VOICEMAIL POEMS

we did not hold hands often we clenched legs under the table hands were too public for two who did not know how feelings socailize we sat on a bench on the corniche watching the nile at noon it was full and calm we could hear the wind sing to the trees on its sides you held my hand and I looked as you took it towards you the wind stopped singing and my heart wanted to come out and taste the water...

after Ocean Vuong and why this want for permanence surround sound my life with backups sound out my name and it’s almost a library flower pressed screen dazed stillness a twinkie and her wrapper words she presses in the shape of a body I too will one day be glad I am no longer violet and instead fertilizer no mama’s memoir no mama to read my memoir will be ocean open ooooo like whale sounds I will...

Tonight you lay on your own couch, trying to head off fixation. Your cigar is just a. You hold it oscillating between Cuban and. You are not. You tell yourself this. You flip through your notebook, and it is filled with pictures of you riding the night. The cigar is in your fingers, which place it to your lips. You take a luxurious puff. Wake up, you whimper, and linger, eyes glazing. Up, you mana...

do not be afraid of your own heart beating there must be chocolate maybe even daily I would recommend buying the better cheese drink orange juice in the morning it will help drink wine or whiskey and write things down it is always good to know your own handwriting remember how clean sheets feel and hot baths keep lip balm by your bed keep a tissue in your pocket buy a lamp so your room is warm and...

What bloomed from grief came instinct, came wrath. The aftermath of my longing will show on your back like Lichtenberg figures after the subtlety of a strike. My beautiful friend, I do think heat causes molecules to excite, and if you let me, we’ll honor the burn marks after this smudging. But not before prayer, not before kneeling behind you your scent, curiously ancient I’m suddenly wet I want y...

three soldiers in tinfoil jackets roasting on the bottom oven rack she’d cut the ends off one too long for its own good hacked chunks from the pudgy pocked one sliced the largest of the lot into quarters pulling used foil from a crumpled stash she manhandled the starchy meal into silver uniforms tried to unwrap and uncrinkle but eventually abandoned hope supper could be smooth or smartly dressed w...

I want to write about eternity too just like the cats probing at their breakfasts or your two week old hands Isadora brushing my beard like sleepwalking windshield wipers or the way the sun uses maple leaves as lampshades if we can spend as much of ourselves in time as out of it if our conch shell ears keep after months the cymbal samba of the sea if your feet tender toweled and purpling remember...

Storms– Wave action– Sand crash– A kite coming close– Wobbling moon– Desire work– These optimisms– There’s your thunder– Your downpour across the street– A kid beating a tree with its stick– Panting about every day– Too hot to worry about plot– Chewing ice into the mic– Today a hundred- year-old woman died– Separately I saw so many maggots later– As a recluse I really went all out– ————————————– J...

after Chappell Roan The cold knows me in ways you never will. Darkness clamps her hand over the city’s mouth. Still, light. Music rises like smoke. And God is anything but subtle — this joint, our first kiss. Now my heart’s a helium balloon — pink, no strings attached. Sailing high among the lanterns — paper clouds in a makeshift sky in a lesbian bar where I keep my sunglasses on so you can’t see...

May 10th Perseverance is terminal, Every day dully getting up. The end times keep edging us But I’m a Taurus— I prefer to come And to go another round. They shot Katy Perry Into orbit, then let her back in. We turned the mission into memes To stop thinking of burned old growth forests, Boiling oceans, where all the bees have gone. In the shuttle there was something To do with a world tour. Will th...

I have been made aware of the fact that you died in 1846, but am hoping this will reach you regardless. I have heard you are the foremost expert on solar activity, weather patterns, and astronomical cycles, as well as the best times to fish and how to build a community. I have heard you lived and worked in New Hampshire, which is where I have recently come to live and sometimes but rarely work. Di...

Solidarity is pissing in adjacent stalls. A godly marriage is a throuple with Christ. Dude was a real trove of sword lore. We cheered for the biracial babies. At the racist wedding, the pastor praised Korean cars & submissive wives. Cousins snuck liquor into the dry reception while sober Christians gnashed their teeth. So began the diaspora. One spent a year in Singapore; another posted pics from...

