is always “degrees.”

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1. How many times this week has my morning commute, or just plain driving to the grocery store, turned into a road-rage-inducing nightmare?

2. Did a failed reporter bond to an alien entity and become one of the many symbiotes who will destroy Earth?

3. Will I ever get over “abbatoir is a grammar”?

4. Is the too-late start even a start? Even if I love unpeeled light?

5. Are all of us who haven’t slept well in years the same people that get eaten by wolves in pornos?

6. ¿Hay leche: Como puedo iniciar sesion?

7. So You Want To Make Block Patterns?

8. Brute force attack protection for the Jersey Community Meetup Flash Talk?

9. Is the smell of Sbarro slice grease and Kool-Aid coming from my hair? or the sky full-lit and full-tilt?

10. heart worms can crawl out of a dog’s nose?

11. Do you know why this street is called My Lapidary Fears Have Become Unguents?

12. Why should I unfriend her when I enjoy reporting her racist QAnon crap?

13. dmv written test practice or elvish translator?

14. If poets wrote laws and lawyers wrote an onomatopoeia of eyebrows?

15. Are aging and living mostly thermodynamic?

16. ¿Dónde? ¿Cuándo? ¿Quién? ¿Cómo? Ecstasy is some sugar daddy, si?

17. Contiguous areas of what?

18. the lizard starkly still against the boiling leaves but the devil just putzing around?

19. Artist, Anger, Abortion, America, and . . . ?

20. any old blue roving?

21. Are you finding strength in the softer vowels?

22. Is that Elton John? (No, it’s John Candy)

23. Monster buck can’t mate?

24. the vulnerability of order under afflicted stars?

25. You know what I’d really love right now? (Crackers?)

26. Ja Rule, just because?

27. So what are people? What is a fork? An ancient spoon? Are heebie geebies Jewish? What was the first hullabaloo?

28. the Doldrums or the Dardanelles?

29. Sam Sundown: to rise or to shine?

30. not the same robot?

31. there are secret notes in mezuzahs?

32. What if Peter hadn’t caught the wolf?

33. degrees

Excerpts from "I Could Never Have a Name"

Written by Greer McAllister

(These may no longer be dreams.)

[But, before it all] it’s simple. Forsythia and chocolate tort in the morning. It’s sunny and I weep for my parents.

[Last month] I go into the bathroom and pull out my mother’s hairbrush. I’m just visiting and I forgot mine. It is packed with a thick layer of dark blonde hair I did not inherit.

[Morning] I feel bad about throwing away the newspaper today. Old world in the garbage can.

[Day] a new way of thinking: not enlightened, but peaceful. I am tucked away in the corner of my room, in the corner of my apartment, in the corner of this city, in the corner of this world, and I have, gently, overcome.

“Life won’t always be so easy.”

“I know.”

[Dusk] so we’re talking about space, space between the lines.

Once, I was a young dancer. A visiting instructor told me I say more with the space between my movements than the dance itself.

I tell him, “thank you.”

He says it wasn’t a compliment.

[Night] heavy snow today fell fast like a woman letting down her hair with frustration, or a line of identical cars speeding down the highway.

Soon, the sun sets and everything is pink, including you and me. Pink bodies on pink bodies, a few men pile them on top of each other and cart them away.

Next, I blush because you compliment my hands, the way they look like your mother’s. I hold them out so you can see them better.

Eyes blink slowly as the piano begins. I watch as you close your eyes, the music playing us out. I finally sleep and we are brought out the front door and onto the men’s cart with the others.

[Dream] making love to my ex.

[Dream] I am in a foreign country in a small city, maybe in Germany. I am with a woman and her baby girl. We are walking around the town mall and trying to think of a name for her daughter. Then, while she is paying for something, a cat, an orange cat, walks over to me. It is very sweet and has a broken leg. A few feet away, I see a man that I know and walk over to say hello. It has been a while. I tell him and the woman about the orange cat, but we all leave without helping it.

[Dream] making love to my ex, purring cats.

[Morning] a sunny morning. Scorn myself later for not appreciating it.

[Early afternoon] again, I am out walking. I reach a park that's not really a park. Wooded mudland, twisted with trash and vine-wrapped trees. I feel moved by the sun and decide to trek into the land, off the road.

Amongst the trees are large boulders, broken glass, deflated plastic, a rusted chainsaw, and a metal filing cabinet. Most surprisingly, is a small, thriving bamboo forest near the back of the park. Someone must have planted it long ago, not knowing its invasive nature or believing it could survive the New York winters.

