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.
an animal
small enough
to pull you from
its name
said on
the radio…
rains
in my stomach
when you
hear rain
Ohio snow wasn’t real I wrote that it was did you see your son collecting the same rock everyday the same rock its vigil for the twisted ankle of a ghost on its way to god well well the veins of the moon are never full your son goes even from heaven missing yes from there he was there
from collection 'apartures':
WAYSIDES
Brother peeling a hidden orange.
A smoke ring where once
our mouse
played dead.
Hearing loss
in a mother's
wrist.
~
house 1
we are slow with our loneliness
so slow that god
thinks in twos
the snow comes for other snow
a spoon
prays
to a mirror
no one can watch
and the snow
gets away
~
house 3
whose childhood
was the longest
there is always
one friend
with a nosebleed
~
MORE AND MORE POEMS ABOUT SLEEP
a cigarette burn and a bitemark fight over a tooth from the dryer
jesus
was just a kid
~
APARTURE
Yesterday, distance destroyed its early work.
Fog machines fell asleep.
I let my son bite me and believed
for three hours
that it was today.
You told me underwater
about the fog machines.
God looked like death. Death saw.
~
apartures, 125 pages
poems, January 2023
collection is pay-what-you-want
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp: $BartonSmock
or Zelle bartonsmock@yahoo.com
blood to bathe us in its blue past, 217 pages
poems new and selected, May 2022
Pay what you want
via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp $BartonSmock
or Zelle bartonsmock@yahoo.com
~
some poems, from:
GHOSTALGIA
A drop of blood lands in an eye-sized field.
Imagine
waking up
to cry.
Hide the hidden ant of your son’s loneliness.
~~~
GHOSTALGIA
By the time darkness touches every map, the baby is useless. God a mistake mistaken for a childhood's double life. If there is a horse, there is a horse
thinking only of itself yet also
on the kindness
of a past
horse.
Sight cooks my eye in a voided spoon.
~~~
SAYMOST
No one in the elevator when it dies
-
By x-ray I mean many stars will find my son
Silent
baby’s
baby
silence
kingsoftrain 