April 2024 Wish you were here is no synonym for I miss you, though of course I do. Wish you were here Like I know you would love this LIke I want to remember this with you, not to you Wish we could rebuild the subtleties to each other and build the details Fall over each other in the telling Want you to feel this first hand, absorbing it too Count you among the partners here along for their own ri...

“There can be but one teacher – nature. She must always be consulted.” - Camille Pissarro I’m wondering how best to preserve this day when I find myself summoned outside into the warming light, tossing my net beyond the low islands and the jagged edge of the Sound, hoping its threads return in gilded attire, yielding a tangle of blessings culled from both sea and hollow that are a mix of old-growt...

"4-tongue poem" by Chiara Crisafulli by VOICEMAIL POEMS

The last night we spoke, you said we could make this work. I sold the bed we used to sleep on, to forget, hoping it would work. I left the pink book you gave me on my desk, your letters in my drawer, the ones where you said love is work. I left the memory of us sleeping on a cliffside in my head but deleted the picture we took, dead-eyed from waking up to work at 5 AM on another coast, the night s...

We promise to protect each other After Willie Perdomo which means we pinky swear it which means we draw our pinkies like switchblades from brassy knuckles which means i hold your hands between the pocket space where we keep the taser between the thumb & index the hammer between the index & middle the cross between the middle & ring & the middle is my weapon of choice which means i talk a lot but m...

Get in vans with strangers: a Palo-Santo heavy Chevy G20 with a sonnet-spilling prophet; a red 70’s Volkswagen shaggin' wagon with three long-haired surfers headed South; a fuzzy pink and purple pimped out festival-goer’s fantasy stocked with the best candy—one taste and I make-out with God. Talk myself out of a felony on one side of the border, have my first lucid dream on the other. Skinny dip a...

"these days, everybody wants to hear the prophecies of yore at a mcdonald’s drive through, and i just don’t think that that’s what i’m after" & when my friend pulls up & the speaker starts crackling with some eldritch horror, & it asks, do you want to die with that? & my friend looks over at me & asks, well, do you? & i say i’m good with just the pepsi, thanks & the eldritch horror, profound & dec...

I dreamed of a canoe, and of the two of us: I was new on the lake. Streaming through the murk, the cellar scent of blue and brown water, and you, my new love, saying nothing, only rowing us backwards deftly. At the lake’s deepest point: a miniature goose—a full grown adult, though not five inches high, resting on an island of ice, mid-June. Tenderly I scooped it. Its feet were frozen in a lump of...

Chocolate Polynesian brown was beckoned to the land of the long white cloud to work in factories, freezing works, docks, was beckoned to work hard, send money back to islands of hibiscus and frangipani But chocolate Polynesian brown got swallowed, digested in a stomach churning with acid-filled hate The outcome? That other shade of brown // But dawn, because you covered your eyes with the dark han...

I studied Italian painters, Giorgione, Titian. At one job, I’m a glorified secretary. I answer the phone in my professional voice and sell gaudy urns to luxe addresses. My neighbor listens patiently, amused by my young life. We’re the only Black gay men in our building, so he has me over for Sunday tea. I fill our cups. For the heart, he says, adding whiskey to his. In the 80s, on a fellowship in...

so you do the next best thing and you cut your hair you follow a youtube video and a confident-man-hair-stylist-type shows you how using a mannequin head and swift movements on your turn you take two ponytails and the shittiest pair of scissors money can buy and you snip away at your kinda-long hair until it becomes less long and hopefully more shape arms overhead you’re diving into what no one ca...

People fell in love during the fall of the Roman Empire and people were falling in love in 1930s Germany, the Nazis were coming into power and regular German citizens were going on dates and falling in love. I have new tires on my car so I feel invincible driving to you through the snow, I am driving to you and a song is on the radio that reminds me of you and I’m passing all these other cars beca...

Dad was on the couch, mostly starving to death in front of us cancer, stage IV (for this type, many don’t catch the earlier stages, and of course there aren't later ones) we hung pinecone bird feeders close to the house, bringing Nature near when he couldn't go out we talked about our shared favorites: the praying mantis, female cardinal, blue herons, black cats we talked about Chris Christie taki...