To allow our team time for a holiday recording hiatus, we’re sharing an encore episode from the Slush Pile archive. This episode, from December 2022, features two poems by poet Nick Visconti, “Burial” and “Unmake These Things.” It also marks the first appearance on the pod by our managing editor, Dagne Forrest. We’ll be back next time with new poems and new guests. In the meantime, enjoy this look back. As always, thanks for listening.

How much meaning do you need, Slushies? When language lingers, when images form a spiral, a murmuration, might a poem’s mood hold meaning close to its heart and simultaneously at bay? And, also, how do you pronounce ‘ichor’? All this and more in a rollicking conversation about poet Nick Visconti’s new work, “Burial” and “Unmake These Things.” And speaking of things, listen for Samantha on Anne Carson’s zen koan dollop of insight from Red Doc>: “To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.” Or for Kathy and Marion confessing their North Carolina ritual groping of the Dale Earnhardt statue in Kannapolis, NC. And finally: geese. Nick Visconti’s poem triggered a reverie-- that time when we accidentally stumbled into the annual Snow Geese migration in Eastern Pennsylvania.

At the table: Dagne Forrest, Kathleen Volk Miller, Alex Tunney, Samantha Neugebauer, Marion Wrenn.

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show. 

Nick Visconti is a writer living with an artist and a cat in Brooklyn. He plays softball on Sundays.

It is love,

not grief, which inters

the deceased

in a hill made of clay.

Sod embraces

crossed arms, legs, eyes shut

looking forever

at nothing

beneath our feet—a container

for men unmade,

no boat to speak of.

No oars

darkly dipped

in water as we pictured

it would be. Instead,

a single shred of light

piercing every lens

it catches. Instead,

a pathway none cross,

just follow through

and up

and up—the cusp of ending,

nothing at all like the end.

He isn’t in this yard when

his children roam. Still,

they dig,

they expect to find him:

braided leather, steel-wound aglets,

his black opal intact.

The sand before me like water, fluid and holy

under the cratered crown nearly

half-awake, circling

as I draw the one way I know—stick

figures in a backdrop scenery, thick-

headed and content, wheeling

psalms of birds, wide-sloping M’s

grouped in permanent murmur. I don’t bother

with the sun’s face, bare in the upper

left corner of the page. I’ve made

a habit out of hoarding ornaments,

given them their own orbit like the russet

ichor dashed with cinnamon

I choke down every morning and afternoon.

The city’s puncture-prone underbite nips

the sky, consuming the bodies

above—thunderheads, billboards

notched, alive in the glow of that always-

diurnal square. There’s been talk lately of

irreversible chemistry, an acceptable stand-in

for cure among believers and experts

in and on the subject of Zoloft-sponsored

serotonin. A first weaning is possible.

Do not bother with a second.