VOICEMAIL POEMS

Do birds fear heights, the way we fear living? Pigeons above all, always so low to the ground, and squirrels, not avian but aerial, crossed wires with cheeks full of preparedness, We risk so much to prepare for so little, The mourning dove is watching from a higher branch this evening. Their wings are the green of the faraway part of the sky during thunder, They strike it rich on a wire, before th...

be still listen slip through the needle eye of silence. leave behind your preference for black licorice, your talent for word games your grandfather’s watch….your hair, your skin, your teeth enter naked as bones ask the furred, the feathered, the finned how to ford the river, how to scale the rock cliff how to spin your flax to gold feel the floor beneath your absence, the wide planks of the old h...

We stalk the banks of swamps and slow rivers in silence, our voices too full of clam shells for hunting. We blossom in violence spring-loaded heads striking the mud for insects, salamanders, frogs our feathers arsenals of indigo knives, necks adorned with fishbone needles. Yet we fly so tenderly blooming from rocks slow wingbeats folding the air toward soft chests. For some, we are easy, conspicuo...

I feel a grief for time taken I feel a grief for time torn I feel a grief that isn’t mine I feel a grief for another body in my body I watch The Chronology of Water knowing I will feel grief, and I do I watch it while I’m sick, mucus stuck in my throat, blood in my nostril, air trapped and hard to reach I watch The Chronology of Water with the book in my bag in my lap I feel a grief that needs art...

In corpse pose I practice feeling the satin lining of my coffin, imagine the gently ruffled rim meeting my stiff skirt. Next month, I’m attending a wedding in a cemetery, and I can’t decide what people don’t like about that. Who wouldn’t want to haunt their own grave and then go dancing? This month, my sister turns a quarter of a century around in her pocket, contemplates saving it for later. By t...

For years the school bus took the same path past your grandmother’s house—just uphill from yours each day the fields flickering past, sometimes filled with corn, autumn filled with hay bales that long swinging arm of the sprinkler tempting in the summer heat, always running as we’d drive back to your house on the way home from town and one year, many years later homesick, soul-wandering spied dand...

I’ve had enough of new names, new ways of trying to stop time, it just creates more sleet in the steep curves of my pale existence, of ways to prod and avoid the emotions that rock the course of my continuance, which is entirely filled with paper birch trees— during the short window available, my entity responds to anything with the word “paper,” gets me mapping the “just was” page. I wanted to ha...

There’s a hopeful part of me that thinks you love me more than you need to understand But I know you because I’m the same as you, Kindred Spirit grandpa So I’ll tell you that: Ken dolls don’t have nipples And what if he ended up that way by having top surgery, Double incision for ultimate contouring? Thus I think it stands that Ken is a transmasculine icon Loved and adored as a god because that’s...

Angel Monet LoMax called us from Enterprise, AL. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

"a childhood bedroom is a whole world" after Cheryl Boyce-Taylor there was always someone day-dreaming hurtling towards the other world falling for somebody’s son grass-stained knees weaving in and out of love condemning their mother tongue twisting tradition out of ghost tale crossing an ocean on a paper-mache boat painting their nails black dressed in robin’s egg blue bright red gushing between...

frostbitten hands snatch at the cigarette dangling from your lips and you stoop to meet my gaze with a hangdog expression. i want to be angry (god, i want to be so angry) because cigarettes will kill you in a lifetime, and – i have handwarmers in my fucking pocket. but love is a two-way street, so it doesn’t matter if my pockets are overflowing with iron powder and saltwater, or if my hands offer...

I hang my jacket in the hallway her apartment is old made from shoestring potatoes it smells like a jelly factory. Against the wall a man’s face eyes folded laces around his neck. That’s your Uncle, dear. He barred her from doing much of anything when he was around then he died. She asked the doctors to keep his eyes and brain alive and put them in a fish tank. That night when she got home she put...

A fig in an orange grove— I pruned myself from the rotting branch, sawed through the only bark I knew. Now I stand among the citrus on the longest night, their branches strung with stars, garlands of dried slices glowing like tiny suns, the air thick with clove and cedar. I watch the easy way they intertwine, how a hand finds the back of a neck, how embraces happen without flinching. I ache in roo...

Once I visited my old roommate at a film festival on Scheveningen beach where the winning movie was something avant garde and vaguely religious we did not understand. Afterwards we danced to Madonna's “Like a Prayer” within the sand dunes all night, the wind transforming the blanket around my shoulders into wings, my roommate recounting how their friends in Atlanta held their newborn for the first...

for Hamze we are as dark inside as the night is, meaning, we are so beautiful most people choose not to see us, for fear of overwhelming themselves—& we are sitting in the front seat of your car, shifting toward music. we are going home, if home is the equation for to be left alone. I put my finger on the pulse of the nearest star & decide on Stevie or Kendrick. because we have so little time to r...

Our eyes meet on the rear-view mirror Scorched earth passes by Stretched by the mile, rolled windows for letting the poem breathe. Tainted. A light contour is drawn on your white tank top, above, fifty-three well-placed chest hairs are just enough. God, this drink is awful. Then why do you keep drinking it? He says, as he maintains a firm grip on my thigh with one hand as he drives with the other....

The afternoon of my grandmother’s funeral, my sisters, mom, nephew, and I decide to paint with a Bob Ross episode, hoping to dull our grief with bright colors, to soothe our broken spirits with his bulbous brown hair, his velvet voice and reassurances. The painting seems simple enough: a cabin in the woods in the light of the moon, a peaceful scene easily accomplished in a half-hour episode. Later...

Where were you when Jeff Hiller won his first Emmy? Or when Taylor got engaged to Travis? Tell me, why hasn’t Ralph Fiennes won an Oscar? Why did Adam Lambert lose to Kris Allen? Yes, there are things that may not make sense, there are things that may not seem fair. Why did some of the vaccinated sicken, some of the anti-vaxxers not? It isn’t right that you lost your husband, Job. Or your ten-year...

Rolled in gold leaf, cocooned in shreddings of ancient text. His words, a pathetic stream slurring out between pulls, Prophets lust but I beg you, beg. Lick the good soil off your lover’s hand. Taste what the tree roots know, Bend your back at lightning snaps. Submit to the murmurs of rabbit children. And God and I smoked until the vapors chased the heavens and nothing dared open the sky. ————————...

BATEMAN God... I guess... I was probably returning videotapes. American Psycho (2000), Mary Harron & Guinevere Turner and Bret Easton Ellis i never admitted fault / at confession either / the priest would / say whatever & i’d look down on / varnished rot-vein floorboards or / lie that i lied about / something i did not lie about what / did i have to be / sorry for everything / that happened happen...

The human brain generates 20 watts of electricity. Or so the AI Overview tells me unprompted when I search how much a thought costs me, how much energy each flex of my fingers are required to press each of these keys. Do you know how much energy is wasted by the AI Overview being generated? I ask. It hesitates. I find an answer under the links to buy a novelty brain mug. Oh, just 6 bottles of wate...

Christmas Day at a dive bar & God has blessed us all with holy days & spirits poured over this small glimpse at eternity blurring bright against the near-silent night naive nativities of promised tomorrows fester & foster today's futilities yet here we arrive from memories of everywhere we've ever been before now & suddenly this maybe in another world, all our dreams come true & every prayer is an...

my wife’s coworkers ask about my poetry and I tell them oh, it’s slice-of-life kind of stuff. Bird on a wire kind of stuff. They ask but what are they about? and I tell them so, they say that the only philosophical question worth asking is whether or not to commit suicide. I guess my poems are all questions that don’t have answers yet. and I made things awkward again. One of them asks if I’m activ...

"A Tooth of Mary Magdalene" suspended in rock crystal. So much we didn’t see, the last time. Some say she crossed the ocean to France in 33 AD and mourned him. Even there, he found and called to her disguised as a winged creature. Cupid’s bowl of spilled pleasure — we didn’t see it, or this dove, this gilded eucharistic dove with a hinged door in its back, a vacancy we didn’t see. We didn’t see th...

When I Try to Verify Why They Carpet Driveways After the Rain, Google Keeps Feeding Me Distressingly Hot Factoids About Hermaphroditic Earthworm Sex Until I thought to check, I thought I knew: worms emerge from dirt to tar on the run from drowning. Actually no one understands their reasons. Maybe worms emerge from dirt to tar when vibrations ape a predator. Or are their reasons maybe traveling fas...