Author: MPJ

Writer, Reader, Editor, Educator.

The Body As Intersecting Lines

MPJ 
draw me free
hand, flat 
against my chest, fingers 
laid across 
a scar, my life
line, bridged by shadow 
stitches crossing 
rivulets 

don’t draw what isn’t
there, absence
of weaponry, only 
sketch in filigrees of hair
delicate
as woven hope

shade my straight lines
queer, irregular
as pathways
seamed and patched
flagrant
as dancers’ soles
mid-leap

make your brush strokes
shameless, vivid
as my slicked and sweated 
connectivity, show 
what sinew can 
be 

seen from space, mind 
wired, every
taut line mapped, a body
transitory, still
transformed, a life
crosshatched.

Prompt

What does your body mean when seen from space?

Jude Marr (he, they) is a Pushcart-nominated trans poet, editor and teacher. We Know Each Other By Our Wounds (Animal Heart Press, 2020) is Jude’s first full-length collection. His work has also appeared in many journals and anthologies, most recently Masculinity: An Anthology of Modern Voices (Broken Sleep Books)

Discipline

MPJ 
When you swing swift, open palm, to pinken
my upturned ass, I brace for the soft sting.
I take a sharp breath, then the ache stills me.
Your hands remind me to whom I belong.
 
You grasp my long hair, pull taut to tame me,
snare a whimper until I gasp your name.
Give me this reverie, animal urged
to break free. Break me. I beg, please, don’t stop.
 
I lose count and collapse, still obeisant
in your embrace. You caress where you’ve bruised,
where you’ve used skin to mark me your canvas.
You coax me back from the brink of spent sense,
 
Call me good girl, your leather-leashed darling.
I promise, I’ll be a good girl this time.

Prompt: Submissive Poetics

What do sexual submission and poetic form have in common? Restraints!

Write an erotic poem that is informed by formal rules. Use precise meter, repeating rhyme schemes, or received forms. In what ways might your obedience to a form or set of rules (or your break from them, you poetic brat!) mirror the erotic moment depicted? How might being forced into particular decisions (or positions) allow you freedom to explore? A multiple-orgasm villanelle? A sestina for your seven-person orgy, each line ending with the name of a new lover? An ode to your partner’s armpit sweat? An elegy for a vibrator that’s run out of batteries? In sex and poetry and poetry about sex, the possibilities seem endless.

Evelyn Berry is a trans, Southern writer, editor, and educator. She’s the author of Grief Slut (Sundress Publications, 2024) and recipient of a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. She lives in Columbia, South Carolina.

Mother Lode

MPJ 
the first mistake was thinking              I 
was self made
not spat out               from my host rock.

I emerged with the same family traits.
same waving hands,                 like hers     
all along—  
                      that volcano of gestures
from a greater ring,           winking heat
along the Pacific.


I had assumed                     island status.
let myself drown               aspiring to be 
a stone that         makes      its        mark  
but I was smashed against. 
   
Forever marked                    
                                    by where I came. 

crossing that ocean  
did not change a thing. still earthbound,       

I was always         a     stone's      throw
from home,

my mother's                    spitting image.

Prompt

We often think of ourselves as autonomous entities with the landscape as our backdrop, but how might land formations speak to and reflect how we move in the world?

Look at a map of your geographical area (physical or Google) as specific or broad as your imagination fancies. Take notes in point form about land formations (eg. bodies of water, mountains, prairie, etc.) and the actions associated with it. Perhaps the map’s shape is suggestive or tell a story about influence the elements such as wind/water current or tectonics. What are the primary features and how do they move? Hone in on action words and vivid descriptions. Consider your findings as metaphors for the way you move in the world. Allow the associations you make to “tell a story” that will generate your first draft.

Jessica Lee McMillan (she/her) is a civil servant with an English MA and Creative Writing Certificate from SFU’s Writer’s Studio. Read her in The Humber Literary Review, Funicular Magazine, Pinhole Poetry, Rose Garden Press, Crab Creek Review and others. She lives in New Westminster, BC.

Driving to Fish Creek Falls in August

MPJ 
I.

I never smelled like a girl
and now I smell 

wholly unfamiliar-
and this is life now.

I want to assign weight
to the ceaseless ache in my hips.

This is middle-age

how morning  and mourning 
feels at the ball joints.

II.

See? 
There-
In the distance-

Are they clouds,
a mountain range,
or a forest?

I can’t wait
to walk through the open 
palms of aspen,

eye to eye with the trunks,
rooted and reaching
for this summer storm.

We are staring 
at the vanishing point
and still, 
I pulse, race for them.

They could be all three.
Either way,
My heart aches.

I ache, regardless.

Prompt

All poets know how inextricably gay the moon is—many of us dedicate whole, joyously queer books to the absolute gayness of the moon. The gay moon is an honored fixture in our tomes. But what about mountains, man? Write a poem about mountains. Bonus points awarded if it’s very, very queer.

Kit Steitz is a poet in Columbia, Missouri. Their work has appeared in The Ivy Review, Moist Poetry Journal, the lickity~split, and JAKE. They enjoy writing poems while fending off slobbering puppies and geriatric ginger cats.

warm February watching nature documentaries

MPJ1 Comment 
a hippo heads straight for the surf
looking for a feeling of smallness in salt water
 
I dump some more salsa
on my night nachos
 
there’s a way if you try hard you can make life
really good 
 
bike shop with its doors open this morning I saw
a dude on Clark Street leaving the gym in his shorts
I saw goldendoodles without sweaters I saw girls 
in hoodies getting after-school chips 
& tea in a can I saw my kid take his coat off while
running on the playground & saw myself 
thinking it wasn’t worth getting up to chastise
he was wearing his skull sweatshirt
 
& now I’m seeing a jaguar fight a crocodile
 
& sure I’m stoned but the kid’s asleep
 
thought about opening windows today
shit winter’s so warm we didn’t 
bother taping them this year
 
there’s not much to like about Obama’s post-presidency as of 2024
but what a great voice for nature documentaries
 
a macaque jumps on 
the back of a distracted deer
& I think how humiliating without language
no negotiation 
no established friendship
you’re a vessel now deer let me ride you
 
there’s no penance I know
to make up for droning Lebanese weddings
or not closing Guantanamo 
 
there’s no reward I know
for being the first Black man
trying to preside in Trump country
 
at least 80 species live in a sloth’s fur
algae swamp moss—I dunno—looks itchy
 
animals & people willingly live in the Arctic
& Mark Zuckerberg’s terraforming Hawaii 
despite locals four years ago 
being like STOP COMING HERE PLEASE 
THE LAND CAN’T HANDLE IT
 
the land can’t handle it
the land can’t handle it
the land can’t handle it 
 
some endangered condors are making
a comeback in Chile

Prompt

It’s easy to say we live in unprecedentedly bad times—partially because we sort of do—but that does not change the fact that there is beauty and goodness and things worth living for in the world. One part of a writer’s job is to call attention to horror, another part of a writer’s job is celebrate wonder when we see it. Still a third part of a writer’s job is going outside. Take a walk around your block/the wilderness/near a body of water. That’s the first step. Then think of something you love and something that pisses you off and put them both in a poem. Bonus points if you can fit in at least two questions and/or anaphora.

Chris Corlew (he/him) is a writer and musician in Chicago. With Bob Sykora, he co-hosts The Line Break, a podcast about poetry and basketball. With Brendan Johnson, he is 1/2 of LAZY & ENTITLED, a writing and musical collaboration. He can be found blogging at shipwreckedsailor.substack.com or on Bluesky/Twitter @thecorlew.

A time of splinters

MPJ1 Comment 
Home was always there but,
it would have been nice,
to know where the door was
one day to the next. Which side 
of the house was set
to let me in. I was as stubborn
as any other child in what
I expected. Plaster and lath
was levered away and words
could wander from the rooms
they belonged to. The paths
of water pipes were made
plain between crooked
wood ribs. Drywall stacked
like a blank tarot deck waited
for months while jackhammers
cracked the slab. The kitchen
calendar Mom got at church
Christmas Eve rattled
on a nail bent by the weight
of all those crossed out days.
Wherever fire should have been
was often cold. The furnace,
the hearth. Plaster dust folded
into our daily bread. We ate it for years.

Prompt

Start with an abandoned poem or draft that centers on some aspect of your childhood – the older the better. Look for more recent experiences that echo what you have written and use details from them to flesh out and add layers/dimensions to the what is in your memory.

Lee Potts is the founder and editor-in-chief of Stone Circle Review. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his work has appeared in The Night Heron Barks, Rust + Moth, Whale Road Review, UCity Review, Firmament, and elsewhere. Lee is the author of We’ll Miss the Stars in the Morning (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and And Drought Will Follow (Frosted Fire, 2021).

Dear words I do not yet have,

MPJ 
I am writing to you from the heart of the empire, so much the heart it does not see itself for what it is. Who speaks for me from here? Am I nobody, or nobody’s mark? One eye bleeding. Grasping for where the wound came from, where the weapon speaks. There in the dark-not-dark he touches everything he loves, looking for danger, touching fleece and fleece, known and known. Underneath each, a soldier.

after Audre Lorde and Amorak Huey

Prompt

Audre Lorde writes in her essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” “What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?” Write an epistolary poem (a poem in the form of a letter) to the words you do not yet have.

Jeremy Michael Reed has published poems and essays in Still: The Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of English for Westminster College in Missouri.

Postmodern Breugel’s Icarus Poem

MPJ 
if his intent
was to confine
the moral
to the edge, to
the puny feet
by which the boy’s
muted entry into
the water is made
known, then, yes:
the eye is masterfully
misdirected to the plot
of land, the farmer’s bright
red sleeve, the slope
beneath
him, his plow;
but the painter’s hand,
whether he intended
so or not,
returned
repeatedly to the pot
of blue, applied
a wash
of brine
to everything:
every eye,
from every height,
conceding
consanguinity with the sea

Prompt: Consider Bruegel’s painting “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” and W.H. Auden’s response poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” alongside William Carlos Williams’ response poem “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” Responses to art need not remain any more static than interpretation of the art itself–with this in mind, and using the above touchstones, write your own response to Bruegel’s landscape.

Jennifer A Sutherland is a poet, essayist, and attorney in Baltimore, and the author of the hybrid, book-length poem Bullet Points: a lyric (River River books, 2023). Her work has appeared or will appear in Hopkins Review, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, I-70 Review, Cagibi, Appalachian Review, and elsewhere.

Elementary

MPJ 
My science fair projects were simple
and miraculous. Father taught me 
to float a needle on water, to transform
the carnation’s white petals 
with the food coloring droppers
my mother pinched to dye frosting.

After school 
I collected rocks.
Identified with schoolwords:
Igneous, Metamorphic, Sedimentary.
A bluegreen stone 
I named Greenie. 

My mother had a pet rock in her childhood. 
Her pet rock had a cardboard house 
to live in.

I asked her over and over—
But what did you want to be? 
I wanted to be a mother.
I don’t know.
I didn’t want 
to be anything. 
Maybe a counselor.
This satisfied me. 

When I graduated high school
my fourth grade teacher mailed me the letter
I wrote to myself. My 10 year old voice 
strange and familiar. Instructions
to the adulthood
she designed—
god	         wife
mother write

The first story I wrote was about a 10 year old girl
who loved rocks. The story named them pebbles.
She traveled to Arizona to look at pebbles.
She found a good pebble
and put it in her pocket.

The story ended in that pocket.
 

Prompt
Write a poem that begins or ends somewhere very small—a corner from your childhood home,
the bottom of a flower vase, a cabinet under the stairs, your shower, a whisper, a child’s sock.
Where does that smallness lead (or guide) you?

Millie Tullis (she/her) is a writer, teacher, folklorist, and researcher. Her work has been published in Sugar House Review, Rock & Sling, Cimarron Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Millie is EIC of Psaltery & Lyre, an online literary journal. Raised in northern Utah, she lives in upstate South Carolina.

After the Last

MPJ1 Comment 
of the birds we kept 
seeds in our pockets
our hands swooping 
to sprinkle dirt

eyes migrated
to uninterrupted sky
found the bare curve
of power lines 

plastic bags
snagged on branches
the rustle of skin 
scattered song

Prompt

Imagine a world where a single species no longer exists, how might this affect you personally, unexpectedly. What would you miss? What have you taken for granted? Write a short poem that outlines this loss and the behaviors your grief might bring to try and bring the species “to life” again.

Jared Beloff is the author of Who Will Cradle Your Head (ELJ Editions, 2023). His work can be found at AGNI, Baltimore Review, and EcoTheo Review. You can find him on his website http://www.jaredbeloff.com. He is a teacher who lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two daughters.