I step down into the tall green stalks. In the center, there are seven folding chairs arranged in a circle. I can only imagine what goes on in the bamboo forest.

Passing stars overhead, dripping-green seance, seven souls among the reeds, broken beer bottles glinting pieces and pieces of their bodies, words, whispers, shouts.

Soft declarations of love.

Little youth.

Looking past the leafy canopy to heaven, clutching your coat, trudging back up, out to the

road.

[Late afternoon] the buzz of coffee, the world is bright and textured. Beauty mark on my jawline.

[Night] there is nothing I want to do more than write. My sister calls me in tears. She has just finished reading some poems I sent her.

“The birds in the last poem were the birds at grandma’s funeral.”

“Of course. There were so many that day.”

“A thousand birds along the highway.”

She says it’s like I’m writing just for her. We don’t know if others will understand.

[Night, high] broken geode, friends laughing.

Itching palms, picking agates like berries from the shore, stopping at roadside cemeteries with my father even though we have no relatives residing there.

[Late] I could tell you that I prayed to the Virgin Mary as a girl. Her blue bust reached out of the church wall during Wednesday afternoon mass, paint chipping off her milky white face.

At night, I would wish to her like a star in the sky. I could see her just past the lilacs, sitting on top of the moon, swinging her legs off the side. Her veil could reach all the way down to my backyard, the end fluttering against my bedroom window. When I opened it, I would see her wiggling her toes, could hear her laughing.

[Dream] I have the eyes of a cat. A certain man is afraid of me. Fuzzy black and white. I show him my new black dress. He is still afraid.

[Dream] the brunette girl brushing her long hair slowly. An absent look in her eye.

[Morning] soft sheets for my body, sheets gone soft from my body.

Collecting old glass bottles for the windowsill, coffee with lots of cream but no sugar.

[Afternoon] sometimes I shuffle a deck of tarot cards to keep my hands busy.

My maternal grandmother taught my sister and me to read tarot years ago. She has been reading cards for her friends since she was my age, wives attempting to read their future while mourning their youth. She sat with the two of us one afternoon. Our other grandmother, our father’s mother, had just passed away and she was in town for the funeral. She read cards for each of us, one after the other, and pulled every card about grief in the deck. We all sat there in awe.

Now, as I shuffle, a single card falls out. The Star. Harmony, hope, relief. A nude woman kneeling on the shore, holding one jar of scalding hot water and another of cold, pouring them into the sea continually. A large star hangs above her long trailing hair.

I place it back in the pile quickly and keep shuffling. Again, the same card falls out of the deck, landing on the floor. I gather it all up frantically and I pick a card from the middle– for the third time, the Star.

Again, I sit in awe, because I know it is the brunette girl from my dreams. She must live on that night-shore, kneeling in front of that water, continually.

[Evening] broken robin’s egg on the sidewalk. So small, can barely see the yolk splattered like paint.

[At night] I look at pictures from over the years. Only took pictures of myself, obsessed by my own image.

My mother never let my sister and I have mirrors in our bedrooms growing up. She read in a book somewhere that it damages young girls’ self esteem.

Some of the pictures are serious, some are childish. It is these that make me feel a certain kind of sadness. If only I could apologize.

[Memory] ground bees flying in the clover one Sunday. My parents decide we will stop attending church. I tell them I can’t abandon her.

[Dream] the smell of a person I don’t recognize.

[Dream, morning] I am in a foreign city with my father, mother, and sister. The people around us are speaking french. We are tired from walking. We rest near a cafe in the full morning sun, so bright we have to squint our eyes to see each other.

When I awake I am alone in my bedroom, far away from France or my family, but my bed is full of the same morning sunlight, so sunny I have to squint to see, to see that everything is a cream color, and full of that sadness, including my pale body.

[Noon] it must be spring now. The sun is a companion along the way, on the train, on this train.

“Where are we going?”

“Well, do you want to come with me?”

“Can I?”

“Of course. Sometimes I get sick of the sun.”

[Afternoon] a crow that sounds like a dog, like daffodils. Daffodils don’t grow where I’m from.

Moon in the blue sky. Blue sky like blue lily, like love, like licking your lips to get the last taste, like living as someone else because life hasn’t been so kind.

I could be dipped in coffee and eaten up if I wanted. I have been offered this. I told him no, not right now, maybe later.

