There are about 90 million dogs in the world, and each and every one of them, no matter how pampered or puny, is descended from the wolf.
Poetry
Your Pelvic Floor Holds Psychic Wounds
the PT says, sliding her gloved finger inside me. We’ll go slow. Tell me if it hurts. Even empathy needs consent.
Exhibit Z
A blank canvas.
An IV runs
from my arm
into the colors.
Three poems
mauled my hand sinking shards of marigold glass into flesh. A savage display of dominance. At least, that’s what he believed in his tiny dog brain.
Insomnia Chronicles XLI
The night is full of insomniacs googling insomnia. I ask the waiter for a glass of cab—cabernet sauvignon—and he thinks I’ve ordered Tab, the original diet soda.
Three Poems
She considered me a dandy. That’s why she loved me. That’s why she hated me.
The Famous Crate from the Book of Exodus
Take it from me. Make copious notes when Moses explains the cubit system. He asked me the levitating crate’s dimensions, and I said six.
Recipe for Kink Confusion
Ingredients:
1 fundamentalist Christian upbringing
3 dominated Disney princesses
1 abusive boyfriend
On Encountering a Double in a Distant Arcadian Village
Spectacle of beard and owlish spectacles,
bulbous nose, domed head, ungainly gait –
the magnet draws me in, then flips –
his impish, portly presence –
Ethnography of Honey
a toasted slice of challah bread, dollopedwith Greek Orino honey—our Saturday morning breakfast
Aggregate
Annie was accustomed to beauty, the vapor of a cloud—ethereal,
and on the nights she piloted the plane—comforting. She felt kinship
with the gray chill of a winter ocean, with kiddie pools like so
Verify you are not a robot. Select all images with a motorcycle.
Daddy Harold, 45, a Harley stained maroon crosses the four-way light.
Shea butter and oily roots
Shea butter and oily roots, I try to lay my head against your collarbone.
seasonal balderdash
That summer, I could not stop myself from rotting. Inertia tying me to the house. Hoping the coffee turns out as black as your insults, the husky driving its car with the windows down so the bag of Takis in the backseat keeps breathing red dust into the air.
Am
He’d be in black jeans on his haunches,
me with my clipboard and pencil, like a father and a son I suppose.
Không
No no – you shall not come over
Null none – there is nothing here
nothing to see and savor just
Mom’s Birthday Follows the Lunar Calendar
The cave was the first. Damp, echoing, and oddly intimate: the sort of place that feels like memory left out in the rain.
Swetha Amit interviews Preeti Vangani about Fifty Mothers (River River Books, 2026), her new poetry collection
SA: Your book begins with an image of your mother's handwritten diary, showing her name change after marriage. What were your thoughts about including that image? PV: The idea of adding the image came much later, after some poems had been written. One of my...
Review of The Boat With a Girl’s Heart by Neil de la Flor by Jonathan Cardew
In the preface to The Boat with a Girl’s Heart, Neil de la Flor offers a candid account of his process and motivation, framing the book as an homage to his late friend and collaborator, Maureen Seaton. De la Flor explains that he drew from their collaborative...
Review of Burnside Soleil’s Berceuse Parish by Francois Bereaud
The epigraph of this remarkable collection (whose title I’ve shortened for obvious reason) reads: “Enterrez-moi là où mon père est enterré.” (Bury me there where my father is buried) which we are told is a line from an Acadian ballad. It’s also the perfect...
Third Period
She lay
with her knees spread wide
on the dirty girl’s bathroom floor,
fingernails scraping gritty tiles.
Recording Emptiness
Flight lasts only as long as there’s a taut tether to the earth—a bond so tight, a brush to the throat would draw blood.Descent is everywhere.Dissent is our unmarried aunt Redwho once fled, peeling skin from forest mistuntil, inside us, she became its very vine.P.S. A...
Three Poems
Before I even realized, the universe had
ruptured. Every cell in your body became a sun
Two Poems
No one has discovered the right way to worship you. I collect your hair. I hang it, in one great knot, like a lightbulb on a red piece of yarn in the yard.
from AMERICAN CYCLORAMA
from AMERICAN CYCLORAMAThe twilights were violet and seductive. All sweet tea and the dark sides of horses.The women would lie tidy in their bedsand wait for rapture. Latches undone andcigarette burns on the carpet. A churningin the belly that grew by incrementseach...
