We moved, and they shot us.
We didn’t move, and they shot us.
We cried, and they shot us.
We slept, and they shot us.
We had children, and their children shot us.
We were childless, and their children shot us.
We bathed, and they cut us.
We cut ourselves, and they shot us.
In our dream, you wrote about us.
They shot us
in our dream. Shot us in their.
Please join us on Sunday, May 26th, at 3pm EST for the fifth installment of the 'I think I can't speak for everyone here' reading series, featuring Dylan Krieger and Alina Stefanescu
Email bluejawedsnake@gmail.com for the zoom link and info
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as editor, reviewer, and critic for various journals and is currently working on a novel-like creature. Her new poetry collection will be published by Sarabande in 2025. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com
Dylan Krieger is writing the apocalypse in real time in south Louisiana. She is the Managing Editor of Fine Print and the author of seven collections of poetry: Giving Godhead (Delete, 2017), Dreamland Trash (St. Julian, 2018), No Ledge Left to Love (Ping Pong, 2018), The Mother Wart (Vegetarian Alcoholic, 2019), Metamortuary (Nine Mile, 2020), Soft-Focus Slaughterhouse (11:11, 2021), and Predators Welcome (Limit Zero, 2024). Find her at DylanKrieger.com
This is how I look
creating
a lonelier
mirror.
The mirror will destroy me before its making destroys me.
We do
I think
our own
stunts
in the past
of god.
I wanted to touch you in a perfect house.
There were three staples
in the stomach
of the holy spirit.
A carpenter bee
was its own ghost.
TODAY AT 4PM EST!
Featured readers Nadia Arioli and Jay Besemer!
The first of two events this weekend for the 'I think I can't speak for everyone here' reading series.
You can email bluejawedsnake@gmail.com for the zoom link and to sign-up for the open mic
Nadia Arioli is the cofounder and editor in chief of Thimble Literary Magazine. Arioli’s poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net three times and for the Pushcart Prize and can be found in Cider Press Review, Rust + Moth, McNeese Review, Penn Review, Mom Egg, and elsewhere. Essays have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize and can be found in Hunger Mountain, Heavy Feather Review, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere. Artwork has appeared in Permafrost, Kissing Dynamite, Meat for Tea, Pithead Chapel, Rogue Agent, and Poetry Northwest. Arioli’s forthcoming collections are with Dancing Girl Press and Fernwood Press.
Poet and artist Jay Besemer is the author of numerous poetry collections, including [Your Tongue Is as Long as a Tuesday] (Knife/Fork/Book 2023); Men & Sleep (Meekling Press 2023); the double chapbook Wounded Buildings/Simple Machines (Another New Calligraphy 2022) and Theories of Performance (The Lettered Streets Press, 2020)). He was a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Transgender Poetry, and a finalist for the 2017 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. Find him online at www.jaybesemer.net and on Twitter and Bluesky @divinetailor.
My first onscreen death was a horse.
And my second, a horse.
If my scene is empty
I’m not poor.
Imagery is form’s broken comb.
Children
in the dark
their hair
for Benjamin Niespodziany
We moved
away
but kept
the same
tornado.
I felt nothing for three days then something for seven straight.
My pills lost their invisibility. God disappeared.
A toddler with a spraycan
walked
into traffic
to start a church
for toddlers
with spraycans.
A sister said to a sister
you’ll die
if you keep
playing dead.
A delayed mirror
personalized
its first
suicide.
I wrote about being pulled from a bathroom stall by a boy I wanted to be.
I folded my mouth into a hurt that only a toothache’s
mother
could harm.
You loved your father.
Your father loved his.
SNOW
Lara Glenum
Action Books 2024
All wrecked attitude and in-house mania, Lara Glenum’s holistically punkish Snow is a fairy tale of reverent perversion as told from the side of two recut mouths. In verse of such unified doubletalk, it hurts to hurt. It hurts to laugh. Glenum is a student of the student’s deep child, and outsources the body acoustic and orgasmic and dooms it and frees it to roam for both leisure and pleasure in an open-air escape room. So knowledgeably sad, Snow has beats so bleakly hilarious that one might need to see if the house is coming from inside the call. You won’t hear it coming.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
kingsoftrain 