Please join us on Sunday September 15th for the 14th installment of the 'I Think I Can't Speak For Everyone Here' reading series. Featured readers will be Eliot Cardinaux and Jane Stephens Rosenthal.
Request the zoom link info and/or sign up for the open mic at bluejawedsnake@gmail.com
Eliot Cardinaux is a poet, pianist, composer, and translator working at the intersection of the lyric and improvised music. The author of On the Long Blue Night (Dos Madres, 2023); and the trio of Quiet Labor, Toy Elegy, and This Music From Another Room; as well as numerous chapbooks, Cardinaux has produced over a dozen albums of original music, including American Thicket (Loyal Label, 2016) with Mat Maneri, Thomas Morgan, and Flin van Hemmen; Pavane (Bodily Press, 2022); Out of Our Systems (Bodily Press, 2022); and most recently, Imminence (self-released, 2024), with percussionist Gary Fieldman. He is the sole founder and editor of The Bodily Press.
Jane Stephens Rosenthal is an award winning director and poet. Her work has been described as “lush melancholy spirituality that makes everything worthwhile.” She is raising her daughter in Los Angeles and currently working on several projects including a coming of age feature film. She also publishes the essay/poetry substack www.poetryisforthemornings.substack.com
I never have enough teeth in my mouth to love my brothers equally. They each have a tick full of blood to throw at a beehive. We form a band to hide our erections but only write one song. Because I’m the oldest, I’ll be dead the longest. Boys don’t call things what they are. Baseball and deer got Ohio lucky. We aim our piss and cry with our stomachs. Think Jesus did all that just to poison god. There are easier ways to get a sister. When shot, we take it in the leg. I don’t go outside anymore but here and there the unshaped crawl into my ear. The re-shaped, not so much. Boys and girls aren’t real. We compare school shooters. Blueballs, leg pain, the holier symptoms of swimmer’s echo.
I swim and the body means nothing.
Nakedness. Hungry at its own feast.
I should’ve touched
more animals.
There are no bombs
if the dead give birth.
The children are crying right now and people want to talk about time. I thought we could buy local and avoid empire. I'm sick again. We thought we could unplug. Drink ourselves to life.
Writing is mostly where I dream of writing. The uneaten moment in the music of its swallowing.
Touch is an eye that can hurt the light.
We’re sick again. We know the bomb as the least long lord of our pills. There is a shadow in my mother that the angels can’t wait to wrap around a thing gone limp. Angels repeat the future and call it doom, but it’s all afterlife.
God’s never done dying.
The angel of suicide can only read cursive
The brain is a thorn pulled like a fingerprint
from the rib of a star.
It’s usually
here
the baby
makes it.
Death will forget to create god.
I said something perfect.
Your father loved you.
Please join us on Sunday 9/8 at 3pm EST for the 13th installment of the I Think I Can't Speak For Everyone Here reading series. Featured readers will be Kristyn Garza and Clara Burghelea.
Email bluejawedsnake@gmail.com for the zoom info and to sign up for the open mic.
Clara Burghelea published two poetry collections: The Flavor of the Other (Dos Madres Press 2020) and Praise the Unburied (Chaffinch Press 2021). Her poems and translations have been published in Goalf Coast, Delos, The Los Angeles Review and elsewhere. She is the Review Editor of Ezra, An Online Journal of Translation and a third-year PhD student in Literature at University of Texas at Dallas.
Kristyn Garza, a chicana from the U.S./Mexico border, moved from her hometown of McAllen, Texas to Austin to earn her bachelor's degree in English Literature at St. Edward’s University, later earning her MFA in Poetry from the University of Notre Dame. She was longlisted for Palette Poetry's 2022 Sappho Prize and her work has been published or is forthcoming in AGNI, Poets.org, Tupelo Quarterly, Cream City Review, The McNeese Review, RHINO, Pembroke Magazine, and others. Most recently, she was awarded the 2023 Academy of American Poets Billy Maich Award. Her chapbook, Dictionary of Bodies, won Gasher Press' 2024 Spring Poetry Chapbook Prize and is forthcoming in winter 2024. Kristyn currently resides in Cincinnati, Ohio where she is in her second year of her PhD in Poetry at the University of Cincinnati.
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