a hiccup
in the nursery
of longing
god
as bait
Letter 070824 bring your own body
Dear Ethan Hawke
Snowfall named the ache in this road after nothing. My son’s knees click on and off. God is a numbers game.
Upcoming readings for the 'I think I can't speak for everyone here' series:
Saturday, July 13th, 3pm EST:
featured Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi and Saba Keramati
Saba Keramati is a Chinese-Iranian writer from California. She is the author of Self-Mythology (University of Arkansas Press, 2024), selected by Patricia Smith for the Miller Williams Poetry Series. She is also the poetry editor for Sundog Lit.
Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi, Frontier I, is a Nigerian-Hausa multidisciplinary artist, poet, and a licenced Medical Laboratory Scientist from Bobi. She is the author of the chapbook Cadaver of Red Roses (winner of the 2023 Derricotte/Eady Prize) and winner of the inaugural Folorunsho Editor’s Poetry Prize 2023, Labari Poetry Prize 2023, the inaugural Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature 2023, and Gimba Suleiman Hassan Gimba ESQ Poetry Prize, 2022 and the first beneficiary of Carolyn Micklem Scholarship. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Strange Horizons, FIYAH, Uncanny Magazine, Poetry Daily, Agbowo, Torch Literary Arts, Arc Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Uncensored Snapshots is forthcoming with Chestnut Review (April/June 2025). She is active on X @ZainabBobi.
Sunday, July 14th, 4pm EST:
featured Melissa Eleftherion and Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong
Melissa Eleftherion (she/they) is a writer, a librarian, and a visual artist. Born & raised in Brooklyn, she holds degrees from Brooklyn College, Mills College, and San Jose State University. They are the author of two poetry collections, field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018), & gutter rainbows (Querencia Press, 2024), twelve chapbooks including abject sutures (above/ground press, 2024), & several books currently touring the rejection circuit. Her work has been widely published & featured in venues like Quarter after Eight, Sixth Finch, Entropy, & Barren Magazine. Melissa now lives in Northern California where she manages the Ukiah Branch Library, curates the LOBA Reading Series, and serves as Poet Laureate Emeritus of the City of Ukiah. Recent work is available at www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.
Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong is from Oregon. Her poems can be found in ONLY POEMS, Shenandoah, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and The Columbia Review, among others. She is a Wednesday's child.
Fliers for the readings:
Thanks to all who participated in/attended the reading yesterday. So special to hear William Erickson and Devan Murphy pray over seashells. A recording of the reading is here
Past readings are here
Please join us over Zoom at our readings throughout this month.
Please email bluejawedsnake@gmail.com with questions, comments, to request the Zoom link for a reading, and/or to sign-up for the open mic
Upcoming events:
Saturday, July 13th, 3pm EST:
featured Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi and Saba Keramati
Sunday, July 14th, 4pm EST:
featured Melissa Eleftherion and Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong
Friday, July 26th, 9pm EST:
featured Marylyn Tan and Angelique Zobitz
Letter 070724
Dear Ethan Hawke
The healer’s secret diet confuses starvation. We live in houses, here, and share dancing videos that will touch three people at once in a cornfield. We bomb our unloaded guns and say things in singsong that are attuned to a cute, collateral resurrection. I drink and my ribs tell god.
Sound
a silent
salt
in tadpole’s
kitten dream
Letter 070524 silence denies perfecting god
Dear Ethan Hawke
What’s the longest name you’ve given to a cigarette? The shortest? I don’t name things anymore. Blue kids. The housefly that burns my shadow.
Letter 070324 the office of the lower body
Dear Ethan Hawke
We are this close to eating online a boneless god. It’s not hell, but there’s a neighbor boy who won’t stop putting wasps in his ear. Mothers can’t sleep if a shoe store is touching the earth and fathers strangle themselves long enough to win a fog machine. I buy a spider each morning from a child who tells me a spider is a button that a ghost can push. Death has a room nearby where blood doesn’t go everywhere. I put deer in front of most things now. Deer-hunger powers the angel’s flashlight. Deer-sorrow the boxcutter’s sex doll. Deer-deer the movies that remove nude scenes from other movies for not knowing the difference between the anorexic and the bulimic. Deer-mouth, deer-dream, etc. Remember our life.
I go to find the bullet. It is never near the screaming. The angel of exit wounds strips for the angel of scars. A tattoo promises a birthmark that it’ll only learn one language. How old is a dog that dies on a star? Suicidal, on a bus, impossible.
Waiting is also a ghost. Deep down, we know every inch of god’s body. For every make yourself small, there’s a bombmaker smaller.
kingsoftrain 