Tag: Poetry

“Love Can Be a Fungus” by Francesca Leader

MPJ 
toxoplasmosis feels like	    love
	to a mouse, you say,		but it’s a	                 fungus

that makes mice think they 	love
	cats, so as to, ingested,	help fungus 	       make fungus.

infected cicadas fuck without rest,
	driven mad, ‘til they drop,	by a genital	         fungus.

but don’t mushroom 	         	networks	      
	bear tender tree warnings?     so what if they’re     fungus?

all we know of 	         	 love
	is it rubs the right hub     in a brain, shaped like       fungus.
	
we two, naked roots in this 	bed,
	my damp on your tongue,	slippery-sweet as a  fungus,

your cum in my 	         	wet—
	oh, that sly,			savory		                  fungus.

Author’s note: I grew up in the northwest, and used to thrive in winter. But after a decade living in Virginia, I’ve adapted so completely to the humid, scorching summers that I shiver in temperatures below 70 degrees. I’d rather sleep naked beneath a ceiling fan than wear longjohns and burrow under layers of quilts. They say some like it hot – I, now, am one of them.

Francesca Leader‘s poetry and CNF have been or will be published in Abyss & Apex, Broadkill Review, Hooligan, Club Plum, Identity Theory, Door is a Jar, Stanchion, Literary Mama, Poetry Aotearoa, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry chapbook, Like Wine or Like Pain, is available from Bottlecap Press.

“After the All-Star Break” by Claire Taylor

MPJ1 Comment 
tomatoes 
straight off the vine
sun-ripe and wet as 
a lover’s July skin 

the day runs its 
humid tongue up 
my thigh

we are only sweat 
and angles—exposed 
elbows, bare knees, sharp 

anger that hangs
heavy in the still 
night air

I read once that on 
hotter days 
a pitcher is more likely 
to hit a batter

remind me in October to apologize 
for how I always 
pitch it inside 

aiming straight for your heart

Author’s Note: In my house, we track the year by the baseball season. Opening Day signals spring. Playoff baseball means fall has arrived. And once the All-Star break has come and gone, we are deep into summer, which in Baltimore means unrelenting heat and humidity. I wanted to capture summer’s specific blend of sensuality and aggression. There’s so much skin and sweat—you can’t help but feel horny!—but it’s also such a stifling, uncomfortable season. I spend all summer bouncing back and forth between desire and rage. I doubt I’m the only one. By October, it’s time for the playoffs and fall, and for me to make amends for all the fights I picked when it was too hot to do anything else.

Claire Taylor is the author of multiple chapbooks, including Mother Nature and One Good Thing (Bottlecap Press). She is the founding editor of Little Thoughts Press. Claire lives with her family in Baltimore, Maryland, in an old stone house where birds love to roost. You can find her online at clairemtaylor.com.

Three Poems by C.M. Green

MPJ 
Some Things are Inextricable

The rush of June returns and 
once more it’s time
things of beauty spill out of my 
mouth like pebbles like teeth
tiny and perfect and I’m only 
three years removed from 
psychiatric
hospitalization

but I want a prettier word, a neater phrase, something like

revivification
or
the continental divide

Two years ago the first anniversary coincided with my first 
dyke march and I peeled away from the crowd to buy 
myself pizza and think how it felt to be a dyke and be alive. 
In the hospital I read brideshead revisited and it brought 
me to life when little else would. I had recently shorn my 
head of hair and kissed a girl for the first time and I was 
still a woman but I was not very good at being one. Oh well

June will soon cease to signify 
madness for me, I’m sure,
give it a year, two, three—
I once thought I’d never look at 
my niece without remembering 
how I lay on a hospital cot 
for her first days, but 
now she’s a person all her own.
 
From the Amtrak between Ashland and Richmond

Virginia is for lovers, a truth that stretches
from the appalachian corner to the peninsula 
where I went mad and saved myself from madness.

You can tell me other states have trees, but 
I don’t think they have trees like this—on the amtrak
to richmond I remembered what capacious love is,

and to spit truth in my hands and rub it together
I would have to say that this is home in a way
that boston can’t be.