[Late afternoon] my sister reminds me of the ancient church-house on the block we grew up on. For a long time, it had a small religious bookstore in the foyer. Its owners cooked in the old parish kitchen and slept up in the choir loft like angels.

[Dream, dusk] purple evening, and I begin to remember all the moments of my life I have forgotten.

When I was seventeen I visited Vienna. I decide now that she looked like this city, the brunette girl: plaster walls and gold trim, and when I walked through her markets and churches, there was nothing but incense and rainwater, the curve of her question-mark spine, knobby knees, asking, “Do I look okay?”

Maybe she looked like the women of Schiele and maybe not. I don’t want to tell her.

Maybe she was a dancer as a girl, like I was, comparing in the mirror our waists, our arms, the length of our hair.

Now, the white morning gives her away. Her dark down, her body-taste.

Miracle.

[Late] always looking out the window, framed by the pane. I will never be immortalized.

[Dream] something about a widow, a red-breasted robin.

[Dream, morning] when I awake, she is gone and I am alone with myself.

I think the cat is hungry for his breakfast.

[Dream, late morning] the I, the eye. The absence of music, the crab apple tree– dead cats buried underneath.

[Dream, midday] Where do you think she’s gone?

Flowers For Dinner

White Morning

Lace Lake

The Lace Lake

Morning, Mourning

The Living Living

The Day at Lace Lake

Woman in the Window

[Memory] her veil taps against the waving glass.

[Dream, afternoon] I am sure of it now. A vision of Mary, like the ones where they see her statue weeping. Chipped paint falling from the sky.

[Dream, night] I am standing somewhere high, looking at it all. I hold up a piece of blue glass to my left eye and the sun begins to rise. I walk into my parent’s house that I don’t recognize. I am only visiting.

The empty, warm winters are what I remember most. A mother’s brooch, a fistful of dandelions, a penny, a few books of a father’s, the stars washing overhead.

Would you tell her something for me?

[Dream, dream] something about absence, about incense. Something about praying.

Not Sure Where To Spend Your Summer Weekend at The New York City Poetry Festival? Let the Tarot Decide!

First, pick a card:

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The Sun

The happiest card in the major arcana. No other choice radiates with quite such optimism and vivacity as this one; a young child riding a white horse in the foreground shows that you long to connect to your inner spirit and reclaim the innocence and unadulterated joy of youth. Those who choose The Sun are ready to claim the fruits of their labor and align with the abundance they know awaits them. We suggest you take your love to the Youth Poetry Festival, a gem of an event sequestered in the grown-up world of the Summer Fest. Here you’ll be invigorated by your inner energy as you listen to the wisdom of toddlers, teenagers, and everyone in-between. Surrender to the cosmic zeal that awaits you, and realign your energy with youth.

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The Moon

With a watery vision of a crayfish that emerges to greet a wolf and dog, the moon represents connection to intuition, dreams, and the subconscious. Its chooser might be voyaging through a time of uncertainty and illusion, and need to attune to a deep divinity or insight in order to move forward. Planting the seeds of the abundant future might require that you listen to your heart, and the underbelly of the human consciousness that runs through your veins. For you we recommend The Typewriter Project, where you’ll get to sit in a typewriter booth outfitted with a vintage typewriter and 100 feet of paper. Inspired by the idea of an Exquisite Corpse, this surrealist writing game allows several authors to contribute to the same poem, adding on ideas to create a single emotionally coherent work. Tap into the city’s subconscious and better yourself in the process.

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Temperance

The balance card. An angel stands with one foot in the water and one on land, and mixes water from two chalices, forging a perfect harmony. Reader, have you mastered the art of patience? You probably have a clear vision of what you want to achieve, and strive toward inner peace and moderation. But in order to get there, you’ll need to perfect the alignment between your thinking and feeling minds. Head over to Milk Press Happenings, where you’ll see a collection of works created on-site set in chambers. Each one contains an intentional mix of poetry and visual art, as well as performance and lighting design, climate control and music, fragrances and soundscapes, all unified in their mission to awaken your aesthetic impulse. Couple the registers of your soul and you’ll surely find abundance.

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The Hermit

Has isolation provided you with a new path to the mountain? You might be feeling like your lantern only illuminates the next few steps, and long for guidance after this period of introspection. You are masterful at drawing up energy from within, and now it is time to bestow that energy on the world. To find an intimate group with whom to share your wisdom, stop by the Ring of Daisies Open Mic. Stop by the sign-up early in the day, and you’ll be presented with the choice to step into the daisy circle to read a poem in radiant meditation and community with others. Or if you prefer, sit in the waving July grasses and let your fellow hermits pour their energy into your changing heart.

