VOICEMAIL POEMS

Begins with texts to my best friend.

Do you want to hear my revenge fantasy?

Let’s get iced coffee and be brats.

Learned helplessness is a crime.

Success is an art. I’m working on my MFA.

That’s deeply stupid.

I’m reviewing my life choices in this Greek restaurant.

Not everyone needs to be a Very Interesting Person.

Who needs a human man? Shadow Daddies exist.

I’m having revenge fantasies. The taste of blood.

That’s deeply brilliant.

I would destroy him. For you.

I’m in love with everything.

I prefer to move in silence.

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Stephanie Valente called us from Brooklyn, NY.

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I am not mentally okay.

I thought of you, or more specifically,

I thought this would be something you'd enjoy.

This is some news you need to hear.

Here is some free therapy that I heard.

This made me cry.

Watch this cute animal & forget how the world is falling apart.

I'm not mentally okay

but I cannot say that to you

so instead I hide the things I cannot speak between the lines

of these memes sent for your entertainment.

A noncommittal event invitation.

My ADHD brain is experiencing mania and I'm consuming consuming media like

CRUNCHCRUNCHCRUNCH potato chips.

I am mentally unwell.

I am bedrotting and need attention.

I miss you but I don't know how to start a conversation anymore.

I want us to be closer but I'm terrified of being vulnerable first.

I'm a crow sending shiny things to your inbox

with no expectation you'll even see them

I am my mother's daughter - I leave her 317 Instagram reel messages to me unread because I feel too guilty and too avoidant to open them.

There is a chasm of things I have not yet figured out how to say.

I only know how to write them in my journal.

I don't know which of these things would be useful to voice.

I am mentally unwell.

I saw this video of two unlikely animal friends resting on each other & I

want us to have the same intimacy.

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Kate Carey called us from Philadelphia, PA.

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I felt like masturbating

I felt like crying

It was the twenty-first century

Already

A quarter over

There had been artistic movements

& wars

My debts had been repackaged

Countless times

The enemy of my enemy

Followed me

On Twitter, now called

Ex-Marines shot themselves in the head in their aunts’ basements

We lost touch almost as a whole

Category

We listened to music for evaluative purposes

Had to turn off Shostakovich a recording of quartet #10 that churned too fast like history

A choir with one boy who couldn’t sing

But tried to follow, quietly

Teachers like cigarettes fired or quit

My memory got so bad

I said the same thing a hundred times

Into the wax cylinder

Like the moon changing in the same ways

Like the water falling back to earth

The killdozer guy said it was like people couldn’t see

The 50-ton machine he was working on for a year and a half

Even though it sat there openly

In a shed, folks coming and going

“somehow their vision was clouded”

It was the twenty-first century

Eschatology

Minus clarity

All the new angels issued

Their wings & narcan

Doing their trainings from home

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Tom Snarsky called us from Berryville, VA.

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Aishvarya Arora called us from Queens, NY.

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He gave up looking for a town, gas station, or house off a road or driveway The desert unfolded further than his eyes could see. In the stillness, the ground spread in glare, broken only by shrubs now and then. A swell of dunes lay below a jut of mountain range bulking up from beneath the surface.

They were told it could take hours to traverse this section. That they should have a full tank, a functioning radiator, and plenty of liquids. No warning was offered about the middle hours of the day. Notions of night, coolness, and breeze were charred in the afternoon glare. They were not told their mouths would stop moving, their minds would stop seeking the right words, that their hearts would contract, twist, and burrow away from the blistering air, the closeness of the car, of each other.

The road snaked a path past shoulders of rock. A ground squirrel foraged, darted between weeds and creosote bushes. He kept his hands on the wheel, his eyes on the cut of the road. Driving on even though he could sense her wanting to stop. He knew she’d climb from the car, step away, wait. She’d identify creatures, absorb them, witness their edgy movement into and out of the earth. Not yet. It was a prayer. Not yet. Once they got through this part they’d be okay, his mind promised. Just get through the jaws of the afternoon.

They weren’t alone on the road. Not the way they were alone beside each other. The sporadic sight of another car or a truck jarred small blooms of hope inside him. They could do this. It could be done. They weren’t forsaken. Look - that couple is perfect, aren’t they? She’s laughing, his smile is huge. Windows down, faces open to the day.

He steered through the chemistry of metal, fuel, and the razored wills of fragile-skinned humans. They pressed through the brittle air, the stunned expanse of earth, the endless heave of sluggish planet. He heard the tires beneath them, the hum of their dull frenzy.

He wished now that they hadn’t been in such a rush to leave. That they had waited a few days, weeks, even hours. Waited for the heat to disintegrate into twilight. They could have eased through the morning, napped in the building temperature, made off at dusk. They could have taken turns at the wheel, slept in shifts, found refuge under the star-punctured night. They could have stayed oblivious to the teeth of mid-day, missed the blast of mute terrain, slipped past the bully of stark beauty. They may have evaded the simmer of their silence, the taunting of their minds, the stunning of their chary hearts.

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Candace Cavanaugh called us from Desert Edge, CA.

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To hate yourself and have sex

makes you a movie director

on a street corner, seeing

everything in slow motion,

scouting for bodies.

When it’s too dark to see

we clock out to edit

more. After work, every night

becomes dance. Re-cuts

of thighs and light shows.

