It’s not often that it happens, Slushies, but it’s always a treat when it does. We’re switching to fiction for the day with “Colfax,” a flash story from Patricia Q. Bidar, author of the short fiction collection Pardon Me for Moonwalking. Spoiler alert: read the story first in the show notes or listen to the story in full at 41:50 before our discussion ruins it for you. Something about the story’s theme and concision reminds Sam of Louise Glück’s prose poems in her late collection, A Faithful and Virtuous Night. Sam also appreciates how the story allows a female character the same kind of recklessness found in Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. Jason shares his surprising childhood connection to Vacaville, CA, one of the story’s locales. And in his role as bad cop, Jason raises a question about uncanny children. Tune in to find out what he means by that. While we’re all bracing for winter storms, we’re happy to dwell, for a moment, in California Central Valley’s humid and fertile atmosphere. As always, thanks for listening!

At the table: Tobi Kassim, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle, and Lillie Volpe (sound engineer)

Bio:        Patricia Q. Bidar is a western writer and Port of Los Angeles native. Her novelette, Wild Plums (ELJ Editions), was published in 2024 and collection of flash fiction, Pardon Me for Moonwalking (Unsolicited Press), in 2025. Patricia’s work has appeared in Waxwing, Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Pinch, and Another Chicago Magazine; in the Wigleaf Top 50, and in many anthologies including Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton), Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. Visit patriciaqbidar.com

Website www.patriciaqbidar.com

Facebook         https://www.facebook.com/patriciaqbidar

Instagram        https://www.instagram.com/patriciaqbidar/

Bluesky              patriciaqbidar.bsky.social

Colfax

Cristina swallows the last of the loose pills from Julian’s glove box. Within a few minutes, fresh energy blooms and fizzes within her; the sensation is of tumbling backward into space. 

Julian: a drug dealer so giant and peevish the floor mats on the driver’s side are bunched and ruined. Underneath his criminal veneer, Julian is just a mundane mammal who’s driven Cristina, an animal woman, to flight. 

Half an hour later, she’s reached Colfax. In this heat, this fecund place. The car has mashed against the gas station’s cashier hut. Years ago, when Cristina was growing up here, this was a drive-in theatre, with a massive image of a vaquero on a rearing steed. Sweltering nights, Cristina would watch movies with her lonely mother, car windows open wide, clasped in the smell of tomatoes, melons, and insecticide. 

Rain begins to pepper the hood. Cristina rises into vegetal air. She doesn’t recall opening the door. 

The window to the hut is dirty and rain spattered. She peers between cupped hands at the empty stool inside, the bank of cigarette packs. Lightning cracks; after a few seconds, thunder rumbles. Cristina presses her hand over her heart. Is she alarmed? Are the pills goosing her pulse? But she feels calm. The sky is a tight lid. It was a mistake, stealing Julian’s car. Julian, who took her in. Identified and claimed her after Cristina finished her time and was so adrift and alone. 

Cristina was working as a server in a West Sacramento brewery. Her last customer on a slow Tuesday night was a black-haired guy in a cowboy hat. Stiff-looking jeans and a pearl-buttoned shirt. A face that seemed not to match the hair. “Lady,” he said so low she had to incline her head. “You think no one sees you. I do. I do.” She joined Julian that very night on one of his quests. He was what her mother would have called a peeping tom. He wanted her to wear nylon hose, like he did. Why not? No one was getting hurt. It was simply watching. Watching women. Women when they were themselves and unaware they were being observed. In a word: seen. Julian was no Rawhead, no Slenderman. Not one of those serial killers roving California freeways in the nineteen-seventies, the ones Cristina’s mother had been obsessed with.

Now she imagines someone peering in through the car door and seeing her, Cristina, slumped behind the wheel. People idealize farmland, farm girls as wholesome. Green, yellow, and blue. 

The sky is cobalt now. Fifty feet away is a bus shelter, sagging and white. A small form is hunched inside. Lightning again, and then, immediately following, that bass sky-rumble. Cristina runs.

Inside, a child of about nine swings its legs. Windbreaker, hood up. 

"Hello there?" Cristina ventures.

"I'm studying these ants," the kid returns. A girl. "Would you like a churro?" Cristina cannot see the girl’s face but is struck by the way she sits. A bell buried deep inside of her tolls.

"Is this the bus stop for town?" Cristina asks.

The churros smell nice; hot grease and cinnamon. Cristina used to make them for her little sisters. She thought she might become a baker one day. At least, when anyone asked, this was what she had answered. She should be hungry.

"That's my car, in case you were wondering,” Cristina says. Nothing. She crouches down beside the girl. “Dead at the service station. Lucky, I guess.”

The child considers this. "Well, not really." She speaks patiently, the way Cristina used to speak to adults at her age. As if they were her younger sisters or the kids in the slow class at school, or the witless ladies in the school office.

