VOICEMAIL POEMS

My dad died

and sports came back.

We wore masks at his funeral

to avoid being next, I guess.

The night before

Joe Kelly fired at Carlos Correa’s head

and cleared the bench

and I get it,

because what other response is there to feeling cheated

than bearing witness to your hate blossoming

from your body,

your spite-filled fingers gripping the splitting seams,

your hurtling release spitting seeds

that will line the graves

of generational grudges.

What song do you serve your ears

the morning after your mom sends you home

with a peace flower

and you say goodbye in the dark

because it hurts to see?

So King Push pummels my skull

as my jaw sits hollow and jagged,

a haggard quarry of heavy stones

and I stare at a cracked tree limb,

angled 90 degrees

in a non-committal breeze.

And a bird cries like a rusty swingset

and now I see the hurt

has just begun to bloom.

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Marissa DeSantis called us from Cleveland, OH.

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You’re like a paragraph in a book, he says, folding a dollar bill into an origami ring at the bar, and I’m not sure if it’s an insult. He slips the ring onto my forefinger: don’t get too excited. Should I apologize to you or myself or the woman who loved him before? I stay for the story. He is the only one who can make me laugh during an argument. We huddle in the doorway of the pub, passing the vape back and forth in the cold. He mocks my rotating flavors: watermelon, mango, strawberry. I tell him I miss my cigarettes but really, it’s just autumn again. Puff, puff. I’m rotting from the inside. Downing pills with an Old Fashioned. My heart is episodic, my brain one chemical imbalance after another. This unfurling is not what I wanted. He’s the head rush from the first good drag. The first sip of coffee to cure a hangover. I’m living at the bottom of the bottle and it’s beautiful here, all glass and no windows. Who is there left to quit for? The bodies in the lake, one of them mine. The bodies in his pool, all of them my lovers. I slaughter them to the gods of my wanting. I like the way he talks to his cats. Throws one over a shoulder and coos. I ache for this rough with my soft. A 4am kiss, a purpling bruise on my bicep. All those late night drives, always to him. We’re at the bar again. I’m nursing an unwanted Tito’s shot as he ignores me for a man with a matching DUI. He only notices when I storm away. Follows as I’m trying to hide so I give him a hard time because how dare he watch me bleed. Scar, I love you. He says my childhood nickname like he can hardly lift it. I’ve forgotten how it feels to be seen and still wanted. I can outrun anything, even love. I can shoehorn any ending I want, even with my heart in his chokehold. In this version, I fish my lovers’ bodies out of the pool for one last dance before burial. I lay my vapes on their graves instead of flowers.

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Scarlett Hume called us from Washington, DC.

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Double-check you have not morphed into wax.

Are the appendages protruding from the trunk

of your body still soft skin, or have you hardened

your armor like they taught you in eighth grade

when a car flattened your cat at your Christmas party?

You cried. You watched as he twitched

and his insides squelched onto the pavement,

and when he became still, his body stiffened.

Still, with tears, you hauled him home. It was hard.

They said “you’re ruining the party with your moping,” so you

plopped by the Christmas tree. It was hard, was it hard

to wake up this morning and find your skin had not

hardened like exoskeleton? You are still soft. Still tender.

It was tenth grade when your grandfather requested you

be pallbearer at grandma’s funeral. You couldn’t

bear it, the weight, the load. The corpse, it was

caked in makeup to mask the blemishes from

Her accident. She was not herself. You grasped

her hand—it was hard. It was like wax,

and when you squeezed her hand farewell,

you left an indentation. That was hard. To see

a hand that was no longer her hand. Remember

if you wake up and don’t feel human, check your hands.

Knead the flesh of your palm. If it morphs to hand again,

you are still alive. You are still alive. Still, you are alive.

You are you, and you are alive! You are alive! You are

soft. Still human. Still tender. Still raw. Still. You are

not twitching. Not wax. It is hard to love because

someday love goes stiff. And you must convince yourself

to lift love from the pavement, to love even when the soft

animal of love’s body hardens, and you cringe when the

coffin contacts the ground. And you feel numb, too soft. When

it’s all too much, let the softness of your body convince you.

You’re alive. You’re alive. You’re alive.

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Kenny Mitchell called us from Bloomington, IN.

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When the blues find where I’ve been hiding,

They pile on like puppies—

so damn excited to see me.

