Voicemail Poems

The last night we spoke, you said we could make this work. I sold the bed we used to sleep on, to forget, hoping it would work. I left the pink book you gave me on my desk, your letters in my drawer, the ones where you said love is work. I left the memory of us sleeping on a cliffside in my head but deleted the picture we took, dead-eyed from waking up to work at 5 AM on another coast, the night sea barely visible beyond your head laid against my thigh, sprawled black hair, it was easy work to be in love with you, but it was impossible to love you in a way you felt. We were two felled trees attached by thin string, trying to work gravity against itself. In a Key Largo parking lot, years ago, before we ever fell through each other, your hand brushed against mine. We worked so hard to be that simple again. B, forgive me. I would have given myself away (I did) just to make it work. ————————————– Jarrett Moseley called us from Charlotte, NC. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.

We promise to protect each other After Willie Perdomo which means we pinky swear it which means we draw our pinkies like switchblades from brassy knuckles which means i hold your hands between the pocket space where we keep the taser between the thumb & index the hammer between the index & middle the cross between the middle & ring & the middle is my weapon of choice whic

Get in vans with strangers: a Palo-Santo heavy Chevy G20 with a sonnet-spilling prophet; a red 70’s Volkswagen shaggin' wagon with three long-haired surfers headed South; a fuzzy pink and purple pimped out festival-goer’s fantasy stocked with the best candy—one taste and I make-out with God. Talk myself out of a felony on one side of the border, have my first lucid dream on the other. Skinny dip a bioluminescent shoreline with a nowhere-bound time -traveller, his touch the lightning that strikes me sober, makes me want to remember. Take LSD blessed by a Mayan shaman on a Panamanian beach. Find out the only love I’ve ever known isn’t free—my softened gaze on strangers spinning around me, I love them not because they’re mine but because they never will be. Get all my shit stolen and backpack for three months without a backpack. Dance callouses onto the bottoms of my feet. When strangers barge into the van, I learn that boundaries don’t need to be barbed wire fences, a purple velvet rope is all

"these days, everybody wants to hear the prophecies of yore at a mcdonald’s drive through, and i just don’t think that that’s what i’m after" & when my friend pulls up & the speaker starts crackling with some eldritch horror, & it asks, do you want to die with that? & my friend looks over at me & asks, well, do you? & i say i’m good with just the pepsi, thanks & the eldritch horror, profound & decrepit, wails like a thousand suns being born or the edge of a paper slicing through skin or your dad shutting the door on your family the morning that he dies & my friend says, oh, i think they only have coke products here, & i say, hm, then i guess a cherry coke & my friend says, okay, a mcchicken, a cherry coke, plus can i get an answer the question unspoken in my heart? because my friend is always saying shit like that, especially in the mcdonald’s drive through & this time the voice from the speaker is sweet dulcet caramel dripping off a spoon, a siren song in symphony, & my friend says, damn, i think i’m a doll

I dreamed of a canoe, and of the two of us: I was new on the lake. Streaming through the murk, the cellar scent of blue and brown water, and you, my new love, saying nothing, only rowing us backwards deftly. At the lake’s deepest point: a miniature goose—a full grown adult, though not five inches high, resting on an island of ice, mid-June. Tenderly I scooped it. Its feet were frozen in a lump of ice, but it stood on my palm as quiet and unmoving as you, who waited with paused oars, seeming not to care much about the goose, but caring about my care. I rubbed my fingers over the ruly bird’s webs to warm them, and the ice melted all shiny and dewy as the goose stared into the distance, patiently or bluely, I could not tell. The goose free, we moved on. // Tuesday night I felt a stabbing at the bottom of my foot; ignoring it I woke in the morning to the same pain and could not run. You sat with me in the dining room and took my foot in your palm and tried to maneuver the splinter out, spaded with your tweezer