“On second thought, I’ll take one of those churros." Cristina says. But the girl has returned to her task: surveilling a line of ants. Cristina’s mind unspools the types. Velvet ants. Pharaoh ants. Argentine ants. Thief ants. The odorous house ants, and then — wasn’t there a sugar ant? 

The smell of water-heavy crops and soil and chemical fertilizer thickens the air. All of the choices Cristina has made in life have led her to this place. "There’s nothing left," she says aloud.

"It depends on how you see it," the girl returns, pushing her eyeglasses up into place with a forefinger. Cristina squints at the obscured face. Then the girl daintily lifts and lowers her hood. And bares the side of her left pinky finger. The small oval scar is exactly like Cristina’s. 

“Did your mother tell you that people with six fingers and toes are giants sired by angels and human women? Something apart from God,” Cristina said. Those surgeries when she was four. 

“She says I’m a monkey.” Cristina remembers a long-ago birthday party, her ninth, attended by zero children. 

She feels the sky drawing her up, then. At the same time, the inverted bowl of sky pushes down. It is like that optical illusion where you can’t tell if the black horse is headed toward you or walking away. Hail pounds the roof of the shelter. The discs of ice flash under the bright lights of the gas pump island. The girl returns to dropping pinches of dough onto the ants. Obeying their internal imperative: a perpetuation of their kind. 

Cristina sees Julian preparing for bed. Applying his eye cream. Clapping twice to extinguish the bedside light. He refers to himself as cerebral. But what is so deep about dealing painkillers during the afternoon shift at the One Stop Spy Shop in Vacaville? Life with Julian had amounted to a slow and downhill slide, and that was for sure.

“We live our lives with our ancestors as witness,” the girl says at last. Her words hang in the air like wet almond blossoms. 

Cristina has to ask. “Am I that? Am I alive?”

And a roar consumes the sky. A silver bus is careening toward them from behind blue oaks.

And a metal monster slips from the asphalt. Rolls end over end. Sky-blotting. Deafening. Images rise and blend and collapse. The blanched face of the driver. The silhouettes of passengers. One of whom is standing. Julian? Something blooms and expands in Cristina’s head.

But there is no bus. No careening crash. Only a fecund silence.

And the girl tears a piece of the churro, nudging Cristina’s lips with the sugar and cinnamon confection. It is absolutely delectable and somehow still warm. Like the corner of a golden kitchen in bygone evenings. A humming mother, changing her dressings. An iron stove and a gray kitten, satisfied and warm. 

Cristina really, finally, is free. She has made it back to the beginning. 

Apart from time, the girl and Cristina stand in the little windbreak like gingerbread children or figures in a Frida Kahlo painting. The girl takes her hand. And then it is she and Cristina and the animal female chain, extending into and past the vanishing point: Girl Girl Girl Girl Girl Girl Girl.

We welcome in the new year with a full house today, Slushies, as we discuss two poems from Cal Freeman. The first poem’s title glacier reminds Kathy of this year’s epic snowfall in Juneau, Alaska (though it’s forty inches, not forty feet, of snow). All that snow reminds Lisa of Boston’s Vile Pile of snow that would not melt until July. Kathy deftly segues that memory back to our own slush pile. We admire Freeman’s use of sonics in “Glacial Erratics” and the poem’s subtle gestures towards relationship strife. We all agree we’re stealing the poet’s apt description of “overwrought craft beer.” 

Since the second poem, “A White Bird,” is a classic Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, the discussion of iambic pentameter that ensues might be helpful to any teachers in the listening audience (as well as KVM’s brother, Dave). Have a listen as we nerd out on meter. All the sonnet particulars lead Marion to admit what it is that gives her a secret intellectual boner. 

We end with lots of fodder for your TBR pile. Listen through the end of the episode for everyone’s recommended reads, linked below. As always, thanks for listening!

At the table: Dagne Forrest, Tobi Kassim, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, and Lillie Volpe (sound engineer)

PBQ’s Recommended Reads:

From KVM:  Lili is Crying by Hélène Bessette 

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

From Jason: Little Rot by Akwaeke Emezi

From Sam: Flesh by David Szalay

From Dagne: When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O’Neill

From Tobi: Sally Rooney’s novels

Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space by Catherine Barnett

Midwood by Jana Prikryl

From Marion:

Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture by Jason Schneiderman

Teaching Writing Through Journaling by Kathleen Volk Miller

To learn to describe the animal by Guillermo Rebollo Gil

From Lisa:

Modern Life by Matthea Harvey

Author Bio: Cal Freeman (he/him) is the author of the books Fight Songs (Eyewear 2017), Poolside at the Dearborn Inn (R&R Press 2022), and The Weather of Our Names (Cornerstone Press 2025). His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Atticus Review, Image, The Poetry Review, Verse Daily, Under a Warm Green Linden, North American Review, Willow Springs, Oxford American, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Advanced Leisure. He is a recipient of the Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes), winner of Passages North's Neutrino Prize, and a finalist for the River Styx International Poetry Prize. He teaches at Oakland University and serves as Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit. 