Three Poems
I miss Doc’s first question when Mr. Abrams’ garage explodes into an acre of purple stars. Brimstone, then looting. Clockwork.
Shark Teeth
My whole life people thought I looked young and I hated it.
Summer before college, I wheeled a purple bicycle
Periodic Table of Fitness
A visual poem.
Review of Skylighting by Charles Hansmann by Britta Stromeyer
Poetic Exploration of Grief: Charles Hansmann's Skylighting “I feel countless lesions scarring inside me, internal marks to mock my survival.,” writes Charles Hansmann in the opening pages of his short novel Skylighting—an introspective and lyrical...
Sugar Pie
Lay the dough across the pie tin, like a sprawl of land surrounded by horizon. Can you hear the pulse of this land? Bare feet beating bare earth. Press it down tight against the sides, sealed like your mother’s stoic lips.
That New Car Smell
I had my first kiss in the back of a haunted car.
The guy who sold it to me said they’d cleaned
it so well it’s like the seats never
Red Flannel Pajamas
Just looking at the autopsy report
So many years in a box
I notice something I never remember reading
when i tell a white boy i am Mexican, he asks me if i think Taco Bell tastes good
i tell him, no,
but yes,
in the way that a mcdonald’s cheeseburger with pickles and mustard
tastes good at 2:37 in the morning when you are broke and drunk and hungry
Biscuits & Gravy
Stove pipe still hot
from the night before—
hands of ash,
rough with grease.
the alphabet of adultery
A is for the age of 28, when I met you at a
bar.
After Midnight
The fridge light spills over me—
white and humming, a single unblinking eye.
Inside, everything glistens:
cold cuts folded like tongues,
Going Under
I take a moonful of sea water / into my pale ribbon lungs / ever entangled / helpless satin / I have glimpsed this you know
What is the Recipe for Joy?
But you can’t start there. You must start with something small and easier to manage, like melancholy.
Summer
Love, your speech is sewered / with the same pilgrim buckle wheat / that canes the distant hills,
Best Words, Best Order
Unlike Sonny, I was never mean for the business. If you work for one too long, they start to wonder what’s wrong with you
Why Girls Coming of Age in the 80s Never Learned to Speak Up
The golden age of slasher films and daytime soaps. The crochet and ashtray decade.
Describe Your Armor
This armor is keeping busy. This armor is talking to a therapist once a week.
In Conversation With the Adaption Predator Wikipedia Page
Avoid detection / Scrub batter from a blue bowl & wash it down the drain. Stare into. The sink’s twisted face.
It’s Your Own Fault
If you’ve ever been one of those daughters refusing / to sleep with your feet dangling from the bed, choosing
Overnight They Morph
Sometimes the apartment building stairs turn into a luge track, designed for speed, enabling a drunk man to fly right out through the window next to the main door.
Cool Heads
Swimming can tadpole your thoughts—slipping, bumping, pulling one another under.
how to survive a ghost infestation
you were a ghost last halloween, / bed sheets with torn edges, crooked virgin mary
Review of Dancing Backwards Toward Pluperfect by Koss, by Matthew Freeman
I was so honored to receive Koss’ new collection, Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect (Diode Editions), and I wasn’t disappointed. To be honest, I was sold at “Pluperfect”, being something of an armchair grammarian. And as the journey went along, I saw such...
Wistful
like the raw sleepless nights that used to be me / or that I am / without too many hours of dreaming / I am no one / like the summer days / that overexpose / until they powder your lungs
The Blade of Cold (Happy Anniversary)
If you live in the West, you must visit
the Great Mayan Reef that runs along
the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico and Central America.
Three Poems
MC sits on a hard chair shaking her head. / It is pre-summer 2013 and MC’s big breasts fall out of MC’s flowered razorback bra. / MC’s black thong swings up from MC’s black yoga pants. / It is 11:06 am and horns are honking on the avenue.
