VOICEMAIL POEMS

For years the school bus took the same path

past your grandmother’s house—just uphill from yours

each day the fields flickering past,

sometimes filled with corn,

autumn filled with hay bales

that long swinging arm of the sprinkler

tempting in the summer heat, always running

as we’d drive back to your house

on the way home from town

and one year, many years later

homesick, soul-wandering spied dandelions

growing, a trove near the treeline

and parked near the ditch to sit for a moment

with my thoughts all running rampant

when they turned to you, and childhood

how second grade best friends lived extremes

up and down the hill, across the trampoline

riding top speed on gravel roads

I used to ride my bike to you,

we lived close enough to each other

it was possible for my little body to pedal

itself there and back without exerting

what it can’t spend

what it doesn’t have, maybe still lacks

the dandelions far across the field

yellow bright mirage in the distance

I would walk there now if you’d meet me.

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Nicholas Bonarski called us from Grand Rapids, MI.

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I’ve had enough of new names, new ways of trying to stop time,

it just creates more sleet in the steep curves of my pale existence,

of ways to prod and avoid the emotions that rock the course of

my continuance, which is entirely filled with paper birch trees—

during the short window available, my entity responds to anything

with the word “paper,” gets me mapping the “just was” page.

I wanted to have deeper words about the Caribou, new designations

that would help me “see,” but writing is always a walk in the dark,

dependent on the will of my body, including that variable, the brain.

If I had soft velvet horns and warming fur I might be okay with my

scattered disposition, instead I take umbrage with the time allotted—

the image of the glam reindeer in the cartoon I saw as a child, and

my fear of extinction in the future. What I learned then as we shifted

from one school to another, was the motto “adapt or die,” isn’t that

true of all of us? Especially for those stuck in migration patterns?

I thought it would change once I became an adult, could control my

own movements. I took stock of the temperature, tried to be kind.

The voyage can be one into lower realms, but that’s one of choice.

I want to excuse myself all the time and make adjustments, change.

I got stuck in the branches of the forest and had no herd to guide me.

I got here, for now, to a desk and typing—the entity with my name never

imagined months in the silence of a temporary haven. Most of the time

I look back at what can be culled so that I can mine it on paper or

communicate with you. From the first I wanted to please and repair

the scar, wanted her to see me, but the chaos around the musical

was full of wild animals and shadows. My body will evolve to cope,

or just end up in trampled grass. Remind me of where I want to go.

Oh yes, those northern landscapes where we won’t be dying of thirst.

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Eléna Rivera called us from New York, NY.

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There’s a hopeful part of me that thinks you love me more than you need to understand

But I know you because I’m the same as you,

Kindred Spirit grandpa

So I’ll tell you that: Ken dolls don’t have nipples

And what if he ended up that way by having top surgery,

Double incision for ultimate contouring?

Thus I think it stands that Ken is a transmasculine icon

Loved and adored as a god because that’s what Barbie and Ken are,

The deities that underscore what it means to be a person, that who we are is limitless.

Thus Ken being trans stands to reify our place in the natural order

And I think I’m like him in that my gender isn’t Barbie,

I’m separate and me and I don’t want my nipples.

In the end I’ll look like Ken, limitless

But I’m still the grandkid you play ping pong with every week

And this isn’t any more different than being a writer amongst a family of scientists

And I know you don’t get that either

So I’ll explain it as this:

I never really grew out of playing with Barbies and Kens

So the stories I’d give them

Now take the form of manuscripts

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L. Amariti called us from Voorhees, NJ.

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Angel Monet LoMax called us from Enterprise, AL.

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"a childhood bedroom is a whole world"

after Cheryl Boyce-Taylor

there was always someone

day-dreaming

hurtling towards the other world

falling for somebody’s son

grass-stained knees

weaving

in and out of love

condemning their mother tongue

twisting tradition

out of ghost tale

crossing an ocean

on a paper-mache boat

painting their nails black

dressed in robin’s egg blue

bright red gushing

between them legs

having a tea party

with a beast

mistaking a father for a prince

fathering the future from a question-mark

counting sheep

learning to read between the lines

reading limbs

shrouding their body in glitter

befriending the witch

within

making mud soup

under moonlight

drinking it all in

commending Mother Earth

bound by something soft

tender-hearted

beating on a kitchen pan drum

bruising their ego

begetting life in verse

crooning in arms

blessed

divinely

alive

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Gabriela González called us from Brooklyn, NY.

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frostbitten hands snatch at the cigarette

dangling from your lips and

you stoop to meet my gaze with a hangdog expression.

i want to be angry

(god, i want to be so angry)

because cigarettes will kill you in a lifetime, and –

i have handwarmers in my fucking pocket.

but love is a two-way street, so it doesn’t matter if

my pockets are overflowing with iron powder and saltwater, or if

my hands offer woolen mittens, or if

i crank the heat in my bedroom to ninety degrees

with just the friction of my hips on yours.

love is a two-way street, and

if your frostbitten hands won’t drop their carcinogens,

you’ll freeze to death.

i cannot exhale love onto your fingertips,

bring feeling back into your bones,

without you first reaching for me.

and i want to be angry

(god, i want to be furious)

but how can i be, when the only thing

your body knows

is how to weather

a midwest

winter?

