Listen Now

as silent and holy as an empty church. a polished row of pews. you, moon in the sky, how do you do it? your one-handed gravity holding still the earth. astral magic trick, you newly christened old god. every family’s forgotten dance is a scar on your surface. memory like a bear trap. worldfodder magnet. wise old sledgehammer once smashed through our orbit longways. we were just a pie cooling on the galactic windowsill. now we say Light & mean your face, stretched our whole lives and once reached your shadow. pockmarked queen of all ships. all flags. can’t sing a note of worship if it doesn’t include a word of pain. the night sky’s opening bell and serene last call, nursing your craters like old wounds nursing your craters like children. your face held high and regal through eons of the same steady bruise and somehow you arrive to us with a bouquet of escape of routes. i have so much to learn from you, and not just about physics. how long did it take you to learn such luminescent confidence? your brilliant backlit halo, the way you just float and move everything, shine your own ligaments to dust. when people say they love each other to the You and back, is it about distance or about damage? about some man’s lonely footprint? and what do we know about damage next to you, anyway? all our blood clots thick with time but you have no winds to whisper your name. sometimes the healing does not rush through you. prehistoric ocean or otherwise. there are no channels you didn’t cut yourself. no way to say Over in the dead space. no one there to hear it but a silent star. and a billion other stars. ————————————– Zachary Goldberg called us from Oakland, CA. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast

remember bodies at night how they glow how they bend into us like refracted light the memory of where a body was after it has left its phosphorescence you cocoon into the spaces around things find yourself in auburn eyes and hazel skin the red that flows from you you learn that aloneness is a softness a sky that pulls you through you see bodies as they are things that love you and then stop when you wake up it’s heavy water write down the deep green blue feelings like paua shells there is a pale existing in your head a light moving in your hair behind a colour in the lunar month you return home the whenua moves its arms up to greet you climb up the hill to see the faraway beach feel lonely like mislaid keys it’s good to be there in the quiet saying to yourself i’m real i’m real as the feelings inside shrink red into shape ————————————– Stacey Teague called us from Clonakilty, Ireland. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast

yeah i’ve got a lighter. can fix your filter. give you honey stick secrets and light tight roll laughter when you call me blue dream like your favorite strain like your favorite character ramona you know the blue of your dreams? yeah they’re both pierced. few things hurt so good like a needle. addict in a cute way. smoker with a toothbrush. dreamer with insomnia. liar and a poet. dream girl without problems. will ignore your worst for a sprinkle of the same. won’t shut the cartoon off till you ask for the remote or a shaved head. will lay alone with you and all of the dirty dishes. or i can wake up pretty if you want me to. i can be your party now and your home in the morning. feed you jewels of deep red pomegranates and suck the stains from the bed sheets. let you call me by any name you want when you fuck me. lick your wounds so you don’t have to. pretend you don’t have them until you don’t. and i will say goodbye before the jump so you don’t have to see me splatter. or if you want, i could rewrite the closing scene. i could change this to a happy ending. i can make you everything you want. i will make me anything if you ask me to. ————————————– Taylor Jaczin called us from St. Petersburg, FL. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast

In the palm of my hand I harbor Fault lines, one-way streets, A famous bridge half-crossed and Another I steered from the passenger’s seat While the driver smoked weed Such honking dreams in the patchouli, Of frolicking unhindered, of Slapping my feet in my Sunday shoes Down my aunt’s hardwood hallway. The earthquakes always come. I’ve cracked off into the ocean. Every day’s dawn yawns a Salty horizon, and the fog rises off the water And the fog rides into town, and the fog bowls me down, And sits on my chest, reading off a checklist of regrets I am so thirsty And my irises are turning gray and It never snows in San Francisco no matter what The souvenirs say. ————————————– Caroljean Gavin called us from Winston-Salem, NC. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast

A man in a powder blue suit offered to tell me my future on Olive Avenue. When I tried to say no, he said Baby, please, in a way that told me that he might know something that I didn’t, so I held out my palm. I used to hold out the same palm on the playground for other girls to read. They would tell me that I was destined to have five kids and a loving husband. Maybe a mini van. They told me my future with such certainty that it was difficult not to see some truth, some sincerity, some genuine desire to wish a happy future upon each other. So I believed them. The man on Olive said he could see Los Angeles and its sprawl. He could see me there, too, but he wouldn’t tell me what I was doing without another five dollars. I looked happy, though, he said. Happy in Los Angeles and laughing in the sun. There, in Fresno, I sought to find an intersection of these futures. ————————————– Mariah Bosch called us from Fresno, CA. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast

I stay in bed til 2 then get up and open all the windows. Make coffee and walk around the 5 x 10 space I call my living room. Turn my attention to the postcards and photographs on the fridge. Stare hard at all that evidence. Whisper: See, there’s no reason to be lonely. Smoke one cigarette and then another on the steps out front. Begin to cry over my own good luck. I never told you this but the truth is I would follow you to the edges of any map. I never told you this but that’s what scares me. And it’s not just that I love you. More often it’s a mixed melody of the same idea, which sounds quite a lot like: thank you. Forgive me one last time. Come back. This time I mean it. ————————————– Sara Hutchinson called us from Santa Cruz, CA. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast

I. I fall in love every time I fly. Leaving Dallas: the medical student wearing headphones and a full headscarf just to forget her be-planed predicament. Above Tucson: the sorority sister with the strawberry hair whose father is waiting at the baggage claim; they leave, arms over shoulders over arms. In Denver. The woman in security: her bright eyes contradict the softening skin on her hands like Kleenex, like my mother’s. I desperately want to be travelling away from here with someone, with one of these walkabout-women at my side on a midnight-plane to anywhere: companionable silence, holding hands in anticipation. II. My parents call from twelve-and-a-half hours in the past to tell me that when they dropped me off for my flight to Seoul on the way out— they saw a woman striding confidently through the winding Sea-Tac security, carrying what they were sure was her whole life on her back, Emryse. She was going off somewhere. On her next adventure. I like to imagine her lived-in day-pack, her tried-and-tested shoes; her threadbare smile. I like to think she was happy because they told me they knew that would be me, one day, and they told me she had been alone. ————————————– Emryse Geye called us from Portland, OR. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast

When are you going to move closer? The space aches between us. It invents its own language. The jagged edge of the ocean paints the sand dark, retreats into its own swollen urge, arcs forward to tease the shore with the inexorable inevitable that drives my hands into the unwritten dark to pull the tide of you over me. Drown me, roll me against you. Make me your pearl. ————————————– Tria Wood called us from Houston, TX. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast

Sons blushed and became soft peaches in the hot backseats of cars, never even wanted the front seat. Or, I was the son, but it’s nice to be plural and grand and count the dandelions in right field as friends, which I picked in the ancient way of boys who’s fathers tried to metaphorically light fires under their asses, there I go again, I was the boy, who was mediocre at boy at best, first boy, if it makes a difference being a minute closer to your father’s father, and I don’t remember if I plucked maybe a little out of spite because my dad told me metaphorically to quit picking dandelions, or if when he mentioned them they sounded like pixy stix in the outfield during a tee ball game, which due to the smallness of five-year-olds mostly happens very close to home plate, and dandelions pluck so satisfyingly like plonking open a can of coke (let us use plonk’s secondary definition of playing on a musical instrument – the coke tab – laboriously or unskillfully) and their frilly heads spin when you shush them in your hands like you’re warming them. If you build it then some of the angels will come to plop down in the outfield, finger the dirt and rest their heads on tender blades while the pop flies pock the earth around them. ————————————– Andy Powell called us from New York, NY. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast

When you’re out in the sticks - the woods are a fortress - sunlight stabs down at you in bright daggers - I bet no one told you how a canopy is like armor. I had a place in the woods where rules couldn’t touch me - little warrior boy with sticks beating up all the full grown men that ever left mama broken. On the ground with a jar of bugs - benevolent demigod me who only knew enough to tear out earthy pieces of the woods and shove them in. Love is often a tearing away - open heart surgery featuring pieces of us that don’t fit - and a partner who can play dead really well. I played house - made a time machine too - went back in time - made mistakes - I must have - how else did playing house get so hard all of a sudden - why else would everything be my fault? I preached in two different churches at the age of eight. I forgot the God is love part - was too busy memorizing bible verses - writing fire and brimstone sermons. Whenever I was on my way to an ass whooping - I always wished I was someone else - someone strong enough to put the switch down. Did you know hide and seek isn’t fun at all - if one person suddenly decides they don’t wanna play anymore? When you grow up and the woods can’t hide you - you learn to disappear on the inside - you try and make yourself a fortress. Best I could muster was a jar of ripped up roots and leaves - with a bug that knew how small he was - who was much loved - until the day he wanted out. ————————————– James Barrett Rodehaver called us from Dallas, TX. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast

I feel as if I should tell you That I have never yet, seen - A Beaver in the Wild/ but have, for sure seen plenty things: -Too many a shrub and quail, -Elk drunk at the Waterfall, -Horses arrogant in the sun -So many a video of Fruit Bats gnawing on…Fruits. -So many dams Made by clawed hands, or less clawed hands. I still strong-arm the river at the diaphragm in wanting - and choke/ Think I grow more confident in The frame I wake in - Every rock turns and shifts to coerce the spirit Outside the Vessel & up the The shore pregnant, affirmed. Hope I am loud enough to Beckon help As the water’s edge keeps climbing. I’m sorry - it is rude to Think me a river. I fear the space I take knowing my Gender both me and coursing, but want not to Scare whatever gets Swallowed by my shadow. I’ve been swallowed, and have seen all not bashfully shroud by my lashes – Sometimes I burst in a partners mouth And a dam breaks – Floods all my being With heavy hand. I do not hear it coming/ go warm as doubt drowning, & hear my name called to me over crashing timber, This Time. It is enough to keep running by morning. Enough when my friends call me a Mother in earnest. It is a truth with heavy hands, Lapping at the levee without relent, But Most Times I cradle my stomach in rushing water and do not feel a Fertile Shore. I weep and search the mirror for a place to rescue my wanting/ Wonder so often if all who love Me must breathe water, Or just as unlikely make a home in my body By their mouths Or clawed hands, Or whatever will a wild thing has To take shelter in impossible places. I had not yet seen one for me in my wandering - this being that treads stream and earth confident //without fear until just here in my room - Through the eyes of another. Bless this Babe of the Wood with soft touch that makes all of my landscape Proud And Untethered. I’ve held this force of nature - & every minute knowing the deficit of The sense to believe those close/in love - Without always seeing & It is enough of a miracle To hear your name from a loved one’s Mouth, to trust//breath and well, I suppose I could have led with just that. ————————————– John Quinonez called us from Boston, MA. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast

1. Trigger happy target 2. Archangel of the burnt and bruised 3. Newport ash on a papi store floor 4. Pants way passed where his mama taught 5. It’s my car sir 6. Ocean front scalp 7. Jesus in hiding 8. Unintentional vaudeville show 9. Fireflies in his palms 10. A friend’s blood 11. Tomorrow’s bedside prayer 12. Tonight’s prime time special 13. It’s just my phone sir 14. I just want to go home 15. I didn’t ask 16. A gunpowder freestyle 17. A stained glass dice game 18. A white man’s orgasm 19. My hands at 16 20. His voice before the shots 21. Stop sign eulogy 22. Mom alone in the chapel 23. No angel 24. All blood ————————————– Dagmawe Berhanu called us from Philadelphia, PA. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast

Sometimes I wish I could stop you from talking when I hear the silly things you say Alison, I know this world is killing you Oh Alison, my aim is true - Elvis Costello, “Alison” I was named for a catcall strung out into three verses and a chorus Ballad drowning in mystery fansites say she’s a pretty stranger his eye caught at the grocery store maybe an ex-fling scraping out a fetus with half his DNA Elvis Costello says my aim is true he might mean it literally No one wastes time on what Alison might say but I am Alison so to Elvis Costello to anyone who has ever claimed to love me Take my name out of your mouth. Your eyes lied when they looked at me and told you muse Damsel I’m the troll under the bridge Asked for peace Got this trap, trap trap Every echo hissing my name in a hated cadence saying: we sing because we love Who wouldn’t want a passion sharp enough to carve the melody of you into the air? I was a child the first time I was dragged from my body and into verse the first time someone thought their love meant they could take my name bend it into a circle to crown them prince or failing that martyr against the heresy of my refusal I ran into the arms of a boy who never sang did what Elvis couldn’t: gift me a contagious silence whistling a hole through my head to land in my own mouth I survived him only to stumble through more poets stitching me into metaphor muting me to make way for the romance they knew they deserved If I were love, I’d say: take my name out of your mouth Set it ablaze I would rather be ash than what you’ve made of me Alison means “of noble birth” A princess of course needs not just a hero but a narrator Her voice only good for singing to the forest creatures The moral only ever Sit Wait Someone will love you enough to speak for you to dirty your name What a happy ending. ————————————– Alison Kronstadt called us from Boston, MA. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast

A few years ago a machine peaked into my head and found a section dead. Most likely from a lack of oxygen in utero, but really, that’s speculation – what’s done is done and there’s no undoing it. Like when I was eighteen and someone pilfered the contents of my lingerie drawer. They took it all: the see-through, the satin, the blood-spotted cotton panties and all the socks and bras. It creeped me out, but I cared less about how it all went missing and worried more just about their being gone. ————————————– Kelly Jones called us from Burlington, NC. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast

For Owen Steinmann (2016-2017) Sugars trickle from maples’ taut trunks, sapping summer energy, the crystallized light of wanting to stay alive. But what melody the drops make a man from a pulpit always says as they leap out the spout, percuss the bucket’s galvanized bottom. Yes, such sweet vasculature and saccharine, this living always toward death. He calls for recalling thinner times, the feel of liveliness not yet stuck in the spiles and given up. Forgetting doesn’t rid our bones of any ache. Look—I’m trying to hold open every leaking word all winter long but this bark cracks, defenseless against air and overfull. For each legible ring, more lost. For each lived ache, a flume of language unspun by air among us. ————————————– Katherine Indermaur called us from Laramie, WY. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast

I finally want to talk about it has taken me a decade more than most and all my wisdom teeth have fallen victim by now there is a draft buried beneath this you will never know of a pleasure of released dioxide and simile I don’t write because the block asks I do this out of an empathy for myself, a backlog of tears and this body knows that the deal is ending soon it just thinks it can wait out having to pay the delivery fee and this is just like me to go on and on nodding to the tune of ephemera in my head without letting go I can count on one hand how many fingers I have lifted to speak to my grandmother or times I even perused a bible yet I could tell you more about how many times I opened my mouth for favor this week alone. ————————————– Olatunde Osinaike called us from Nashville, TN. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast

…july. wilted cereal in a bowl / we drown in brown boiling milk. the haze of sparklers and fire- works add to the deafening heat that drips into august. caged in by smog, air smells of cigarettes and melted tar. surely this place is meant to ignite. september, when he arrives, he thinks this is a flat plain, where desert dirt covers everything like snow and sweat is meant for breathing. but then- october, and the devil’s breath laps up lotion, claws skin with its vicious teeth. yowling roofs beat whoosh and bend of threatened windows. tree leaves sound like ocean. stripped-dry littered bare limbs. the hard ones snap, ripe for a switch. usedtabe gangs of tumbleweeds ran the streets; now, solitary wadded balls of rootless limbs roll by. november is a postcard miracle, surrounded snow capped crisp sky where our eyes hang glide like eagles. we perch low in the valley shadow straining to see the walk of fame. sunset and hollywood. palm springs. peer into the pier of the pacific. every mountain peak is paramount. he says, if it weren’t for the devil’s breath, i’d never know where we are, and just how beautiful ————————————– Romaine Washington called us from Rancho Cucamonga, CA. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast

The eyes have it: weight, such that they can’t even roll. This is one of those moments when I should probably listen to my body but you know how it goes when someone talks too much for your taste (coffee, sir?). There’s lots of work to do today. There’s money to be had and even more easily lost like a sensible child to the pursuit of higher learning after high school. Time is really something, isn’t it? Death is entirely something different, but I don’t believe in dying in the sense that I haven’t done it yet, so I’m unsure if I can. I’m rather incompetent when it comes to handling important matters and a de facto doctorate in the trivial; I’m always the trial and I’m always the error. If ever I’ve felt content, maybe even happy, it was a glitch. And then it was gone. ————————————– Cortney Lamar Charleston called us from Jersey City, NJ. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast

brilliant elixer fuck me up fuck me dead why does academia hate me i’m ready to sacrifice my body to a career something boring like teaching teenagers why romeo and juliet did or didn’t die make my grandparents proud of me again i pour this into my glass and pour my glass into the bathtub full of rejection letters that call me ‘jessica’ instead of jessie this is the year of being normal let’s get married and request fuzzy bath towels let’s get married and i’ll wear the white dress and makeup and smile for 12 hours until my teeth fall out or my chin rots academia what did i ever do to you would i not make you proud either are you scared of me am i not worthy enough to pay you to rub me raw kill me deader than i already am academia all i want to do is walk down your pathways and smell your million dollar flowers i am not so full that i cannot hunger i am not so tired that i cannot stay up for two years straight in this scenario you are my grandparents and you are proud of me and i am sitting at the piano with straight white teeth and slender fingers men can be proud of and i never get too drunk and i always stay in this line in this scenario we never fuck up we never drink the sun on accident we never forget to turn faucets off magical drinkable liquid elixer you promised me more than this ————————————– jessie knoles called us from Bellingham, WA. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast

I was on my back that morning standing still & running half-turned, fetal & spread eagle & curled up along the edge of the hospital bed and the doctor says “It’s time,” & I already know because it has always been time, time to push & she is explaining to me how to push, how to undulate you from my body & as she explains I bring my chin to my chest even though my chin was already there & had never been there & never would be just like you were already there & had never been & never would not be there because I already knew & know how to push & so I push & was pushing because I’d always been pushing & you appeared blue and be-limbed because I push you there right there, little boy, into the world & onto my abdomen right where you’d forever never been before and after amen. ————————————– Laura Davis called us from San Francisco, CA. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast