VOICEMAIL POEMS

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...

Another storm has the neighbors' chickens all lumped together and subdued, so I can't hear them from my attic room. Rain has thrown itself for days against the roof. "What is the cruelest month?" people ask. Last year I watched a man put one poor frozen bird in a garbage bag at the end of winter; it had been stuck in a corner of the coop. That's what Spring does: uncover what you thought was gone,...

End of the year gray. Anchors Where balloons should be, or: Could peace wait on the outer Bank of sane. How in the holiday Buzz to say nothing for clear, that is: Give me back remembering, Its attendant costumed sting. The portraiture made overkill By rain. No incoming. The quantum State the same. The slide to black, The self-quilled quell to love The heartburn sun, its citrus sky. If only. ------...

i. In the other world, everything smells like cherries. Every phone call is the news of someone's death, and every cigarette is candy. In the other world, you tell me you do not love me every day, and our bed is made from cedar trees. The horses run rider- less and frightened, chased by men with bottles for weapons and collarbones made of ice. The plains are a burnt orange in the other world, and...

Part 1: Untitled It was yesterday or something, when I heard the song playing in a store, asking do I make myself a blessing to everyone I meet? I don't sing it to myself, exactly, but I do repeat it, metallic gyre, all the day long. In the at-home lab of an electrical engineer, I was surrounded by metallic gyres (not an industry term,) tiny spools of wire thread that do not unwind to fulfill thei...

The town knows about darkness, the slithered purple that comes on the land when rotation hides the sun. Something gathered, slow and heavy and electric, almost as though the town knows evil is coming, and its shape. From here we can't see spots on the sun. We know where the roads go and where, how the ground lies. The town has us because we know it, and it knows us. It sees through our lies, even...

we're crying in a costco parking lot fiending for that intimacy we once felt because every so often we lose it and then i get depressed when i think you deserve much better sometimes i think i deserve better too most of the time it feels like i am already holding all the good that's out there large and fragile in my arms i hold on for dear life 
 the woman parked across from us is staring i wonder...

the ammonite an index of sutures i got tired of cataloging them hermetically sealing little traumas afraid they'd get to know one another go boom little mother catastrophes instead i smashed little rocks to bits in a ditch each shard a memory released pressure from stomach the common burial ground the cavity of accumulation each little box coated in dust and feelings each glass stone chamber not r...

He had created a type of 3d paint, was one of the first things he told us. As we followed him upstairs to his plant filled apartment, we decided he was lying. It wasn't long until he told us about Mexico; kidnapped by cartels, held hostage for weeks, his father and grandfather were mercenaries in the French Foreign Legion. He introduced us to his three passport dog, four French girls and his pal f...

"when you see a mountain coming, get out of it's way." my uncle, six-two and oxen told me after clipping my wing. i learn at an early age to be a black man is to see a black man and fear his size, momentum. to love a black man is to see his shape and surrender. i lay myself down on his threshing floor say uncle, and await apocalypse across my arms. when two gods enter a room, one is humbled. but t...

My mother calls them phases and maybe that's an accurate representation because they're lunar, edges of something, the kind of scrambling you do drunk in the dark. It's a lot of being drunk in the dark. I'm dying to discover myself and finally be cool. I'm smoking. I'm smoking hot. I'm a smoking gun. I went out one night and suffered through talking because I just wanted someone-anyone!- to fuckin...

All soldiers believe Charms in their MREs are foul luck, bad juju, more than just a dark talisman, a virtual death sentence. Patrols have been called off if some dirtbag private straight out of basic tested fate by peeling open a pack of the generic Jolly Ranchers knockoffs that bring nothing but doom. Everyone on the FOB heard stories about how Charms were a malediction that summoned malefactors...

my head is full of blood steamed like latte foam pressing open the seams in my skull, burning through folds in my brain like a shot luge. my head is the generating station in the delaware river, developed into luxury condos with beds that fill the whole homes. my head is a smoking suite with smoke stains in the corners of the ceilings and the ice cubes smell like the smoke stains and that is disap...

Klu klux what? I'm a such A tool for America Hands scraped raw Hammered deep into cotton Fly up and it rains gold I'm a Midas But was forced to turn Inanimate objects into fortune To fields of green picked Over and rotten I'm a supposed Dead used problem Both birth and demise Alleged Between trying to kill And forgetting about I'ma question A poking to see if I writhe How much can a country Heap o...

sonnet for Trans Lifeline & February 2017 & for Kai It snowed last week & the clouds slept lower. I wonder where your body went without you, who unraveled it & what came falling from their mouths. I think of you; a weighted sky; dirt, loosening itself in welcome; what it is to bury: to deem ready to give back; to kill: to call a body just a body, to turn to flesh & name the rest, the lost, the sti...

I set down my flaming sword long enough to stare into a hunting trip photo at my Grandfather's memorial. It shows two men, and him between them in a dress and wig-hilarious joke (everyone laughed), "abomination" an Uncle scoffs casual-like now, tells story: "that's the ugliest woman I ever saw" man driving by says to man in passenger seat (everyone laughs). See: sadness and shame felt in my painte...

Our hosts Logen Cure and I.S. Jones review their favs from our Fall 2017 issue! (Get caught up on Fall 2017 here: https://soundcloud.com/voicemailpoems/sets/voicemail-poems-fall-2017) This installment features poems by Kimiko Hirota, Austin Beaton, and Kai River Blevins. Music by TrueKey. (@truekey). >> The deadline to submit to our Winter Issue is December 1st: http://voicemailpoems.org/call >> H...

I have spent a thousand years picking myself out of the middle of nowhere on an empty highway clutching fistfuls of fireflies to my eyes clawing poppy blossoms across a belly full of rabbits I dripped with peppercorns I salted the earth as if that would make the mud easier to swallow I buried the creatures with a pocket watch and a dead fish and mounds rose up the hills of my body a congregation o...