Tag: tercet

Two Poems by Will Diggs

MPJ

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.

Two Poems by Chris Corlew

MPJ1 Comment

I MAY NEVER BE STRAIGHT EDGE BUT IT IS PUNK ROCK TO QUIT DRINKING

in the NOFX song Bob spends 15 years gettin loaded until his liver exploded
saying he wanted to think about nothing

am I made of the same weakness
afraid of checking my mail? 	

cockroaches & bedbugs my first apartment like Charybdis’ maw of misery
molded paperbacks thanks to a busted ceiling pipe like
cosmic justice for my settler ass like all streams flow 
into the sea & yet the sea is never full homie

all becomes dust	
it is not a sin to recycle a book

the best conversations happen in a tavern but
the revolution doesn’t happen because you got drunk

the revolution is clear-eyed & callous-handed & joyous in struggle 
the revolution is constant as a river & leaves you sore but naturally high
the revolution is dancing with everyone on the floor

in community garden mornings
in the drag punk band hollerin on the street festival north stage
in the public school fundraiser night

it is song you started but only the rest of the band could finish
it is a reliable bus route
it is a shared box of blueberries

WHITE PARENTS OF BIRACIAL CHILDREN

do people ignore you
at the airport 
if you’re the parent not holding the kid’s hand?

our kid’s pre-k3 teacher called him a ‘bright light’
which was as adorable as hummingbirds
of course that’s exactly what you are yes it is you are bright light

cut to a couple years later 
talking about being half-Black half-white 
he asks how much of him is bright light

every part of you is bright light I tell him
but that’s not the point 	it’s Black History Month
& sun is shining at the park
& my wife teases me 		he still needs sunscreen you know

one day my son will grow up
& be another Black man
I can screw up a handshake with

Chris Corlew is a writer and musician living in Chicago. His work has appeared in Cotton Xenomorph, Whisk(e)y Tit, PassionFruit Review, Cracked.com, and elsewhere. He can be found at lazyandentitled.org or on Bluesky @thecorlew.

“I Wanted to Tell You about These Geese” by Amorak Huey

MPJ 
I love the work a kiss can do. The way
it leaves language
harmless, temporary. 

The way it erases a whole history of distance.

It’s raining in Ohio this morning,
roadside ditches filled to overflowing,
and I don’t have words

for the distance between this morning
and our last kiss.
When I was an editor

I was taught not to write last
when I mean most recent.
What I mean

is we should be kissing even now.
I mean you should see this sky
emptying itself into the day.

So much rain. And
despite the rain, geese anyway. 
Torrents of them, flying home.

Amorak Huey is author of five books of poems including Mouth, forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2026. Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches at Bowling Green State University. He is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024).

“Counter-clockwise” by Nico Green

MPJ 
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.

“Prepping” by Matthew Murrey

MPJ 
I’ve done some: a little extra 
food and toilet paper socked away,
and cash in case cards won’t work. 

Better is the idea of cultivating 
being a neighbor—pitching in 
for the broken or the broke. 

She knows first aid. They raise bees. 
He is an expert at cultivating  
beans, greens, and fruit in the yard.

Of course I’ve considered guns, what 
country do you think I’m from? But bullets 
go only one way—no going back. Better

is the suggestion to pay attention 
to right now, the handbasket, and make it 
artful, sweet, and inviting all the way to hell.

Matthew Murrey is the author of Bulletproof (Jacar Press, 2019) and the forthcoming collection, Little Joy (Cornerstone Press, 2026). Recent poems are in One, Anthropocene, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. He was a public school librarian for more than 20 years, and lives in Urbana, IL with his partner.

“Shopping Music of the Gods” by Kyla Houbolt

MPJ 
Someone said hurdy gurdy heart
so of course I thought accordion heart,
vuvuzela heart, calliope heart.

Hello, heart, I say as it knocks
on my door.  What have you been
up to? Oh nothing much, says
heart, achingly.

We have broken much together,
heart and I, and yet we still
do not know each other
very well. I offer my kazoo.

