Heaven is all pain
until you get there.
Dead angels hurt the earth.
I have spiders
and you
have wasps.
In the ambulance,
the kid sleeps on a door of hunger
to stay
awake.
I carry
in my mind
my mind.
It never knows.
I can’t
in the dream
open
your book.
My hands
so small
took time
to vanish.
When I say
I'm lonely
I just mean
I'm lonely.
There's so much to do
that I
can do.
I once read my entire body
with mosquito
bites.
It ends
and ends.
Please join me as I host the first of the I think I can't speak for everyone here reading series with featured writers NC Smock and Benjamin Niespodziany.
Reading will be held over Zoom on Sunday, April 21st, at 4pm EST.
Email blujawedsnake@gmail.com for Zoom link and open mic sign-up.
Benjamin Niespodziany is a Chicago-based writer whose work has appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50, Booth, Conduit, Indiana Review, and others. His debut poetry collection was released in 2022 through Okay Donkey and his novella of connected stage plays is out now with X-R-A-Y. You can find more at neonpajamas.com.
NC Smock lives and works in the community sector in Baltimore, Maryland. His creative writing efforts are mostly channeled into grants for community organizations. He is currently working on a written and spoken word project, No Arrival, which is anchored by his sketches and paintings. This project will soon be available in video and audio snippets, as well as a flip book where segments can be rearranged and read in any order. The project will be published under the name Wyeth Mann.
TOSKA
poems
Alina Pleskova
Deep Vellum Publishing 2023
Alina Pleskova’s inventive and non-recreated Toska is a simultaneously incoming and upcoming work versed in a voice thrice unreal. In the reading, I felt so distant from my own handwriting that I decided to not take notes. My worry began to worry, sure. But also, the hereness of my joy departed sweetly from two places at once. Pleskova’s writing is deeply spelled. Whether it’s the strange shortcuts that longing gathers to delay its arrival, or the stilled intimacy that leaves loneliness in a vehicle designed for reentry, Pleskova seems a first visitor of a remembered life and makes short agony of the current moment without timestamping our human, our outdated, anguish. Toska has better words for its words.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
Art should let you down.
Porn
has no
machine.
A man is starving in a house full of food.
He deserves
the house
because his mother
ate quietly
(in a hole of openly)
blue
privacy.
Silence
has one
secret.
That’s
not art.
how long would god have watched
if god
hadn’t looked
beauty
is bearable
place
come back
This is not a poem like that is not a body. Each movie playing is an extra room. Eyesight the impossibility of nearness. Touch is always too young to have visions. My death is empty. We’re not close. My death is empty but my ghost death is on all fours. You can put ghost anywhere. Bomb ghost. Ghost wrist. At my saddest, my shadow does its best to be me looking at a black watch. What time is it there? Time of death
is it there
Song I died to
Poem that killed me
animal
crying
in the outhouse
we keep
listening
gods of tomorrow
eventually
our stomachs
growl
at the same
time
now on
as lonely
as a color
kingsoftrain 