VOICEMAIL POEMS

I have been made aware of the fact that you died

in 1846, but am hoping this will reach you regardless.

I have heard you are the foremost expert on solar activity,

weather patterns, and astronomical cycles, as well as

the best times to fish and how to build a community.

I have heard you lived and worked in New Hampshire,

which is where I have recently come to live and sometimes

but rarely work. Did you know that ticks no longer freeze here,

in the winter? The annual mean temperature has increased

by about 2.6°F since your days. I check my ankles in both

August and January, and am disappointed by how little

it snows. I read about you on the Almanac’s website

(a website is like a book that’s in the air) and wanted to reach out.

They have a biography on you, they praise your name, they say

there were two total solar eclipses in the US in your lifetime.

They publish a new cake recipe on your birthday every year.

They sell things now, too, like a Fruits Vegetables & Herbs

1000pc Puzzle for $19.95 and a Jeffersonian Brass Kinetic

Wind Vane for $119.99. Don’t worry, that’s inflation, mostly.

I know you just wanted to help the travelers, sailors, bookkeepers,

beekeepers, and prognosticators. I don’t know if those people

exist anymore. Robert Bailey Thomas, I fear summer now rots

into last ditch efforts and expletives over the softness of peaches,

so I’ll wrap up with some questions I hope you can answer.

Why can I only see some stars out of the corner of my eye?

Was your America much greener? Why, even when I am so quiet,

and so good, can I not catch a fish? Why did you die, when

you knew every psalm by heart and every benefit of witch hazel?

Do you ever feel like July has forgotten your name?

Do you know what I mean? Hey, Robert Bailey Thomas,

please say you know what I mean.

————————————–

Lauren Mills called us from London, UK.

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Solidarity is pissing

in adjacent stalls.

A godly marriage

is a throuple with

Christ. Dude was

a real trove of sword

lore. We cheered for

the biracial babies.

At the racist wedding,

the pastor praised

Korean cars &

submissive wives.

Cousins snuck liquor

into the dry reception

while sober Christians

gnashed their teeth.

So began the diaspora.

One spent a year in

Singapore; another

posted pics from

Botswana. Were

we the first to get

divorced? At least

on that side of the

family. For twelve

years she was my

grandmother too.

Remember how we

buried her in the rain,

& how afterward we

ate crab cakes.

————————————–

Alexa Vallejo called us from Philadelphia, PA.

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April 2024

Wish you were here is no synonym for I miss you, though of course I do.

Wish you were here

Like I know you would love this

LIke I want to remember this with you, not to you

Wish we could rebuild the subtleties to each other and build the details

Fall over each other in the telling

Want you to feel this first hand, absorbing it too

Count you among the partners here along for their own rides

Drinking in the soprano soloist, a bringer of comfort, this time firmly hand in hand

I said I wish you were here because I WISH YOU WERE HERE

This time, I’ll settle for one of us

November 2024

I miss you jumps to my mind and tempts my tongue, only for strangers to hear it.

To be somewhere alone is to be there unseen, thoughts unheard, except by their thinker.

Their thinker, like The Thinker, sits unseen by any he knows, his crowded head superimposed on whipsering autumn plane leaves.

Surely I am beheld as I behold, traversing sunlit plazas, long skirted and parasol shielded

If only as Narcissus in mirror-black windows.

My thoughts have value even if no one reflects on them.

These mountains scrape the sky even after the sun dips behind them,

the gardens keep growing in darkness even after the dykes who dressed up for the art have wandered out

Jesus and Mary Magdalene remain trapped amid rough marble after I stop circling them .

And I grow softer and stronger by the day, even though at the end of it there's no one to feel it for a thousand miles

————————————–

Juniper Danger called us from Philadelphia, PA.

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“There can be but one teacher – nature. She must always be consulted.”

