Rabbits stick to the tree of blood. I hear everything that I believe. It was snowing. Your father was choking. Bone, he said, in the bread. They don’t even cry.
We had three good dogs. Three of my brothers shared a dress. Neighbors shook televisions to hear the ocean. Bones faked brokenness. It’s not hard to say it was real. In a city of bathrooms, puking is a language. Taking pills in a parked car shrinks god and/or roadkill. Sleep is smaller than an angel. Bodies eat pain.
The water is gonna reach us. Actors are going to tell us how they got into character. Animals are going to name the angels. A bomb named lifelong will see god and then see god only. I am already forgetting how it ends. I had little songs and thought of my children. Pain burned its own music.
I was five
Told I’d be penniless
Giving off a vibe
In the emptiness
I was five
Praying in the bathroom
over hives
Deprived
of onlyness
Pawing
god’s side
with loneliness
~
I gave myself a paw
Moon Flogged
poems, Réka Nyitrai
Broken Sleep, 2024
I adore the poems in Réka Nyitrai’s Moon Flogged. I worship without purpose. I am lost here where loss gets the nothing it deserves. This is the work of a third language. Of an equal. I don’t mean equal as something controlled. I mean an equality built on an erratic focus and condemned by unusual landlords. It’s an expectant nowhere that goes everywhere. The verse here combs like a ghost barber through the hair of those distracted by the abandoned erotica of a neckless god. This is a poetry of visual sense and illogical logistics. Lovely and odd, it’s the alien bird that feathers its spontaneous theft with secondhand keystrokes and it's the domestic fossil brushing for fingerprints rolled across the weak monitors of our projected tenderness. I mean to get carried. Away.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
I reach into a dream and pull out no small puberty. Every sister is terrifying. Hundreds of frogs jump differently away from a pond with two shadows. I can’t afford a ghost but can a demon. It looks at my ghost. Then at my food. Days from now, an entire train is used to transport the bones of a single mouse. I think I’m asleep. A sound thinks I’m asleep. Writing isn’t that important. You could die here and everyone would know.
Every day is not your last.
God doesn’t write.
They cut off my hand, put it in the microwave, and left me to die.
I became the loss
fish
scrapeghost.
I made it to the microwave, but it was locked.
I didn’t understand.
Then did.
The microwave was wrong.
Bliss goat, god bless
I don’t
need to live
You’ve loved god long enough to break her bones. This poem is about trees when it’s not about weeping. Weapons all say the same thing. Mistaken for language the grammar of cruelty.
I kiss her stomach and god sets a seashell on fire.
Angels fake amnesia.
I want to drink and cook.
I want to watch movies and not drink.
I want my invisible teeth
abused
by color.
I want my doctors to say seashell
scrotum
syndrome.
I want these meds to sadden drones.
I want fatigue. Hell’s rubber mirror.
I want my children to be so exhausted that they pray
to a ghost
that’s praying
to them.
I want your poems
your shorter
poems
to drive
death mad.
I want to crucify my tongue.
I want a wasp to crucify my tongue.
I want shape
to burn faster
than form. Nudes
to zoo
nakedness.
A fed raccoon.
Or a dog that believes.
Please check out all previous readings of the 'I Think I Can't Speak For Everyone Here' series HERE
They include:
4/21/24 Benjamin Niespodziany and NC Smock
4/28/24 Tom Snarsky and Darren C Demaree
5/18/24 Jay Besemer and Nadia Arioli
5/19/24 Pamela Kesling and Bee Morris
5/26/24 Alina Stefanescu and Dylan Krieger
7/7/24 Devan Murphy and William Erickson
7/13/24 Saba Keramati and Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi
7/14/24 Melissa Eleftherion and Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong
7/26/24 Kristopher Biernat
8/3/24 Crystal Stone and Lorcán Black
8/25/24 Adedayo Agarau
9/7/24 Medha Singh
9/8/24 Clara Burghelea and Kristyn Garza
9/15/24 Eliot Cardinaux and Jane Stephens Rosenthal
And please be on the lookout for our upcoming readings:
9/21 Saturday, 3pm EST: Brian Dawson and Julián Martinez
9/22 Sunday, 3pm EST: Aditi Machado
10/12 Saturday, 12pm EST: Réka Nyitrai
10/19 Saturday, 3pm EST: Tim Tim Cheng
11/3 Sunday, 4pm EST: Darren C. Demaree, interview and coverage of his new book So Much More (Small Harbor Editions, Nov 2024)
Email bluejawedsnake@gmail.com with inquiries, to request info, to sign up for the open mic.
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