Erasure as Creative Act: A Review of Remi Recchia’s Aphorism  |  Paroxysm (fifth wheel press, 2025) by D.W. Baker

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Aphorism  |  Paroxysm by Remi Recchia (fifth wheel press, 2025). 40 pages. $12

Aphorism  |  Paroxysm by Remi Recchia (fifth wheel press, 2025)

In the opening phrase of “Psalm 111,” an erasure poem titled after its biblical source text, the autobiographical speaker of Aphorism  |  Paroxysm (fifth wheel press, 2025) identifies the chapbook’s personal animating force: “my heart, / upright, // studied.” Author Remi Recchia’s hybrid manuscript, which blends selected free verse compositions with nearly a dozen biblical erasures and over two dozen facsimiles of the transmasc writer’s social media posts from 2022, directly addresses the contested intersection of trans bodies and Christian beliefs. Recchia’s work demonstrates related ideas that transcend poetics and theology: that erasure can be a creative act, and that human creation can be a fulfillment of God’s love.

The decision to reproduce relevant social media posts within the text complicates genre by foregrounding documentary and commentary. Recchia’s 2022 archive includes unabashed statements that lend precise context to his verse, including defining confessions (“The thing about me is I’ll write trans erotica in church and then go out and preach the gospel of Jesus Christ”), self-aware jokes (“As a post-op transmasc, it is simply a Rule that I must wear tank tops whenever it broaches 68° or higher”), and philosophical positions (“Literally the only ‘self-made man’ is a trans man. This is the hill I will die on”). Without the elaboration of an essay or the figuration of verse, many of the character-limited posts might indeed qualify as aphorisms: concise and accessible distillations of truth or sentiment. Instead of attempting to delineate truth from sentiment in a persuasive mode, Recchia’s social media reproductions illuminate and celebrate, affirming the truth of the writer’s authentic perspective.

The levity of Recchia’s posts offers a satisfying complement to the solemn style of his verse. The book’s opening text, “Dead Name” (previously a final selection for the 2021 Best New Poets anthology), is a poignant elegy in tercets that historicizes trans perspectives as more than a passing fad or contemporary symptom. The poem’s epigram identifies “Frank Dubois and other ‘female husbands,’ 1883” as antecedent figures, representatives of a time when “We didn’t have the words” to fully describe trans experiences. Readers are also shown complementing details from Recchia’s own lived experience, such as how “I still turn when I hear my dead / name at the coffee shop, feel etymological / bomb spray shrapnel across the room.” Past and present collide in the poem’s conclusion:

But the only witch now is the hunt I’m dodging
with Frank Dubois. He’s not behind or ahead, he’s with me,
in me, evading this hunt without beagles or guns, French

horn transformed into the echoes of our old names, excess
syllables filling our heads while we strut on the streets
crowded with the girls & deaths we used to look like. 

By linking trans struggles for belonging across disparate frames of history and vocabulary, Recchia advances an understanding of trans identity as a naturally emergent phenomenon, a small but persistent pattern in the variegated fabric of human biology.

A prose poem that substitutes mid-line slashes for line breaks, “Gifts,” explicitly imbues this understanding with a Christian concept of providence, or divine guidance of worldly action. The text sustains its momentum on the anaphoric current of the repeated phrase, “God gave,” interspersed with periodic responses by the speaker. Recchia’s choice of form streamlines the juxtaposition of positive and negative events, such as “God gave me a pet dog / God gave my dog arthritis, twisted joints & inflamed nerve” and “God gave me white spots on the brain / God gave me an MRI.” To this litany of bodily complaints, Recchia adds one that can be read to represent trans identity: “God gave me a body / I said wait it doesn’t fit quite right.” When considered in light of the book’s adjacent social media posts, the overall effect becomes one of interrogation: where do we draw the line between permissibly medical and impermissibly heretical acts of intervention into God-given creation? If accepting God’s providence does not mean embracing complacency, but instead recognizing human action as a constituent element of divine creation, what criteria might we use to discern the Godliness or worthiness of intentions and results?

