HOW TO POET
Ten Poet Pairs Who Would Have Been Best Friends If They Were Born in the Same Period
Ten Poet Pairs Who Would Have Been Best Friends If They Were Born in the Same Period | Clickbait is a blog designed to shamelessly attract attention to poetry. Using devices typically reserved for online “clickbait” like listicles, how-to’s, trending topics, SEO, hashtags, hyperlinks, hyperbole, sensationalism, puff, and fluff, the poets at The Poetry Society of New York are having a little fun.
Written by Jane Brinkley, Festival Development Intern
Sappho and Adrienne Rich
Though one was born in Lesbos and the other in Baltimore, both boast a generational re-innovation of what it means to be a gay woman– Sappho with her love poems, Adrienne with her introduction of the term “compulsory heterosexuality.” To fall in love with another woman– to fall in love with letters and poems –maybe these things would make them good community members. But if not, they could at least commune with each other, critiquing work over a couple of drinks and commiserating over what it means to be a queer writer in this– and any– time.
Lord Byron and T.S. Eliot
Known for their adaptation of modern themes in surprising ways and dying of diseases of the lung, these two men separated by time and an ocean offered similar lyrics of being and love befitting their personal experiences. Maybe they wandered similar streets looking agape at the night sky, maybe they sat on similar benches as they composed similar poems. Both often assigned as long-form writers to new students learning to annotate and analyze, they might share a laugh or build a friendship imagining the worlds their poems have built in the hearts of poets new and old.
Emerson and Mary Oliver
This one is fairly obvious– nature bends toward the page when it comes to both authors. Though Oliver writes a hundred years or so after Emerson, the two likely wandered in the early morning dew and thought of flowers and mountains and what it means to be free, even if they belonged to different schools of poetry. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to belong to the world? Who knows– yet Walt and Mary might, writing on behalf of any and everyone who wanders.
Baudelaire and Allen Ginsberg
If the heartbeat of the metropolis were a genre, both of these poets would be in the business of capturing it– though they dealt with different moments, one in Paris and one in New York, their long-form poems of radical change, of fervor and the death of culture, work well in concert. Though Ginsberg’s disciples wouldn’t likely read too much Baudelaire, there is no doubt that they would have been friends if given the chance.
Ocean Vuong and Langston Hughes
As gay writers in the city writing of diaspora, belonging, and change, these men would have much to talk about. Reviews call them pariahs and voices of a generation, they’re headers on recommended reading lists for social justice and change, but most importantly their prose and poetry sings with an understated quality of the quotidian, little moments that build up into a resolute and alchemical change in feeling across neighborhoods and then worlds of meaning.
Maggie Nelson and Anne Sexton
Nelson wrote her thesis at Wesleyan on Sexton, but that isn’t the only reason we see these two women as being part of the same poetic family. Nelson’s brash and prosaic language and Sexton’s feminist confessionalism belong on the same bookshelf, and not only for their literary similarities– they share a certain feminine yet brutal verve that transcends the particularities of their personal oeuvres. Besides, what makes better Sunday brunch conversation than the inherent carnality of womanhood and its attending frustrations? At the very least, this is a meet-up I would like to attend.
ten things poets don't want you to know
In a past century Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. He's a retired math professor and has published poems in numerous literary journals, including Spillway, the American Journal of Poetry and Willow Springs. His fourth collection, Deja Vu Goes Both Ways, won the Star 82 Press Book Award.
Written by Heikki Huotari
These trees are helices, all saints and sinners
per their birth certificates, unloved or loved with
strings attached. A blushing husband in a blushing
husband's body, you would choose the barber with
the bad haircut, the dentist with the crooked teeth,
the cop that's black and blue.
As hemispheres are glued together crudely
so entangled cantilevers are grandfathered, four and
twenty to a pie. To monopeds on unicycles there is
no emotion but in person, advanced placement or
domesticated carnivore. Let's stipulate im-
provisation, Chubby Checker, like we did in 1964.
Unmitigated hummingbirds belittle your
position. Barriers are bustle-supplemented. On the
butter sculpture you like best perhaps you'll pin this
ribbon. Every deity a distribution, my center of
gravity is yours. So subsequent to radiator failure
you may stay in Grant's Pass, Oregon forever.
how to discuss your ex-lover
Born in the fog of San Francisco, Nicolette (she/her) is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, and internationally-exhibited photographer. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently "Portrait of Your Ex Assembling Furniture". Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Rattle, Leopardskin & Limes, Quiet Lightning, and others. You can find her at www.nicolettedaskalakis.com or on Instagram @hellonicolette.
Written by Nicolette Daskalakis
Speak of them in the past tense, like they are deceased, or moved to a far-off country
devoid of an internet connection and cell reception.
