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5 of 124

"Work Ghazal" by Jarrett Moseley
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 sea barely visible beyond your head laid against my thigh, sprawled black hair, it was easy work to be in love with you, but it was impossible to love you in a way you felt. We were two felled trees attached by thin string, trying to work gravity against itself. In a Key Largo parking lot, years ago, before we ever fell through each other, your hand brushed against mine. We worked so hard to be that simple again. B, forgive me. I would have given myself away (I did) just to make it work. ————————————– Jarrett Moseley called us from Charlotte, NC. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems
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"We Promise to Protect Each Other" by Lauren Dotson
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 my face says i can’t fight your face says we should run which means i face you standing still pressing my switchblade into yours wishing the switchblades were switchblades & not pinky promises we draw from brassy knuckles want brass knuckles but don’t want proximity want a gun but don't want that smoke want incense but only handmade want these hands to be protection enough that’s what space in poems are for: to store arsenals in this ars poetica keys between my fingers never felt comfortable like i would get sliced too if it came down to it i am walking across a blacktop i could tar myself into the sun is saying i should get home but home is on my hip i am aware of you & all the things that follow to follow & nothing more which means we promise to protect each other we pinky swear it ————————————– Lauren Dotson called us from Chicago, IL. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems
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"Things I'd Still Do" by Dré Pontbriand
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 bioluminescent shoreline with a nowhere-bound time -traveller, his touch the lightning that strikes me sober, makes me want to remember. Take LSD blessed by a Mayan shaman on a Panamanian beach. Find out the only love I’ve ever known isn’t free—my softened gaze on strangers spinning around me, I love them not because they’re mine but because they never will be. Get all my shit stolen and backpack for three months without a backpack. Dance callouses onto the bottoms of my feet. When strangers barge into the van, I learn that boundaries don’t need to be barbed wire fences, a purple velvet rope is all you need. The prophet heads North and Tara asks Are you sure he’s not the one who stole all your shit? Nope. Hand what’s left of me to a golden-haired dreamer who hymns any instrument he holds. Change my mind about building a home in the gap between his front teeth. Leave him carving our initials in the rearview like the one before him left me. Fall in love during a solar eclipse. Let a wizard undress my notions of pleasure in the stolen darkness at mid-day, melt into the world of tantra without knowing what it means. Yes, a nameless rose does smell as sweet. I’d forego the forever my college sweetheart promised when he said he’d ask my dad, like I was an 18th century commodity. I’d handpick the same bouquet of brief eternities, still slam on the gas pedal—my rose-coloured windshield shattered to pieces when I travel to the final frontier to find the lights in his Northern eyes out of order those nights. Kintsugi: the Japanese art of repairing broken items with gold lacquer; freesias swooning over the fallen vase—her slow dance of shimmering scars. Given the chance, I’d still fling myself off the shelf, bless the falls that broke me golden. ————————————– Dré Pontbriand called us from Antigua & Barbuda. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems
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"these days, everybody wants to hear the prophecies of yore..." by Aparna Paul
"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 & decrepit, wails like a thousand suns being born or the edge of a paper slicing through skin or your dad shutting the door on your family the morning that he dies & my friend says, oh, i think they only have coke products here, & i say, hm, then i guess a cherry coke & my friend says, okay, a mcchicken, a cherry coke, plus can i get an answer the question unspoken in my heart? because my friend is always saying shit like that, especially in the mcdonald’s drive through & this time the voice from the speaker is sweet dulcet caramel dripping off a spoon, a siren song in symphony, & my friend says, damn, i think i’m a dollar short, but it’s okay because i have two dollars in my pocket, & anyway, the prophecies are free here, free like the way any of us are, free as a man with an albatross around his neck, free as an albatross around a man’s neck, since the albatross is dead, and isn’t death a kind of freedom?, free like a limited time only BOGO sale at the Gap, free like you’ll still have to give up your firstborn son, but whatever, who’s having babies in this economy, anyway, not to mention your firstborn won’t be a sun, if anything they’ll be the MOON, & we drive to the window & my friend’s camry sounds like it might fall apart right there & so might i, if i’m being honest & i look into the black hole at the first window or rather, it looks into me, i blink first & it becomes a murder of crows, silent, except to say second window only tonight, & then i say it, just for good measure, second window only tonight, & we’re at the second window, which is a little grimy, with a freckled bespectacled teen behind it, & she looks like me, a study in personal time travel, but when i ask my friend he says, hey, doesn’t that guy look like me? so it could be the whole world, or nothing at all (like most things) & i’m handed the cherry coke without much fanfare & the teen leans out the window to whisper in my friend’s ear & i strain to listen but all i hear is the rustling of the first breeze that ever swept this earth, & when my friend turns to me, he says, the prophecy machine is down tonight. can i get a sip of your cherry coke? & we drive away, dial-shifting through static, as the world dissolves into whipping wind, fresh fizz, & our laughter, spilling into empty eternity ————————————– Aparna Paul called us from Cambridge, MA. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems
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"The Goose: A Diptych" by Devan Murphy
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 ice, but it stood on my palm as quiet and unmoving as you, who waited with paused oars, seeming not to care much about the goose, but caring about my care. I rubbed my fingers over the ruly bird’s webs to warm them, and the ice melted all shiny and dewy as the goose stared into the distance, patiently or bluely, I could not tell. The goose free, we moved on. // Tuesday night I felt a stabbing at the bottom of my foot; ignoring it I woke in the morning to the same pain and could not run. You sat with me in the dining room and took my foot in your palm and tried to maneuver the splinter out, spaded with your tweezers the dip in the soft spot of the sole, right beneath the ball, asking, “Does this hurt?” I wanted to answer, “Yes, and I love you,” but I could not tell you I loved you while you held in your hands something so rude as my dirty and wounded foot. You could not remove the splinter, but with time it came loose on its own, or else the soft cheek of my sole grew hard enough to enclose the shard. ————————————– Devan Murphy called us from Pittsburgh, PA. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems
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