VOICEMAIL POEMS

All soldiers believe Charms in their MREs are foul luck, bad juju,

more than just a dark talisman, a virtual death sentence.

Patrols have been called off if some dirtbag private

straight out of basic

tested fate by peeling open a pack

of the generic Jolly Ranchers knockoffs that bring nothing but doom.

Everyone on the FOB heard stories about how Charms

were a malediction that summoned malefactors who

felled soldiers with sniper fire, mortar blasts and IED ambushes.

Marines supposedly even once threw Charms at the enemy in a firefight

to even skewed, candy-altered odds.

That's why you never ingest Charms.

That's why you cast them away theatrically,

make a real show of it.

That's why you have to observe the whole superstition.

We all choke down MREs.

That's a universal experience.

Some have Charms; some don't.

It's all chance.

It's purely random, who's charmed or cursed by fate.

Likewise, it makes no sense who randomly

gets killed, maimed, blown up, torn apart,

out there, outside the wire.

There's no rhyme or reason

behind which soldiers go down,

who gets battlefield crosses with helmets, rifles, boots and dog tags,

who succumbs to PTSD, traumatic brain injury, moral injury, any war wound.

Maybe some stale, rotten hard candy

could make sense of it all.

Maybe Charms are just imbued a significance they never earned

in a senseless chaos devoid of any meaning,

in an abysmal void that invites lore.

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my head is full of blood steamed like latte foam

pressing open the seams in my skull,

burning through folds in my brain like a shot luge.

my head is the generating station in the delaware river,

developed into luxury condos with beds that fill the whole homes.

my head is a smoking suite with smoke stains in

the corners of the ceilings

and the ice cubes smell like the smoke stains

and that is disappointing in an expected way.

and i'm laying in my underwear in every single bed,

rolling and sighing in the sheets

and taking notes

how do i feel here

what did i do here

how was the bounce

maybe a man is there smelling sweaty

or like flat champagne sticky about the nape

and i like to feel wanted

or at least i like to be paid what i told that feeling i wanted.

or at the very least, i'm shoveling black sand into some deficit,

punching out, and watching the direct deposit cartwheel in at 3am.

i am trying to convince everyone that this is what i do,

i lay in the beds and turn inputs to outputs

and i go out with my friends when i feel like they miss me

and i make wry jokes about my own self-worth and my lonesomeness

and they laugh and i write about the things that they laugh about in language opaque enough that i don't even feel it anymore.

and i am naked looking out a big window in a luxury condo

where my spirit is hung on a bamboo hanger like a bathrobe.

of course it is the 4am hour where nothing is provocative any more. i read a magazine article in some design rag

about the fire hydrant pumping station across the river.

without it, they'd never have built the station or turned the station into condos.

the fire would have burned in the middle of the river and the lights would all ball-gag themselves.

i feel very bad for the factory. does he like to gorge himself

in big sucks and swallows from the river just so that

people can tap it from hundreds of holes miles away?

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Klu klux what?

I'm a such

A tool for America

Hands scraped raw

Hammered deep into cotton

Fly up and it rains gold

I'm a Midas

But was forced to turn

Inanimate objects into fortune

To fields of green picked

Over and rotten

I'm a supposed

Dead used problem

Both birth and demise

Alleged

Between trying to kill

And forgetting about

I'ma question

A poking to see if I writhe

How much can a country

Heap on a back until

It concaves into a nail

America's only seeming quandary

You jealous?

//

Hey Klu

Can I call you Klu

What you going to do

With that cross besides

Make me laugh

A tongue is a flame

A black body is a cross

You worship, me?

Little ol' burnt thing

Used to be pick to your ninny

Now every time you lynch me

You clone me

//

Behind you!