On the james river I leapt from rock to rock
with my best friend who has asked me to 
perform her wedding. Capacity, as a quality

of being capacious. The mountains here are
just better, sorry, than any others, because
they remind me of truth as love, as vast

as any ocean—and we have that too, 
on the other side, chesapeake bay and atlantic
saltwater, and I grew up knowing that 

this is where my bones will be buried.
The Last Summer I Believe We Will Ever Have

Kiera tells me the humidity in Boston is like
being inside a mouth and that
their IMPORTANT PAPERS are DISSOLVING!
And, I read about becoming a citizen archivist
because soon the boot will come for the face
of anyone whose art expands possibility.
And, Vickie says we should go to the beach soon.
And, I have central air in my new apartment
which I feel a tiny amount of shame about.
And, my mother talks about the supreme court
while my senator calls for court packing
while others claim victory and threaten revolution.
And, revolution doesn’t sound so bad at this point,
but not the one they’re talking about.
And, I miss Virginia like a lover.
And, Meadow and I went swimming 
in the james river, just two 
trans kids enjoying the rapids.
And, I want to move 
to Richmond every time I visit.
And, summer makes me remember strawberries—
in childhood dusted with sugar, in adulthood soaked in vodka.
And, forty-thousand people have been murdered in Palestine because
the thing I won’t call my country will not stop sending bombs.
And, I don’t know how to keep writing.

Author’s note: I wrote these poems in the summer of 2024, which to me feels like the very last summer before something. I don’t know what. I spent the first week of July traveling between Massachusetts and New York and Pennsylvania and Virginia, seeing family and beauty at every stop, and as I travelled I wrote about the place of art in the face of rising fascism and genocide. The Supreme Court made some bad decisions. My three-year-old niece became my best friend for two days. I saw every one of my four siblings, and I saw my high school best friend for the first time since 2019. The news talked about the rise of the right in Europe. I visited my 95-year-old grandmother and brought her farm-grown plums. My mom watched a lot of MSNBC. And always, since October, Palestinian people are being murdered by Israeli forces and American weapons. How to write in the face of all this? How to reconcile the love in my life with the hatred in the world? Poetry is the place I have turned to to work through these questions, and these poems are the result.

C.M. Green is a Boston-based writer with a focus on history, memory, gender, and religion. Their work has appeared in Full House Literary, beestung, and elsewhere. They stand for a free Palestine, and encourage you to find tangible ways to do the same. You can find their work at cmgreenwrites.com.

“Be Careful” by Tom Snarsky

MPJ 
for Kristi


The smoke grows, & it gets harder
to see past. In the dream I am wearing

your ring on my right hand, only now
it’s inscribed with something, one

word
too small to see. It is getting darker

crows are having whole conversations
& I’m following you

who lead me
from just ahead

a phone light on the mountainside

Author’s note: Spinoza had a ring inscribed with one word, a constant reminder to himself that can be rendered in English as this poem’s title.

Tom Snarsky is the author of Light-Up Swan and Reclaimed Water, both from Ornithopter Press. His new book A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems is forthcoming from Animal Heart Press in 2025.

“Pond Life” by Glenis Moore

MPJ 
The pond is calm today.
Its surface a glassy mirror
for the bright blue of the summer morning.
Leaves of water bistort dot the surface:
lie lows for the adventurous ladybirds
voyaging to the foreign land
beneath the shade of the bay tree.
Lime green duckweed tries to clump
where the sun bakes the water
but the water snails love to graze
in the slack heat while
the frogs doze in the silent depths
with the detritus of last year's blooms.
A newt turns beneath a leaf
and is gone, its yellow belly
echoing the golden dandelions
at the pond's rim as a soft breeze
ripples the water's face just enough
to disturb the pond skaters
and I look up to see
the pin prick of a skylark
in the brazen sky.

Author’s note: Our garden pond is small and yet it seems to attract frogs, newts, dragonflies, damselflies plus a host of other insects. It is also my sanctuary from the world’s madness where I can breathe and slip into the wild. On a warm calm day, such as the one in the poem, it reminds me that we are only one small cog in a vast array of beautiful wheels.

Glenis Moore is a relatively new writer working in the flat lands of the Fens near Cambridge, UK. When she is not writing she makes beaded jewellery, knits, reads and runs 10K races slowly. She has been previously published by Dust Poetry, The Galway Review, Infinity Wanderers and Cosmic Daffodil.

“Spring Evening” by Taylor Brunson

MPJ 
	Andrew Wyeth, 1948

Fields no longer seized by a sere sameness, 
sunlight lingers to breathe warmth into 
the room’s every seam, returning to 

remind me: See? Imagine no virtue 

in hoping for so little. Here, I find myself 
given back to the animal I am, all fur, 
all flesh, musk and appetite, loping 

out of a season that saw the sun leant 

into its own diminishment. A creature 
surviving just to learn intimately 
what rutilance the lengthening day 

demands of your eyes, closed to the light. 

Held flank against flank, our forms’ 
every slip and slope exposed. Of this tenderness,
what should I hope when there are so many 

seasons left to pass? Imagine no virtue 

in hoping for so little. Your scent, curled 
beneath my sheets, a specter 
I would follow anywhere. See?

