Fogged Clarity Podcast

In winter, she comes to visit.

Following me around the house,

asking questions with your mouth.

She rests your chin on my head.

After I’ve said goodnight, she roots around for you,

digging for lost Christmas ornaments, state fair plush toys,

faded Polaroids of us at Mammoth Cave,

you at Cedar Point.

She ferrets out your old socks,

your work shirts stained with motor oil.

Our daughter needs things

to hold, to take with her when she leaves.

She and I are opposite coasts of the same country.

Rather than dig, I winnow—

the soft clacking of mahjong tiles,

the large golden koi, the half-empty bottle

of ‘Lectric Shave I hide beneath the bathroom sink.

How to keep you from scattering with the chaff?

When will the wind finally take you?

The Camelot, the Dolly Parton, the Alba Semi-Plena

that we planted—their little heads droop

beneath the meager new frost.

I count the coral folds of the Camelot,

the creases on my face from the nose pads of my glasses;

the rain, the darkness, the hollow in our daughter’s throat.

Today, I found you in the sink.

Yesterday, on the pillows.

I find you in the butter dish.

In the cold soil I hold in my hand.

Michelle Peñaloza is the author of two chapbooks: landscape/heartbreak (Two Sylvias Press, 2015) and Last Night I Dreamt of Volcanoes (Organic Weapon Arts, 2015). Her poems and essays have been featured in Waxwing, Poetry Northwest, New England Review, Off Paper, Vinyl, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships, awards, and scholarships from the University of Oregon, Kundiman, Hugo House, 4Culture, Artist Trust and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, among others. Michelle lives in rural Northern California.

Sure, I want to believe a poem can block a bullet too

that a poem could save me at the end of the world,

my bug-out bag teeming with “Good Bones.” My friend’s

husband sells guns. He’s a republican. His sales boom

under a democratic president, and sometimes he feels

strange-weird about making money off his opposition.

But people are afraid, he says, that their guns will get taken

away, so they load up and up, and now that Trump is here

people are pushing poems around the Internet like a salve,

slathering feeds with verse as sustenance for the apocalypse.

I’m getting emails about my work, they read: it’s so important

right now. I think right now has always been for sale. I was

always born writing poems about my skin and country. Anyone

in marketing knows about fads. Sometimes when I enter a new

house I wonder if they have a gun hiding under their bed, locked

and cocked… when I just have a poem in my pocket or stuck

in my head. Like when I’m in traffic, sometimes I say out loud:

I know all words come from preexisting words and divide

until our pronouncements develop selves. Sometimes I’ll mess up

and say it again until the line rolls over my tongue like warm milk.

If someone breaks into my house and wants to kill me, do it.

I’ll have nothing but a stack of books by my bed that I’ve been

wanting to read or am in the middle of reading or holding a gift

from a friend who said you need this book right now. I thought of you

when I read this book. See: when you [                       ], everything

be a poem. Everything be – my life still standing – a loaded Gun.

Every. Thing. Be, a deadly foe bent on my destruction. No, I can’t

separate my politics from my family or my body from my body.

You say you love me/You say you love me/You say you love me,

then love these parts of me you didn’t vote for, and then say how

much you love me again. Say it louder. Say it till you’re tired like

I’m tired of forgiving and explaining myself. Sometimes, I don’t

want to forgive, or explain myself. Yes, I write what I know and

what I want you to know (and what I don’t know): is everything,

how everything be so in right now, yes, everything might be falling

apart, but the center must hold, because when you [                      ]:

it has to. The center can hold—the center can hold and still sing.

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry chapbook Equilibrium, selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. She is the winner of the 2016 Academy of American Poets Prize and 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize, and is currently an MFA candidate at Vanderbilt University where she serves as Poetry Editor for Nashville Review. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Sewanee Review, Rattle, Best New Poets 2015, and elsewhere.

A bank’s clean limestone façade,

and inside, just past the marble columns,

beneath the perfect glass dome,

the carnival frenzies. Everyone

he’s known or lost or longed for

forced to wear feathery masks.

He loves excess, but only in the way

a flood loves excess—the destructive

miracle of it, so much of what permits

a life, unbridled and swallowing

the strip bar and library, the street lights,

the park benches and their endless

recipes of lovers, the one final justice

spilling through the police station’s

skylights, the abandoned building

an aquarium of rotted boards,

the whole rumpled shawl of it, the whole

monastery pool of it, the whole indigo

and glimmering sky turned up bright,

again, over the country.

Keith Leonard is the author of the poetry collection Ramshackle Ode (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). He is also the author of a chapbook, Still, the Shore (YesYes Books, 2013). His poems have recently appeared in the Academy of America Poets Poem-A-Day Program, Horsethief, and Copper Nickel. Keith has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Indiana University, where he earned an MFA. He lives in Columbus, Ohio.

I will take joy from wherever it comes.

I will wring it out of my grief.

I will seize it from my enemies.

Joy has no identity, no politics, no beliefs.

It is not deterred by my righteous indignation.

I will find hope is in its presence, not some bird in my future.

God gives us anger to confront true injustice.

God gives us joy to keep us from cutting

ourselves on our own swords, a point

of which balances the scales held by a woman

in turn enfolded by her own lover, Joy.

When I seize joy from my enemies,

my enemies follow. It is a thread of diamonds.

When pulled, it unravels everything except the shine.

Martha Serpas is the author of three collections of poetry: Côte Blanche (New Issues), The Dirty Side of the Storm (W.W. Norton), and 2015’s, The Diener (LSU). Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. Active in efforts to restore Louisiana’s wetlands, she co-produced Veins in the Gulf, a documentary about coastal erosion. She teaches at the University of Houston and serves as a hospital trauma chaplain.

Dreams refuse to wake with us.