- Camille Pissarro

I’m wondering how best to preserve

this day when I find myself summoned

outside into the warming light, tossing

my net beyond the low islands and

the jagged edge of the Sound,

hoping its threads return in gilded

attire, yielding a tangle of blessings

culled from both sea and hollow

that are a mix of old-growth splendor

and the commonplace, while I fall

back to silence, watching the way

the morning light breaks apart and

is then quickly redrawn by wind gusts

that blur and wrinkle the surface of

the water, and entranced by the soft

rustling of the beach grass and taste

the tang of salt-scented air while

white-capped tides are suffused with

the same mussel-blue hue as the

open fist of sky and seeing how

both air and water are stitched together

by these clamorous gulls rising in

rapture then swooning towards shore

and asking what more can be done

other than to try and somehow slow

earth’s hurry and call summer back.

————————————–

John Muro called us from Glastonbury, CT.

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"4-tongue poem" by Chiara Crisafulli by VOICEMAIL POEMS

The last night we spoke, you said we could make this work.

I sold the bed we used to sleep on, to forget, hoping it would work.

I left the pink book you gave me on my desk, your letters

in my drawer, the ones where you said love is work.

I left the memory of us sleeping on a cliffside in my head

but deleted the picture we took, dead-eyed from waking up to work

at 5 AM on another coast, the night sea barely visible beyond your head

laid against my thigh, sprawled black hair, it was easy work

to be in love with you, but it was impossible to love you

in a way you felt. We were two felled trees attached by thin string, trying to work

gravity against itself. In a Key Largo parking lot, years ago, before we ever fell

through each other, your hand brushed against mine. We worked

so hard to be that simple again. B, forgive me. I would have

given myself away (I did) just to make it work.

————————————–

Jarrett Moseley called us from Charlotte, NC.

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We promise to protect each other

After Willie Perdomo

which means we pinky swear it

which means we draw

our pinkies

like switchblades

from brassy knuckles

which means

i hold your hands

between the pocket space where we keep

the taser between the thumb & index the hammer between the index & middle

the cross between the middle & ring & the middle is my weapon of choice

which means

i talk a lot

but my face says

i can’t

fight

your face says we should run which means

i face you standing still pressing my switchblade into yours wishing the switchblades were switchblades

& not pinky promises we draw from brassy knuckles

want brass knuckles but don’t want proximity

want a gun but don't want that smoke

want incense but only handmade

want these hands

to be protection

enough

that’s what space in poems are for: to store arsenals

in this ars poetica keys between my fingers never felt comfortable like i would get sliced too

if it came down to it

i am walking across a blacktop

i could tar myself into

the sun is saying

i should get home

but home is on my hip

i am aware of you

& all the things that follow to follow & nothing more

which means

we promise to protect each other

we pinky swear it

————————————–

Lauren Dotson called us from Chicago, IL.

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Get in vans with strangers: a Palo-Santo heavy Chevy G20

with a sonnet-spilling prophet; a red 70’s Volkswagen

shaggin' wagon with three long-haired surfers headed South;

a fuzzy pink and purple pimped out festival-goer’s fantasy

stocked with the best candy—one taste and I make-out

with God. Talk myself out of a felony on one side of the

border, have my first lucid dream on the other. Skinny dip

a bioluminescent shoreline with a nowhere-bound time

-traveller, his touch the lightning that strikes me sober,

makes me want to remember. Take LSD blessed by

a Mayan shaman on a Panamanian beach. Find out

the only love I’ve ever known isn’t free—my softened

gaze on strangers spinning around me, I love them not

because they’re mine but because they never will be.

Get all my shit stolen and backpack for three months

without a backpack. Dance callouses onto the bottoms

of my feet. When strangers barge into the van, I learn

that boundaries don’t need to be barbed wire fences,

a purple velvet rope is all you need. The prophet

heads North and Tara asks Are you sure he’s not the one

who stole all your shit? Nope. Hand what’s left of me

to a golden-haired dreamer who hymns any instrument

he holds. Change my mind about building a home in the

gap between his front teeth. Leave him carving our initials

in the rearview like the one before him left me. Fall in love

during a solar eclipse. Let a wizard undress my notions

of pleasure in the stolen darkness at mid-day, melt into

the world of tantra without knowing what it means. Yes,

a nameless rose does smell as sweet. I’d forego the forever

my college sweetheart promised when he said he’d ask

my dad, like I was an 18th century commodity. I’d handpick

the same bouquet of brief eternities, still slam on the gas

pedal—my rose-coloured windshield shattered to pieces

when I travel to the final frontier to find the lights

in his Northern eyes out of order those nights. Kintsugi:

the Japanese art of repairing broken items with gold lacquer;

freesias swooning over the fallen vase—her slow dance of

shimmering scars. Given the chance, I’d still fling myself

off the shelf, bless the falls that broke me golden.

