Fogged Clarity Podcast

He faced my mother

at the front door

with the heat turned off.

She wanted heat, like

wanting water. The metals

in the cellar didn’t clatter.

We lived those years

in borrowed rooms: his.

The grates whispered

when the warmth blew.

I sided against my own

because my body

was wrought by her—

heatless, stranger

to her comfort.

I grew despite.

Cold tuned my ear

and I worshipped what

he was, with his car

and his gold lighter.

For years after,

I moved aside

to give up space,

repulsed by my own

have-not. Even God’s

first breath sparkled

in the dry straw.

Jessica Cuello is the author of Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016), Hunt (The Word Works, 2017), and several chapbooks. She has been awarded The 2017 CNY Book Award (for Pricking), The 2016 Washington Prize (for Hunt), The New Letters Poetry Prize, and a Saltonstall Fellowship. Her newest poems can be found or are forthcoming in Passages North, Crab Orchard Review, Transom, Foundry, The Missouri Review, The American Poetry Journal, and Red Paint Hill.

We begin

with this Rorschach

of blood on thigh:

first, a gravedigger shoveling earth

into our bed,

then the rotting barn

we once undressed in.

Beneath this wet duress, we beg

in unison

to be born.

 

***

What’s the word

for the soft white belly

after the harpoon,

but before the hooks?

Last month, we bought the books

that told us what to buy.

Then bought none of it.

 

***

That August, when the river dries up

and the cattails sway like torches

waiting to be lit, we miss

the mud most.

We call it a crick, then dip

our toes into what’s not there.

 

***

Our little god-gone-

cannibal, our little omnivorous

accident, our little shit storm

of surrender, our little meaning-

cum-mercy, our little ball

of lightning, our little life-

boat hell-bent

on being held.

 

***

After the first deep freeze,

the elm leaves seal themselves

beneath the puddles:

each leaf blackened red

like a wound

we step carefully over.

She will unstitch you,

our mothers say.

The days pass: ocean,

ocean, accident.

Here a cave of prehistoric

fear, there a nest of teeth.

When you won’t sleep,

I lay you down on the floor

and kneel at the altar

of you altering me.

Fritz Ward is the author of Tsunami Diorama (The Word Works, 2017) and the chapbook Doppelganged (Blue Hour Press, 2011). The recipient of the Cecil Hemley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America, Fritz’s work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, The Adroit Journal, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. He works at Swarthmore College and lives just outside of Philadelphia.

A premier of the title track off Detroit bassist Betsy Soukup’s forthcoming album, This Disquiet.

Betsy Soukup is a bassist active in the Detroit jazz community. She sometimes plays with drummer Cory Tripathy and bassist Ben Willis as The Betsy Soukup Trio.

She stared at the sky in the seat beside

him as they lapped the miles on cruise,

then woke from her fugue at a stop sign

in Bliss to see just where they were

and how much gas was left, to turn

from the blue and give him a kiss.

Back from their drive, he dropped her off

at Spruce and Vine, then watched her fly

into the night on the hidden broom

beneath her dress and disappear

into the light of the gibbous moon.

Earthly fool, lost chauffeur,

he searched for her down every road

for the rest of his life. Felt her cool

chthonic lips on his in the dark

of every cruel, spectacular evening.

Chard deNiord is the poet laureate of Vermont and author of six books of poetry, most recently Interstate, (The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and The Double Truth (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). His book of essays and interviews with seven senior American poets (Galway Kinnell, Donald Hall. Maxine Kumin, Jack Gilbert, Ruth Stone, Lucille Clifton, Robert Bly) titled Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs, Conversations and Reflections on 20th Century American Poets was published by Marick Press in 2011. He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Providence College and a trustee of the Ruth Stone Trust. He lives in Westminster West, Vermont with his wife Liz.

he still paints

that rockabilly archtop

baby blue

Megan Denese Mealor has been featured in numerous journals, most recently The Opiate, Maudlin House, and The Metaworker. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and serves as a reader for E&GJ Press. Her debut poetry collection, Bipolar Lexicon, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. She lives in Jacksonville, Florida with her partner, son, and two cats.

You fool, I said, to not look me in the eye.

I used to wait for the serenade. Now I’m waiting

for some lover who takes pictures of himself

alone in his room

to notice, beck and call, to thicken

my milk. Some nights I go bustle my balling gown

from a gray gull closet, then wait to be asked to dance. But he’s too busy

taking pictures of himself to see me in the room,

disco ball bleating silver specks––I’m the smudge in the corner

by the keg clutching a restless flock of Grey-Lag geese,

the quick flighty types who hiss. Kiss me

and up we go. Then a six-foot drop

to the ground where we peck and doodle. Imagine the double dance I can do

with my geese, my orange beak and me. Wait a second.

I am not a goddamned bird. Nor am I

a fisherman’s wife. Though I am some dumb hook,

bait numb and funny looking. Funny-looking-lady. You fool,

I said, to the one in close proximity, the one still taking pictures of himself in bed,

but in my head I said you foolish fish wanting the big life

of pictures, not the simple one with three good children

and some punctual old fool. I hear they eat dinner every night at 6

in the simple life. But me and my camera-man, we live

the watercolor lie. Sooner or later it all blurs. I am ten years

too late, I think, under the observation of geese.

The camera observing us alone in our wanting rooms.

