When I Try to Verify Why They Carpet Driveways After the Rain, Google Keeps Feeding Me Distressingly Hot Factoids About Hermaphroditic Earthworm Sex Until I thought to check, I thought I knew: worms emerge from dirt to tar on the run from drowning. Actually no one understands their reasons. Maybe worms emerge from dirt to tar when vibrations ape a predator. Or are their reasons maybe traveling fast on slicked slab? Reproducing? When vibrations ape a predator, or are mock applause when I drop a glass traveling fast on slicked slab, reproducing language is beyond me. My speech breaks with static snow, mock applause, when I drop a glass knife voice. Sticking to the surface language is beyond me. My speech breaks with static snow, turns trail. Trail: proof and proof of absence. Here’s my opened-by-a- knife voice sticking to the surface of the steel. Spill turns trail. Trail: proof and proof of absence. Here’s my opened-by-a- mouth mouth. I say of the steel spill that I can be allowed to want. I’m saying mouth: Mouth. I say all that I can be allowed to want. I’m saying I’m all mouth, I’m just open mouth, and I’m just-open. I feed and I’m equalizing pressure. I feed like falling and I fuck like falling, equalizing pressure, meant to shed a wreck of men like falling, and I fuck like falling was becoming of the nymph stage. I claim I was meant to shed a wreck of men, their aims. I knew what needy grubs, what writhing life I’d swallowed clean, was becoming. Of the nymph stage, I claim I was on the run from drowning. Actually no one understands their aims. I knew what needy grubs, what writhing life I’d swallowed clean until I thought to check. I thought I knew. ————————————– Callie Jennings called us from Boston, MA. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

we did not hold hands often we clenched legs under the table hands were too public for two who did not know how feelings socailize we sat on a bench on the corniche watching the nile at noon it was full and calm we could hear the wind sing to the trees on its sides you held my hand and I looked as you took it towards you the wind stopped singing and my heart wanted to come out and taste the water I said look how my hand looks no matter how many times I wash it you said look how mine sweats and then asked if it bothered me I held your wrist and folded your hand and brushed it with mine again and again until it is my hand that is wet you smiled and looked down happy and shy like a bird folding into itself I asked you for a kiss I could not say it I wrote it in a notebook you once wrote your name in words were too intimate for two who did not know how love talks the notebook became a pigeon back and forth between us it held words our mouths dared not admit you wrote a falouka is where you get one you knew the nile had none that day no one teaches a girl how to want without bruising the family name so you swallowed it and it bloomed somewhere I could not reach and I loved before I had the language then it came in a dialect I had to translate for myself so I spat it out and kept the bitter ache I would go through your things and asked about them I claimed to get to know you better through the small and ordinary to break what ice may be left you said I know but I secretly hoped I would be mistaken for your watermelon lipstick and go home with you but you went home and I stayed I pass by the bench and ask it why are you still here it says nothing but I hear echoes of your laughter so I sit and watch the nile full and calm but the wind no longer sings it just blows and I get cold easily nowadays but I wait a falouka might pass ————————————– Muhammad Rabih called us from Egypt. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

after Ocean Vuong and why this want for permanence surround sound my life with backups sound out my name and it’s almost a library flower pressed screen dazed stillness a twinkie and her wrapper words she presses in the shape of a body I too will one day be glad I am no longer violet and instead fertilizer no mama’s memoir no mama to read my memoir will be ocean open ooooo like whale sounds I will linger forever in the aqua uh huh I used to be fern now I’m feather my body retreats for ever/y line I write I forget my hands can strangle recycle like madness like magic I immortalize the white I wrangle with pen body oh body earth will ground us whole ————————————– Fiona Martinez called us from San Diego, CA. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

Tonight you lay on your own couch, trying to head off fixation. Your cigar is just a. You hold it oscillating between Cuban and. You are not. You tell yourself this. You flip through your notebook, and it is filled with pictures of you riding the night. The cigar is in your fingers, which place it to your lips. You take a luxurious puff. Wake up, you whimper, and linger, eyes glazing. Up, you manage. Up. The notebook falls from your other hand. Gravity is repression, you think and try to not. You know how you will feel when you awaken. You can already feel the cold sweat coming. ————————————– JeFF Stumpo called us from Litchfield, NH. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

do not be afraid of your own heart beating there must be chocolate maybe even daily I would recommend buying the better cheese drink orange juice in the morning it will help drink wine or whiskey and write things down it is always good to know your own handwriting remember how clean sheets feel and hot baths keep lip balm by your bed keep a tissue in your pocket buy a lamp so your room is warm and buy things so they are memories later and look at your hands they are beautiful! Once a week make a nice meal because you can and don’t be afraid to be alone that would be like throwing away perfectly good socks or bras keep them and buy new underwear it’s easy to forget but let your friends remind you and remember your friends and their favorite colors and kiss someone just to taste their lips love your apartment even when the microwave breaks love food even when it is toast from the toaster love your hands and your skin put rings on your fingers wear a designer lipstick and keep it in your pocket ————————————– Charlotte Alexander called us from Moscow, ID. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