Instagram @johnfreeman5984

Photo credit: Shdia Amen

Glacial Erratics

A White Bird

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.

It’s a banner day here on the pod, Slushies. We welcome a very special guest, American Poetry Review’s Elizabeth Scanlon to the table as we discuss three prose poems from Sara Burant.

Dagne sends out birthday wishes to Canada’s own Margaret Atwood while Lisa shows the team her Margaret Atwood-as-saint candle. We note the recent poetry trend towards raising the profile of female visual artists whose work has been overlooked during their lifetimes. Artists like Sonia Delaunay, mentioned in Burant’s poem “Fields,” and Hilma af Kilmt, whose art inspired Didi Jackson’s recent book “My Infinity.” 

The mention of a clay pipe in one poem sends Marion running for a treasure her husband found while mudlarking. Kathy cops to her blue-collar resistance to a precious ars poetica and we discuss what it takes to win her over in the end. Elizabeth relates how John Ashbery likens waiting for a poem to a cat’s finicky arrival. We note Frank O’Hara’s notion of “deep gossip,” name checking his own friends along with celebrities in his poems, a gesture Burant employs in her poem “Heat wave.” And we come full circle with a shout out to American Poetry Review’s own podcast where Elizabeth interviewed Margaret Atwood during the pandemic. As always, thanks for listening!

At the table:

Dagne Forrest, Samantha Neugebauer, Elizabeth Scanlon, Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, and Lillie Volpe (sound engineer)

Bio: Sara Burant’s poems, reviews, and collaborative translations of Paul Éluard’s poems have appeared in journals such as OmniVerse, Pedestal, periodicities, Ruminate, and The Denver Quarterly. Her work has been honored with a fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts and a residency at Playa. At 55, she received an MFA in Poetry from Saint Mary’s College of California. She’s the author of a chapbook, Verge.

after Frank O’Hara

For the chickens I save tidbits, potato skins, and the outer cabbage leaves which make me think of hats. The red wobble of the hens’ combs and the smell of their fecal heat, unaccountably dear to me. Awaiting a match to warm me, I chew on a clay pipe’s stem, contemplating the waning moon of its bowl and my pink lipstick past. The silence behind words spoken or thought clucks softly in my inner ear. Sitting inside, I can’t help looking out, a lifting, carrying blue, the wind’s little pull on the earlobe of my heart. Lately I’ve been cutting paper into shapes that mean Feed me or Take me to your leader, wishing I’d been taught to name feelings as they arise. Tenderness for the apple still hanging from winter’s limb. Loneliness drunk down with morning’s darjeeling. There are conspirators for beauty. Like rabbits, they leave tracks in the snow. Like geese, they arrow through hallways of night. Without sentiment or self-pity they gaze at certain slants of light. They chip away the ice with a pick to get at the lock. Then they pick the lock. And oh, what a view. I want to walk in the dark to get there, not following anyone’s directions. To enter the fortune teller’s crystal ball with bread in my pocket and a botanist’s loupe. Though I don’t know your name, I move forward only beside you, your imaginary hand in mine. 

The woman at the table next to mine gives up loud-talking in favor of song, but it’s not looking for love, it’s looking for FUN—& feeling groovy. Maybe I should warn her—today’s theme isn’t love or fun, it’s submarine & skedaddle, it’s danger-danger, hold your breath & sound. This avalanche of heat, these record-shattering days. See the breakage piling up on sidewalks so hot the barefoot babies weep as they learn to toddle. Maybe, as you like to point out, I’m catastrophizing, when what I really want is to feel groovy again. To butter my skin with baby oil & sizzle, walking barefoot along the burning sand, Bradford Beach where I fell in love unrequited for the umpteenth time. Back then, who was counting? Back then summer lasted for years & still wasn’t long enough. 1978, despite Mother’s reservations, I saved my babysitting money for a ticket to Fleetwood Mac at County Stadium. Eilleen, Maggie, Liz, Jean, Mary, me—& Stevie Nicks & Christine McVie, the elm trees & long summer dusk of those women’s voices. A dusk so filled with the orange, violet & chartreuse silk of its immense flag flying above, beside & through you, you neglect to notice shadows splotching the periphery & forget your curfew. I didn’t notice much, so stoned I was, we were, melting into the moment’s spotlessness, our adolescent hips grooving, our tan arms waving, here, now, this, this, this—I mean there, then, that, that, that—no one yet suspended for drinking, no one yet strung out, dropping out, running off with boys to Oregon or Wyoming, limping home pregnant or in rags. The elms, gone. Mom, Vince, Rob & Christine McVie, too. I’ve had to swear off many things due to poor digestion—but oblivion, I’d still like to indulge in that sometimes, diving into it like a bee into a flower, a morning glory, its dumb, purple, one day only show. 