The book’s erasures of the Bible engage these questions at the level of form. Among the most striking, “Psalm 23,” forges its response using the text of the famous passage which begins, “The Lord is my shepherd,” and details walking through “the valley of the shadow of death.” Recchia selectively erases words from the text to create new verse, a minimalist narrative that connects the traditional “shadow of death” with what can be read as a gender dysphoric experience: “my / want / makes me lie / and / revives / pathways for / shadow death,” claims the speaker, who fears that “my head / is running over / and shall follow me my / for ever.” In contrast to this presentation of misaligned living as a source of pain and suffering, Recchia offers affirmative texts such as “Psalm 84:1–6,” which reads:

How dear to me is
My desire and
my flesh.

The sparrow has found a house
and a nest
by the side of
my God. 

Celebrating the flesh as a house on the side of God, in a text fashioned by erasing scripture, is the poetic complement to another of Recchia’s pointed social media statements: “Trans people are perfect and exactly as God made them (trans).” In this sense, transformative procedures that use excision and creation to save a life from cancerous despair—biopsy, surgery, prosthesis, and more—can be seen as providential acts, or choices of faith that enable God to work through human action.

Aphorism  |  Paroxysm offers a genuine rendition of surprising synthesis, showing readers that the space between queer and Christian communities allows room not only for conventional disagreement, but also for principled alignment. Recchia’s hybrid approach to this task succeeds by channeling a colloquial voice in the American tradition of Whitman: a voice that sings the body electric, in order to illuminate the multitudes contained within the body politic.

Remi Recchia is a Lambda Special Prize-winning poet, essayist, and editor from Kalamazoo, Michigan. A nine-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has appeared in World Literature Today, Best New Poets 2021, and Best of the Net 2025, among others. He is the author of two collections of poetry, four poetry chapbooks, two children’s books, and the editor of two contemporary poetry anthologies. Remi has received support from Tin House, PEN America, and the Poetry Foundation. He holds an MFA in poetry and a PhD in English. Remi is currently pursuing an M.Div. at Yale Divinity School, where he serves as poetry editor for LETTERS Journal and lives with his wife, daughter, and two cats.

D.W. Baker is a poet and editor from St. Petersburg, Florida. His poems appear in Identity Theory, fifth wheel press, Sundog Lit, and BRUISER, among others, and have received nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. His reviews appear in Variant Lit, Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, Paraselene, and more. See more of his work at www.dwbakerpoetry.com

Howl It So: A Review of Catherine Rockwood’s Dogwitch by Violeta Garcia-Mendoza

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Dogwitch by Catherine Rockwood (Bottlecap Press, 2025). 28 pages. $10

Dogwitch by Catherine Rockwood (Bottlecap Press, 2025)

As family lore goes, I was a little girl who required an extensive collection of dog stuffies arranged around me in order to sleep at night—read it as childhood quirk or beginner’s attempt at protection spell—but it portended a significant and lifelong affinity for dogs. Through childhood, adolescence, college, marriage, motherhood, and midlife, I’ve always lived alongside as few as one and as many as nine actual dogs at a time. Purebreds, street dogs, strays, ferals, fosters, and rescues, these were not just dogs in the background but dogs as close companions with individual personalities and with whom I shared a spectrum of integral bonds. Anyone who knows me knows I’ve never met a dog I didn’t like (often more than most humans), and I guess so does Instagram, because I was drawn to Catherine Rockwood’s chapbook, Dogwitch, the moment my feed served it up to me.

Dogwitch’s cover features Bertel Thorvaldsen’s relief of Psyche and Cerberus, immediately suggesting mythic encounter between woman and animal. Thorvaldsen’s work signals shadow and trial, both of which follow in Rockwood’s poems; but it also depicts a tentative sense of connection and understanding between Psyche and Cerberus, as she bends and reaches to offer him the honeyed cake and, though monster, he receives it in the posture of a loyal hound.

