Touch touches everything it touches.
The tv
our own
grief
santa
ever you see
disappeared
from its own
pain
a rabbit
with no
skull
not stare
at god
ever
you nod
off
sleep
was bathing
death
looked
how shy
Saturday, May 18th / Sunday, May 19th – The ‘I think I can’t speak for everyone here’ Reading Series
Hey all! Please join us this Saturday May 18th AND Sunday May 19th for the next two installments of 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
Saturday May 18th, 4pm EST
featured: Nadia Arioli and Jay Besemer
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.
Sunday May 19th, 3pm EST
featured: Pamela Kesling and Bee Morris
Pamela Kesling grew up in a hole in the woods in central Appalachia, with mostly her sisters and books for companionship. She taught herself to read at three years old and read voraciously from that point on. Over the years, she has written magazine articles, newsletters, tourism brochures, and lots of marketing copy. Today, her personal focus is on poetry about the complexities of life in Appalachia, much of which is inspired by the natural world surrounding her. She occasionally dabbles in short stories as well, and has a novel perpetually "in progress." By day, she works in business development for a mid-size regional law firm. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English Literature from West Virginia Wesleyan College and an MBA from Marshall University. She has been published in The Vandalia and Metro Valley Magazine.
Bee Morris is the author of Notes on Qualia (Bottlecap Press, 2023). Their published work can be found in various online and print journals, including Poet Lore, Salamander Magazine, Underblong, and Landfill. They reside in San Francisco.
a spot
in the human
brain
all my life
a worm
in my son’s
dream
my eyes
tell my eyes
that light
is on fire
that light
can trick
a bomb
it needs
a machine
that uses
men
I am in
that spot
a private
doll
burns
its dick
with a dick
I crush
the doll
it hurts
it hurts
god
fact one
fact two
fact three
on boats
there’s no
term
for suicide
suicide
watch
the bird
sick
sea
The baby is sad three times before it dies. At the funeral, we smile with our mouths closed. A singer friend of mine tells me he can still feel the body temperature of a wolf spider in the arch of his foot. The spider is fine. It might be the only spider in Ohio. Ohio is a pharmacy run by children. There’s food, but there’s no food. Mirrors belong to the puzzle piece in my throat. Teeth confuse god.
SMALL POEMS AGAINST DYING
Nude I carry my untouched handprint into the past disappearance of a photographed leaf. Pain and sickness lose each their memory but lose god’s first. It’s dark in the dark. Lift a spider’s broken finger.
SMALL POEMS AGAINST DYING
In reverse, the baby looks like it's helping the doctors build a machine. I smoke on the roof and my brother gets a nosebleed in the cellar of a house we're not going to buy. Art invents time to impress pain.
SMALL POEMS AGAINST DYING
Erasing the scarecrow’s ankle with a cigarette.
Cutting the hair of the crucified.
Stars
and jobs
and stars.
Black Pastoral
poems, Ariana Benson
The University of Georgia Press, 2023
I give up on beauty. And then, and then. Ariana Benson’s Black Pastoral is an anti-next of verse that stuns and revives, that resurrects to retell. It names names and knows origin stories have only to be shared to rectify their shoddy beginnings. It is a work of shape and vindication, a work of worried syllable excavated by words gone awol from their bland enlistments. Wordplay is wordwork. Wordplay means. Atrocity says its peaceful piece. I’m not sure how to recite this. It was here and I arrived in the after non-image of a brutal stillness. Benson writes love poems to places no map can map. Its claim voids reclaiming with its re-reveal. Be floored, be lifted, sure. But return to be also returned.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
Seraphim
poems, Angelique Zobitz
CavanKerry Press, 2024
Seraphim, as studied into wrestled voice and receivable interrogation by poet Angelique Zobitz, is a work of violent winnings that knows join and joy to be close enough in the saying as to allow the lovesick and the bloodwrecked to speak healing into and from the wounds of differently seeded desires. Whether an utterance redacted by the written or a writing redacted by the said, it is always a singing that hears a listening song and hits the numb note of a language lived as a taking that’s given to steal. Versed fully by confrontation and slippage, Zobitz creates these poems in the constant already of the present where home is a spell that none recite entirely might sound evade trickery and seek to word itself found in churches and game shows, at suppers and salvations. As a reader, I felt housed and shown, unsafe and cared for, lifted and more earthly for an angelology so riotous and rescuing.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
You Don’t Have to Believe in the World
poems, William Erickson
April Gloaming, 2024
I belonged, once, and was given brief belongings. One such belonging may have been William Erickson’s deeply invented work You Don’t Have to Believe in the World. Repetition here is a woven fragility that loosens only at the tenured etiquette of delicacy. Erickson’s verse is both placeholder and future claim, and contains the letting go that is a roof and then a window and then a mirror with a stomach of rain. Shake every umbrella. Double every ghosted ghost and photograph that which wants a soul. I get drunk and read and don’t get drunk and write. I can do neither. I can do both. Work like this sobers me inward. Is a magic show for the disappeared. If brevity is a borrowed faith that only suffers those who return it changed, then Erickson’s poems coin their take with a madly measured giving.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
My handwriting is described as a suicide note written by a scarecrow and my brother’s as a tattoo scratched off by a god trapped in a silent ambulance. We’re on different parts of the baby. I cry my pencil into a detailed sleep. My brother cries himself to hell. I recall a same life. He recalls a current. The baby is our brother, then our sister, then both. We see it in pieces. Every creature knows how long we’ve been here.
kingsoftrain 