Two Poems
hands sweaty, i passed the book around the bus: / the smut in The Godfather was giggles in middle school, / paper older than our eyes, / profanity softer than our lies:
Gauze is €2.30 at the Pharmacy
Dad / I don’t think you understand / I’m bleeding here / I’m not trying to waste your time
Uterus Lessons
(This poem is plagiarized by so-called poet, Elly Katz. To see how more amazing the original poem is here is the link: https://32poems.com/poem/sarah-burke/ Now, childless, I knowthe distance we must gofor one knot of chromosome,one pinch of protein, to meet another,...
Distress Signal, A Cracked Pantoum
He paints each crooked word to mask his aims — / some multiply, some fatten, some draw blood. / He grasps a million lives he seeks to harm. / Remember, if you end up on your own
The Vision
After Sharon Olds I prop myself up on my elbowslike some faded postcard of a pin-up girl - What if it finally works? The jagged swell between us grows. The sheets become tangled seaweeda shipwreck wrapped in our legs. He presses his lips to my forehead and turns as if...
Soupcase
“We are all going to die!”
fumed the stranger
on the beach, waves lapping
Suggested Edits
Original:
The boy builds a tower from matchsticks.
It falls at dawn.
“We Began in Cosmic Obscenity”: A Review of Alina Stefanescu’s My Heresies by Jonathan Cardew
Giants exist in Alina Stefanescu’s My Heresies. Giants of the past. Romanian giants. Beatific giants. Poetic giants like Rilke and pop cultural ones like Neko Case. Giant wit. A giant bang! “As for the giants, they were gigantic,” shrugs...
There are no 4th floors at the Grand Hyatt Beijing
because in Cantonese, the word for 4 sounds like death, 14 is dead, 24 easy to die & who even knew
Popcorning Parts by Amy Marques: A Conversation Between Claudia Monpere and Kim Steutermann Rogers
Kim Steutermann Rogers Do you remember when Amy showed us PARTS? We were in the lobby of a hotel during AWP, a long Starbucks line behind us. We’d been chatting for probably an hour, getting to know each other in person for the first time after meeting in numerous...
ode to long lost discord friends
my professor once said,
“darkness can be a consequence of light,
and not just the absence of the latter,”
Three Poems
I’m licking a wrist, it tastes salty, rugged, like stagelight
an hourly wage of love from balding men. Fatherly,
exclusively, but underground flowers
Praying While Driving Alone
Namô Tassa Bhagavatô Arahatô Sammâ-Sambuddhassa
I pray, hands clasping the steering wheel
STOP (RESISTING)
-WHEN A FORK HITS THE FLOOR-WE ALL JUMP-IN THIS HOUSE-
-NO LASTING REST-SNAGGED BREATH-WILL DAD GET MAD?-
-OF COURSE HE WILL-DON’T DARE DROP CRUMBS-
Snakeskin Road
I’ve seen her running from one end of Alki Beach to the other,
up Harbor Ave and back to Jack Block Park and the steel mill,
under the bridge and up West Marginal Way—I only know her
For Seth
You left a note on your wall
in between the posters
of your heroes, scribbled
in smudged permanent ink,
Dust
Every night, the solid bodies of my dreams linger long in the air before falling on my pillow like dust. When I wake up, I collect the dust into a glass jar and observe it.
I Hate Dragonflies
The summer is dying in my arms
While the pages shred themselves
Mirth simmers in humid air
Dread winds like ribbons ‘round my fingers
I Make Altars
I knock your headboard against the stucco and studs rattle the collars we wore the leashes between us wrapped twice round our fists I smash the pots you willed with cracked hands…
The day you left
tooth marks on my skin, I did not
recognise the hunger. Your neck blue,
my eyes sweat. Now alone
Afterfeathers: A Zuihitsu
A few weeks have passed since graduation, since the last time I’ll ever see you. I can’t see that yet. I still have hope.
Birth
Something with the body of a woman
and the head of an antlered dear
approached me in haste.
Sound Bath with a Bison
reflected orange light off irises
there is cereal on the counter the dog drinks
& I walk tall to steer noise off the bed
Fog Dip
glowing through bone,
trash chrysanthemums—
building blocks
of death—tally a tear-shaped
Review by David McNicholas: Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco by K. Iver, aWord Search
Order a Copy
Self-Portrait as Finishing the Meal
A pile of blue glass keys from the dollar store. The horse polishes her face in the mirror, perfect palomino, a mane of extensions, of late fees.