Early winter weather has us pondering an alternate definition of “slush pile,” albeit the mucky, grey residue remaining after a city snowfall. Our Slush Pile is far more fresh, but still a wintry mix as we discuss the short story “Catherine of the Exvangelical Deconstruction” by Candice Kelsey. You might want to jump down the page and read or listen to it in full first, as there are spoilers in our discussion!

The story is set on the day of the Women’s March, following 2017’s Inauguration Day, but only references those events in the most glancing of ways. Instead the protagonist glances away to an array of distractions: Duolingo, a Frida Kahlo biography, a bat documentary, European architecture, banjo music, a stolen corpse flower, daydreaming, and actual dreaming. In the withholding of the protagonist’s interiority, Sam sees a connection to Rachel Cusk’s Outline, while Jason is reminded of early Bret Easton Ellis. The editors discuss how fiction might evoke the internet’s fractioning of our attention, by recreating the fractioning or reflecting it?

We’d like to offer congratulations to Sam whose debut book of short stories, “Uncertain Times,” just won the Washington Writers Publishing House Fiction Prize. As always, thanks for listening!

At the table: Dagne Forrest, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle, and Lilllie Volpe (Sound Engineer)

Listen to the story “Catherine of the Exvangelical Deconstruction” read in its entirety by Dagne Forrest (separate from podcast reading)

(Website): https://www.candicemkelseypoet.com/

(Instagram): @Feed_Me_Poetry

Catherine of the Exvangelical Deconstruction

Catherine’s thumb hovers over Duolingo’s question, her mind dim from doom scrolling, chest dead as TikTok. The green owl stares. She swears its beak is twitching. 

“Got 5 minutes?” 

She swipes Duo, that nosy bastard, and his taunting French flag icon away. “Non.” The apartment is dim, the air too still. Days feel hollow and unhinged, as if she’s Edmond Dantès tossed off the cliff of Chatêau d’If, a brief and misplaced shell weighted to the depths of the sea. So much for learning a language to calm the nerves.

Frida Kahlo's face stares from the page of a book she hasn't finished reading. “I should just return this already.” There are days she commits to her syllabus of self-education and days she resents it. Kahlo’s eyes pierce her, and giving up feels like large-scale feminist betrayal—how she has shelved the artist, her wounds, tragic love, and all. But even sisterhood is too much this January 21st, and of all people, Kahlo would understand.

Catherine opens her laptop and starts a documentary about bats instead. Chiroptera. A biologist with kind eyes speaks of their hand-like bones, the elastin and collagenous fiber wings. The chaos of nature is its own magic realism. She learns bats are vulnerable like the rest of us. Climate disruption and habitat loss. Plus white nose syndrome and the old standby, persecution by ignorant humans who set their caves aflame. In the documentary, there is a bat with the liquid amber eyes of a prophet. Maybe that’s what this world has had too much of, she begins to consider. Mid-deconstruction of decades in the white, evangelical cesspit of high control patriarchy, Catherine sees the world as one big field day full of stupid ego-competitions like cosmic tug-a-wars. And prophets were some of the top offenders.

King Zedekiah, for one, had the prophet Jeremiah lowered into a well by rope, intending he sink into the mud and suffocate. All because he warned the people of their emptiness. Her mind wanders to Prague, to art, to something far away that might fill her own cistern life.

“Maybe next summer,” she whispers. “Charles Bridge, St. Vitus.” The rhythm of bluegrass hums through the speakers, enough to anchor her here, in this room, in this thin sliver of a world she cannot escape. “That could be the problem; I need to learn Czech. No, fuck Duo.”

J'apprendrai le français. J'irai à Prague. Je verrai les vieux bâtiments.

But then, something strange. The banjo’s pluck feels different, deeper, its twang splitting the air. She Googles the history of Bluegrass, and the words tumble from the page, layering like the weight of a corpse settling into the silt off the coast of Marseille.

The banjo isn’t Appalachian in origin but rather West African—specifically from the Senegalese and Gambian people, their fingers strumming the akonting, a skin drum-like instrument that whispered of exile, of worlds ripped apart. American slavers steeped in the bitter twisting of scripture trafficked them across the Middle Passage, yet in the cruel silence of the cotton fields, they turned their pain into music. How are we not talking about this in every history class in every school in every state of this nation? The akonting, an enslaved man’s lament, was the seed of a gourd that would bloom into the sounds of flatpicking Southerners.