A supercut is a cheap haircut, not filmmaking technique.

But I know montage because I put movement

over belonging, dwell only in breath, each a one-time use.

Montages aren’t romantic.

They are light shot through crashing

tunnel, excess draped in scarcity. No,

there aren’t many rhythms to curl up inside.

But why luxuriate in memory?

Rewind us. I am radiation. I’m giving

off so much light. I can’t stop working.

I can’t sleep. I’m out in nightclubs, searching.

Burning for it.

Someone that knows how not to hate me.

Someone that can teach me how.

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Ankoor Patel called us from San Francisco, CA.

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The cut on my ankle bleeds into the shape of an exclamation point

You speak and it comes out ornate

swirling, as if from an an ancient book

I’m trying to follow those letters

which are, inevitably,

words, through the tall yellow grasses

at the edge of the lagoon

where your charm bracelet lays splayed in the sand

and my nose disappears into the blue

Let me tell you about swimming:

The bleeding stops

The world ends long enough for you to miss it

The cold snaps, like a spell from the end of a wand

melting fear into a body

the weightlessness unhowling me

In the water your words circle me

floating in amongst the moon jellies

On my back I watch my breasts like two pale ducks bob in the gentle waves

I watch them fly away

Your words bend into the exclamation point

Make a portal of me

A sentence of me

A loudness of me

I paddle back to shore

a pearl growing under my tongue

I settle into the meat between land and sea

and decide to stay there

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Asha Berkes called us from Tacoma, WA.

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How their branches seem

to extend without burden

in the lengthening light,

their star-shaped leaves

of deepest burgundy,

weightless, more form

than texture, surrendering

to autumn air in such a way

that it’s difficult to discern

where leaf-tip ends and

shade begins; until, wind-

jostled, they flutter like

wisps of cordovan dust

out into a blue expanse

of emptiness – traversing

the chasm between having

been and soon becoming –

showing us a way forward,

letting go without regret

or anguish, and knowing

this world will be made

whole again from those

very things that have

been taken or freely given.

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John Muro called us from Guilford, CT.

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I hope all my books are banned books,

like, so contraband

they start trappin’ them out the bando—

people fiendin’ for my words with such fervor

clawing at the door

for just one more taste

someone keeps the lookout

to make sure twelve don’t see the weight:

tiny baggies filled with poem scraps

pushed out from every corner

I hope my books become

so obscure

that someone’s biggest flex

is telling you they’ve read me

and then you search for my Wikipedia page

and all it says is

-Black

-queer

-longtime resident of the south

-93 ‘til infinity

I hope white people hate my shit

try to say it means nothing in the daylight

feel so raw and dirty

sneaking peaks on the dark web

face a hot mess of flush;

I hope they slam their laptops shut

when they hear footsteps approaching

hang their heads with shame

and spend the rest of their lives wondering

how much they missed out on

I hope they outlaw my books

And then drag queens read them to toddlers

on the front steps of the capital

I hope there are no front steps

of the capital

Because I hope the empire falls

I hope a trans woman throws the first brick

And I hope a page ripped from one of my books

is attached to it

I hope, one day, I meet a genocide survivor

all grown up, despite all odds

And they tell me

they know all about my books

And I’ll gasp

and ask them how my poems made it to Palestine

Through the whisper network, they’ll say

We mixed them with Arabic

and by the time they reached us

they already had French

Haitian Creole and

Swahili in them too

I hope my books are too heady for the Pulitzer

I hope my books get down on the down-low

I hope their registration expires

I hope my books live in infamy

I hope my books turn into history books

buried somewhere long forgotten

only to be dug up

in two hundred years

by whoever is still left on this rock

And they read them

and they cry

and they wonder what made me write these words

and what type of world we were living in

where people banned books

and then they take my books

toss them into a pit

pour one out for an ancestor

and then they burn them for warmth

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Kelsey L. Smoot called us from Atlanta, GA.

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as silent and holy as an empty church.

a polished row of pews. you, moon

in the sky, how do you do it?

your one-handed gravity

holding still the earth. astral magic trick,

you newly christened old god.

every family’s forgotten dance is a scar

on your surface. memory like a bear trap.

worldfodder magnet. wise old sledgehammer

once smashed through our orbit longways. we were just a pie cooling on the galactic

windowsill. now we say Light &

mean your face, stretched our whole lives

and once reached your shadow. pockmarked

queen of all ships. all flags. can’t sing

a note of worship if it doesn’t include

a word of pain. the night sky’s

opening bell and serene last call,

nursing your craters like old wounds

nursing your craters like children.

your face held high and regal

through eons of the same steady bruise

and somehow you arrive to us with a bouquet

of escape of routes. i have so much

to learn from you, and not just about physics.

how long did it take you to learn

such luminescent confidence? your brilliant

backlit halo, the way you just float and move

everything, shine your own ligaments to dust.

when people say they love each other

to the You and back, is it about distance

or about damage? about some man’s

lonely footprint? and what do we know

about damage next to you, anyway?

all our blood clots thick with time

but you have no winds to whisper

your name. sometimes the healing

does not rush through you. prehistoric ocean

or otherwise. there are no channels

you didn’t cut yourself. no way to say Over

in the dead space. no one there to hear it

but a silent star.

and a billion other stars.

————————————–

Zachary Goldberg called us from Oakland, CA.

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