The Song of Those Who No Longer Remember the Laughter of Rain
The desert wind calls a name written on vertisols. Don’t be surprised, dust forgets its source the moment it leaves the ground. The dust will settle.
“Ellipsis” and “Erogenous”
To ourselves we confess…
for who else understands
the delicate line between us,
like silk from the spinneret,
matrilineality in walls | scalp [|] disorders
my hair is falling out like my mother
after shower her back amaze of thin
Girls Will B Girls
girls will b
girls when they learn
to smile
ugly with their back teeth
The Lost Tribe
I stumbled on them in a hoolie circle
in a cul de sac, cut off from the rest
of us, the over the Burrin,
scattered wanderers in Ballinacarrig Woods.
to smithereens: sand magic
on the cusp of adulthood, i sold homicide at a lemonade stand. / slaughtered mister sandman with a Desert Eagle to the head,
Drift On
When we break apart, you stay on the East Coast with the dishes / and one of the diamonds. I keep the dog and the other one.
Entanglements
Murder Boyfriend parks. / Moves a turtle from the road. / The gulch marks a course of untried knives.
Tina Needs a Deadline
Tina needs a deadline or she spins out, Tina says, disassociating to fight off dizziness. She’s a bit like 90s cartoon Tasmanian Devil Taz.
Dear Mary: An Erasure
When I talk to you in my head
You’re offended
On Summer Mornings, I’d Walk Through the Woods with My Grandpa
Memory is the uninvited guest that demands too much, takes more than it gives. Remember the summer you’d walk to the creek with your grandpa, it asks with a lilt of a demand in its voice. Remember how you wanted to take the goose’s eggs home for breakfast?
Driving in the Snow
I love being inside a snow globe—visiting a miniature village of snowmen or elves or penguins, ice skating by a quaint gingerbread house, or standing beside the Empire State Building, the Liberty Bell, Mount Rushmore or waving from a balcony in Cinderella’s castle, or...
Review of Shannon Wolf’s Green Card Girl
by Francois Bereaud “It’s the things you don’t expect to miss that hit you the hardest.” This line from Green Card Girl, a prose poetry collection from the British-American writer Shannon Wolf hit me hard. In this, her first collection published by ELJ Press,...
Maybe, Maybe
I might find another dog. Maybe next year, after I’ve finished
with this year’s therapist, done with all that talking about the
unsuccessful talking I’ve done with other people, maybe I’ll be
stripped down to just walking or sitting and saying Good dog!
Don’t Take Me to Lethe
An echo of footsteps drapes over me as I court midnight city—even warehouse / buildings loom, those lumbering from Milwaukee high-rises—inky shades iron- /
black slant across pavements
Three Poems
I’m sorry I’m late.
I just gave birth to my husband —
says the woman.
She’s naked
The Dead Have Better Things To Do
How we love to imagine them lounging around, looking out for us,
distracted from the delights of the afterlife, waiting to swoop in
and snatch us by the collar as we’re about to step off some cliff.
The Bridge
The bridge hung over dark waters there was a place to get on if you wanted to go somewhere there were painted parts where the graffiti had been covered there were torn down posters and fagins the city you could see from the river was the heights the only place I ever sat was by one end looking out over my home and scorning the people and the changing lights but still for all it hung there was one place the bridge could not take you.
Two Poems
half a percent of baby seahorses survive to adulthood male seahorses carry the children & lay them on the church steps at the feet of God my brother & me we were the children we had a holy light within us & everyone told my father you carried such good boys
Spoiler
Today, the ambulance bulked yellow through the trees for you, and this is the kind of poem I will only show people in the event things turn out fine. In your absence, dusk and summer twinned and twined so I thought of different hills to these, sky losing its blaze...
Dislocated
If you ask me why I left Michigan,
I would tell that you that it wasn’t because
Of the weather which left me with a bloated album of waiting
for the blackouts
Five Billion Rutabagas
Somewhere I read
that if you want
to stifle a yawn
you press the web of flesh
Woe, Wrong, Wound
Grief, n. Seven brush fires raged in my little county on Labor Day. On sidewalks, paint spells Careful, but you have to be looking down already to read that. A town on the eastern side of the state is gone now. It took only three days. You know what else happens in...