Or by the river talking to the fish not listening. Listen,

I say, you old fools, where is the hook and release,

the remote feeling of a body so slippery

it leaves someone’s hands in a fish-like huff.

I hear a woman gets old in her gills. All that breathing through water.

There I go again, off and wanting currents.

I see a picture of me with that man in his room,

minus the geese. We are clouded,

like Turner’s Boats at Sea in a white, goose-feathery bed,

a poster on the wall behind our heads: acid sun, black sea,

peripheral beach. Kiss me, you fool, I slur,

like a movie star roach. Wait––I want no insect in this scene.

I’ve used up all my seas and their horizons too. I have to go

with the geese. I am catching fire inside the camera’s burning bulb.

Or I am thinking how every thing that is a thing

is out there

and there it stands waiting under your eye until someday

you notice it.

Francine Conley is a writer and performing artist. She has a chapbook of poems, How Dumb the Stars (Parallel Press, 2001), and other published pieces can be found in: New England Review American Literary Review, Tinderbox, Green Mountains Review, Juked, Paris-Atlantic, and Shadowgraph Magazine, among others. She earned an MFA from Warren Wilson. For more on her writing and performance art: https://francineconley.com

The sky is not falling it’s

failing

as the rainband doxes trees in a wiretap wind :

seismic 7, the plastisphere

swelling, 413 AR.

Here’s what little I know

about going

about it : coldblack city

streets in an outage, kinky

blowdown a tape on a loop, the scuffed

muscle and worn

bone of a rotator cuff like a door come off

its hinge.

A prettiness

to break my face against. Or the government’s.

The sky is flailing—a hoax, a

helix, its daylight

an algorithm of

textured demos and Perlin noise

on a dome—and every time the sunshine dims

the system is

infrathin.

The afternoon twitching in Afib with

fog at the far end of town, purling

like a tectonic crack

shellacked in iPhone glass, my data

shadow flickers along the paywall and

casts me

out  :  a whisper

through the darknet. A pearl.

Fox field at evenfall.

Andrew Zawacki was a 2016 Howard Foundation fellow in poetry. His most recent poetry book is Videotape (Counterpath). His new translation of Sébastien Smirou, See About (La Presse), earned grants from the NEA and the Centre National du Livre.

Buying up the bad debt

—an edgelands

in the air—then returning

 

the ocean to circulation

after a fresh

coat of paint : circuit

 

bent canary song, petcoke

for export, préliminaires2,

jetwash out of my

 

aftermarket, hydrofluoro

carbon mouth.

At night the sky gets

 

snagged in the trees it

goes back

up in the morning.

 

The blast radius

center everywhere.

On foot

through the city as a

live-fire exercise—

windblown,

snowblind,

like a negative

yanked from the dark—:

 

not

an avatar in an environment

but the figure

 

as ground   for the ground.

Andrew Zawacki was a 2016 Howard Foundation fellow in poetry. His most recent poetry book is Videotape (Counterpath). His new translation of Sébastien Smirou, See About (La Presse), earned grants from the NEA and the Centre National du Livre.

–Rothko’s Phalanx of the Mind

Everything is a weapon

the glass pane poised

in the geometry

of its shanks

even the shadows

when imposed

by the brain’s

peach-pit wrinkles

onto what

could be

floor             ceiling             sky

but all

with the same

sharp intent

thin             impaled           desire

like an acupuncturist’s needle

a parabola of musings above

a flaccid tongue

and its balmy shadow below

massaging the pane to shatter

into the not-flesh of us all

Adam Vines teaches at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and edits Birmingham Poetry Review. He is the author of two collections of poetry, The Coal Life (University of Arkansas Press, 2012) and Out of Speech (LSU Press, 2018) and is coauthor of two collections, According to Discretion (Unicorn Press, 2015) and Day Kink (Unicorn Press, 2018). His recent poems have appeared in The Hopkins Review, Five Points, Green Mountains Review, The Greensboro Review, and Tupelo Quarterly.

–Rothko’s Street Scene

Perhaps he still had crumbs

on his lips, his collar, his lap

when he unzipped. Perhaps

he was still bound in half-sleep,

looking back at his memory

pressed into the mattress.

Perhaps the streetlamp’s inquisition

through the open window

persuaded the cracker-mattress

skyscraper to press its bald head

flat against the frame or the woman

horrified by its sight to boil

in her own skin, a red almost too orange,

crabs dumped across the Sunday news.

No one else is hungry or horny here.

The brown stripe of a man wedges

into a breezeway. A granddaughter,

her dress a swarm of chips clipped

from the thumb-moon, legs simmering

from ankle to shin to knee,

cooling to pink at the hemline,

her arm outstretched, elbowless,

impeding her grandmother’s path.

Rothko said he was no colorist

and a painting is not an experience.

Don’t be coy. Make me believe in this innocence

of nothing, the not-story of our lives.

Adam Vines teaches at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and edits Birmingham Poetry Review. He is the author of two collections of poetry, The Coal Life (University of Arkansas Press, 2012) and Out of Speech (LSU Press, 2018) and is coauthor of two collections, According to Discretion (Unicorn Press, 2015) and Day Kink (Unicorn Press, 2018). His recent poems have appeared in The Hopkins Review, Five Points, Green Mountains Review, The Greensboro Review, and Tupelo Quarterly.