These days, I’m into cats, brother.

You know, maybe one will rub up against me,

once in awhile, or meow enough

until I give it what it wants—

usually my food and then, my appetite.

But the dogs, man…

they just don’t stop—

yipping, nipping, slobbering—

all fucking over me,

and then I’m down for the

three-to-five-day count.

I try to rationalize—“They’re just puppies. They’ll get bored and go away.”

I try stoicism—“I can’t get bothered by the uncontrollable.”

I try booze—the puppies just lap that shit up.

But they always sniff me out!

After a few days enjoying the sunshine,

I guess my contented stink gives me away,

‘cause the cute, fucking, little, tail-waggers

always, always fucking find me,

the little shitheads.

First rule of depression:

We don’t talk about depression.

I wonder if Paper Street Soap Co.

makes Existential Stench—

extended release version, of course—

its scent so cloying and heavy, it’ll

hide my temporary joy.

Crap! Here they come, the adorable little bastards.

Shoving their tongues up my nose, in my mouth,

and one—I’m sure his name is Cletus—

is so glad to see me, he’s going to pee on me, gah!

Get away from me you goddamn mutts!

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David J. Schast called us from Elkins Park, PA.

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My mother’s half brother wore a blue herringbone tweed jacket with padded elbows to her funeral / The kind worn by a caricature of a substitute teacher or traveling salesman or a freshly sober high school dropout / He told us to call him Uncle Loser & used to whisper to us in the back of his trailer the same three ghost stories every summer / The one about the man who underachieves his way back to the kiddie table when the adults start pairing themselves into euchre teams / The one about a man who drags a rusted shopping cart behind him as he haunts the parking lot of the abandoned shopping malls that line the freeway access roads / The one about his teenage classmates who drank themselves into their senior year & went missing while camping in the woods not far from here / Uncle Loser taught his parrot all the best curse words to use on everyone except grandma & his daughters / We thought that damn bird was gonna outlive us all but she died early from lung cancer / Family Tradition / For every set of us one must annihilate himself farther faster / Uncle Loser surprised his in-laws by looking like a goddamn college professor next to the cremains of my mother / My dad was so impressed by the burnout’s newfound glamour he offered to buy a round of drinks for them before remembering that side of the family was newly sober / Uncle Loser used to let me spin around in his daughter’s tutu in front of an antique mirror in the back of his trailer / He was glad someone enjoyed his embroidery.

Ask Your Uncle to let you take a tutu home | Turn to page 2

Spin until “Genius of Love” starts to skip | Turn to page 3

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RJ Equality Ingram called us from Portland, OR.

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They call one bulldagger.

I heard them say she spreads women’s legs that's all

she does, but I know her. She builds

entire worlds where their mouths cannot go,

their eyes cannot perceive.

What they wonder is who she fucks

and how they are going to have more children

in the world, and there is more to loving a woman.

I know because I hold them two inside.

An elder called the bisexual one greedy,

and we all laughed at her small imagination.

Her hands mortared me together.

Them two made me part of a house

to hold back the winds and water for a century,

keep them safe whether hurricane

or one of them come knocking at their door,

and because the family loves a corpse,

we will be cremated into ash and return as blocks

calling out for a love like theirs to hold.

The only thing that hears

them two sex are concrete and coal fly,

and neither one will tell.

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Marlanda Dekine called us from Georgetown, SC.

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I want to be: a good boy, your domesticated coyote.

My tongue’s handwriting is the shape of your body

unshaved and without a shower.

They need us to feel disgusted

with ourselves, so you commit

to my appetite unreserved.

You become tender only while listening to crust

punk and letting my fingers impersonate what I really want.

The moon is a cuck watching our disentanglement.

I can’t remember if I slept but the birds are our mothers

waking us up. You make my coffee like a prayer,

so I call you a saint right before we kiss.

It is time to creep into something

other than each other, but you don’t need a leash

to take me on a walk. You’re five feet taller than me

when I’m on all fours. You fear a million fears about me,

but only a handful are true.

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Mary Violet called us from Philadelphia, PA.