Tragedy
There are about 90 million dogs in the world, and each and every one of them, no matter how pampered or puny, is descended from the wolf.
Your Pelvic Floor Holds Psychic Wounds
the PT says, sliding her gloved finger inside me. We’ll go slow. Tell me if it hurts. Even empathy needs consent.
Exhibit Z
A blank canvas.
An IV runs
from my arm
into the colors.
Three poems
mauled my hand sinking shards of marigold glass into flesh. A savage display of dominance. At least, that’s what he believed in his tiny dog brain.
Insomnia Chronicles XLI
The night is full of insomniacs googling insomnia. I ask the waiter for a glass of cab—cabernet sauvignon—and he thinks I’ve ordered Tab, the original diet soda.
Three Poems
She considered me a dandy. That’s why she loved me. That’s why she hated me.
The Famous Crate from the Book of Exodus
Take it from me. Make copious notes when Moses explains the cubit system. He asked me the levitating crate’s dimensions, and I said six.
Recipe for Kink Confusion
Ingredients:
1 fundamentalist Christian upbringing
3 dominated Disney princesses
1 abusive boyfriend
On Encountering a Double in a Distant Arcadian Village
Spectacle of beard and owlish spectacles,
bulbous nose, domed head, ungainly gait –
the magnet draws me in, then flips –
his impish, portly presence –
Ethnography of Honey
a toasted slice of challah bread, dollopedwith Greek Orino honey—our Saturday morning breakfast
Aggregate
Annie was accustomed to beauty, the vapor of a cloud—ethereal,
and on the nights she piloted the plane—comforting. She felt kinship
with the gray chill of a winter ocean, with kiddie pools like so
Verify you are not a robot. Select all images with a motorcycle.
Daddy Harold, 45, a Harley stained maroon crosses the four-way light.
Shea butter and oily roots
Shea butter and oily roots, I try to lay my head against your collarbone.
seasonal balderdash
That summer, I could not stop myself from rotting. Inertia tying me to the house. Hoping the coffee turns out as black as your insults, the husky driving its car with the windows down so the bag of Takis in the backseat keeps breathing red dust into the air.
Am
He’d be in black jeans on his haunches,
me with my clipboard and pencil, like a father and a son I suppose.
Không
No no – you shall not come over
Null none – there is nothing here
nothing to see and savor just
Mom’s Birthday Follows the Lunar Calendar
The cave was the first. Damp, echoing, and oddly intimate: the sort of place that feels like memory left out in the rain.
Swetha Amit interviews Preeti Vangani about Fifty Mothers (River River Books, 2026), her new poetry collection
SA: Your book begins with an image of your mother's handwritten diary, showing her name change after marriage. What were your thoughts about including that image? PV: The idea of adding the image came much later, after some poems had been written. One of my...
Review of The Boat With a Girl’s Heart by Neil de la Flor by Jonathan Cardew
In the preface to The Boat with a Girl’s Heart, Neil de la Flor offers a candid account of his process and motivation, framing the book as an homage to his late friend and collaborator, Maureen Seaton. De la Flor explains that he drew from their collaborative...
Review of Burnside Soleil’s Berceuse Parish by Francois Bereaud
The epigraph of this remarkable collection (whose title I’ve shortened for obvious reason) reads: “Enterrez-moi là où mon père est enterré.” (Bury me there where my father is buried) which we are told is a line from an Acadian ballad. It’s also the perfect...
Third Period
She lay
with her knees spread wide
on the dirty girl’s bathroom floor,
fingernails scraping gritty tiles.
Recording Emptiness
Flight lasts only as long as there’s a taut tether to the earth—a bond so tight, a brush to the throat would draw blood.Descent is everywhere.Dissent is our unmarried aunt Redwho once fled, peeling skin from forest mistuntil, inside us, she became its very vine.P.S. A...
Three Poems
Before I even realized, the universe had
ruptured. Every cell in your body became a sun
Two Poems
No one has discovered the right way to worship you. I collect your hair. I hang it, in one great knot, like a lightbulb on a red piece of yarn in the yard.
from AMERICAN CYCLORAMA
from AMERICAN CYCLORAMAThe twilights were violet and seductive. All sweet tea and the dark sides of horses.The women would lie tidy in their bedsand wait for rapture. Latches undone andcigarette burns on the carpet. A churningin the belly that grew by incrementseach...
