Journal Update

Once in a blue moon, I’d like to call attention to works that have appeared elsewhere and the generous journals hosting them. In December, I’ve had three works appear through multiple outlets. Two of them are quite nascent. One of them has reincarnated into a new form. Glass is an especially intriguing outlet, since they would originally publish one poem a week every Wednesday. Please feel no pressure to look into these, as I aim to not only support my own name but promote just a handful of the dozens of journals I frequent.

Thank you sincerely for your time and the support. If you take away anything from this post, remember the small and large publishers alike, the pockets they empty, or the lives they dominate for the selfless proliferation of literature.

http://www.birchgang.org/issue-1-4/

http://www.glass-poetry.com/journal/archives.html

http://www.delugejournal.com/issues.html

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Cricket

What are the symptoms of wanting

outlets to melt in your hand, stick

to your cheeks with cheap licorice?

 

I console my batteries like dying

crickets. Wait for that leg to sputter,

the mic in its thighs to gain power.

 

Pure water isn’t very conductive.

I dare you to drink from wetlands

that don’t transform your feet to rubber.

 

The electric tongue, stilled in new tar.

Lily pink lingers on your fingers, misty

on the matter if it was Advil or candy.

 

It’s not about healing anymore

but liquefying your spine into

rivers brimmed with biomass.

Second Ode

*After initiating a series titled “Odes to Female Demons and Their Unbiblical Genitalia”, I’ve scrapped the third installment and decided that this second piece had stagnated: it’s a wee bit dusty. The original work is still a poem in progress. 

Acrid skins dangle through our fruit baskets

and tongue the rusted silver like frigid serpents.

 

We peeled divinity from our hands in bitter rinds,

constantly scraping our callouses off the scale

so our bodies wouldn’t interfere with weighing the produce.

I still hear the hissing gossip of granny smiths

bathed in rich oxygen and false blessings.

What sour little devils. In the mornings,

I wear new prayers like a uniform crinkling its brow.

I drink my roles in a mimosa of tinnitus.

 

I’m still viscous. You’re sticky with sweat.

We’re dusted in expired confectioner’s sugar.

There’s a brain on the banana hook.

I core the apples and prepare the sheets

as pharaohs removed their organs for the afterlife.

 

I was once tilled from the maternal copper

of pulled pork gone cold and damp paper bags.

Maybe you have a little bit of maternity left

over in that pigsty of a skeleton, still tinny

like old pipes. Do I linger in your bones?

Perhaps I could just improvise tomorrow

 

and try on botanical globes like rotting testicles,

as if I’d finally be willing to bear your worlds.

As if any of them were actually mine.

Gratitude (Free Write)

I toss my tantrums to the apricot walls with last year’s toys, their nicked batteries splaying in transient stains across the whisky tiling. Leak in Christmas ribbon crimsons, desperate innards shimmering in gaudy tissue. Of course, I call this crying. I tear at my own gears like gutting pumpkins; I squelch like a rotten gourd. Of course, I can’t call this crying. The frontal lobe sneaks out in the guise of melting crayons, skinned like the shadows of runaways and their coughing grey trains. I am a child. Thank you for the womb. I wasn’t good today. Thank you for the goo.

Absences & Advertisements (Not a Poem)

Please excuse my absence of writing and reading poetry on this blog. I’ve entered my senior year of undergraduate work, as well as maintained a full-time neuroengineering position this summer. I absolutely intend on returning when the courses have lightened and my graduate applications are submitted. There are some fabulous poets I have, unfortunately, fallen quite behind in reading, and rest assured that your craft is missed in my literary life. I’ve also initiated a personal project (a.k.a. a chapbook) that has absorbed much writing that could possibly be published on the blog.

Featured is the cover picture for Menacing Hedge (credits to Lily Furedi), which is a beautifully-curated online magazine. Some of my work was published in their most recent edition. I suggest you check it out (due to my bias or not): it was always an abstract favorite of mine, and I was ecstatic for this acceptance.

http://www.menacinghedge.com/fall2016/

During the Coup

In the pews, boiling headless roosters.

Cornea kicked out in visionary scuffles,

those glass-stained mosaic cockfights.

 

Today, I’ve come in my cloudless best,

shadows sewn in wet petticoats, drowned

retina, lambskin, by ladles for hands.

 

Did you hear that His cerebrospinal fluid

clucks limply while it boils down the cones

and rods like thermometer mercury?

 

They’ve forgotten their colors.

Spherical bodies, tumble with the earth.

Have you seen it yet?

Compose

Meringue ankles.

I asked it to embalm the sun and all of our laws.

 

Chiffon digits.

I asked it to feed the starving constellations shivering in celestial gutters.

 

Clouding senses.

I asked to drink as well, to drown and hallucinate.

 

Improper science:

I asked for it to manifest.