Still, the banjo plays on in Catherine’s apartment. A much more tolerable sound than Duolingo’s dong-ding ta-dong. But she can’t quite cleanse her mind of the French lessons, of Lily and Oscar.

Il y a toujours plus. Her voice is barely a whisper, trying to reassure herself. There must be more.

A recurring dream, soft and gleaming like a pearl—her hands moving over cool clams, shucking them on a beach house in Rhode Island. It’s a faint memory, but no less ever present. Aunt Norma and Uncle Francis’ beach cottage and the closest thing to a Hyannis Port Kennedy afternoon of cousins frolicking about by the edge of a long dock lured back by the steam of fritters. But this time, Ocean Vuong stands beside her. He’s talking about the monkey, Hartford, the tremors of the world. And the banjo has morphed into Puccini’s La Bohème, which laces through the rhythm of Vuong’s syntax like a golden libretto.

They notice a figure outside the window, a shadow in the sand—the new neighbor? He’s strange. A horticulturist, they say. Catherine hasn’t met him, but there are rumors.

“Did he really steal it?” Vuong asks. She practices her French—it’s a dream after all—asks “Le cadavre fleuri?”

They move to whispers, like a star’s breath in night air. Rumor stands that in the middle of California’s Eaton fire, the flower went missing from the Huntington Museum in Pasadena. The Titan Arum, bloated and bizarre in its beauty and stench, just vanished. Fran at the liquor store says the new neighbor, gloves always pressed to the earth, took it. 

At night, she hears him in the garden, talking to the roots. She imagines his voice, murmuring something incomprehensible to the moonlight. Like that’s where the truth lies—beneath the soil, between the cracks of broken promises, smelling faintly of rot.

She recalls the history she once read, so distant, so impossibly rotten. During WWII, when the Nazis swept through Prague, they forced Jewish scholars to scour their archives. They wanted to preserve the so-called “best” of the Jews—manuscripts, texts, holy materials—for their future banjo-twisted Museum of an Extinct Race.

She shudders. The music, the wild joy of the banjo, now seems infected with something ancient and spoiled. The act of collecting, of preserving, feels obscene. What do you keep? What do you discard? Whom do you destroy?

She wakes from the dream, her phone still alive with French conjugations. The bluegrass hums, but it’s heavier, like a rope lowering her into Narragansett Bay.

The neighbor’s house is dark. But she thinks she can see him, a silhouette against the trees, standing still as a warning. Everything is falling apart at the seams, and she is both a part of it and apart from it. Like each church she left, each youth group and AWANA or Vacation Bible School where she tried to volunteer, to love on the kids, to be the good follower she was tasked with being. 

She leans her forehead against the cool glass of the window, closing her eyes. The ache is there, the same ache that never quite leaves. It’s sharp, it’s bitter, it’s whole. The small, steady thrum beneath it all. Il y a toujours plus.

Maybe tomorrow she will satisfy Duo. Maybe next fall she will dance down a cobbled street in Prague. Find five minutes to feel human. Perhaps she will be whole enough, tall as St. Vitus Cathedral, to face whatever is left of this America.

She closes her eyes to Puccini’s Mimi singing Il y a toujours plus and dueling banjos while her neighbor secretly drags a heavy, tarp-covered object across his yard under the flutter of Eastern small-footed bats out for their midnight mosquito snack. A scene only Frida Kahlo could paint.

In this our second episode discussing work from poet Eli Karren, we’re shifting timelines, story lines, wine time, and coffee time. We welcome special guest, Tobi Kassim, as part of the podcast team for the day. (We’ll be “sprinkling” special guests throughout the upcoming season!)

We dig into Eli’s richly detailed poem “Franchise Reboot” which nods to David Lynch’s nineties TV phenom, Twin Peaks, along with the Museum of Popular Culture, Ikea furniture, Matthea Harvey’s poem “The Future of Terror,” and Wandavision, among other touchstones.

The team questions some of the advice we’ve received on what should or should not be included in poems: dreams, color lists, center justification, cicadas. It’s an airing of pet peeves, Slushies. And then we decide to get over ourselves. Tune in with a slice of cherry pie. As always, thanks for listening.

At the table: Tobi Kassim, Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, and Lillie Volpe (Sound Engineer)

 @eli.james.karren on Instagram 

Eli Karren is a poet and educator based in Austin, TX. His work can be found in the swamp pink, At Length, Palette Poetry, and the Harvard Review.

Franchise Reboot

We sat at the diner in Snoqualmie 

quoting lines back and forth

to each other. Saying what we could remember, 

without fidelity, without 

choosing a character or a scene. 