Heart declines. Pulls out
a blues harp, says,
shut up them damn birds,
I got something to say.

Kyla Houbolt is a poet and gardener living in North Carolina, USA. “Shopping Music for the Gods” will appear in her full-length selected and new poems, Becoming Altar, forthcoming from Subpress in autumn 2025.

“Fantasy with Christopher Plummer’s Captain Von Trapp” by Violeta Garcia-Mendoza

MPJ 
Tonight, yes to the boatswain’s whistle,
yes to the scold that won’t reach your eyes
& yes to that eye contact

while you pull off your gloves
& pin my arms back when we’re dancing
the Laendler. Yes to the clap of us

in the courtyard, yes to the path
of guitar-callused fingertips: neck,
collarbone, back… Yes to your lips

at my ear crooning Edelweiss.
O homeland of saltwater bodies 
coming undone.

Violeta Garcia-Mendoza is a Spanish-American poet, teacher, and suburban wildlife photographer. Her debut poetry collection, SONGS FOR THE LAND-BOUND, was published by June Road Press in 2024. Violeta lives with her husband, teenage children, and pack of rescue dogs on a small certified wildlife habitat in western Pennsylvania.

Two Poems by Catherine Rockwood

MPJ 
Inverie, Knoydart, June 2024

By the harbor again and once again low daylight.

When the mountains are illuminated 
we receive them.

Somewhere uncoastal, southward,
teens

are keeping themselves alive 
as they can in little towns

where hairdresser shops 
outnumber other business.

No. Strike that. 
Even here

where robins land 
on sustainable pub-tables

to receive a peanut, shelled:

here 
in these isolated

regenerating districts
with their managed woodlands

and fences, 
their reiterated

statements of difference 
from the mainland 

here too
teens

are keeping themselves alive
as they can 

in low light
near breathless June waters. 
Boston Seaport, July 2024

Where the unpredictability of the body
meets weather 
is the world.

To weather is to survive
and fall apart.
Like this.

I am weathering, every day
and laughing sometimes:

loving my children
according to their specific ways

even as cloud comes right down to the water
and summer loses its sum

becomes mer

a salty fog we swim in, having missed

the sea.

Author’s Note: I guess what I found by Loch Nevis and Boston Harbor was a surprising commonality of quiet gray haze and overcast skies. That’s a more frequent phase of summer now, when it isn’t bright/scorching or cloudy/scorching. * I also found a surprising but to me sustaining commonality of care. Wherever I was I ended up thinking about kids, both my own and the children of others. The work children do to live their lives. The quotidian deprivations and difficulties that are, even in a best-case scenario, part of growing up. The way this present time is different, yes, but not cut off from how kids have lived in the past and will live in the future. The way we must and will go with them.I placed myself next to the sea a lot, this summer.  It’s much on my mind, the sea, and what our relationship with it will be in the coming decades of climate instability.

*(fuck Exxon, fuck Shell, fuck BP, etc., and their enablers) 

Catherine Rockwood lives fairly close to Boston. She/they reads and edits for Reckoning Magazine, and reviews books for Strange Horizons. Two chapbooks of her/their poetry, Endeavors to Obtain Perpetual Motion and And We Are Far From Shore, are available from the Ethel Zine Press.

Two Poems by Chris Corlew

MPJ 
WINDY MORNING KAYAKING PRATT BEACH

today I take
only what the Lake gives me

what oceanographer can measure the height of swells
on sight? 	no conquest only quagga mussel infestation

today the Lake wants me like a 	pawing 	overeager lover 
& I sprawl myself on top of its welcome

today is white-capped 	& the first time 
swells knock me off my kayak shoulder missing lake bottom rocks

humble thyself homie
in the sight of the Lake

northwestern winds 		& no room for ego
do you want to go home? 	do you want your arms to yearn to

nag in neglect until before bed when you do push-ups?
or do you want to have fun?

no concern for horizons 	no pondering time in these swells
only the water in front of you

paddle droplets on a life jacket
puddles in the boat

ribs in the sand after & pluck
a hair from the back of my thumb
THE TREES MY DUDES THE TREES

headbanging kelp forests 	the sea-cats
of Chile’s beaten coast hunt with agility implying they
could probably guard Kevin Durant one-on-one		(in the dark

the stoned horror writer
makes a note of vampire bats on screen)	evergreen rainforests where I

would maybe melt out of reverence 		can I kiss the mapungauri’s hand?