Issa Me

Oh! You thought the

Noose would kill me

No, no,no,no,no,no

I mean not really me

But another me

Remember the clone

The string up

and teleport

So every molecular thing

Served up to slaughter

Still lives structurally

Same skin and everything

But equipped with the

Memory of your evil

I do strange things with memory

Like let it drip into a knife

But don't worry

I haven't breathed here enough

To know how to use it

//

I don't get the sheet. I never got the sheet. I mean sure back then it was just as much about costuming fear as it was a mask, but now it's not even necessary. We have lived long enough to spot a racist. A white person could yawn and I could tell you if they whisper nigger under their breath in boardrooms or if they loudly proclaim their lust for my blood. It's all the same to me, all engineers of the type ecosystem that thirsts for black death so take off those gosh-darn sheets, join us, reveal how easily you slip into assembly, you'd be surprised.

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sonnet for Trans Lifeline & February 2017

& for Kai

It snowed last week & the clouds slept lower.

I wonder where your body went without you,

who unraveled it & what came falling

from their mouths. I think of you; a weighted

sky; dirt, loosening itself in welcome;

what it is to bury: to deem ready

to give back; to kill: to call a body

just a body, to turn to flesh & name

the rest, the lost, the still of us fever

dream prophecies of flightless birds

about the heavens they can't reach. We know

the sky was falling long before these days.

It's just, it seems, the ground thaws out softer

for us, now. Hungry or buckling or kind.

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I set down my flaming sword long enough to stare into

a hunting trip photo at my Grandfather's

memorial. It shows two men, and him between them in

a dress and wig-hilarious joke (everyone

laughed), "abomination" an Uncle

scoffs casual-like now, tells story: "that's the ugliest woman

I ever saw" man driving by says to man

in passenger seat (everyone laughs).

See: sadness and shame felt in my painted

toenails hidden in socks, the tie too tight around my neck,

clueless compliments about my long hair and hoops.

Retell the story a different way: at 10, a buck strung for skinning

from the eaves; the droppings he cut out and put in my palm.

I can never breathe in church, but this morning I took communion

for the first time in 9 years, for the old man-God knows why.

Over his grave beside his stillborn first daughter's,

I become the hospital where he died-Queen of

the Valley (think meanest motherfucker: full crown

of antlers on my head, long locks of weeping

willow dyed with blood trailing in the wind, time

turned back on itself, a naked Eve naming all the animals).

Pulling my dress off the hanger, I bear witness:

the empty center of the universe like a liver spot;

wind in my hair, sun on my bare shoulders;

and under the ground, hidden in the urn,

his miserable ashes in drag.

*Title quoted from the obituary for James E. Fidler published in the Napa Valley Register, 08/28/2017 (http://napavalleyregister.com/lifestyles/announcements/obituaries/james-e-fidler/article_65807aa0-9a66-5a83-a859-8be03d18c1c7.html).

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Our hosts Logen Cure and I.S. Jones review their favs from our Fall 2017 issue!

(Get caught up on Fall 2017 here: https://soundcloud.com/voicemailpoems/sets/voicemail-poems-fall-2017)

This installment features poems by Kimiko Hirota, Austin Beaton, and Kai River Blevins. Music by TrueKey. (@truekey).

>> The deadline to submit to our Winter Issue is December 1st:

http://voicemailpoems.org/call

>> Help us made more of these by supporting us on Patreon!

http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems

>> Review us on iTunes:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/voicemail-poems-.org/id847081003

I have spent a thousand years

picking myself out of the middle of nowhere

on an empty highway clutching fistfuls

of fireflies to my eyes clawing poppy

blossoms across a belly full of rabbits

I dripped with peppercorns I salted

the earth as if that would make the mud

easier to swallow I buried the creatures

with a pocket watch and a dead fish

and mounds rose up the hills of my body

a congregation of sparrows sang like nightingales

as if that would bring me peace my ghost

is mad Ophelia babbling in swampflower

poltergeisting the highways and waiting

for the next thud wooden dolls slapped

out of my hands brings me walnut shells

to curl into like that could keep me safe

from waking up again in the cheekbone curve

of a boy who does not know the difference

between a raven and a writing desk between

I’m sorry and have some wild almonds

love I picked these myself

you’ll have to kiss me to taste them

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The voice spills / Over the telephone / Time morphed into frequency / And back again / A compression of sentiment / Unraveled by longing / It says: ‘hiiiii’