While so many literary representations of dog ownership lean on cliche and sentimentality, Rockwood’s poems resist those pitfalls and captivate their reader by focusing on a mutual guardianship between “difficult” woman and dangerous dog. I use quotes around “difficult” because it’s a slippery, othering label often used to describe and weaponize any shade of female nonconformity—social, behavioral, sexual, psychological, etc.—but one that is essential in understanding the external judgement leveled at the speaker of these poems. Rockwood’s speaker is not sorry, doesn’t always trust her impulses, and owns her furies, questions, and appetites. In “A Tinderbox Itself is Innocent,” she writes, “some people meet me and back away stiff-legged / senses thrumming.” She is “too much” in a way that, at least to this midlife reader, feels relatable.

Similarly, the dogs in these pages are not the adorable, endearingly-derpy, or easy-to-love pets that strangers walking down the street might stop to coo over; these are dogs with pasts, with teeth, with pointed muscle. I loved the attention to animal physicality in these poems. In “The fifth thing,” Rockwood writes:

		A hound is a moving sculpture of appetite.
	
		I cherish the points of their cheekbones, almost as sharp
		as the white teeth that lie behind generous curtains of muzzle
		above long jaws with flews like opera capes.
		Where you like to see excess expressed is a personal thing.
		I prefer when it’s pointing toward the gullet.

In Dogwitch both speaker and subject are creatured by danger, violence, betrayal, and cruelty; experience teaches them their capacity to both survive and inflict damage. But in their shared vulnerability and wariness, they attach to each other with a fierce loyalty and protection. One of my favorite examples of this is in “Ode to Meanness,” where Rockwood writes:

		O, Meanness! Generations
		of dirt-wall cellars and the rusted nail
		inside loose shingle rise to your clenched fists. 
		The bone-marked cur that mauls
		the well-fed hand now looks to you
		with frightening devotion.

Later, in “Familiar,” the first of several poems considering the relationship between witch and familiar, Rockwood writes:

		It does not always have to drink your blood.
		It can be a live thing watchig
		what you honor, what you defile.

If the trope of dog as man’s best friend suggests a kind of human-animal connection that results in obedience, Rockwood’s “Familiar” series subverts that expectation by portraying an edgier telepathy between woman and hound. Under such a bond, every flicker of distrust, rage, or resentment gets transmitted immediately, just as it would between witch and familiar. Think dog as hygrometer calibrated for storm-turn, dog as live wire volta. If it is a strangely gratifying kindredness, Rockwood is aware that it’s also practically inconvenient to have your dog knowing and acting according to your darker, otherwise un-telegraphed thoughts, just as it can be a weight to understand and manage theirs. 

In “To the Witch of Edmonton, her Familiar’s Love,” Rockwood writes:

		no slight malignant thought, Elizabeth,

		could dwell with thee a minute ‘fore I knew
		(so close and apt did my soul hang on thine)
		and then what thou hadst frowned on I would seek
		to havoc

This psychic attunement works as a powerful engine of action and empathy in Dogwitch. In “For Abandoned Pets,” rabbits, cats, and a hound are rescued by sisters asking themselves if they’ve “learned / how to love a fearsome high-ribbed creature/running after trust that flees her.” In “Anti-Catechism,” the speaker frenzies, questions a higher power, and risks injury while attending to “a beautiful / feral dog [she’s] trying to fucking save” after it has poisoned itself with “a half a pound / of strong dark chocolate stolen from the counter.” Even though “Anti-Catechism” is threaded with irreverence and skepticism, I love the way it gives form to devotion in adverse conditions.

In the face of the hopelessness that marks our modern lives, Dogwitch is marked by an insistent urge to be present, perceive, and try our damnedest to save difficult, dangerous creatures anyway. The speaker knows the total achievement of this is impossible, and Rockwood’s reader knows the same, yet there is a significant sense of grace baked into the attempt.

