VOICEMAIL POEMS

To hate yourself and have sex makes you a movie director on a street corner, seeing everything in slow motion, scouting for bodies. When it’s too dark to see we clock out to edit more. After work, every night becomes dance. Re-cuts of thighs and light shows. A supercut is a cheap haircut, not filmmaking technique. But I know montage because I put movement over belonging, dwell only in breath, each...

The cut on my ankle bleeds into the shape of an exclamation point You speak and it comes out ornate swirling, as if from an an ancient book I’m trying to follow those letters which are, inevitably, words, through the tall yellow grasses at the edge of the lagoon where your charm bracelet lays splayed in the sand and my nose disappears into the blue Let me tell you about swimming: The bleeding stop...

How their branches seem to extend without burden in the lengthening light, their star-shaped leaves of deepest burgundy, weightless, more form than texture, surrendering to autumn air in such a way that it’s difficult to discern where leaf-tip ends and shade begins; until, wind- jostled, they flutter like wisps of cordovan dust out into a blue expanse of emptiness – traversing the chasm between ha...

I hope all my books are banned books, like, so contraband they start trappin’ them out the bando— people fiendin’ for my words with such fervor clawing at the door for just one more taste someone keeps the lookout to make sure twelve don’t see the weight: tiny baggies filled with poem scraps pushed out from every corner I hope my books become so obscure that someone’s biggest flex is telling you t...

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 th...

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 y...

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 withou...

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 hor...

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 fu...

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 tr...

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...

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 calle...

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...

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 ea...

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 m...

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....

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 D...

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 o...

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 o...

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 hav...

…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-...

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...

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...

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...

Our hosts Logen Cure and I.S. Jones review their favs from our Winter 2018 issue! (Get caught up on Winter 2018 here: soundcloud.com/voicemailpoems/sets/voicemail-poems-fall-2017) This installment features poems by: Kirwyn Sutherland https://soundcloud.com/voicemailpoems/taunts-to-the-klan-by-kirwyn-sutherland zach blackwood https://soundcloud.com/voicemailpoems/whelp-after-aziza-barnes-by-zach-bl...