                                                                    ambush is easy enough when you
                                  look like a leaf the narrator says about frogs

reincarnate me as a dew drop above the Valdivian Forest
seems a million times more
purposeful & fulfilling than 21st century USA

the trees the trees are so many can you
		see the trees & not praise the trees my comrades-in-leaves?
can you see the Chilean palm trees mix with Valdivian species & not worship the earth?

                                                    the trees the trees marvel at the trees
                                  & cacti grow in the clearings

the trees depend on monito del monte
to swallow their seeds whole & shit out germinating pods in sticky residue
this animal is 40 million years old we’re talking first mammal old

that should be sacred the trees should be 
considered a holy site

                                  & the monkey puzzle tree resistant 
                 to volcanic ash can you even believe
how big the world is? 		how tall the trees?

can you even believe how impossibly small
even a 20-story apartment building is? & yet each life contained within a treasure? even thousands of miles from these sacred trees? 			what a treat
                                               to be alive to be stoned & up late
& watching a streaming service I only have
so my son can watch Mickey & Bluey & Spider-Man 	(& I can watch Star Wars)

& no there’s more there’s the divine
dewey & shaggy with cacti in the clearing 
the trees my dudes the trees

we end as we began
water-bound
confronted with wave battering

Author’s Note: Summer—and by extension kayaking season—is fleeting. Yet the water is eternal if we manage it properly. There should always be a Lake Michigan and therefore should always be summer days I can spend cradled and held atop its currents, one of millions of grateful water passengers. I’ve never personally seen the beauty of Chile’s landscape or wildlife or people or culture, but I really hope to one day, and it bums me out how much climate change could affect all of that. So these poems, to borrow an idea from my friend and co-host Bob Sykora, are attempting to freeze two marvelous moments in time: a day I went kayaking and a night I spent watching a nature documentary. With hopes that this act of reverence through art can honor such sublime connection with the wider world and inspire more.

Chris Corlew is a writer and musician living in Chicago. His work has appeared in Cotton Xenomorph, Whisk(e)y Tit, The Rumen, Cracked.com, and elsewhere. He can be found blogging at shipwreckedsailor.substack.com or on Bluesky @thecorlew.

“After the Start of Summer” by Kevin Risner

MPJ 
the lake blooms a bright green more vivid than geckos.
When these blooms enter the household, it’s only natural
to collect them, place them in a glass vase, burn eyes
with pollen. Pink and orange petals flutter onto the table.

They say that algae blooms mean an overabundance
of phosphorus. It’s toxic.

We drink up facts, reap the consequences, even when
it’s not our fault. I am a wooden raft headed down
the river after a heavy rain. The water’s thick there.

I hope to make my way out of this sand trap
through storm into sunlight, no longer
hidden by mattress-stuffing clouds in
the endless overcast that is November.

Author’s note: This poem spent a long time percolating and undergoing changes, much like how lakes do each year. In 2014, a severe algal bloom formed on Lake Erie off the coast of Toledo, which led to extreme water restrictions (for drinking, bathing, washing dishes). The result of agricultural runoff, this particular bloom shows vividly how much we, humans, have adversely affected waterways of all sizes and shapes. I try to explore the beauty of such events and how they can become disastrous, and how often they may return. The blooms will be pretty severe this year, but not as bad as the ones a decade ago in 2014. That’s a small sliver of hope. And I hope we can find these slivers from time to time, not just here in the crevices of this poem, but elsewhere in the world.

Kevin A. Risner is from Ohio. He is the author of Do Us a Favor (Variant Literature, 2021); You Thought This Was Just Gonna Be About Cleveland, Didn’t You (Ghost City Press, 2022); and There’s No Future Where We Don’t Have Fire (ELJ Editions, 2025).