————————————–

Nix Carlson called us from Lexington, KY.

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I hang my jacket in the hallway

her apartment is old

made from shoestring potatoes

it smells like a jelly factory.

Against the wall a man’s face

eyes folded

laces around his neck.

That’s your Uncle, dear.

He barred her

from doing much of anything

when he was around

then he died.

She asked the doctors

to keep his eyes and brain

alive and put them

in a fish tank.

That night when she got home

she put on a mambo record,

poured herself a vodka, lit a cigarette,

and blew smoke in his eyes.

The tank is down the hall

full of algae and bubbles.

She has it hidden

behind a curtain.

On the wall are photos

of President Gerald Ford,

our family on vacation,

and antique pictures of naked ladies.

How many naked ladies do have to look at

before I get something to eat? I ask.

I’ll think about it, she says.

Behind the curtain skirts are hung up,

sponges tied together,

a bag of teeth.

My Auntie takes a photo of me

so my parents will see

the child they raised,

buzz-cut, roadworthy.

My Auntie tells me stories

about my family,

takes me shopping,

for sweaters and sneakers.

When she gets excited

she makes the sound

of a happy seagull

and spins like a mooring buoy.

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Bill Ratner called us from Los Angeles, CA.

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A fig in an orange grove—

I pruned myself from the rotting branch,

sawed through the only bark I knew.

Now I stand among the citrus on the longest night,

their branches strung with stars,

garlands of dried slices glowing like tiny suns,

the air thick with clove and cedar.

I watch the easy way they intertwine,

how a hand finds the back of a neck,

how embraces happen without flinching.

I ache in rooms full of warmth.

Grafted here now,

tethered to sap not my own,

wrapped in evergreen and borrowed moss—

the trees around me

teaching what roots can do when the frost comes,

how love moves through heartwood

without asking permission.

Then the gathering scatters.

Everyone carries their candlelight home.

My husband’s hand knows my bark.

My in-laws wrap me in their shade.

This grove has given me everything.

And still—

somewhere, two trees stand stubbornly rooted in place;

they planted me and refuse to water;

they’d lose me before submitting to pruning themselves.

I am full of sap,

of sweetness,

of more love than I was built to hold,

and still bleeding from a cut I made to save my life.

————————————–

Tian Sanchez-Ballado called us from Tallahassee, FL.

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Once I visited my old roommate

at a film festival

on Scheveningen beach

where the winning movie

was something avant garde

and vaguely religious

we did not understand.

Afterwards we danced to

Madonna's “Like a Prayer”

within the sand dunes all night,

the wind transforming the blanket

around my shoulders into wings,

my roommate recounting how their friends

in Atlanta held their newborn

for the first time.

We biked miles back into town

and laid next to a canal.

As we smoked weed, they confessed

they might never be able to live

in our home country again.

I know, but tonight let’ s pretend

we’re the loves of our lives,

I retorted, swinging a stick

to hit another out of the air.

Murmuration began overhead,

the birds changing phase

according to the relative strengths

of our anger, wonder, and fear.

The sky moved without permission.

We let the mosquitoes circle

and bite our legs bloody until light.

Small volumes of ourselves

hung in the air around us

as we ignored all the ways to start over.

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Cole Pragides called us from San Francisco, CA.

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for Hamze

we are as dark inside as the night is, meaning,

we are so beautiful most people choose

not to see us, for fear of overwhelming

themselves—& we are sitting in the front

seat of your car, shifting toward music.

we are going home, if home is the equation

for to be left alone. I put my finger on the pulse

of the nearest star & decide on Stevie or Kendrick.

because we have so little time to reflect

on the recklessness of our still being alive &

underneath stars & singing, we just sing.

I teach you the words to my oldest freedoms,

or we scream skyfuls of threats & boasts, queued

from our permissionless names, & for a moment, we

watch depression unfold: our killed souls spinning

their dust back into us, claiming the feet, the hands,

the tender mouth.

be careful what we tell ourselves—

everyone I know will be dead soon, it will not end

soon, it will not end—the myths we craft

with hopelessness. & who ever said joy had no utility?

if our homelands do not remember our names,

we are both hated in this awful place, let us make

crooks of our famed blood, let us refuse our bones

their crackle, let us speak the silliness we inherited,

let us open wide the blackest sky & release every

shadow of the innocent caught in our throats, & let us revel,

revel, revel in the thrilled motion of our excellent & working hearts.

————————————–

Ariana Brown called us from Houston, TX.

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