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.
three
days old
the son
of a butcher
dies
for seven
minutes
longer
than the son
of a sign
maker
it’s the last
unfair
thing
swears
the butcher
his god’s
longest
brain
protesting
perfection
We fund the film of our dying with the money we get from our dead. If you’re alone, say we. Three frogs, one dog, ants. A spider I thought was a tick. The dog was an accident. A friend who doesn’t like my work warned me about that first line. It’s okay, I love my friend. His heart is an anthill of electric longing. He prays himself a redder apple while watching baseball. There are too many handheld things. God can’t be born.
they found
that Ohio
child
at peace
listening
to snow
breathe
it took
hours
not
minutes
dogs
in mirrors
dig
dig away
my sadness
a bone
made of glass
how
dumb
I write
poems
about my teeth
and lose
the poems
Hey all! Please join us on Sunday May 19th 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
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.
Hey all! Please join us on Saturday May 18th 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
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.
A see-through dress
that can’t
catch fire. A hair
from god’s
failed hair
salon.
Smoking
to protect
a strangled
mother.
EDINBURGH NOTEBOOK
Valerie Mejer Caso
translated by Michelle Gil-Montero
photographs by Barry Shapiro
Action Books 2020
Locally unpredictable with a prehuman freezeframe warmth, Valerie Mejer Caso’s Edinburgh Notebook, as silently translated to vividity by Michelle Gil-Montero, and as unseen from below by photographer Barry Shapiro, is a work of angel bandages and spirit health that is transported and stilled by that ghost vein of connection that puts a body to our ways of being elsewhere. It’ll bring you to the knees of another. I think there is a car accident. I think there is a shadow that would burn itself fatherless on its sunbathing mother. I think there was and then I think there wasn’t. Mejer Caso catches time yawning.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
A tree will grow around the death it cannot have. Lightning displays only the suddenness of its roots. A deer stares at god. Counts to ten. Doesn't know.
kingsoftrain 