Tag: poem

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

“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.

“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.

“Counter-clockwise” by Nico Green

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I want you and I want you too.
I want two loves around me. Swirling in a spiral, if possible.
Counter-clockwise.

I want to look up at the sky and see two faces.
Two moons orbiting an alien planet.
We left the old one behind. It couldn’t hold us anymore

I want to look up at the sky and see two faces.
Then I want them to look at each other with all the love in the Universe.
The Universe we created together. The old one couldn’t hold us anymore

I want two dogs and two cats and two lovers and 6 rooms, for when we need to be alone.
I want to collect all the love that loves me back and fill a house with it.
A new species of love that grows when exposed to sunlight. 
The old love couldn’t hold us anymore.

Nico Green is a Brazilian-American poet based in Lisbon, Portugal, and the founder of Poems for Strangers, featured in a documentary by Ukrainian filmmaker Anastasiya Bura. His work explores love, sex, and non-monogamy, reflecting his activism in sex-positive and polyamorous communities. He/Him.

“I was a child, all body.” by Tara Burke

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It was always the mountain
and me. Paris Mountain.
The woods were mine:
tree tops, rocks, creeks,
space between. I topped
for the first time on leaves
straddling felled trees.
The way they laid across
space, over huge limestone,
and moss, rocks begging me
to shimmy across. I laid
on my belly, wrapped
my young arms and legs
around her girth. I couldn’t
reach my own fingertips,
pressed into the rough bark,
pressed my ear too, so I
could hear her breathe.
This was around the time
my pelvis had a body
of its own, my pubic bone
close to anything at all
and a rhythmic rocking
took over. I let myself
be all pelvis, all fingers
and ears, all torso and legs
and tongue. I was a child
who’d pressed herself
into many things but
the forest took me in.
I came alive, moaned
like an animal, looked
around. Was it me, or this
tree? Or the wild, how it
always seemed to see?
Alone, usually, but not
here. She, the trees. She,
the mountain. She, the space
between my sound and hers.
We came up together, I learned
my body, she taught me what
it is to be alive, how to be a wild
beast on this blue green earth.

Tara Burke is from Paris, Virginia and teaches at VCU and the Visual Arts Center of Richmond. Her poems were recently published in Screen Door Review, Shenandoah Literary, Khôra, and Southern Humanities. Lately, she’s absorbed in making shorter, surreal love poems, speculative stories, handmade quilted things, and clay houses.

“108 degrees, honey” by Thanh Bui

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there will still be humans, my lover says 
though we might not be included in that.
our kind isn’t just going to die out immediately,
to which i envision the skin of the ones who’ll 
live. visit a Titanic museum—to predict which 
persons will survive, you’d need to know their 
statuses. an iceberg does not discriminate, nor do 
fires, but people? we aren’t natural. did you know 
the world is running out of sand? we’re not even 
wealthy enough to know what to hoard, to hide. 
for now, i can get water whenever, i am rich with 
someone else’s thirst. our guide this summer 
was from Quảng Trị, & didn’t know of electricity 
until 2004. while he used candles, i moused 
computers, i watched tv. during covid, i witnessed 
my relatives pray for the vaccine already in my body 
waters away. watching is another kind of pain. 
that’s why they use it as torture, too. what’s as 
un-human as having no power to change what’s 
in front of you? bó tay as it all sinks. is it a good 
thing i don’t know what species we’ve lost? which 
cats are the last of their kind? my phone keeps 
turning off, says it’s too hot to function. the summer 
construction workers have a tip: turning off the AC 
in their homes an hour+ before work helps them 
acclimate to the heat. elsewhere, they’ve invented more 
ways to survive. but we are a country of litigators.

Thanh Bui was born in Gò Vấp and raised in Dorchester & Alief, and is a writer & actor based out of Austin, Texas. She loves constantly.

“Natural History Museum” by Pam Yve Simon

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Posing for a selfie in the museum,
you pulled me in close for a kiss.
Motion sensors disengaged, alarmed wire quieted,
the security guard on a lunch break. 
All at once, our love 
became visible and accessible. 
For that one moment, 
I didn’t feel like a relic
of myself.

Pam Yve Simon (she/her) believes in love and art. Her poetry and photography have appeared in print and online publications, including Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Stanchion, Northern Otter Journal, FERAL, and The Daily Drunk’s Marvelous Verses anthology. Say hi via Bluesky Social @PamYve

“Summer Light with Migraine” by Donna Vorreyer

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a horseshoe shovel

Something precious, pink shimmer of quartz in rough earth—
precious glimmerseed of memory. No lie, things have been rough.
Pink-cheeked fever, clustered stab of pain. But I’ve found here, in
shimmer and dirt, a slow sifting of time, a stalled second-hand, the quartz
of a Swiss watch stymied. When I close my eyes, I imagine a mound of
quartz where the garbage lies, where even trash cans shimmer
in the right light. How lucky to have known love, its gardens of pink,
rough caresses. Such delicate firmness. Both common and precious,
earth that blooms diamonds, stays fertile, alway growing something.

Donna Vorreyer is the author of Unrivered (2025), To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) & A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She hosts the online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey and co-edits of the online journal Asterales.

“We may think Bede” by Catherine Rockwood

MPJ1 Comment 
did or could not say what true speed was1  
without impossible foreknowledge of 
jet-bombers, lasers, a crouched F1 car.
But this morning two sparring sparrows flashed
past my dull head into a wet azalea
and in that wing-touched moment of departure
my soul spoke, Oh.

1 Viz. Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica II.13 “The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter…”

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. A third chapbook, Dogwitch, is forthcoming from Bottlecap Press.