Chocolate Polynesian brown was beckoned to the land of the long white cloud to work in factories, freezing works, docks, was beckoned to work hard, send money back to islands of hibiscus and frangipani But chocolate Polynesian brown got swallowed, digested in a stomach churning with acid-filled hate The outcome? That other shade of brown // But dawn, because you covered your eyes with the dark hands of night batons bashed on doors, scaring pregnant women, given barely enough time to dress while dogs spat their barks through bared teeth But dawn, Because you hid behind the horizon torches blazed, blinding, breaking sleep and families as parents were taken from screaming kids to be jailed then charged then sent back to the islands Dawn, because you were silent, because all murmurings were silenced. ————————————– Cindy Kurukaanga called us from Aotearoa, New Zealand. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/v

I studied Italian painters, Giorgione, Titian. At one job, I’m a glorified secretary. I answer the phone in my professional voice and sell gaudy urns to luxe addresses. My neighbor listens patiently, amused by my young life. We’re the only Black gay men in our building, so he has me over for Sunday tea. I fill our cups. For the heart, he says, adding whiskey to his. In the 80s, on a fellowship in Spain, he practiced arias and translated Romani ballads. After a concert, he presented Leontyne Price with flowers wrapped in sheer blue paper. Today, I argue Another Country is Baldwin’s best novel. My neighbor shares a recipe for chicken paprikash. Gone like that, he says, flipping through an album of friends in their youth with fades and thick mustaches. They could quote Mahogany. They cut up in the house-inflected dark of a dancefloor, worldly and glamorous as a Venetian painting. I refill our cups. A splash of whiskey in his tea. ————————————– Derrick Austin called us from Chicago, IL. voicema

so you do the next best thing and you cut your hair you follow a youtube video and a confident-man-hair-stylist-type shows you how using a mannequin head and swift movements on your turn you take two ponytails and the shittiest pair of scissors money can buy and you snip away at your kinda-long hair until it becomes less long and hopefully more shape arms overhead you’re diving into what no one can say today was the first day of April you got rejected from a job opportunity you remembered it’s your abuser’s birthday you sit on one friend’s porch and don’t talk about it you sit on another’s futon and you do the night wears on the day folds in on itself and you catch a glimpse of your body in the toothpasted mirror arms overhead you’re picking fruit we’ve seen this before in fact we saw you in this exact position three months ago in a stranger’s bathroom using arts n craft scissors you saved the hair before immediately losing it one day sooner or later you might find a bundle of yo

People fell in love during the fall of the Roman Empire and people were falling in love in 1930s Germany, the Nazis were coming into power and regular German citizens were going on dates and falling in love. I have new tires on my car so I feel invincible driving to you through the snow, I am driving to you and a song is on the radio that reminds me of you and I’m passing all these other cars because I have new tires and it’s snowing so hard but maybe I’m in love and I have to remind myself that happy people can still die in a car crash. There was happiness in 1930s Germany and at the end of Rome, too. Falling in love doesn’t do anything for the climate crisis, falling in love won't save democracy. It’s late-stage capitalism, it’s the fading days of the Anthropocene, new tires don’t save me from other drivers and love doesn’t save us from anything really, but isn’t it nice, for a minute in the snow, to feel so wildly protected? ————————————– Jill McLaughlin called us from Portland, ME. voicemai

Dad was on the couch, mostly starving to death in front of us cancer, stage IV (for this type, many don’t catch the earlier stages, and of course there aren't later ones) we hung pinecone bird feeders close to the house, bringing Nature near when he couldn't go out we talked about our shared favorites: the praying mantis, female cardinal, blue herons, black cats we talked about Chris Christie taking a swing at the Bully, about what the hell would make someone crazy enough to walk into North Korea we talked about how to take care of mom where to find the passwords, who to trust we talked about the final moment and how I might not make it (I did, he waited) we talked about how a summer would never be enough time, as the days stretched out my son, his namesake, waited in the cherry tree ————————————– Annie Powell Stone called us from Baltimore, MD. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