Do not use their name in conversation, refer to them instead as “a friend of mine” or
“someone I knew.” This is less intimidating to present and future romantic prospects.
Allow them to take on the qualities of an estranged elementary school friend or a
distant cousin whose name you occasionally forget. Always occasionally forget their
name.
When someone mentions them, nod slowly, like you’re trying to remember what their
face looks like. Try to forget their face, especially if the person you’re talking to has a
face like their face.
If you find yourself in conversation with someone who regularly sees them, do not ask
about them. Instead, talk about yourself, preferably using a lot of positive adjectives
like wonderful and amazing, even if adjectives like shitty and depressed would be more
accurate.
Rewrite memories as to make the new ones more accessible in conversation: Go to the
museums you went to together, with someone new. Eat at the restaurants you ate at
together, with someone new. Listen to the music you listened to together, with
someone new. Speak about something new, with someone new.
Avoid discussing your ex-lover.
january blue (night I)
Evan Neiden (they/them) is an NYC-based writer and performance artist. They make poems out of Jewish folk tales, big band music, childhood synesthesia, black licorice, and wrong numbers. Sometimes they go by "january blue."
Written by Evan Neiden
the night i lost january, they were playing pretty music on the radio
[we interrupt this broadcast to bring]
the music told me first, and then the calls came in
[you breaking news tonight a body was]
i turned the music up until i couldn’t hear the ringing
[found washed up, frozen on the edge of lake michigan]
i don’t remember what they were playing on the radio but
[the body was waterlogged past recognition but]
i remember i listened in all night long
[whatever the cause, it happened weeks ago]
even as, hour after hour, my ringing phone went quiet; even
[before the body found its way into the water, it was]
when the sun came up and the frequency went
[dead.]
dead.
[once again,]
the night i lost january was the last night anyone called, it was
[those investigating could not identify the deceased but hey are]
the last night i called myself my name
[still attempting to put a name to the body; the coroner was]
and found something else in the radio silence
[unable to determine an exact time of death, but]
I don’t know whether their name was really
[they’ve surmised that the individual died sometime in]
january
[january]
but it’s my name now
[now back to your regularly scheduled programming]
and tonight, as i listen to the radio
[good night]
my name is pretty music too
Clickbait Review: How To B*tch to Strangers on a Park Bench
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.
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
Shari Caplan (she/her) is the siren behind 'Advice from a Siren’ (Dancing Girl Press). Her poems have swum into Gulf Coast, Painted Bride Quarterly, Angime, Drunk Monkeys, and elsewhere. Shari’s work has earned her a scholarship to The Home School, a fellowship to The Vermont Studio Center, as well as nominations for a Bettering American Poetry Award, a Rhylsing Award, and a Pushcart Prize. She proudly serves as Madam Betty BOOM, the “Miss Congeniality” of the Poetry Brothel, here to abolish Puritanism (and other icky isms!). Madam Betty BOOM wants YOU! to come to the Poetry Brothel in Boston. Follow her at sharicaplan.com and @MadamBettyBOOM on Instagram.
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
Stephanie Berger is a poet, experience creator, and entrepreneur. She earned a B.A. in Philosophy at the University of Southern California, received an M.F.A. in Poetry from the New School, and before founding The Poetry Society of New York, she taught in the English Department at Pace University. Stephanie is currently the CEO of The Poetry Society of New York and co-creator with Nicholas Adamski of The Poetry Brothel, The New York City Poetry Festival, and The Typewriter Project. She is the author of IN THE MADAME’S HAT BOX (Dancing Girl Press, 2011) and co-author with Carina Finn of THE GREY BIRD: THIRTEEN EMOJI POEMS IN TRANSLATION (Coconut Books, 2014). With Jackie Braje, she founded Milk Press, a publisher and nurturer of poetic collaborations.
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
Jackie Braje is a Brooklyn based poet-person, the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Milk Press, the Programs Director for The Poetry Society of New York, and guardian of Bird, the dog. Outside the Orb of Poetry, she is also a freelance editor, publishing PR associate, adjunct English professor at Brooklyn College, and Kate Bush enthusiast.
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
Jane Brinkley is an incoming sophomore at Smith College studying English and poetry. Her written work has garnered highest honors with organizations like the American Theater Wing, the Blank Theater, and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. She joined PSNY as a festival development intern in the spring.