They prefer the easy rewrites of sleep

to the alarms and showers

of daily routine. And who

can blame them? The noise

of this daylight, its empty oaths,

grind so hard into the skull,

the persistent weight

of my own head against the pillow

makes that weightless world

a welcome flight from a life

burdened with shadow.

Michael T. Young’s fourth poetry collection, The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost, was published by Poets Wear Prada. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award, and the Chaffin Poetry Award. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals including The Ashville Review, Cimarron Review, The Cortland Review, Main Street Rag, Prick of the Spindle, and The Potomac Review.

As beautiful as it is relevant, here’s Will Oldham performing his new song, “In Good Faith”.

LYRICS

In good faith:

Rocks are buried beneath tons of earth to become diamonds

With the gift of the sunlight the kudzu vine goes climbing

I open my heart to a world not of my making

We open our eyes to another morning breaking

In good faith:

We place our hands on the faces of our mothers

We do what we can to lift fear from the minds of our brothers

Instruments play songs brought forth from the hearts of their makers

These vibrations resound bringing union and love to all takers

In good faith:

We went to the polls so the world would know our choices

Our freedom was sold as the world ignores our voices

A hammer will come to smite the bewildered millions

A new crop will rise, a bodiless swarm of fresh children

Will Oldham is a musician and actor living in Louisville.

Author Rick Ewing sits down to discuss and explore the biographical elements of “Smoking Monkeys”–the novella he wrote as a recovering alcoholic living in the Bellevue Men’s Shelter in Manhattan.

“Smoking Monkeys” was designed and printed by Fogged Clarity and Small Fires Press. It can be purchased here.

Rick Ewing is an author living and writing in New York City. His novella, Smoking Monkeys, was put into print by Fogged Clarity in Spring 2016.

And then it turns cold, fall, the sky full of upside-down

ships, and wind, the grass turning

a bright but pale shade of green, sunlight between stark clouds, no

more yellow of daffodils, some window plastic flutters,

it’s coming, the wonderful specter of pothole-filled roads, a warm

car, gloved hands on a steering wheel, tires spinning in ditches,

snow-blindness, but now the lake outside the window is incessant, bothered

with dimples. Later it will flatten, and glow . . .

The yellow jackets rise through the wind currents, across the dead patches

of lawn and gray divots; they swim

up—glistening like enamel—crawl up under the gray-blue siding,

you place your ear against the house in order to hear them smolder,

a series of neon signs surging, a forest of cattails on fire,

something close to death breathing, waves shushing you

to sleep through an open window, stars hard as snowflakes nailed

to the sky in your brain, where you watch yourself

rise, step down into a small boat; there is a dance hall across the way,

where everyone you’ve ever touched is waiting.

David Dodd Lee has published eight collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Animalities (Four Way Books, 2014). His poems have recently appeared in Guernica, Field, Gulf Coast, Blackbird, and The Nation, among other journals. Lee teaches creative writing, visual art, and literature at Indiana University South Bend, where he also serves as editor-in-chief of the university’s 42 Miles Press.

My guts gurgle under my hand; yes, a place to hide, yes . . . When

the sun sets in the west, the river shines all the way across. News travels:

a clown,

a man whose job was kids’ parties, shoots himself

at his ex-wife’s house. It’s summer, too hot, all the parking lots

and porches abating in an arrogance of excess. “The new

normal.” While

here at home, under a thin sky of breath, my muscles hold memory together,

a sculpture by Brancusi—a bird in space—arcing past the stars; I was also young

once. Was I ever fond of clowns? A rustle of finches scatters stones under the

reach of

the trumpet vine, the clematis that is piling over everything else. ‘George Arthur, Jr.”

the paper announces the name. He put on his clown make-up, Ron says.

Said that Deidre told him. A gun goes off in the woods. It mixes with the roar

of cars

at the drag strip. The river doesn’t make a sound. It’s slow and mindful. It’s

hard to be brave, hard not to go all the way without leaving

a mess, without harming others. Without excluding them either.

David Dodd Lee has published eight collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Animalities (Four Way Books, 2014). His poems have recently appeared in Guernica, Field, Gulf Coast, Blackbird, and The Nation, among other journals. Lee teaches creative writing, visual art, and literature at Indiana University South Bend, where he also serves as editor-in-chief of the university’s 42 Miles Press.

The camp counselor’s voice

was sun-shot molasses—invite

the light, she said, so I let it

ebb up my knuckles and elbows

until warmth washed over

my entire torso like sunset

on a pocked brick wall, and I

became that light—sort of—face up

and afloat on the chapel floor.

Gong rung, I was the last

camper to slowly—mindfully—

open my eyes in the supine

position of renewed awareness,

surprised to find the others

tittering, gawking in my

direction. Clearly, my sweatpants

had tent-poled, campsite

of my own unplanned erection.

Could it be that my ego

had departed through my penis?

My pecker rigid with my

spirit’s activation? And where

were you, O Angel of Tumescence,

in my red-faced hour? Why

not appear in the rafters

and proclaim readiness

the greatest virtue, or at least

trumpet the relative

innocence of certain pubescent

reactions? Thereafter, I

was dubbed “Hard-on Boy.”

But the real growth came

after the ribbing:  I started

not to care. What could I say?

Sometimes a kid relaxes.

James Kimbrell was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1967. He has published three volumes of poetry: Smote (2015), My Psychic (2006), and The Gatehouse Heaven (1998), and was co-translator of Three Poets of Modern Korea: Yi Sang, Hahm Dong-Seon, and Choi Young-Mi (2002), all with Sarabande Books. His work has appeared in magazines such as Poetry, Ploughshares, Field, and Best American Poetry, 2012. He has been the recipient of the Discovery / The Nation Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Tallahassee where he is a professor in the creative writing program at Florida State University.