We got the coffee, the cherry pie, 

took pictures with a piece of wood 

that the waitress passed across the bar, 

cradling it like a newborn. 

Earlier, we had gone to the waterfall, 

and I confessed that I had been

falling in love with a coworker. 

Or rather, that it felt that way. 

Melodramatic. Full of will they 

won’t they tension.

You said, expertly, that that 

was probably the only exciting thing about it. 

That not everything in life 

has to be a soap opera. 

Later that night, when you went off 

to chaperone a high school dance

I saw a movie 

about a woman who fucks a car.  

Outside the theater,

some guys smoked cigarettes

and wondered aloud if originality was dead. 

I told them that the only glimmer

of the original is the terroir, 

the local language, the dialect and vernacular. 

All the shit you suppress

when you move away

from your childhood home. The things 

you pay a therapist to excise from you

in a room comprised only 

of Ikea furniture. 

On the long Uber back to your house

I thought about the future of nostalgia,

the car careening through downtown Seattle,

past the Shawn Kemp Cannabis shop, 

and the Museum of Pop Culture, 

which held a laser light show on its lawn. 

The whole drive I had the words 

tangled in my brain and was trying to recite 

Matthea Harvey’s “The Future of Terror.” 

I remembered only the generalissimo’s glands 

and the scampering, the faint sounds

of its recitation humming below

the car’s looping advertisements 

for Wandavision. In my head 

the possibility of infinite worlds thrummed.

Once, at a farmers market, 

I watched an elderly man

wander through the stands, 

past the kids playing with pinwheels

and eating ice cream, 

a VR headset strapped 

to his face, his hat in his hand,

the muffled sound of tears

in his vicinity. I always wondered

what he had seen. 

What reduced him to tears

on a May afternoon, 

his hands splayed forward,

a little drunk with sun 

and regret, reaching out 

towards something.

III.

This, I tend to gussy up at parties. 

A lie I tell myself because I want 

to believe in true love. As I say 

in the diner the owls are not 

what they seem. But at what point 

does the false supercede the real? 

When you came home, I was crying 

on the couch, rewatching 

its rejection of closure.

Its protagonist catatonic 

for sixteen hours, a walking 

talking middle finger. 

Just so we can have this moment 

where he says the line 

and has the suit and we hear

the famous song 

and are embraced again. 

Seeing you, seeing old friends

this is how I always feel. 

Reminded of this pond

deep in the woods.

Somewhere I went to only once 

but keep returning to 

in dreams. 

I remember how we hiked 

an hour out

and slipped below the water

as the sun began to set.

In the dream, sometimes 

there is an island. Sometimes 

we swim to its surface. 

Sometimes the moon arises,

its gravity pulling us deeper

out above the blackness

where the shale slips

to the bottom. I’m never sure

if it is when I sink into the water or exit 

that I become someone else.

Wake always with a lyric 

on my lips. This 

is the me I’ve missed. 

The one that survives

the factory reset, the franchise

reboot. The one I dreamt

of every morning

when closure was something

to be evaded, treated 

like the cars in a Frogger game. 

But not here, with you, 

halfway across the country.

If I grasp gently, 

I can take the headset

from my eyes. 

I can almost see 

where the red curtains part

and the sycamores begin. 

At the table: Dagne Forrest, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle

This recording had a rough start, Slushies. We’re talking technical difficulties, disappearing dogs, and tomato-eating cats. But we rallied in time to discuss two poems from Eli Karren. Jason hails the Whitmanian, associative line found in these poems. We’re taken with the specificity of detail, right down to botanical names and brands of beer. And speaking of Whitman, Kathy shares this scathing review of his then newly published Leaves of Grass.

Eli Karren is a poet and educator based in Austin, TX. His work can be found in the swamp pink, At Length, Palette Poetry, and the Harvard Review. 

Mountain Laurel

Last summer I drank until blackout, then chatted about Cronenberg with my neighbor.

Really, it was a baptism.

To dip my head beneath the current, still in the blackness, and rise to the light.

I had kept myself distracted with NBA highlights and foreign films. With amateur

Elegy for the East Side

Just tonight, walked from one end to the other, sequestered to the sidestreets, skipping

Their wives hold Hamms in a semi-circle and look slightly like a Midwestern coven

Nothing a shot of Malort and some curly fries couldn’t handle

On the corner, telephone pole advertisements proffer mass ascension and a wet T-shirt contest

No fireworks

No strangers in the street holding sparklers as we find each other in the handsy cocoon

When Marion pops up on Zoom with her curls blown out to smooth newscaster perfection, it’s a hot topic and one that offers a perfect lead-in to the first poem up for discussion, “Your Hair Wants Cutting” by this episode’s featured poet, Michael Montlack. The three poems we’re considering take inspiration from the Mad Hatter character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. We discuss, Slushies, how much, if any, contextual framing is needed to guide the reader when poems refer to a character who resides in our collective imagination.

