Voicemail Poems

They call one bulldagger. I heard them say she spreads women’s legs that's all she does, but I know her. She builds entire worlds where their mouths cannot go, their eyes cannot perceive. What they wonder is who she fucks and how they are going to have more children in the world, and there is more to loving a woman. I know because I hold them two inside. An elder called the bisexual one greedy, and we all laughed at her small imagination. Her hands mortared me together. Them two made me part of a house to hold back the winds and water for a century, keep them safe whether hurricane or one of them come knocking at their door, and because the family loves a corpse, we will be cremated into ash and return as blocks calling out for a love like theirs to hold. The only thing that hears them two sex are concrete and coal fly, and neither one will tell. ————————————– Marlanda Dekine called us from Georgetown, SC. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app

I want to be: a good boy, your domesticated coyote. My tongue’s handwriting is the shape of your body unshaved and without a shower. They need us to feel disgusted with ourselves, so you commit to my appetite unreserved. You become tender only while listening to crust punk and letting my fingers impersonate what I really want. The moon is a cuck watching our disentanglement. I can’t remember if I slept but the birds are our mothers waking us up. You make my coffee like a prayer, so I call you a saint right before we kiss. It is time to creep into something other than each other, but you don’t need a leash to take me on a walk. You’re five feet taller than me when I’m on all fours. You fear a million fears about me, but only a handful are true. ————————————– Mary Violet called us from Philadelphia, PA. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

I’m on the floor again, and that isn’t a metaphor for rock bottom. My new therapist asked me how I did it. How I managed to keep myself safe all these years. For the first time in over a decade, I was honest: I don’t remember. The meds are working, too, I think. Though after they unfurl my patterns, my dreams of precision, all the rot turns to tremors in my hands. It feels like the world ended when we were fourteen, and after years of dodging the undead on bare feet, I finally found my way to cold water and clean shoes. So after the session, I went out and bought stamps. I was thinking of the last time you and I shared a meal. How we cried in the rollercoaster line at Busch Gardens because we were hot and hungry and couldn’t fit ourselves to girlhood. How you said that Tampa will never be home because we wear fewer clothes here and our sweat smells different here. That night we tossed curse words across the dinner table and stuffed our mouths sour with lettuce. —By now you must know that I’ve broken my promis

We open with a stationary shot of me in my office, a pride flag on the wall behind me. An offscreen bonfire flickers in my eyes, and the savvy viewer will read this as a symbol of both passion and hunger, and before they can ask where it comes from I begin to speak: “I’m a therapist and community organizer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is my audition video for Survivor in the form of a poem, and my name is Isaiah Moses Newman…” and the savvy viewer will recall, here, that Moses once came upon a field that held a bush that burned and would not die, and if they are Jewish they may also know that he answered the blaze by shouting hineni, which can translate to “here I am,” but also “witness me here, having survived all that has tried to kill me.” A drumbeat begins in the background as I describe the tear-stained and sleepless nights of my adolescence, and then on screen a picture flashes: me and the friends I called family at age 19, huddled in down jackets like penguins, and there is a conspicuous

In August it’s hard not to want – everything heavy with it – ginkgo fruit rots on sidewalks, sweat falls down spines, the whole beast city breathes in smog and breathes out low clouds dropping lightning. Confused, a little, reading subway signs for revelation, it all comes up wonder – which pre-historic lizard dragged itself up into daylight just so you could buy Calvin Klein underwear and forget to call your mom on purpose? Who’s your manager, Saint Sebastian? Maimonides? What day of the week is it? How did you get this number? Rumi, I told you to stop calling my motel. I need to be alone for a long time, ride the empty train over the bridge back and forth, commune with Whitman above the East River. Where else do you go to ask when summer cherry pit spits questions into your lap? Whose ghost do I see on street corners? When does the weight lift? What do I do with this little bit of time I’ve caught to live inside? What do I do now I want to eat every apple, seed stem core? Who belongs, who decides? Does

We learned to love the birds. The backyard bird with her black cap and white cheeks. The flicker so flirty in his polka dot dress and red scarf. The bus-stop-bird who mocked us each morning with a mixtape of songs by someone else. We learned to love the bones. The mismatched shingles on the mansard roof and the pumpkin-colored door. The wrought iron staircase and windflower wallpaper– the backdrop for crushed velvet dresses and top hats. We learned to love the pool. The feeling of lungs so full of breath we learned to live underwater. Our fins unfurled and settled at the bottom of the ceramic basin. The sub-aquatic sounds, muted and muddy, but unmistakably mermaid. We learned to love through frayed feathers and stone skin and saltwater dreams. We learned to love through all the silly seriousness of being immortal teens. ————————————– Colette Love Hilliard called us from St. Louis, MO. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profil