Three Poems
I miss Doc’s first question when Mr. Abrams’ garage explodes into an acre of purple stars. Brimstone, then looting. Clockwork.
Shark Teeth
My whole life people thought I looked young and I hated it.
Summer before college, I wheeled a purple bicycle
Periodic Table of Fitness
A visual poem.
Review of Skylighting by Charles Hansmann by Britta Stromeyer
Poetic Exploration of Grief: Charles Hansmann's Skylighting “I feel countless lesions scarring inside me, internal marks to mock my survival.,” writes Charles Hansmann in the opening pages of his short novel Skylighting—an introspective and lyrical...
Sugar Pie
Lay the dough across the pie tin, like a sprawl of land surrounded by horizon. Can you hear the pulse of this land? Bare feet beating bare earth. Press it down tight against the sides, sealed like your mother’s stoic lips.
That New Car Smell
I had my first kiss in the back of a haunted car.
The guy who sold it to me said they’d cleaned
it so well it’s like the seats never
Red Flannel Pajamas
Just looking at the autopsy report
So many years in a box
I notice something I never remember reading
when i tell a white boy i am Mexican, he asks me if i think Taco Bell tastes good
i tell him, no,
but yes,
in the way that a mcdonald’s cheeseburger with pickles and mustard
tastes good at 2:37 in the morning when you are broke and drunk and hungry
Biscuits & Gravy
Stove pipe still hot
from the night before—
hands of ash,
rough with grease.
the alphabet of adultery
A is for the age of 28, when I met you at a
bar.
After Midnight
The fridge light spills over me—
white and humming, a single unblinking eye.
Inside, everything glistens:
cold cuts folded like tongues,
Going Under
I take a moonful of sea water / into my pale ribbon lungs / ever entangled / helpless satin / I have glimpsed this you know
What is the Recipe for Joy?
But you can’t start there. You must start with something small and easier to manage, like melancholy.
Summer
Love, your speech is sewered / with the same pilgrim buckle wheat / that canes the distant hills,
Best Words, Best Order
Unlike Sonny, I was never mean for the business. If you work for one too long, they start to wonder what’s wrong with you
Why Girls Coming of Age in the 80s Never Learned to Speak Up
The golden age of slasher films and daytime soaps. The crochet and ashtray decade.
Describe Your Armor
This armor is keeping busy. This armor is talking to a therapist once a week.
In Conversation With the Adaption Predator Wikipedia Page
Avoid detection / Scrub batter from a blue bowl & wash it down the drain. Stare into. The sink’s twisted face.
It’s Your Own Fault
If you’ve ever been one of those daughters refusing / to sleep with your feet dangling from the bed, choosing
Overnight They Morph
Sometimes the apartment building stairs turn into a luge track, designed for speed, enabling a drunk man to fly right out through the window next to the main door.
Cool Heads
Swimming can tadpole your thoughts—slipping, bumping, pulling one another under.
how to survive a ghost infestation
you were a ghost last halloween, / bed sheets with torn edges, crooked virgin mary
Review of Dancing Backwards Toward Pluperfect by Koss, by Matthew Freeman
I was so honored to receive Koss’ new collection, Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect (Diode Editions), and I wasn’t disappointed. To be honest, I was sold at “Pluperfect”, being something of an armchair grammarian. And as the journey went along, I saw such...
Wistful
like the raw sleepless nights that used to be me / or that I am / without too many hours of dreaming / I am no one / like the summer days / that overexpose / until they powder your lungs
The Blade of Cold (Happy Anniversary)
If you live in the West, you must visit
the Great Mayan Reef that runs along
the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico and Central America.
Three Poems
MC sits on a hard chair shaking her head. / It is pre-summer 2013 and MC’s big breasts fall out of MC’s flowered razorback bra. / MC’s black thong swings up from MC’s black yoga pants. / It is 11:06 am and horns are honking on the avenue.