We also talk about local and regional idioms, and for Kathy, how difficult they are to unlearn (shout out to Pittsburgh!). Marion accidentally bestows a new nickname on Jason. Dagne has an opinion about how speech is rendered within a poem: italics or quotation marks. She’s team italics, Slushies, which are you? While thinking about the line in these poems; Marion refers to Jason’s excellent essay on the history and theory of the line from his book Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture. Another poem in the batch has Marion recalling Jason’s poem “Wester.” As always, thanks for listening!

At the table: Dagne Forrest, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, and Lisa Zerkle

Michael Montlack's third poetry collection COSMIC IDIOT will be published by Saturnalia. He is the editor the Lambda Finalist essay anthology My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (University of Wisconsin Press). His work has appeared in Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, Cincinnati Review, Lit, Epoch, Alaska Quarterly Review, Phoebe and other magazines. In 2022, his poem won the Saints & Sinners Poetry Contest for LGBTQIA+ poets. He lives in NYC and teaches poetry at NYU and CUNY City College.

https://www.facebook.com/michael.montlack

https://www.instagram.com/michaelmontlack

(website) https://www.michaelmontlack.com/

“Your Hair Wants Cutting”

my grandmother would say, sitting there at her window,

Muchier

Picture me on a grand terrace, tipping my hat.

Inheritance

There wasn’t much to leave—my sister,

Episode 143: Do They Still Have Bulletin Boards?  

Our discussion of Alyx Chandler’s poems has us considering the liminal space between girlhood and womanhood, summer and fall, print and digital cultures, good bug and bad, Slushies. With these poems, we’re swooning over summer’s lushness, marveling over kudzu’s inexorable march, and thinking back to steamy afternoons running through sprinklers with skinned knees. Set at the end of girlhood, these poems makes us think of the Melissa Febos book of the same name. Jason is charmed by the poet’s hypotactic syntax and her control of the line. Be sure to take a look at the poems’ format at PBQmag.org.  

As our own summers wrap up, Lisa saves monarch caterpillars while Sam smushes lantern flies. Kathy shares her new secret for a solid eight hours of sleep. Looking to the future, we’re celebrating forthcoming chapbooks and books. Dagne’s chapbook “Falldown Lane” from Whittle, Jason’s book “Teaching Writing Through Poetry,”  and Kathy’s “Teaching Writing Through Journaling,” both from a new series Kathy is editing at Bloomsbury. As always, thanks for listening. 

At the table: Dagne Forrest, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle 

Author bio: Alyx Chandler (she/her) is a poet from the South who now teaches in Chicago. She received her MFA in poetry at the University of Montana, where she was a Richard Hugo Fellow and taught poetry. In 2025, she won the Three Sisters Award in Poetry with Nelle Literary Journal, received a Creative Catalyst grant from the Illinois Arts Council, and was awarded for residencies at Ragdale and Taleamor Park. She is a poet in residence at the Chicago Poetry Center and facilitates workshops for incarcerated youth with Free Verse Writing Project. Her poetry can be found in the Southern Poetry Anthology, EPOCH, Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. 

Author website: alyxchandler.com 

Instagram @alyxabc 

Love Affair with a Sprinkler

I’ve only got

so many days 

left to wet this face

to rouse enough

growl to go back 

where I came from 

to build a backbone 

hard as sheet metal

from the engine of 

dad’s favorite truck

the one I can 

never remember 

though it carried me 

everywhere I needed to go 

and of course

where I didn’t

short-shorts trespassing 

abandoned kudzu homes 

scraped legs inching  

up water towers

creeping down stone

church rooftops

girlhood a fresh-cut lawn

where secrets coiled

like a water hose 

stuck in kinks

spouting knots 

writhing in grass 

begging to spit at

every pepperplant 

sate all thirst

I want to drown

to be snake-hearted

again my stride full

of spunk and gall

half-naked in an 

embrace with the 

spray of irrigation jets 

their cold drenching

my kid-body good 

and sopping-wet 

in hose-water rivulets

under its pressure 

I shed regret

molt sunburn

squeal hallelujah 

in a hot spell—

such a sweet relief 

I’d somehow 

after so many years

forgotten.

Once I Lived in a Town 

where grocery stores dispensed 

ammunition from automated machines, 

all you needed was an ID and license,

the sign advertised, but there are ways 

around that, a cashier told me, snuff a bulge 

half-cocked in his cheek. But my target? 

The choose-your-own-adventure 

bulletin board. If you were brave,

you’d let some guy named John shoot 

you with their dad’s old Nikon film

camera. Girls only. No tattoos, the ink of

the red-lettered flyer bled. Those days 

I craved someone—anyone—to lock

and load my rough-hewn beauty like 

a cold weapon. Ripen the fruit of 

my teenage face. Save me. Instead I

washed the ad in my too-tight jeans,

let it dye my pocket grapefruit pink. 