Author’s note: Ekphrasis has become a means of extending how I relate to an art object, a channel to examine the self through a lens that feels beyond it. I wrote this poem at the turn of winter to spring and at a moment where a season of contentment in my life seemed to be drawing to a close, which felt deeply disheartening. And yet here Wyeth opened a spare room to me and asked me to consider, at the end of one season, why I might not hope for even more warmth and affection in the lush seasons sprawling ahead.

Taylor Brunson is a poet whose work has been featured in perhappened, Non.Plus Lit, and The Ex-Puritan. She serves as an assistant poetry editor for Four Way Review and Nashville Review. Taylor can be found on Twitter, @taylor_thefox.

Dramatic (Dear Stranger, I)

MPJ 
       You are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed of being. —Pedro Almodóvar

Need another word, not irony, for what happened when I fell
in love not-quite-with-you-but- with your poem about falling

in love with the idea of a woman, with a myth, with history,
with wanting to ask do you want to go swimming? to someone

who was never real but maybe also was, or maybe who’s the realest
when we all believe in her. (Clap, clap, goes the idea of Audience. Fairy-wings.)

I wanted to reach through the fourth wall and touch you, but the wall was not
a wall, it was a screen: your lipstick smile on the other side of it. So close

and way-too-far, and when you touched my (real, small, living, human) hand
in the park, just once, by accident, I full-body-unlocked in a way I didn’t know

what else to call except love, but maybe it was more like seeing,
or like the future’s aperture opening up to living-through-it—

me face-to-face with some other me, the one I hadn’t
been, yet. I know it’s boring, but I’m saying you changed me.

I’d still call that love, but love’s the loaded-est of loaded guns,
and all I want this thing to mean is open seas of something soft

or looking at you looking at the sky and thinking closer. Full-volume radio,
every stupid pop song I used to be too-scared to sing along to.

I guess I’ll never know, or care, what kind of love this is except the truest
kind I’ve ever felt: the kind where all the women stay alive

in this weird picture—my hands / your hands in separate oceans, girl-fish
bodies underwater, all the tallest marbled opalescent statues of ourselves:

full-frame visible, longed-for (wanted wanted wanted wanted) by some brief myriad
(who knows how long) (I know: not long) of infinite, enamored strangers’ eyes.

Prompt: Instructions to be Followed, Revised, and/or Ignored

1) Scholar Jay Leyda describes Dickinson’s poems as often having an “omitted center” — I take
this to mean that sometimes her poems are about something that can’t quite be said directly, or
that something important has been left offstage. Write a poem that works this way, in whatever
way you find meaningful. Remember that “success in circuit lies.”

2) Use a uniform stanza length (couplets, tercets, quatrains, etc). Metric choices are up to you. If
you’re going to break your own constraint, you’d better do it for a reason.

3) It is often the case that the I in a poem both does and does not speak for its author. This works
in different ways in different poems. Write a poem in which the I is fairly close to your lived
human self, like the part of an asymptote where the line approaches infinity. Consider subjectivity
as an unsolvable math problem, unless this gets in your way.

4) If you’re bored of your own errors, try creating some new ones. Franco “Bifo” Berardi says
poetry does this, and I like to think he’s right.

5) Say something true, even if it pains you. Otherwise aren’t you just wasting your own time (and
possibly that of your reader)?

6) On the other hand, consider the truth to be found in fiction.

7) Refer to mythology in some way. There are plenty to choose from. Proceed from an abundant
mood. Poetry, like living, thrives in contradiction.

Jo(ely) Fitch is a poet living, thinking, reading, and walking in and around Cincinnati, Ohio. Find her in most of the usual webspace places: @joelyfitch on Twitter/X, @jo_elyly on Instagram, @jo-ely.bsky.social on Bluesky, and joelyfitch.com. Jo coedits Atmospheric Quarterly. 

Dream, with an interior

MPJ1 Comment 
1.

Dream, with a tool. If this is rock, or stone. The stone
becomes hammer.

Rare outings mouth the words. We sing, behind the scaffolding
of facemasks.

I daily walk a slim incline, and steady. The ponderous framework.

A composite of inactivity, and lockdown patterns.

Robert Kroetsch: What is a letter? Sometimes it is a star that fell.

If dismember is actually the opposite 		of remember.


2.

To translate, sound. Rose: the doorbell. Electronic adaptation
of Westminster chimes.

I can barely hear. 		They saw the decades go, between us.

Toys on the shelf. Two towels decorate their floor.

I have been thinking, lately, of Falstaff. Let him come, they say.

Aoife: I am sad for your father. I remember Grampy. A name
they never called him.

To make so fine a point: in this economy?

