Texas Will Always Makes Me Think of You
︎︎︎ Ginger Jones
︎ May 9, 2025
Our baby has our misty eyes
He’s my little shadow
But I can only grieve him
His daddy can’t drink anymore
Forgot all the plans we made
Remembering the threat of a good time
The way he would dance on my belly
As if we were made for each other
But I am the start now
Although roughly imagined
Not at all distant nor immediate
It’s becoming now
If I were out of smog and under clear skies
With my baby and my boy
If what you got isn’t what you want
Blame what you give
Even if you give it your all
He’s my little shadow
But I can only grieve him
His daddy can’t drink anymore
Forgot all the plans we made
Remembering the threat of a good time
The way he would dance on my belly
As if we were made for each other
But I am the start now
Although roughly imagined
Not at all distant nor immediate
It’s becoming now
If I were out of smog and under clear skies
With my baby and my boy
If what you got isn’t what you want
Blame what you give
Even if you give it your all
Birds, Hell & Rust
︎︎︎ Gülen Çelik
︎ May 8, 2025
He was like sugar,
rim on a glass.
Taking me from bar to bar
under his configuration.
His glistening face was unsculpted marble.
Tales of untold pity upheld him,
shoved forward to a combative drive.
Where is this man’s grand gear shift?
Rather, a ceremony of his malnourishment,
salivating at night, giving away.
So generous, I screamed out of joy.
Birds, his morning mockery.
Hell, bedside habit.
Rust, amorphous armor.
rim on a glass.
Taking me from bar to bar
under his configuration.
His glistening face was unsculpted marble.
Tales of untold pity upheld him,
shoved forward to a combative drive.
Where is this man’s grand gear shift?
Rather, a ceremony of his malnourishment,
salivating at night, giving away.
So generous, I screamed out of joy.
Birds, his morning mockery.
Hell, bedside habit.
Rust, amorphous armor.
American Philosophy
︎︎︎ Tom Snarsky
︎ May 6, 2025
New wounds, heavily informed
by what the body could do to make sense
of the old ones, became part
of our personal technology, reverb
for the stories we’d been
telling ourselves since childhood
a wah pedal we could press in the face
of the many adversities that kept us
from becoming the versions of ourselves
who did all our imaginary interviews,
had absolute moral clarity
like a nun or a cartoon. The common
loon’s tremolo, the two tones
sent out as a call, then answered, life
continuing on pretty much this basis
all its life. You ask me, am I ok
to make a card payment?, the balance
of our shared account a little
like a tritone, a fleck of time passes
and did it go up or down? Most likely
the Orphic option, a crowd
gathering around the drunk woman
getting arrested on River Road
she took the curve so slow and sloppily
she ran her Escape into the bamboo.
I’m telling you, François Villon would’ve been
the greatest Instacart shopper of all time
on your friend’s phone, you both high
and unsure whose idea it even was
to get DiGiorno, in this case also
delivery. From every evil a new family
of jokes is born, new species of comedy
(to say nothing of poetry) for surviving
the fundamental goofiness of being
beholden to norms you had no say in,
Villon (né de Montcorbier or Des Loges
I love that no one knows the real
name) having to reinvent estate planning
as a matter of principle and poverty
which America has shown us are
two sides of the same dime. That part
in Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada
when Efrim Menuck & co. interview
a poet who spits fire
at a judge, Chat Pile’s Raygun Busch
(né Randy Heyer) singing WHY
DO PEOPLE HAVE TO LIVE OUTSIDE
which works because there’s no answer,
no loon calling back, a writer on a podcast
clarifying she didn’t live
out of a van doing homeless outreach
she just worked out of one,
the guy in “Blaise Bailey Finnegan III”
also owned a bunch of guns (was it
the same guy?), Menuck himself
didn’t read the lines on “The Dead Flag
Blues” the car’s on fire and there’s no driver
at the wheel it was an unattributed friend
the best any of us can probably hope to be
the machine bleeding to death
me leaning into fair use
and here come the strings, cheese
in one light, sincerity in another
the Christmas tree in Morvern Callar
Kristi just bought a foot-tall aluminum one
missing its top branch. No matter,
parts are interchangeable, the rich man
said robots could be babysitters
or teachers, I blew my head off
in my head and then continued
my day, an experience I wager is more
common than wellness can allow
us to admit, a wallet full of blood
at the six-and-a-half-minute mark
how long does your attention last? Does it
laugh at limits, or bring them upon itself
swiping between the same three apps
like a cat pawing at glass trying
to get at the fox on the other side?
It’s a strange kind of dying, living
like a shadow. I think all the time about
two lines: does death come alone
or with eager reinforcements (Coil)
and I need your love to silence all my shame
(Beth Gibbons), seventeen words
pretty parsimonious for a prayer I think,
pull one arrow out of Saint Sebastian
and light a candle, burn off the fog
like fat or the sun. Balász Pándi’s drums
on so many Merzbow records
like garlic on being alive. Do you ever hear
your own voice saying the least
believable words, but you can’t take them
back or you’d get a wellness check
called on you, like a penalty
or a spiteful teacher, thinks you don’t know.