Two Poems
hands sweaty, i passed the book around the bus: / the smut in The Godfather was giggles in middle school, / paper older than our eyes, / profanity softer than our lies:
Gauze is €2.30 at the Pharmacy
Dad / I don’t think you understand / I’m bleeding here / I’m not trying to waste your time
Uterus Lessons
(This poem is plagiarized by so-called poet, Elly Katz. To see how more amazing the original poem is here is the link: https://32poems.com/poem/sarah-burke/ Now, childless, I knowthe distance we must gofor one knot of chromosome,one pinch of protein, to meet another,...
Distress Signal, A Cracked Pantoum
He paints each crooked word to mask his aims — / some multiply, some fatten, some draw blood. / He grasps a million lives he seeks to harm. / Remember, if you end up on your own
The Vision
After Sharon Olds I prop myself up on my elbowslike some faded postcard of a pin-up girl - What if it finally works? The jagged swell between us grows. The sheets become tangled seaweeda shipwreck wrapped in our legs. He presses his lips to my forehead and turns as if...
Soupcase
“We are all going to die!”
fumed the stranger
on the beach, waves lapping
Suggested Edits
Original:
The boy builds a tower from matchsticks.
It falls at dawn.
“We Began in Cosmic Obscenity”: A Review of Alina Stefanescu’s My Heresies by Jonathan Cardew
Giants exist in Alina Stefanescu’s My Heresies. Giants of the past. Romanian giants. Beatific giants. Poetic giants like Rilke and pop cultural ones like Neko Case. Giant wit. A giant bang! “As for the giants, they were gigantic,” shrugs...
There are no 4th floors at the Grand Hyatt Beijing
because in Cantonese, the word for 4 sounds like death, 14 is dead, 24 easy to die & who even knew
Popcorning Parts by Amy Marques: A Conversation Between Claudia Monpere and Kim Steutermann Rogers
Kim Steutermann Rogers Do you remember when Amy showed us PARTS? We were in the lobby of a hotel during AWP, a long Starbucks line behind us. We’d been chatting for probably an hour, getting to know each other in person for the first time after meeting in numerous...
ode to long lost discord friends
my professor once said,
“darkness can be a consequence of light,
and not just the absence of the latter,”
Three Poems
I’m licking a wrist, it tastes salty, rugged, like stagelight
an hourly wage of love from balding men. Fatherly,
exclusively, but underground flowers
Praying While Driving Alone
Namô Tassa Bhagavatô Arahatô Sammâ-Sambuddhassa
I pray, hands clasping the steering wheel
STOP (RESISTING)
-WHEN A FORK HITS THE FLOOR-WE ALL JUMP-IN THIS HOUSE-
-NO LASTING REST-SNAGGED BREATH-WILL DAD GET MAD?-
-OF COURSE HE WILL-DON’T DARE DROP CRUMBS-
Snakeskin Road
I’ve seen her running from one end of Alki Beach to the other,
up Harbor Ave and back to Jack Block Park and the steel mill,
under the bridge and up West Marginal Way—I only know her
For Seth
You left a note on your wall
in between the posters
of your heroes, scribbled
in smudged permanent ink,
Dust
Every night, the solid bodies of my dreams linger long in the air before falling on my pillow like dust. When I wake up, I collect the dust into a glass jar and observe it.
I Hate Dragonflies
The summer is dying in my arms
While the pages shred themselves
Mirth simmers in humid air
Dread winds like ribbons ‘round my fingers
I Make Altars
I knock your headboard against the stucco and studs rattle the collars we wore the leashes between us wrapped twice round our fists I smash the pots you willed with cracked hands…
The day you left
tooth marks on my skin, I did not
recognise the hunger. Your neck blue,
my eyes sweat. Now alone
Afterfeathers: A Zuihitsu
A few weeks have passed since graduation, since the last time I’ll ever see you. I can’t see that yet. I still have hope.
Birth
Something with the body of a woman
and the head of an antlered dear
approached me in haste.
Sound Bath with a Bison
reflected orange light off irises
there is cereal on the counter the dog drinks
& I walk tall to steer noise off the bed
Fog Dip
glowing through bone,
trash chrysanthemums—
building blocks
of death—tally a tear-shaped
Review by David McNicholas: Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco by K. Iver, aWord Search
Order a Copy
Self-Portrait as Finishing the Meal
A pile of blue glass keys from the dollar store. The horse polishes her face in the mirror, perfect palomino, a mane of extensions, of late fees.