We live in a world full of incomprehensible trouble and cruelty, and in a world where a close-to-unconditional love between species is possible. Rockwood writes “[In] all the starving world…Dogs love / where they are beloved. It is our doom / thus to be moved.” Full as it is of “cursed and glorious dogs” and their humans, “good days and ruin,” Dogwitch makes perfect reading for this incongruence.

Violeta Garcia-Mendoza is the author of Songs for the Land-Bound (June Road Press)—a 2025 National Indie Excellence Award finalist, 2025 Eric Hoffer Award honorable mention, and 2025 First Horizon Award finalist. In 2022, she received a grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation for her poetry. Violeta’s work has appeared in Sugar House Review, The Dodge, RHINO, SWWIM, Psaltery & Lyre, and elsewhere. Violeta lives with her family on a small certified wildlife habitat in suburban western Pennsylvania.

Catherine Rockwood (she/they) reads and edits for Reckoning Magazine. Two chapbooks of their poetry, Endeavors to Obtain Perpetual Motion and And We Are Far From Shore, are available from The Ethel Zine Press, and a third chapbook, Dogwitch from Bottlecap Press.

“Rapture is a painful thing” by McKinley Johnson

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after Louise Bourgeois’s Arch of Hysteria (1993)

It’s no simple vanish, no snap of earth-forming fingers;
when God takes you, it's violent.
Dissonant trumpets, burning chariots,
angels grab you by the belt and 	yank.

Your clothes are not left, neat and folded,
in your seat. There is no flash of light,
no cooing of doves—you are here and next
you know you are heavenbound, Godspeed,

hips skyward, limbs trailing behind,
shoulder ripped from socket by the drag;
friction makes you burn, a reverse comet, 
a smoking censer chain-dragged through the sky,

sprinkle your sulfur down on earth—
that is what hell smells like. There is no
chance for goodbyes, or there wouldn’t be,
if your ascension wasn’t eternal. By the time

you realize there was time, those you left
behind are gone—their journey equally plummet,
you just had the luck to spite gravity, you predestined
devine, you rainbow-clad prophet, father of Methuselah.

Be glad your friends are the ones in the iron box;
be glad as you soar past Saint Peter, that he stamps
your name in the book; be glad the cherubim east
of the garden lowered their swords for you. Be glad

oh golden image of God, that He has made you
and allowed you this ascension, this fire is cleansing,
this journey a lesson. Why would rapture be anything
but painful? Even Jesus had to suffer to get here.

McKinley Johnson (he/him) is a poet from the foothills of Appalachia. He is an MFA candidate in Poetry at George Mason University and a teaching fellow for Poetry Alive! His work can be found in the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Award Anthology Pinesong, Neologism Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.

“I Search the Internet for Evidence to Justify My Melancholy” by Jacqui Zeng

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Yes, headlights are 15% brighter now
and plane turbulence is actually worse.

Birds crash into windows, 
little yellow packages dropped

onto the sidewalks, announcing
the death of spring and the rise

of brutal summer. Someone
is trying to poison the rats

in my neighborhood, but
the squirrels lay belly-up

instead. Covid rates are spiking, 
again. Last week’s death count buried

in a webpage few are reading.
Our city will get 30 days

of dangerous heat next year.
I know 30 people who don’t

have air conditioning. Heat
has a bitter taste. Like asphalt.

Lightning bugs are going extinct.
Little kids don’t understand 

what the glowing circles are 
in books and movies set in summer.

The U.S. Military is the largest
polluter in the world. 51 million tons

of CO2 per year. Also, our bombs.
Also, dust flumes six stories high.

The official death toll in Palestine is
massively, massively, undercounted.

Any rain big enough, anywhere, 
could sweep a house away. 

I need to reacquaint myself 
with the Earth I actually inhabit.

I keep a pit in my stomach
so I don’t blow away.

Jacqui Zeng’s poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Mid-American Review, HAD, and TIMBER, among others. She received her MFA from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. They are a poetry reader for Tinderbox Poetry Journal and currently live in Chicago.