————————————–

Dré Pontbriand called us from Antigua & Barbuda.

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"these days, everybody wants to hear the prophecies of yore at a mcdonald’s drive through, and i just don’t think that that’s what i’m after"

& when my friend pulls up & the speaker starts crackling with some eldritch horror, & it asks,

do you want to die with that?

& my friend looks over at me & asks, well, do you?

& i say i’m good with just the pepsi, thanks

& the eldritch horror, profound & decrepit, wails like a thousand suns being born or the edge of a paper slicing through skin or your dad shutting the door on your family the morning that he dies

& my friend says, oh, i think they only have coke products here,

& i say, hm, then i guess a cherry coke

& my friend says, okay, a mcchicken, a cherry coke, plus can i get an answer the question unspoken in my heart?

because my friend is always saying shit like that,

especially in the mcdonald’s drive through

& this time the voice from the speaker is sweet dulcet caramel dripping off a spoon, a siren song in symphony,

& my friend says, damn, i think i’m a dollar short,

but it’s okay because i have two dollars in my pocket, & anyway, the prophecies are free here, free like the way any of us are, free as a man with an albatross around his neck, free as an albatross around a man’s neck, since the albatross is dead, and isn’t death a kind of freedom?, free like a limited time only BOGO sale at the Gap, free like you’ll still have to give up your firstborn son, but whatever, who’s having babies in this economy, anyway, not to mention your firstborn won’t be a sun, if anything they’ll be the MOON,

& we drive to the window

& my friend’s camry sounds like it might fall apart right there

& so might i, if i’m being honest

& i look into the black hole at the first window

or rather, it looks into me,

i blink first

& it becomes a murder of crows, silent, except to say

second window only tonight,

& then i say it, just for good measure,

second window only tonight,

& we’re at the second window,

which is a little grimy,

with a freckled bespectacled teen behind it,

& she looks like me, a study in personal time travel,

but when i ask my friend he says,

hey, doesn’t that guy look like me?

so it could be the whole world, or nothing at all

(like most things)

& i’m handed the cherry coke without much fanfare

& the teen leans out the window to whisper in my friend’s ear

& i strain to listen

but all i hear is the rustling of the first breeze that ever swept this earth,

& when my friend turns to me,

he says, the prophecy machine is down tonight. can i get a sip of your cherry coke?

& we drive away, dial-shifting through static,

as the world dissolves into whipping wind, fresh fizz,

& our laughter, spilling into empty eternity

————————————–

Aparna Paul called us from Cambridge, MA.

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I dreamed of a canoe, and of the two of us: I was new on the lake. Streaming through the murk, the cellar scent of blue and brown water, and you, my new love, saying nothing, only rowing us backwards deftly. At the lake’s deepest point: a miniature goose—a full grown adult, though not five inches high, resting on an island of ice, mid-June. Tenderly I scooped it. Its feet were frozen in a lump of ice, but it stood on my palm as quiet and unmoving as you, who waited with paused oars, seeming not to care much about the goose, but caring about my care. I rubbed my fingers over the ruly bird’s webs to warm them, and the ice melted all shiny and dewy as the goose stared into the distance, patiently or bluely, I could not tell. The goose free, we moved on.

//

Tuesday night I felt a stabbing at the bottom of my foot; ignoring it I woke in the morning to the same pain and could not run. You sat with me in the dining room and took my foot in your palm and tried to maneuver the splinter out, spaded with your tweezers the dip in the soft spot of the sole, right beneath the ball, asking, “Does this hurt?” I wanted to answer, “Yes, and I love you,” but I could not tell you I loved you while you held in your hands something so rude as my dirty and wounded foot. You could not remove the splinter, but with time it came loose on its own, or else the soft cheek of my sole grew hard enough to enclose the shard.

————————————–

Devan Murphy called us from Pittsburgh, PA.

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