The Song of Those Who No Longer Remember the Laughter of Rain
The desert wind calls a name written on vertisols. Don’t be surprised, dust forgets its source the moment it leaves the ground. The dust will settle.
“Ellipsis” and “Erogenous”
To ourselves we confess…
for who else understands
the delicate line between us,
like silk from the spinneret,
matrilineality in walls | scalp [|] disorders
my hair is falling out like my mother
after shower her back amaze of thin
Girls Will B Girls
girls will b
girls when they learn
to smile
ugly with their back teeth
The Lost Tribe
I stumbled on them in a hoolie circle
in a cul de sac, cut off from the rest
of us, the over the Burrin,
scattered wanderers in Ballinacarrig Woods.
to smithereens: sand magic
on the cusp of adulthood, i sold homicide at a lemonade stand. / slaughtered mister sandman with a Desert Eagle to the head,
Drift On
When we break apart, you stay on the East Coast with the dishes / and one of the diamonds. I keep the dog and the other one.
Entanglements
Murder Boyfriend parks. / Moves a turtle from the road. / The gulch marks a course of untried knives.
Tina Needs a Deadline
Tina needs a deadline or she spins out, Tina says, disassociating to fight off dizziness. She’s a bit like 90s cartoon Tasmanian Devil Taz.
Dear Mary: An Erasure
When I talk to you in my head
You’re offended
On Summer Mornings, I’d Walk Through the Woods with My Grandpa
Memory is the uninvited guest that demands too much, takes more than it gives. Remember the summer you’d walk to the creek with your grandpa, it asks with a lilt of a demand in its voice. Remember how you wanted to take the goose’s eggs home for breakfast?
Driving in the Snow
I love being inside a snow globe—visiting a miniature village of snowmen or elves or penguins, ice skating by a quaint gingerbread house, or standing beside the Empire State Building, the Liberty Bell, Mount Rushmore or waving from a balcony in Cinderella’s castle, or...
Review of Shannon Wolf’s Green Card Girl
by Francois Bereaud “It’s the things you don’t expect to miss that hit you the hardest.” This line from Green Card Girl, a prose poetry collection from the British-American writer Shannon Wolf hit me hard. In this, her first collection published by ELJ Press,...
Maybe, Maybe
I might find another dog. Maybe next year, after I’ve finished
with this year’s therapist, done with all that talking about the
unsuccessful talking I’ve done with other people, maybe I’ll be
stripped down to just walking or sitting and saying Good dog!
Don’t Take Me to Lethe
An echo of footsteps drapes over me as I court midnight city—even warehouse / buildings loom, those lumbering from Milwaukee high-rises—inky shades iron- /
black slant across pavements
Three Poems
I’m sorry I’m late.
I just gave birth to my husband —
says the woman.
She’s naked
The Dead Have Better Things To Do
How we love to imagine them lounging around, looking out for us,
distracted from the delights of the afterlife, waiting to swoop in
and snatch us by the collar as we’re about to step off some cliff.
The Bridge
The bridge hung over dark waters there was a place to get on if you wanted to go somewhere there were painted parts where the graffiti had been covered there were torn down posters and fagins the city you could see from the river was the heights the only place I ever sat was by one end looking out over my home and scorning the people and the changing lights but still for all it hung there was one place the bridge could not take you.
Two Poems
half a percent of baby seahorses survive to adulthood male seahorses carry the children & lay them on the church steps at the feet of God my brother & me we were the children we had a holy light within us & everyone told my father you carried such good boys
Spoiler
Today, the ambulance bulked yellow through the trees for you, and this is the kind of poem I will only show people in the event things turn out fine. In your absence, dusk and summer twinned and twined so I thought of different hills to these, sky losing its blaze...
Dislocated
If you ask me why I left Michigan,
I would tell that you that it wasn’t because
Of the weather which left me with a bloated album of waiting
for the blackouts
Five Billion Rutabagas
Somewhere I read
that if you want
to stifle a yawn
you press the web of flesh
Woe, Wrong, Wound
Grief, n. Seven brush fires raged in my little county on Labor Day. On sidewalks, paint spells Careful, but you have to be looking down already to read that. A town on the eastern side of the state is gone now. It took only three days. You know what else happens in...