I know what I’m saying
This universe is moral
—Ariana Reines, attribution is important
like the season’s first snow. Thoreau
gossiping even in jail, finding history
in one little Concord
room, predating Alvin Lucier by 123 years
Jarboe singing There’s a star in her mind
a year before I’m born—I’ll take it
The slow orbit of Massachusetts
and the long game of alcohol, blue
laws like little reminders not to play
too rough even though as an older sibling
you made that mistake, structurally,
tried to atone for it
by picking your sister
up from drinking in the woods
clandestinely, almost no
oil in the car, changed
nowhere near often enough, it was your first
go at caring for a large mechanical entity that could
bring you places and also was
easily the most likely thing to kill you
in concert with your own choices,
the kind of adolescentness
that doesn’t end, a toxic childhood
that has mutated into a perpetual
teenage dream (italics c/o Jonathan
Gorman, Mark Francis Johnson, and
Andy Martrich, of Hiding Press
about Ruth Jespersen whose book The Blink
of an Eye I couldn’t get a hold of
if I tried). The fridge clicks
and the water dispenser/ice maker
keeps collecting fruit flies. John Dewey
walking naked around the house,
given the full name John Dewey with nothing
in the middle bc his older brother, John
Archibald Dewey, had died at two and a half
of scalding, falling backward into a bucket
of boiling water which didn’t kill him
but the sweet oil and bandages
put to his wounds, which when he was left
by the fire to warm up ignited
did. So John Dewey was just John Dewey
and articulated a vision
of American education enlivened
by active learners, teachers who were not
authoritarians but instead listeners,
fosterers of the curiosity
that makes you go what
do whales do in winter
or what was John Dewey’s middle name?
They migrate, traveling thousands of miles
to warmer waters, Journey
to the Center of the Earth
starring Brendan Fraser, five point eight
on IMDb, I know the new Laura Dern
vehicle will be bad but it’s my god
-given right to watch it anyway
by what the body could do to make sense
of the old ones, became part
of our personal technology, reverb
for the stories we’d been
telling ourselves since childhood
a wah pedal we could press in the face
of the many adversities that kept us
from becoming the versions of ourselves
who did all our imaginary interviews,
had absolute moral clarity
like a nun or a cartoon. The common
loon’s tremolo, the two tones
sent out as a call, then answered, life
continuing on pretty much this basis
all its life. You ask me, am I ok
to make a card payment?, the balance
of our shared account a little
like a tritone, a fleck of time passes
and did it go up or down? Most likely
the Orphic option, a crowd
gathering around the drunk woman
getting arrested on River Road
she took the curve so slow and sloppily
she ran her Escape into the bamboo.
I’m telling you, François Villon would’ve been
the greatest Instacart shopper of all time
on your friend’s phone, you both high
and unsure whose idea it even was
to get DiGiorno, in this case also
delivery. From every evil a new family
of jokes is born, new species of comedy
(to say nothing of poetry) for surviving
the fundamental goofiness of being
beholden to norms you had no say in,
Villon (né de Montcorbier or Des Loges
I love that no one knows the real
name) having to reinvent estate planning
as a matter of principle and poverty
which America has shown us are
two sides of the same dime. That part
in Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada
when Efrim Menuck & co. interview
a poet who spits fire
at a judge, Chat Pile’s Raygun Busch
(né Randy Heyer) singing WHY
DO PEOPLE HAVE TO LIVE OUTSIDE
which works because there’s no answer,
no loon calling back, a writer on a podcast
clarifying she didn’t live
out of a van doing homeless outreach
she just worked out of one,
the guy in “Blaise Bailey Finnegan III”
also owned a bunch of guns (was it
the same guy?), Menuck himself
didn’t read the lines on “The Dead Flag
Blues” the car’s on fire and there’s no driver
at the wheel it was an unattributed friend
the best any of us can probably hope to be
the machine bleeding to death
me leaning into fair use
and here come the strings, cheese
in one light, sincerity in another
the Christmas tree in Morvern Callar
Kristi just bought a foot-tall aluminum one
missing its top branch. No matter,
parts are interchangeable, the rich man
said robots could be babysitters
or teachers, I blew my head off
in my head and then continued
my day, an experience I wager is more
common than wellness can allow
us to admit, a wallet full of blood
at the six-and-a-half-minute mark
how long does your attention last? Does it
laugh at limits, or bring them upon itself
swiping between the same three apps
like a cat pawing at glass trying
to get at the fox on the other side?
It’s a strange kind of dying, living
like a shadow. I think all the time about
two lines: does death come alone
or with eager reinforcements (Coil)
and I need your love to silence all my shame
(Beth Gibbons), seventeen words
pretty parsimonious for a prayer I think,
pull one arrow out of Saint Sebastian
and light a candle, burn off the fog
like fat or the sun. Balász Pándi’s drums
on so many Merzbow records
like garlic on being alive. Do you ever hear
your own voice saying the least
believable words, but you can’t take them
back or you’d get a wellness check
called on you, like a penalty
or a spiteful teacher, thinks you don’t know.