“boy crazy” by Danielle McMahon

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summertime stings of honey-
suckle & sweet sweet gasoline 
spilt on blacktop

sneakers

O how the hot tin roofs 
glint in harsh sunlight & 
our lovesick hearts answer 

to the creak of slick skin 
stuck to plastic lawn chairs

hey, tell me again how
that puckish grin 
was enough to send you

set you straight 
into the arms of

classic rock radio 

blaring from every passing pickup 
the sedated earth seeding
some needy piano ballad 

with lyrics all too muddled 
to make out

the ditch weeds & reeds 
swaying along 

caught in the crutch 
of an orgasmic electric guitar 

solo

the swell of distant horse-shit & crop-rot
diesel fumes & freshly mown grass

& lo!

how the breeze comes on 
like an afterglow 
hopelessly blue

tragic

lips howling out 
for a man to moon over
i’m saying full-

on bewitched by the tang 
of condensed air 
dripping over carpet

at vfw bingo nights & the peel 
of reeling teenagers on summer 
carnival rides

tell me again about those
backseat creeps 
their pickup beds & sleeper vans 

agile arms stretched out to rest 
over sun-kissed 

shoulders

& cigarette machines pinging away 
in arcade corners like 
slot machines

hey, tell me again 
about his earnest eyes
clear as creek-water 

clear as the ice 
sweating it out 
in my empty 

glass

Danielle McMahon is the author of Cold rain in Pittsburgh (Bottlecap Press, 2024), The Oracle’s Voicemail (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), The TV Guide (Alien Buddha Press, 2024) and insecure lovesong (Maverick Duck Press, 2024). Her micro-chap rowhouse song is forthcoming in the 2025 Ghost City Press Summer Series.

“Stockton Blvd.” by Nicholas Viglietti

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Northward,
On Stockton Blvd. 

Cruisin’ under an ocean sky; 
It's a sun blazed, 
kinda day.
 
Strollin’ south – 
Thickness.

That makes you drop 
Your mouth.

On night-club heels. 

Beauty is both ways, 
All ways & always.
 
Fuck shade, 
Shine anyways.

Nicholas Viglietti is a writer from Sacramento, CA. Katrina ripped the gulf coast, he rebuilt homes there for 2 years. Up in Mon-tucky, he cut trails in the wilderness. He pedaled from Sac-town to S.D. He’s a seventh-life party-hack, attempting to rip chill lines in the madness.

“THE SPEED OF THINGS AT SPRING RUN” by Andy Fogle

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A green frog on the bank,
and we just watch. 

Everyone knows this
from cartoons and/or

being outside: the leap
is a single, swift, arc

from right there at our feet
to somewhere else

we don’t even know.
It happens when we get

too close. If we’re lucky, 
if the water 

is clear enough,
if the light is right, 

we can see the creature
that lives in both worlds

living in the other now,
and the single kick that

flicks it from one side
of our vision to

the other. Everyone
knows about the land

and water deal, 
but amphibian also means

of doubtful nature. 
Were we made

for both worlds?
It’s good we started

with just watching, ok
that we’re fuck-all to the frog, 

the one that haunts stone,
and a miracle

that we manage to track
its flight through the stream

because—God!—it gets
so far away so fast.

Andy Fogle is poetry editor of Salvation South, and author of Mother Countries, Across From Now, and the forthcoming Telekinesis, collaborations with Hope LeGro (Ghost City). He’s from Virginia Beach, spent years in the D.C. area, and now lives with his family in upstate New York, teaching high school.