Once I lived in a town where daily I

wore a necklace with a dragonfly wing 

cured in resin, gifted from a lover, 

a lifelong bug hater. Love can live in 

the crevice of disgust, I found, but 

lost it within the swaths of poison oak 

where I shot my first bullet into wide-

open sky and felt death echo its curious 

desire, automatic as the gun’s kickback. 

My legs mottled in pocked rash. Then a 

hole I didn’t know existed. A souring. 

Bitter and salt the only taste craved, 

a rotten smell in the fried fatback I ate. 

Once I lived in a town where the first 

boy I kissed in the wreathed doorway

of my childhood home left Earth too

soon from a single shot. I can’t ask: is

this what the military taught him? I only

know the cruel way high school relationships 

end, 5-word text then never again. His fine-

line dragon doodles and i-love-you notes 

still in my Converse shoe box in an attic,

twelve years untouched. I once lived in 

a town where obits never contained

the word “suicide”—everyone is a child

of Christ, and I mean everyone, our pastor

used to say, a joke staining his sincerity. 

God, how I undercompensate, use safety

pins for my grief when I need weapons-grade 

resistance, a cast-iron heart. Once I lived

in a town where I found a primed handgun

under the bed of a boy I cheated with.

Delirious, I buried it in a dumpster until

he cried that it was his great-grandfather’s,

an heirloom he couldn’t forget or forgive

and after that I never saw him again. I didn’t

have the language to ask him what I needed

to know, Prozac newly wired in my brain,

a secret I could barely contain. Once I 

crushed my trigger finger between the

door of who I wanted to be and who

I actually was; I let that town press me 

like a camellia between a book, inadequate 

as a cartoon-decorated band aid trying to

stop the blood flow from a near-miss bullet.

The Brooder

beneath nest boxes a squawk sinks out 

so docile it turns me over both startles and

settles me this sudden birdbrain 

how domestication is a brawl 

inside me: the cockatrice

papering my chicken heart with pockets of wire 

I peel back its cuticle remove the bloom

to clean the coop  

and find a little yolkless moon 

an eyeball I push open and memorize

then chuck over my roof

until a hen digs a crack with her beak

breaks speckled curtains 

of turquoise consumes her newest creation

without pity or

pause

While our team is on a brief recording hiatus, we’re sharing another encore episode from the Slush Pile archive. This one is from late 2017 and found Jason still in his bathrobe. Nick Lantz published a new collection of poetry in 2024 “The End of Everything and Everything That Comes after That”, and we love an opportunity to celebrate our past authors. Sidle up to our virtual editorial table and take a listen to an episode that considers three poems by Nick Lantz.

In this episode, the editors review three poems by Nick Lantz: “An Urn for Ashes,” “Starvation Ranch,” and “Ghost as Naked Man.”  As a child, Nick Lantz was obsessed with paranormal phenomenon and the unexplained, from cryptids to aliens to ghosts…

Present at the Editorial Table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Tim Fitts, Sharee DeVose, Jason Schneiderman, Marion Wrenn, Samantha Neugebauer, Joe Zang (Production Engineer)

For the first and possibly only time, we were in a recording studio within Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business, which made us feel like we were on an episode of The View. This week, the editors review three poems by Nick Lantz: “An Urn for Ashes,” “Starvation Ranch,” and “Ghost as Naked Man.”

As a child, Nick Lantz was obsessed with paranormal phenomenon and the unexplained, from cryptids to aliens to ghosts. These days, he tells people he’s writing a book of poems about ghosts, though that’s only sort of true. His fourth book, You, Beast, won the Brittingham Prize and was published by University of Wisconsin Press in 2017. He was also the recipient of a 2017 NEA fellowship for his poetry. He lives in Huntsville, Texas, where he teaches at Sam Houston State University and edits the Texas Review.

“An Urn for Ashes” gets us started off on our a conversation on past lives and reincarnation. Lantz’s impressive use of language and imagery draws up ideas of present beings possessing remnants of those far in the past. Moving on to “Starvation Ranch,” the editors reflect on what memory and recollection look like in the modern era. The poem layers alluring images that are beautifully constructed and give us a front seat in recounting many summers past. The final poem, “Ghost as Naked Man” offers a reimagined commentary on gender as a social construct. Seemingly in conversation with other works on the topic, the poem conveys frustration and destruction, then pride, as expressions of manhood. It also brings to mind Ada Limón’s “After the Storm,” published in Issue 66 of Painted Bride Quarterly. Listen in for our takes on these poems and the verdicts!

The atoms that made up