To kneecap grief. What might that look like.


3.

An event, of saltwater. Rubble. Dreams of flying, falling.

And then, 		she woke. Our bedroom doorknob, rustles.

Prompt

If you’ve a short poem on a particular idea or thread or consideration, attempt to write a third around some of those same ideas. And then write another. And then another. Keep going. Once you move yourself through the expected, obvious material in that direction, then you are forced to see where else you might go. It is one thing to write a poem on the colour blue or the memory of a house, for example, but what might the tenth poem on such look like? What might the fifteenth? This is where your mind begins to move in directions entirely unexpected, even by you. See how far you can take it. See how far you can go.

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include the poetry collection World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). His collection of short stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press) will appear in fall 2024. An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (periodicityjournal.blogspot.com) and Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com). He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

Self Portrait as a Leading Man

MPJ 
Less than fur but more than shadow. If I were a boy:
a good start. But I have always been a girl,
even when I wanted
not to be,

wanted to play Harold Hill and lean across the desk
to sing to Marion (in the moonlight, a man
could sing it. In the moonlight…).
Why was it the boys
got all the best 
songs?

Now, with age, I hardly see it, have to tilt my face
to the bathroom spotlight to find it. 
Grown blonde, somehow,
on its own.

Not the harsh practically shimmering gold accusation
it became at age twelve, 
Charlene and I

pinched in her tiny, back-of-the-medicine cabinet
mirror, buttering the top of our lips, 
school paste thick and thicker the bleach
because we couldn’t get it
gone, make it
disappear 
fast

enough. Out out damn spot. Oh, those auditions
for grade school plays. Charlene, Prince John.
Charlene, Lady MacBeth, instead of me
because I didn’t think I’d be allowed
to say damn.

Damn you, mustache, you resistance
to a dainty kind of girlhood,
shoes I couldn’t 
kick the ball in,
dresses frilled
with itch.

I wanted to pitch overhand. I wanted
to sing Dulcinea. I wanted
Danny Zucko’s 
leather jacket

and a pair of black Chuck Taylors that could
run me out of the neighborhood’s
bracket of lawns to the
outskirts,

new houses going up but no walls yet,
foundations only in that
good red clay

my Mama would scrub all day
and never get the stain out.

I wrote this poem from the following prompt in Jessica Jacobs’s and Nickole Brown’s Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, a glorious, generous book that I highly recommend:

“An ode is a poem that addresses a particular subject, often in praise. In the poem “Ode to Fat,” Ellen Bass revels in her wife’s boundless breasts and marshy belly. / I adore the acreage / of your thighs and praise the promising / planets of your ass. Standing in front of a full-length mirror, see if you can look at the parts of your body you tend to criticize and resee then as opportunities for celebration. Write a description in which you extol the virtues and strengths of these parts, making them—just for the brief duration of this page—each their own kind of superhero.”


Rhett Iseman Trull‘s first book of poetry, The Real Warnings (Anhinga Press, 2009), received the 2008 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, as well as the Brockman-Campbell Book Award, the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, and the Oscar Arnold Young Award. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and other publications. Her awards include prizes from the Academy of American Poets and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation. She received her B.A. from Duke University and her M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where she was a Randall Jarrell Fellow. She and her husband publish Cave Wall in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Turn

MPJ 
OED, v.: 31. Followed by into or to, indicating the result of a change. a. (a) transitive. To cause (a person or thing) to become something else; to change, transform, or convert into something. 

Before this conversion we have to turn  
one’s body; turn foes against one another; turn  
a sentence toward a different cast; turn an instrument  
so precisely now for shaping. We must turn  
as the door turn upon hinges. We must turn thee  
hither, turn thee. We must turn for rest, trying 
each corner of my Bed, / To find if Sleep were there, but Sleep  
was lost. Before changing into, we must twist (an ankle) out  
of position (esp. by landing awkwardly); we must wrench, or  
we must sprain. We must first acknowledge that turning or 
peeling mushrooms is an art that practice alone can attain. 

We must turn about, and we must play. 

Why must progression start first with so much  
practice? Why must practice acknowledge before  
its process so much grief? A clumsy knocking against  
glass, music turned down soft? (Bed turned down; these rocks,  
by custom, turn to beds of down. A bed turned down.) 

What is that which I should turn to? Every door is barr’d 
with gold, and opens but to golden keys. 

This poem started off, once, as birds.

Prompt

Write a poem using as many senses of one word as you can.

Emily Kramer is an editor and miscellany living in Boston. She received her B.A. in English from Barnard College where she studied with Saskia Hamilton, and her PhD at Boston University’s Editorial Institute, where she created a critical edition of the poems of Arthur Hallam, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.