VOICEMAIL POEMS

ài yɑ, I gasped in a foreign language he laughed, taking off my socks toes without nail polish, he kissed the sweat beads on my back without a photographer a woman in white dress a man in linen suit held the turquoise river and their breath fit bodies running shirtless under the sun poured molten gold made me stare, ài yɑ he left before we wrinkle ————————————– Elena Wu called us from Chicago, IL....

Warning: do not think this bed will bear your weight across the bay. What holds you at night may not carry you in the morning. The air might already be leaking. It may not be what it seems. Run your hands along the seams. Check every fold for hidden faults. Feel for well-meaning pokes and jabs. Caution: be wary most of holes. puncture holes/nail holes/eyeholes/keyholes/pinholes/drainage holes/armh...

BERLIN (Reuters) - A swan has fallen in love with a plastic swan-shaped paddleboat on a pond in the German town of Muenster and has spent the past three weeks flirting with the vessel five times its size, a sailing instructor said Friday. He's not half nuts, this German swan, to love Something so near the actual, you might squint from shore, squishing sand beneath your toes, to see its broad white...

Con·tain·er /kənˈtānər/. (noun). 1. An object. 2. An object that can be used to hold. 3. An object that can be used to transport something. Synonyms: Vessel. Do you feel like a vessel? Ves·sel /ˈves(ə)l/. (noun). 1. Ship. 2. Hollow container. 3. Cask, Barrel, Ship. I think of myself as a container. in august i started eating myself into myself. this isn’t a metaphor. i was actually hungry. a barre...

Joy can survive climate change. Radioactive baby crawling on all fours. So full of movement and color. Half the animals are gone, but baby finds other creatures to play with. Their gills are on the outside, their eyes haunting and heterochromatic. Their skin glows, too. Sharp, variegated ecstasy. Exuberantly fat lines aglow with graffiti ethos. Taking the world as it comes, not as it ought to be....

I’ve always wished God could grow me down into an egg in the snow. White on white. Piles of drift. Back in Cincinnati my tongue grew red in the midday cold, waiting for someone to suck it like cherry popsicle. Those were the days I danced like Jesus was coming. I took off my clothes and I felt very good about it, like it was the only thing in the world. Once I petted a farm chicken so softly she b...

"paul wall drives me home after our sade concert date" & names me his favorite dime. rubs his hands on my jukebox thighs & bobs his head to dj screw along the lake. i lean into the purple of midnight & take his palm to my cheek. suck in the freezing drip of platinum rings. we sail the shore south in a topless whip, my lollipop mouth matching its lacquer. he, my bourbon smooth guide, diamond dipped...

Between months of silence, my father sends me communist TikToks from Chinese accounts. I assume they are pro but can’t know—I don’t have the app. What is between us remains unwatchable. But I want to look at him across our dimming country, water and wheat becoming one expanse of night. If I could drive to him, I would begin the wrong way. When he sends me a video of Anne Hathaway giving a speech a...

Mom is sitting cross-legged on the hard kitchen floor, slicing cabbage and green onions for kimchi, covering her mouth as she laughs. She’s watching 7-year-old me in the living room, lip-syncing to Madonna and Whitney Houston, holding my Walkman like a microphone, grabbing my shiny Michael Jackson glove suspenders, pretending I am the next winner on Star Search. My brother, who is two years older,...

They say I appear in different places, to different people, at the same time. Saints bilocate too. If I had wings, my flapping would make every verb a we. Pain has splintered me. I am detached, restless, scattered to the wind of people’s wants. I am the necessary monster, the needed threat, the whispered warning. I am forever in your mouth. I do penance. Nothing is ever anyone’s but a woman’s faul...

When I tuck my hands into the wool fingerless gloves, close them into fists, then open them again to the world When I drive to CVS to pick up my dad’s antibiotics, for healing the stitches Under a puffy bandage on his cheek When I walk in the biting 36 degrees, come inside with a crimson face, and find that the frost has expelled the damp muck from my mind When I taste the bitterness of a cappucci...

I want to own that electric blue Ford Fiesta again. Drive all night, & all day, & all night through. Let the odometer eat the miles it takes to marvel at an endless Texas, until the car runs out of gas, & I am staring down the old shingles on the gazebo in the town square in Calhoun City, Mississippi. Back to the place where my grandmother was raised (the last of eight), & my grandfather is known...

