VOICEMAIL POEMS

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...

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...