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
tova g. (they/them/theirs) is a non-binary, queer poet from new york. they are currently an undergraduate student at sarah lawrence college, specializing in dramatic literature, poetry, & greek and roman antiquity. they have studied closely with acclaimed professors such as joseph lauinger & marie howe. pre-pandemic, they were actively involved in the new york theatre scene; most recently, they were the assistant stage manager for the off-broadway new york premiere of kayla martine's indoor person. their poetry is inspired heavily by the haight-ashbury beat movement & following 1960s psychedelicized aesthetics, virginia woolf's modernism, william burroughs' postmodernism, performance poetry, & frank o'hara's new york school. their experimentation regarding style & structure, as well as their self-aware theatricality & irreverent irony, build on the legacies of poets ranging from lenore kandel, to harold norse, to ntozake shange, to bob kaufman. they attempt to write at the intersection where poetry, theatre, music, & visual art meet. they are currently living in new york city with their partner & cat.
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
Lisette is a MFA student at The New School studying poetry and pursuing graduate minors in Impact Entrepreneurship and Transmedia & Digital Storytelling. She received her BA in English – Creative Writing and a minor in Communication from Hope College in Holland, Michigan. When she’s not writing Lisette is the digital media manager for The Poetry Society of New York, The Poetry Brothel, and Pen Parentis. She also serves as a poetry editor at Statorec and Milk Press Books. She finds her vocational calling in creative communication, connecting others with their artist abilities, and cultivating poetic spaces in the online and physical world. In her free time, she reads feminist zines, attempts to keep her plants alive, and has long discussions about New York punk.
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.
Sadhika Ganguli is a rising freshman at Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has been published in Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing, The Athena Review, For Women Who Roar, The Sheepshead Review, and the Jessie H. Butler Poetry Contest anthology. She is a proud woman of color and poetry is her passion. Writing, in general, has not only gotten her through tough times but has been able to complement the good in her life.
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
Esther Eidenberg-Noppe (they/them) interned at Youth Speaks Seattle, a non-profit poetry organization for two years, and was on the 2018 team representing Seattle at Brave New Voices, an international poetry-slam competition. Esther has been published in the 2019 anthology “Thriving While Trans” and the Sarah Lawrence College literary magazine Love and Squalor.
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
A. Spark is a NYC bred poet, transferred to sunny LA. She earned a BA in writing from The New School and sometimes performs as The Morrigan with The Poetry Brothel. She is glad to be walking the Earth with the many wondrous creatures she encounters.
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
Brandon James O’Neil is from New York City and currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Iowa, working remotely from the Upper West Side. His husband—a medical resident at Mount Sinai West—and himself were married in December 2019, roughly three months before the outbreak of COVID-19 and spent the duration of the global pandemic in their studio. Brandon’s poems grew out of those months of isolation, protest, and uncertainty. His work has appeared in Image, Psychological Perspectives, and Plough and his poem "Cats" won the First Line poetry contest from Alexandria Quarterly.
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
Kevin R. Farrell, Jr. is a New York based artist, poet, and educator whose work has been published in BONED – Every Which Way, Burning House Press, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Adroit Journal, Ink in Thirds Magazine, Foxhole Magazine, Yo-NEWYORK! and others. In 2021 Farrell released Best of the Worst, now in its second pressing, which consists of 20 poems that have risen to the top of the trash heap that is his constant documentation of a life spent toeing the line between spiritual bliss and emotional upheaval. His new book Top of the Heap is scheduled for a June 2021 release. As a recovering addict each day can be a struggle when dealing with the dumpster fire that is modern day existence. Sometimes Farrell attempts to put out the fire, on other days he warms his hands by the flames.
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!
Will Pewitt’s work in fiction, poetry, history, and philosophy has appeared in roughly two dozen publications. He has taught at a variety of institutions from the University of Arizona, where he earned his M.F.A., to the University of North Florida, where he currently teaches global literature.
by Will Pewitt
Five haikus made from erasures of supposedly “presidential” tweets.
letter for my lover on pesach
Ash Freeman is a junior at Sarah Lawrence College. They are originally from Miami, Florida but mostly write about their time spent in Michigan and the queer pastoral. They are the Editor-in-Chief of Love & Squalor. Their submission encapsulates their writing as a whole: honest, obsessed with love, and almost grotesque.
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
Sharon Mesmer's most recent poetry collection, Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place, was voted "Best of 2015" by Entropy. She's the author of several other poetry books, as well as three fiction collections including Ma Vie à Yonago, in French translation from Hachette. Four of her poems appear in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (second edition). Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine/The Cut, the Paris Review, and the American Poetry Review. Her current manuscript-in-progress, Even Living Makes Me Die, contains poems dedicated to 37 "under-known" women poets of the Americans, from Canada to Chile, from the 19th century to the present. She teaches creative writing at NYU and the New School.
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.”
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"
Originally from Minnesota, Greer McAllister is currently earning a Bachelor of Arts with a focus in creative writing and literature at Sarah Lawrence College.
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.