I come in knowing where you are, hunched beneath the showerhead, breathing hard, swaying under the spray, eyes unmoored. I enter the tub soft-footedly, into the shallow water, circling your ankles until I become a small ocean, and you, shuddering in my tide, hold yourself hostage with the strength of your arms wrapped around your knees. the window fogs over, steam on the glass keeps crying as if i...

I was minding my own business when it happened. A flash of brown. A single ringing blow, then a dull thud. That was all it took to end the mourning dove. How our window shook to look upon its brutal work. At least it was quick. A useless mercy. To spend a life singing just to go out making that sound. To have the entire sky, wide open and die trying to fly into a room. I did the only thing I could...

He left his toothbrush on my sink— a reminder so slight, yet it haunts me as surely as his touch. I pointed it out, as if I wished to free myself of it; he smiled as he walked out my door, and chained me with his leaving it there. And I, a fool to my own heart, left my razor in his bathroom— a blade as sharp as he sees me, as useless as hope, bound to rust with the hours wasted. ————————————– Lill...

plush meadow thick, like the mop of an evergreen love speckled instinctively with dandelions marking its fertility –i bring my palm to my duafe which beast of the divine bestowing her highest honor releasing it all carried; re-entering the soup time’s folding us all into the dawn of my thirty-fourth –yes us all, broken down. ribs sprouting with floral aplomb tufts of fur and moss matrimonial i don...

i was born lake, formed lake even before that, the dig deep landscape before the motor, pine letter making berms where the snow retreats, so many parts of me are containers for water i had to move, i didn’t know this from outside of my body, from outside of any body, didn’t want to be the sloshing water, didn’t want to be the wake, didn’t want to wake to know who gets the water who gets the water...

Saying I love you in my mother tongue is impossible. My mother never loved me in words. She gave up a continent for me, its contents traded for a feathered hope of better. For me, she went to scrub the floors in houses we could not afford, came home and scrubbed our floors, as well, then shopped, and cooked, and mended, and then scrubbed some more. The days all slipped into the slit between the sc...

The bells like a leviathan breach the membrane of the liquid dark, tumbling forth like a vanguard incited by adrenaline and the call of drumbeats. The God Paradox States: 1. If God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, He has the power and also the desire to end evil. Through the open window, the January air bites at the alveoli lodged deep behind my sternum; moonbeams litter the asphalt in geometric...

the vines awaken to greet the ripening day the sun climbs to its zenith scattering darkness from every corner you fold your sorrowing hands across your belly only yesterday there was a heartbeat your weary body tightens under the blaze of light yet your soul remains untouched by its ray ————————————– Aleksandra Jovičić Đinović called us from Serbia. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemai...

money runs like blood through the big american corpse my big american corpse takes the subway chews the same piece of gum too long like cud like cows we mill in the smoke between tracks eyes wide and sightless our big american mouths follow hunger to hunger won’t see the plainclothes cop until it's too late won’t see him put his hands on a dirty arm won’t remember where that arm goes when it disap...

I heard the first note on a train out of town A certain je ne sais quoi was ignited With the flair of a madman, sprung out of my chair Slammed emergency stop and alighted Waltzed up and down the boarded up boulevard Enjoyed the sensation of the silent street Underscored by the tune of a tuba at noon Which put the soul back into my feet Spinning round to the downtown dive bar A subterranean musical...

This time I’m breast. Face down, breasts hanging as still as I could be. I brought my breasts, body, here, it feels like. I am not exactly my body today. I remember choosing dying in my sleep during the childhood game, as if we could predict or choose that kind of ending. I repeat the soft animal of your body – it hurts to forget the geese, Mary Oliver’s name, to rest my middle on a plastic suppor...

Dear moon child of the Universe wake up and lift your golden feet & wave your hand's glory to your placid disposition however humble it may be without surrendering your human dignity For you have the worthy right to be present here void of dark imaginings of who's over your halo & beneath the sole of your feet Dear child see here as loud as the echoes of the walls of your heart not as broken dream...

Do you remember that summer I spent trying to catch your snort in a jar? That snort you’d bury under a cough every time. A boy breaking through the drywall of a man. I wrote twenty-six poems about you. I gave you a warehouse and turpentine on your cuffs and night air in your gaze. But you wore yellow baseball caps, socks with sandals. Minnesota stamped in cotton, the blockiest state. Remember that...