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I’m on the floor again, and that isn’t a metaphor for rock bottom. My new therapist asked me how I did it. How I managed to keep myself safe all these years. For the first time in over a decade, I was honest: I don’t remember. The meds are working, too, I think. Though after they unfurl my patterns, my dreams of precision, all the rot turns to tremors in my hands. It feels like the world ended when we were fourteen, and after years of dodging the undead on bare feet, I finally found my way to cold water and clean shoes. So after the session, I went out and bought stamps. I was thinking of the last time you and I shared a meal. How we cried in the rollercoaster line at Busch Gardens because we were hot and hungry and couldn’t fit ourselves to girlhood. How you said that Tampa will never be home because we wear fewer clothes here and our sweat smells different here. That night we tossed curse words across the dinner table and stuffed our mouths sour with lettuce. —By now you must know that I’ve broken my promise: I’m dealing with men so I don’t have to deal with myself. I’m thinking of one who lives on the west end of the city. He makes odd music, and I pretend that its subversion is what inspires me. He calls me the poet of silence and hair—you’ll be proud to know our love never reached flesh. Thank God it stopped at the bones. I hope you’ve kept your promise. And I hope your thyroid is better. Tabitha, if I could carry it all, I would.

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Meghan Malachi called us from Chicago, IL.

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We open with a stationary shot of me in my office, a pride flag on the wall behind me. An offscreen bonfire flickers in my eyes, and the savvy viewer will read this as a symbol of both passion and hunger, and before they can ask where it comes from I begin to speak:

“I’m a therapist and community organizer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is my audition video for Survivor in the form of a poem, and my name is Isaiah Moses Newman…”

and the savvy viewer will recall, here, that Moses once came upon a field that held a bush that burned and would not die, and if they are Jewish they may also know that he answered the blaze by shouting hineni, which can translate to “here I am,” but also “witness me here, having survived all that has tried to kill me.”

A drumbeat begins in the background as I describe the tear-stained and sleepless nights of my adolescence, and then on screen a picture flashes: me and the friends I called family at age 19, huddled in down jackets like penguins, and there is a conspicuous silhouette carved out of the center of the picture, but I do not name him, or describe the way his loss shattered us.

Instead, the picture vanishes, and I explain that I have spent the past year obsessing over a reality TV show in which found families tear each other apart for false promises of survival, and it has felt familiar.

I do not say that I lost someone the same way as the silhouette in October, because the law prevents me from speaking their name. I do not describe how badly I want to believe that we can save people, and how I have failed. Instead, I speak of the many ways I have tried to stop the world from burning even when it seems impossible,

and then we pan to the fourth wall, which is not a wall at all but a curtain of air that opens onto a field containing a bonfire, and a long tracking shot follows me as I walk through it,

and I stop next to the inferno and my ribs glow through my shirt like coals and we zoom out to see that the bonfire was actually the burning bush the whole time, limbs outstretched and skeletal, and I reach my arms up to the sky and my fingertips light like candlewicks, and the glow spreads from my ribs to my heart, and the savvy viewer will see how I burn and burn and do not die,

and then I shout of how the world seems always to be inventing new ways to break the people and communities I love, but my heart burns with the flame of survival and I am a therapist to keep as many of us alive and singing as I can, and I am an organizer because we deserve a world that can hear our songs,

and I will win Survivor if you put me on the show because I know what it takes to keep the torch of belief alive in the face of all that would drown it.

So hineni, CBS. Here I am. Come and find me.

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Isaiah Newman called us from Cambridge, MA.

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In August it’s hard not to want –

everything heavy with it – ginkgo fruit

rots on sidewalks, sweat falls down spines,

the whole beast city breathes in smog and breathes out

low clouds dropping lightning. Confused,

a little, reading subway signs

for revelation, it all comes up

wonder – which pre-historic lizard

dragged itself up into daylight just

so you could buy Calvin Klein underwear

and forget to call your mom on purpose?

Who’s your manager, Saint Sebastian?

Maimonides? What day of the week

is it? How did you get this number?

Rumi, I told you to stop calling

my motel. I need to be alone

for a long time, ride the empty train

over the bridge back and forth, commune

with Whitman above the East River.

Where else do you go to ask when summer

cherry pit spits questions into your lap?

Whose ghost do I see on street corners?

When does the weight lift? What do I do

with this little bit of time I’ve caught

to live inside? What do I do now

I want to eat every apple, seed

stem core? Who belongs, who decides?

Does want end with get? And if not –

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Birch Wiley called us from Brooklyn, NY.

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