Let’s be monsters. Let’s be witches and bitches and crones and just hideous. Let’s be powerful. Let’s take and take and take and grab the world, just fucking hold on with claws and teeth and refuse to let go. And let’s be gluttonous. Let’s devour. Let’s see what we want, what delights us, and let’s inhale it with no regard for propriety. With no regard for you. Let’s be insolent. Let’s be wanton. Let’s be ugly. Let’s show our teeth as a warning sign before we sink them into your neck. Let’s be savage and angry. Let’s say, This is for me. This is because I want. This is because I exist. This is because I take up space, as much as I want, and more, and I survive despite your best efforts to tamp me down, and I will fucking wear my defiance like a punch to the gut or— Go ahead. Tell me the red on my lips is too suggestive. It’s my fucking mouth. And I use it to bite more than anything else. ————————————– Maia Brown-Jackson called us from Philadelphia, PA. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicem

Three weeks to Christmas. We bide our time on the line by conjuring posties of the past— side-burned and handcuffed, the ones in ‘81 who dared to defy back to work orders. Got the whole country maternity leave. Now we fight traffic in trucks that hit 40 degrees, deliver an endless stream of Sephora and Nespresso, spend hours alone with the clang of keys on metal, compete with the Amazon drivers for free parking spots and as we pass each other on the street they sometimes stop to ask: It’s a good job right? For the benefits? A good job is any job that keeps you out of a tent. We probably wouldn’t defy like the legends of ’81, too many struggling with groceries and rent. Here’s the talking head on the news again. Sound bites smooth as the 300 thread count shirt he has on. As if we are a private business, not a rusting crown corporation. Meant to serve all citizens of the nation, including its workers who are crippled by inflation. Every postie’s got a side hustle and a secret dream. Lauren sews crafts

if you are sad: sit, silent, and bathe in the brine of an olive jar. let the salt consume you till you are preserved in acidity rather than memory, and the blood in your veins might well be that of the ocean. if they ask you how it happened, say: “i didn’t know how to swim.” this is false, but so are the teeth they blatantly lie through. (you do not owe them the truth if they don’t give it to you. do not sacrifice your bitterness for these saps.) return to the olives. swallow the pits: wrinkled fools have no place here, at least not since he died. stare as they swim around your plate, reminiscent of almonds, and remember how he taught you that the amygdala handles emotion. maybe by overconsumption you can erase all you ever knew. when asked, say he was your mentor. when asked, say he was kind. when asked, say you’d do anything to see him again. the olive jar says you should take only nine, yet seventeen have passed through your teeth. it is okay. it will all, one day, be okay. ————————————– Annabelle Chen c

Lake Berryessa, azure at our backs the man from Toluca slips me lozenges from under his tongue Spanish alive in my mouth touches the screen reaching deep lights from his phone plays me my first cumbia: chee chih chih woodsmoke unfurls decomposed flesh dusted bones awakening at his cue turning slight curving threaded magnets loop khee ki-ki khee ki-ki khee ki-ki each scratch of rake pulling me into the earth thrumming his hand at my hip la guira’s song tethered ancient spine’s pulse hungry, touch the heart of before knowing how to fly, certain feathered tz sts sts tz ————————————– Tatiana Chaterji called us from unceded Ohlone land in Oakland, CA. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/

"There is a look one sees, the mouth somehow desperate– … the fear of death, taking as its form dedication to hunger…" - Louise Glück b/c one day i will want for nothing b/c one day i will not want b/c one day i will need nothing to want for b/c one day my body will cease to function b/c one day my body will function outside itself b/c one day my body will cease functioning as a vessel for causeless desire b/c one day my body will cease desiring cease to function b/c one day the flesh of the earth will clothe the body’s naked hunger b/c one day i will feed off nothing but the dirt’s choicest cuts b/c one day the dirt’s best nourishment will stonewall the body’s needing & wanting b/c one day i will become dirt my gut become dirt pelvis become dirt hands legs spinal column become dirt skull cavity encompass dirt drawing down dirt to become dirt one day b/c the hungry ghost of my body seeks grene pasture & stil waters one day b/c feeding the 5000 remains a miracle, not a reality one day b/c desperate