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The Tower

Lightning strikes. You take your lover’s arm as the ground below you crumbles, and you begin to fall. Just when you felt at-ease the world slashes all promises, and now you’re chaotically scrambling to climb back up. Dear reader, do not fear: the tower is a card that promises profound enlightenment. Maybe you chose it because you have seen the cracks forming and harbor a deep wish to be spiritually shaken. Who doesn’t feel this way these days? I suggest you head over to The Poetry Brothel, an immersive literary cabaret that mixes activism, vaudeville, burlesque, magic, and mysticism. Do you secretly like it when poetry readings erupt instead of fluttering? Give in to the divine timing of the universe and open yourself up to change, body and soul.

What would a poetry vying for attention look like?

Written by Halim Madi

Exhibit 1

Listen to your heart it is whispering

the stories you’ve forgotten

to tell the child inside

Exhibit 2

Bury us

while you’re at it

Peel our nails

The skin that’s under

is a weapon a rocket a knife

pointed poignant painting your privilege

as oppression

Exhibit 3

1:15pm Santa Barbara’s lower riviera, I buy

10120.13764808 OCEAN TOKENS

This cryptocurrency my new visa

Replace my Lebanese passport with a portal

To salvation

You can be rich too

Just keep trying

Exhibit 4

Stay

strong believe

in your dreams, you are the captain

of this ship

don’t settle stay

Focused — out of many one

You you you you you

This one

too shall pass until it doesn’t

Exhibit 5

Mother,

When did you become a man

Married into a lineage of testosterone

As you grieved your husband

Grew Adam’s apple

Bit, grinned, spit sideways

Pointed at my little hands, said

Man up

Exhibit 6

I was walking up this hill and decided to sit.

I’ve been here for 3 years.

This poem about consciousness

will last a lifetime

Exhibit 7

12 13 14 Reminders:

1. Buy shorts, squash and a black hair tie

2. Write a letter to Rachel

3. Also, quinoa

4. Schedule time with Andrea

5. Don't self medicate

6. Build an altar for your father

7. Something is singing, maybe waiting. Are you late?

8. Don’t mistake silence for depth, especially in men older than you

9. Ask a doctor first then self medicate

10. Avoid carnivore flamingos, standalone devices, two-way mirrors

11. Don’t jaw-xercise, it hurts your ears

12. Forgiveness the red circus where we juggle blades

13. The lizard brain is my favorite

14. This whole age thing turns out to be real

Gratis Versus

“An imitative meta fiction about poetry and poets” by James Joaquin Brewer

“I’d as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.”

— Edward Lathem, editor, Interviews with Robert Frost

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After Robert Frost picks an apple from the kitchen bowl for breakfast on the first warm morning of spring, he makes sure to tie the bright white strings of his size-nine Converse high-tops as tight as his arthritic fingers will allow. (Care of the foot is critical.) Eager for the new experience ahead, he grabs his old canvas gym bag and sneaks out the back door, apple in hand, to meet his good neighbor Jack K. on the other side of the gate for the short walk to the unfamiliar court.

Throughout the previous spring, at Jackie’s insistence–proclaimed on the first day of the new season, the idea just generated spontaneously it had seemed to Robert –they had been committed fencers. (“Oh, just another kind of outdoor game, / One on a side. It comes to little more . . . .”)

The foils were surprisingly expensive, but they had saved a considerable amount by electing not to purchase masks. “We don’t need no stinking mercy masks,” Jackie had growled at the cashier before converting his tone into a soaring laugh. “We won’t be getting that close to one another, merci-you-very-much. We’re just taking it up for the exercise–the chance to limber up and increase our flexibility. I’m not a’feared of my partner here–he’s quite . . . disciplined.” He prodded the button at the end of his shiny new toy against Robert’s chest. Robert half-smiled, took a step back, and carefully tucked the credit-card carbon into the pocket of his weather-stained windbreaker.

By the end of that rather short season of thrusting at one another under the inconsistent shade of some decrepit trees in the town park, they shared the opinion that Jackie’s prediction had been reasonably close to accurate. The few minor scratches both had received were easily treated with the contents of Jackie’s modest medicine cabinet. On each of these unfortunate–but rare and mostly peaceful–occasions, Robert would stand out in the driveway and wait for his good neighbor to return from behind his irregularly bouldered fence with a couple of drugstore bandages and a tiny vial of antiseptic lotion. By the time spring had turned to summer and the pair had decided to switch to croquet, their consensus was that when it came to fencing they were well-matched.

This year, again at Jackie’s insistence, they decide their new spring game is tennis. At his insistence also, to save on gasoline they agree to use the nearby grade-school playground basketball court–even though it lacks a net. “Who needs a net anyway,” says Jackie. “I’m too old and stiff to properly leap across one without killing myself after I beat you six-love, six-love, and six-love.”

“Maybe so,” returns Robert, “but I’ll pretend it’s there, just low to the ground, as I skip across it after smashing that last fast winner past your feeble forehand, your feeble backhand, your any kind of hand!”

“I take that as an impolite and unpoetic insult,” sends back Jackie. “Bad form, sir, bad form!”

“Well, sir,” replies Robert, “mark my words well–and yours too–after what you said about love-love-love it serves you right! Who are you to accuse me of bad form?”

“Serves me wrong, you mean,” retorts Jackie, watching Robert take an ancient-looking tennis racket from his dusty gym bag. Suddenly Jackie reaches down and snatches two tennis balls from the open bag, then straighten sup with a grin that becomes nearly a leer as he tries juggling the pair of fuzzy spheres. Robert stands scanning his good neighbor from head to toe for a moment before slowly extending an empty hand to intercept one of the balls, the other falling to the ground and dribbling away to bounce off the pipe-metal stanchion supporting an un-used, chain-netted, rust-coated basketball hoop.

“You’re out of bounds, sir,” shouts Robert. “Over the line!” Holding the head, he points the wooden handle of his racket first toward the rolling ball and then down at Jackie’s size-twelve shoes. “And according to my measures, you’re a foot-fault just waiting to happen.”

They each laugh as they stake out opposite sides of the net-less court, their vocal sounds seeming similarly erroneous and forced, each wishing silently for a return to fencing.

I just don't invite him.

Excerpted from the before & the after by Dominique E. Carrieri

I stand in the center of a circle, in full view of my

peers. I pull snakes and tiny lizards from my

exposed abdomen. The sensation sparks

fluttering anxiety that morphs into confusion and

honest curiosity. I wake from the dream and cry.

The internet tells me I’m missing someone inside

me that makes me feel whole.

At this point, my partner and I have been together

for over two years. We’ve shared two homes, one

dog, and own a printer, so I’d call that a pretty

serious relationship.

He is a large, bearded, cis man with teddy bear

eyes that make you wanna say, “hi.” Standing

beside him presents me with a privilege I’ve never

felt, to be catapulted to a world that perceives me

as an insanely helpless heterosexual being.

I’ve always kept my identity safe in sacred places

and sometimes it speaks so loud I imagine its

voice could blow a train across the country.

Sometimes, it puts lizards in my stomach.

Other times, it is quiet and hides in the tiny

wooden drawers of my grandmother’s jewelry

box, waiting for dark filled silence to gently lower

the rowboat, sailing tirelessly back to the queer

world I call home.

I’ve always been a bit of a wild card. I love to lick

the spoon in front of people who have opinions on

loud chewing or messy eating.

I love assembling hurdles in front of those who

challenge things they cannot change almost for

sport, but this world is exhausting.

In this world, I cannot be many, only one.

My ravenous queerness challenging norms and

social paradigms can be seen as threatening and

sometimes even dangerous.

My lack of feminine nature results in the

misconception that we aren’t a couple at all and

we take front row seats to each other’s

discomfort, while we dodge the advances of

unknown, interested strangers.

I bring to the table some of my darkest memories

in my partner’s most comfortable environments.

The more my queerness bleeds onto my clothing,

my speech, my car, my hair, the more this new

world tells me:

“This isn’t what a heterosexual couple looks like.

This isn’t even what a queer couple looks like.”

But what if it is?

If my love is to exist, he loves me because I am

queer. His response to my identity informs his.

We stand beside each other and our identities

remain tragically different, but isn’t that true for all

people?

In order to be together, we must also know how to

be apart. To operate on the most opposite of

hemispheres, to live even if it means accepting

each table isn’t a party of two.

You won’t notice my partner in attendance at most

queer gatherings. This is not because he doesn’t

want to be there.

To be honest, I just don’t invite him.