I know what I’m saying
This universe is moral
—Ariana Reines, attribution is important
like the season’s first snow. Thoreau
gossiping even in jail, finding history
in one little Concord
room, predating Alvin Lucier by 123 years
Jarboe singing There’s a star in her mind
a year before I’m born—I’ll take it
The slow orbit of Massachusetts
and the long game of alcohol, blue
laws like little reminders not to play
too rough even though as an older sibling
you made that mistake, structurally,
tried to atone for it
by picking your sister
up from drinking in the woods
clandestinely, almost no
oil in the car, changed
nowhere near often enough, it was your first
go at caring for a large mechanical entity that could
bring you places and also was
easily the most likely thing to kill you
in concert with your own choices,
the kind of adolescentness
that doesn’t end, a toxic childhood
that has mutated into a perpetual
teenage dream (italics c/o Jonathan
Gorman, Mark Francis Johnson, and
Andy Martrich, of Hiding Press
about Ruth Jespersen whose book The Blink
of an Eye I couldn’t get a hold of
if I tried). The fridge clicks
and the water dispenser/ice maker
keeps collecting fruit flies. John Dewey
walking naked around the house,
given the full name John Dewey with nothing
in the middle bc his older brother, John
Archibald Dewey, had died at two and a half
of scalding, falling backward into a bucket
of boiling water which didn’t kill him
but the sweet oil and bandages
put to his wounds, which when he was left
by the fire to warm up ignited
did. So John Dewey was just John Dewey
and articulated a vision
of American education enlivened
by active learners, teachers who were not
authoritarians but instead listeners,
fosterers of the curiosity
that makes you go what
do whales do in winter
or what was John Dewey’s middle name?
They migrate, traveling thousands of miles
to warmer waters, Journey
to the Center of the Earth
starring Brendan Fraser, five point eight
on IMDb, I know the new Laura Dern
vehicle will be bad but it’s my god
-given right to watch it anyway
Tom Snarsky writes and lives in the mountains of northwestern Virginia.
2020-02-15
︎︎︎ Josh Lovins
︎ May 5, 2025
Hunger,
A kind of damaging hunger,
Which would detach its host
From all it could not eat,
And which could only eat,
Burn, clothe, repeat, repeat,
Detach, detach, detach,
Words so as not to reach
For what it could not catch.
A kind of damaging hunger,
Which would detach its host
From all it could not eat,
And which could only eat,
Burn, clothe, repeat, repeat,
Detach, detach, detach,
Words so as not to reach
For what it could not catch.
The Things You Never Know
︎︎︎ MD Wheatley
︎ May 3, 2025
Noah came up to me on the playground
with something to say. The boy rarely
spoke so I was all ears. This was 2
weeks before he rode a tricycle into
a brick wall at recess. Maybe he
didn’t see it, I don’t know. I know
he can’t see very well but who’s
to say what his world looks like.
And of all places, when he collided
with the wall, it scraped that pointy
ridge of his brow bone. His blood
dripped all over the sidewalk. It
could have been much worse,
could’ve split open, but thankfully
he wore his glasses that day. Now
here we were, eye not yet bandaged,
no glasses on, level with my navel
and Noah said, “Naomi in hospital.”
“Who’s that?” I said. “Naomi my
wife. She in hospital cus she in bad
wreck,” he said. “Oh no,” I said, “I hope
she’s going to be okay.” He lifted his
shoulders, dropped them, let out a big
sigh. Then he said, “She fine but guess
what?” “What?” I said. “Naomi cheat
on me with my brother.” “Oh man,”
I said, “That’s rough. I didn’t know
you had a brother.” Noah stopped there
to look up at me with his big ass smile.
I wanted more but that’s all he had so
I said, “Don’t let em see you coming bubba.”
with something to say. The boy rarely
spoke so I was all ears. This was 2
weeks before he rode a tricycle into
a brick wall at recess. Maybe he
didn’t see it, I don’t know. I know
he can’t see very well but who’s
to say what his world looks like.
And of all places, when he collided
with the wall, it scraped that pointy
ridge of his brow bone. His blood
dripped all over the sidewalk. It
could have been much worse,
could’ve split open, but thankfully
he wore his glasses that day. Now
here we were, eye not yet bandaged,
no glasses on, level with my navel
and Noah said, “Naomi in hospital.”
“Who’s that?” I said. “Naomi my
wife. She in hospital cus she in bad
wreck,” he said. “Oh no,” I said, “I hope
she’s going to be okay.” He lifted his
shoulders, dropped them, let out a big
sigh. Then he said, “She fine but guess
what?” “What?” I said. “Naomi cheat
on me with my brother.” “Oh man,”
I said, “That’s rough. I didn’t know
you had a brother.” Noah stopped there
to look up at me with his big ass smile.
I wanted more but that’s all he had so
I said, “Don’t let em see you coming bubba.”