A conversation about nothing is spoken / The day’s errands / The planned social respite / A desire to lay roots too soon to build / Hidden within a sense of fear of the future / What lays beneath

Beneath the telephone / Lies a manipulation so essential / Its how music to MRIs function / Called the Fourier transform / And as removed as you think math can be from philosophy / Well transform it into another domain / They are the same thing / What I mean to say / Is Fourier found a way to describe how something instantaneous / Is infinite / A pulse in time / Corresponding to a sinc function in frequency that stretches to infinity / Decaying, it’s limit approaching zero, reverberations felt less and less as you leave the instant behind but ever so present / Laid on top of each other like rain drops / Like a voice / Dancing in time

But to get that voice back to me / The telephone truncates / Otherwise it would alias / His words would morph into something indistinguishable / Like he isn’t him / Like he’s the CIA agent he always jokes he could become / What I mean to say is in order to bring words back to me / Engineering dictates that the sinc function must cut off at a certain point / Not let it stretch to infinity / Practicality telling philosophy to stop overthinking or I’ll lose my mind / Or the signals can’t get reconstructed / He says he has to go / I know our conversation about nothing can’t last very long / If I want to preserve the instant

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(after Jacqui Germain)

Tells me that I’ve spent enough time

antagonizing him, corrupting his divine

name, condemning the thinly veiled violence

in his bones.

He demands that I forgive

his unrelenting presence,

forbids me from saying all that I’ve learned

about him – like Man is the aftertaste of disgusted stares.

or Man comes alive when hardened fist meets pliant ribcage,

his laughter

exposed

by the sudden crack.

or Man says my mouth is a broken levee, my voice

an unwelcome flood (softly) wearing down

the fang of him.

or I know there is something powerful about queer blood.

Why else would Man be drawn like a rabid beast

to the iron of me?

or Man begs silently for the warmth of desire, for open arms,

for hands that no longer grasp at his throat.

or Man is a leech, a broken mirror, a wounded animal –

small and fragile and desperate and defeated.

or Man has turned my family against me.

Man has turned my family against me.

Man has turned my family against me.

or Man has turned my family against themselves.

or I was born into the hands of a doctor who sucked

Woman from my throat, filled my gasping

lungs with the drought of Man.

or I was born into the hands of a doctor who worshipped Man.

What chance did I have?

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In the morning, I stood up, sticky and sweaty.

I walked to the fridge with weight.

I felt a stillness.

This house has been quiet since you left.

When you were gone I slept on your side of the bed and

didn’t wake up once during the night. There could only

be two reasons—

1) Because your side is better than mine or

2) Because I sleep better when you are gone.

When you were gone I cleaned the house and sat in silence.

I read on the balcony while I grilled chicken wings in a

marinade I had invented (You would have loved them).

I slept naked.

I didn’t flush the toilet every time. I danced.

I had friends over for cherries and pistachios.

I moved your chair to the other side of the room.

I watched the fireworks.

I smoked your weed.

I listened to music. I stretched. I sang.

I stayed up late.

I fell asleep on the couch.

I touched myself.

I took a long shower. I fell asleep on the couch.

I washed the dishes. I scrubbed the grill.

I ate ice cream.

I ate ice cream.

I ate ice cream.

I missed you most in the afternoon when the daylight

no longer knew which color it wanted to be.

I watched a video of us singing in the park.

I smiled out loud. I thought about what it would be like

to dance for you—If you’d ever get over yourself.

I thought about what it would be like to flirt with you like

you were a stranger—If I could ever get over myself.

I looked at my nails a lot. I wrote.

I talked to angels.

I listened.

I mapped out five different garage sales happening

around our home and planned to go to each one.

I didn’t. I tricked time.

I crushed hunger.

I did not cry.

I did not drink.

I did not lock the sliding door.

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