We failed, you & I, to care for plants we potted at the start of summer—lamb’s ear & lavender, one for each pocket. You told me you loved to stroke the soft fur of the hedgenettle & the smell of your hands upon pinching a switch of lavender & I said I loved our hands together, futuring something into soil. Then we failed in miniature each day, forgetting the attention required for something gentle to thrive, until, too late, we realized that they were barely holding on; that—whether whither or rot—something had soured as we went about separate summers; that we could not now feed them all at once without drowning; that every living thing wants for water, care, hands, and to be thought of every day. ————————————– Tonee Mae Moll called us from Baltimore, MD. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

They say it can’t be, but it is, perfect. What they don’t know is that clocks circle the drain like pasta water, unasked questions we both know answers for. After some time we actually did become psychic—I know another life flickers somewhere in your mind, yet you come home to guess at The Price Is Right. It says I have seen what God does and the endoscopy, and I could not find another crevice through which to love you—whatever hasn’t been said is whispered over and again as we hang in the blackness of the in-between dotted with blue, white, and red giants. ————————————– Sandra Marchetti called us from Lisle, IL. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

It’s not about who made the mistake with the wrong address in the GPS getting us to Brooklyn an hour late, is it? It’s about your retirement and our finances, and a 20-something living in our house without employment but with a car payment. It’s about the four scrapings the dermatologist did this summer to determine if I have another basal cell carcinoma. It’s about the arthritis that’s making my fingers achy and your neck pain from past injuries stealing your sleep and making you cranky. It’s about the rising prices on the three bedroom houses with a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains we’ve been dreaming about since ‘19. It’s about Sandy who we visited Wednesday at the assisted living facility and her forgetting the names of her grandchildren because of that nefarious bitch, Dementia. Getting off the elevator to see her, we were hit with the thick odor of overripe flesh, like forgotten Georgia peaches adrift on scorched Southern grass in August. She was lining the hallway of patients in fr

that's a euphemism—yes, i have cavities, but it means i am bullet train, bound for collision. i am jar of marbles broken across a concrete floor. i am the rise of the seas. what i lack in control i make up for in firepower and i should not be given an excuse to start shooting. i am landslide tornado earthquake wildfire, ready to raise hell, ask questions later. i put the disorder in bpd and my nightmares like to remind me. i close my eyes, see incisor pop softly out of gumline. run tongue through bloody mouth, lose teeth like i used to cut corn off the cob. same time tomorrow night. ————————————– nat raum called us from Baltimore, MD. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

Here we are among snow and ash. Cracked from saw or harsh November winds. We are wood always moving. Bit of flesh from birch, oak, cedar. Stacked for burning. Once I was home to a little ant, he swallowed my bones. Built a little city. More crawled in. They made me warm in winter. Little curling creatures. I said, soak more from soil, make each splinter firmer. My god we grow. Leaves arrived fat, cradling bubbling dew. I tell you I know what it is to be a universe. Tonight leaves turning ash first reach for sky then they fall and they fall. To be turned into nothing. ————————————– Oisín Rowe called us from Boston, MA. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

On PCH somewhere Malibu— going north not quite yet at Point Dume, two biker boys, not quite men, stopped at a red light. Underneath hiero- glyphic hand signs a single red rose in hand outstretched. Electricity wrinkled between them, All-American rose received, ugly-beautiful bag scene. This scene was recalled to me like a home-movie dancing on the TV. ————————————– Mattie K. Lagan called us from Seattle, WA. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

Talking shit, like you know about cracked knuckles and flamin hots with pickle juice. Or the broken heat lamps on the El, or getting high off a lakefront. Yesterday, I counted every duck at the lake and called them my woes. By hook by crook by crooked alderman, you learn that the trap that stays shut is the trap that starves. No one will beat or bite this place out of me. Not by the skin of their enameled teeth. Not by the potholes on every major street. Not by the 312. Not by the school closures. Not by the crack of a July thunder. Like being at The Taste and getting flooded by rain. All that muddy. All that moist. Like when you were little and other kids hit you, and your mom said to hit ‘em back. ————————————– Ola Faleti called us from Chicago, IL. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

Bluster - Ola Faleti by VOICEMAIL POEMS

Lambs Ear and Lavender - Tonee Mae Mol by VOICEMAIL POEMS

Knowledge - Sandra Marchetti by VOICEMAIL POEMS

Tabitha - Meghan Malachi by VOICEMAIL POEMS

I Tell You I Grew From Dawn - Oisin Rowe by VOICEMAIL POEMS

Survivor Audition Video Number 3 - Isaiah Newman by VOICEMAIL POEMS

im overdue for a dream in which my teeth fall out - nat raum by VOICEMAIL POEMS