Two Poems by Will Diggs

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Imma Die Bout My Queer Niggas

ion wanna die bout my queer niggas
cuz i believe we should live. 

we all gon die eventually but 
if we can keep death waiting 
i really think we should.

greedy bitch already out here 
taking everyone she can without  
second thoughts on the matter.

if she keeps beating at the door, 
i think one of us should open it up
& yell her ass back down the driveway
to that raggedy hooptie parked curbside.

but if she just insists someone accompany
her to wherever the fuck death resides
when she not robbing niggas of years

imma jump up & down waving my 
hands in the air, screaming the whole time

hollerin’, me me me it must be me!
for my queer niggas.

i know bout five of em gon tell me to go 
back in the house & sit my ass down but
them niggas didn’t get the memo. they been

doing this shit for years, pushing to the front 
of the front lines. taking all the bullets & none

of the credit for longer than folks have cared 
to acknowledge their existence. our existence.

imma die bout my queer niggas cause we
deserve a chance to live fruitfully & 
every orchard has its own harvest song &
no one gets to say ours doesn’t sound good 
or should end.

I Write Love Poems Too

i borrowed the last cup of sugar 
from next week.
tomorrow is Friday & Tuesday 
expects to bake lemon pound cake

so will need me to make good on 
my promise of repayment.

pieces of my heart float around rib 
cages in homes i have never visited.

you call him my name over dinner
& say he’s just trippin but we both

heard you even though i ain’t spearin’
meatballs or spinnin’ pasta on my plate.

when we talk on the phone i hear you lie
about the way things have gone since we

last spent time together & i identify with 
this kind of bullshitting because my life
been hell since we disconnected too.

today i heard a poem by a Brit about 
birds & bees but not sex.
it gave me chills, made my heart skip.

watched the new Destin Conrad
music video three times in a row & said
in my head, fuck that man 
makes great music & dances his ass off.

one day soon we should talk on the phone so
long we decide to continue the conversation in
person, then fall asleep in each other’s arms. 

the world is ending if the rich have their way 
which is to say they’ve got plans to be on Mars 
once the world dies, so let’s live a little together.

Will Diggs is a Black pothos father residing in North Carolina, where he hikes and loses Scrabble tournaments. His work also appears or is forthcoming with The Rumen, IMPOSTOR Lit, Furrow Magazine, and more. You can reach him at digable.creatives@gmail.com.

“Porosity” by Deirdre Lockwood

MPJ 
Season of salmonberry then	currant
raspberry
	      thimbleberry		cherry 		almost
blackberry

of ants in the kitchen

of napping while she naps
writing undercover

the blanket naked 

				                 (its crimson sleeve
				                 whirling in the wash)

On this morning’s walk with Josie
a dog named Sedona
a thousand whys

Summer’s unboundaries pour us &

I wonder if my neighbor is angry
or worse.

The ants come marching in
the kitchen windows

Out back where Peggy’s ashes 
settled at Easter

her pale pink roses
trumpeting.

Will this be how I teach Josie 
about death—or when I wipe the ants up
with a sponge?

		                                (We had an unusually wet spring.)

The neighbor’s irritation marches over
the soft pink tones of his wife
and daughter.

			                      (She lived in this house 				
                                                 almost all her life.)

Each day the sun shines, the trees ripple,
I walk all the way to the park,
I am holy

				             (weeks 
				              I prayed restore my bellows
				              feared
				              my life retracted)

so what escapes now is let in
unquestioned,
like a breath

weaving
alveoli				     i l o v e a l (l)
interstitial			     i  startle in it
heal 

	     rasp
		       thimb
			          sal
				          straw
					               black


sirens bagpiping up
				             (imagine Josie furrowing
				              I hope someone is okay)
 
to be spared for another rinse
another tumble
tongue bunched with fruit
from her palm
 

Deirdre Lockwood’s debut collection, An Introduction to Error, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in September 2025. Her work has appeared in Threepenny Review, Yale Review, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere.

“Cocktail Grapefruit Tree” by Kit Steitz

MPJ1 Comment 
I too, have more than 
one name 

I too, shift into 
the transitioning season 

becoming more me 
more defined by thirst 

as I grow away 
from the dirt

Kit Steitz is a queer, non-binary poet, and the founder/EiC of Pink Poetry Club on Bluesky. Their work has appeared in Moist Poetry Journal, the lickity~split, ALOCASIA, like a field, Roi Fainéant Press, and others. You can find their neurospicy-fueled ramblings at @kitikins.bsky.social