My dad died and sports came back. We wore masks at his funeral to avoid being next, I guess. The night before Joe Kelly fired at Carlos Correa’s head and cleared the bench and I get it, because what other response is there to feeling cheated than bearing witness to your hate blossoming from your body, your spite-filled fingers gripping the splitting seams, your hurtling release spitting seeds that will line the graves of generational grudges. What song do you serve your ears the morning after your mom sends you home with a peace flower and you say goodbye in the dark because it hurts to see? So King Push pummels my skull as my jaw sits hollow and jagged, a haggard quarry of heavy stones and I stare at a cracked tree limb, angled 90 degrees in a non-committal breeze. And a bird cries like a rusty swingset and now I see the hurt has just begun to bloom. ————————————– Marissa DeSantis called us from Cleveland, OH. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile

You’re like a paragraph in a book, he says, folding a dollar bill into an origami ring at the bar, and I’m not sure if it’s an insult. He slips the ring onto my forefinger: don’t get too excited. Should I apologize to you or myself or the woman who loved him before? I stay for the story. He is the only one who can make me laugh during an argument. We huddle in the doorway of the pub, passing the vape back and forth in the cold. He mocks my rotating flavors: watermelon, mango, strawberry. I tell him I miss my cigarettes but really, it’s just autumn again. Puff, puff. I’m rotting from the inside. Downing pills with an Old Fashioned. My heart is episodic, my brain one chemical imbalance after another. This unfurling is not what I wanted. He’s the head rush from the first good drag. The first sip of coffee to cure a hangover. I’m living at the bottom of the bottle and it’s beautiful here, all glass and no windows. Who is there left to quit for? The bodies in the lake, one of them mine. The bodies in his pool, al

Double-check you have not morphed into wax. Are the appendages protruding from the trunk of your body still soft skin, or have you hardened your armor like they taught you in eighth grade when a car flattened your cat at your Christmas party? You cried. You watched as he twitched and his insides squelched onto the pavement, and when he became still, his body stiffened. Still, with tears, you hauled him home. It was hard. They said “you’re ruining the party with your moping,” so you plopped by the Christmas tree. It was hard, was it hard to wake up this morning and find your skin had not hardened like exoskeleton? You are still soft. Still tender. It was tenth grade when your grandfather requested you be pallbearer at grandma’s funeral. You couldn’t bear it, the weight, the load. The corpse, it was caked in makeup to mask the blemishes from Her accident. She was not herself. You grasped her hand—it was hard. It was like wax, and when you squeezed her hand farewell, you left an indentation. That was hard. To se

When the blues find where I’ve been hiding, They pile on like puppies— so damn excited to see me. These days, I’m into cats, brother. You know, maybe one will rub up against me, once in awhile, or meow enough until I give it what it wants— usually my food and then, my appetite. But the dogs, man… they just don’t stop— yipping, nipping, slobbering— all fucking over me, and then I’m down for the three-to-five-day count. I try to rationalize—“They’re just puppies. They’ll get bored and go away.” I try stoicism—“I can’t get bothered by the uncontrollable.” I try booze—the puppies just lap that shit up. But they always sniff me out! After a few days enjoying the sunshine, I guess my contented stink gives me away, ‘cause the cute, fucking, little, tail-waggers always, always fucking find me, the little shitheads. First rule of depression: We don’t talk about depression. I wonder if Paper Street Soap Co. makes Existential Stench— extended release version, of course— its scent so cloying and heavy, it

My mother’s half brother wore a blue herringbone tweed jacket with padded elbows to her funeral / The kind worn by a caricature of a substitute teacher or traveling salesman or a freshly sober high school dropout / He told us to call him Uncle Loser & used to whisper to us in the back of his trailer the same three ghost stories every summer / The one about the man who underachieves his way back to the kiddie table when the adults start pairing themselves into euchre teams / The one about a man who drags a rusted shopping cart behind him as he haunts the parking lot of the abandoned shopping malls that line the freeway access roads / The one about his teenage classmates who drank themselves into their senior year & went missing while camping in the woods not far from here / Uncle Loser taught his parrot all the best curse words to use on everyone except grandma & his daughters / We thought that damn bird was gonna outlive us all but she died early from lung cancer / Family Tradition / For every set of us one m