What bloomed from grief came instinct, came wrath. The aftermath of my longing will show on your back like Lichtenberg figures after the subtlety of a strike. My beautiful friend, I do think heat causes molecules to excite, and if you let me, we’ll honor the burn marks after this smudging. But not before prayer, not before kneeling behind you your scent, curiously ancient I’m suddenly wet I want you protected, well fed. So please, let me sage you. The air around you. The air around persimmons you’ve hung out to dry, leaving you / not bruised but sugar-bloomed into a world you want to breathe in. And you’re gonna wanna know what becomes of it, the tsuris of us. Probably nothing, it’s nothing, right? I keep finding you in kitchens. And I, tending to a grow bag full of fairytale eggplants, their blooms bowing down as if in shame or in love or as if grieving was a thing of shame or love or is it your scent, curiously ancient, that is the intimate why of my grieving. ————————————– C. Rivera called us from New York, NY. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

three soldiers in tinfoil jackets roasting on the bottom oven rack she’d cut the ends off one too long for its own good hacked chunks from the pudgy pocked one sliced the largest of the lot into quarters pulling used foil from a crumpled stash she manhandled the starchy meal into silver uniforms tried to unwrap and uncrinkle but eventually abandoned hope supper could be smooth or smartly dressed when the oven sang out its warning she skinned them from the foil burned fingers in her haste to separate what she’d spent so much energy on wadded up the bits she couldn’t reuse and chucked ‘em in the bin the bin it’s where most of us find ourselves after a relationship sharing space with those silver skins not fitting any better than the aluminum did her and her meal prep her and her insistence others should hide what she plans to devour ————————————– C. Late called us from Kansas City, MO. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

I want to write about eternity too just like the cats probing at their breakfasts or your two week old hands Isadora brushing my beard like sleepwalking windshield wipers or the way the sun uses maple leaves as lampshades if we can spend as much of ourselves in time as out of it if our conch shell ears keep after months the cymbal samba of the sea if your feet tender toweled and purpling remember the ant hills and thumb tacks and jelly spills they haven’t found yet if your big sister and her enormous feelings and your mom and her incomparable well of kindness and how they use each moment almost like a ladle if everything is like breath if we can use jazz the way we use a shower if everything can be a little of everything else if the naked basement bulb of my patience in its morse distress can most times be enough if the slapstick surgeon of memory can hang in if the horror show doesn’t get too hungry for more and more dimensions if we can start carpet bombing the nations of the earth with dollar bills and daisy petals instead if our favorite pizza place can please fall into the amber bath of immortality and we can live there in perennial Friday evening they’re bringing cups of ice and the ovens are awake ————————————– Dylan Emmons called us from Poughkeepsie, NY. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

Storms– Wave action– Sand crash– A kite coming close– Wobbling moon– Desire work– These optimisms– There’s your thunder– Your downpour across the street– A kid beating a tree with its stick– Panting about every day– Too hot to worry about plot– Chewing ice into the mic– Today a hundred- year-old woman died– Separately I saw so many maggots later– As a recluse I really went all out– ————————————– Jenna Cardinale called us from Brooklyn, NY. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

after Chappell Roan The cold knows me in ways you never will. Darkness clamps her hand over the city’s mouth. Still, light. Music rises like smoke. And God is anything but subtle — this joint, our first kiss. Now my heart’s a helium balloon — pink, no strings attached. Sailing high among the lanterns — paper clouds in a makeshift sky in a lesbian bar where I keep my sunglasses on so you can’t see me cry. If we’re already in Hell, then that explains middle school, which isn’t when I knew. But the body, like God, offers signs. Neon and to the point — Open. Welcome. Thank You. When I called desire by name, the fog lifted from our past. (Seventh grade art class. I wanted to tell you.) Twelve years later, your palms are electric against my cheeks. Eyes, the color of parched earth — so here is my grief. Winter, like any crush, renders my layers useless. I forgive myself. In New York, there are no chance encounters. There are choices other than fear. ————————————– Micaela Camacho-Tenreiro called us from Wharton, NJ. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

May 10th Perseverance is terminal, Every day dully getting up. The end times keep edging us But I’m a Taurus— I prefer to come And to go another round. They shot Katy Perry Into orbit, then let her back in. We turned the mission into memes To stop thinking of burned old growth forests, Boiling oceans, where all the bees have gone. In the shuttle there was something To do with a world tour. Will the wet bulb be worth it? A senator says we all have to die sometime, Which is news to me! I am always telling people How Katy Perry killed a nun. Now she’s coming for the rest of us. I too could call myself an astronaut; We tell ourselves stories in order to et cetera. I wanted heaven But space spat me out. I heard earth girls are easy. I’m so easy I only learned how to fight Back last week. I didn’t win. But I cured my depression By making the bed! The cure lasts ‘til just past The point I’ve smoothed the duvet. I draw the curtains. I play a record. I shake my locally-sourced oat milk To eke out one more use. Does it bother me, us fucking other people? Jury’s out. But if I picture you Brushing another woman’s hair From her mouth an atom bomb detonates. I see all my bones. They are female And furious. They rattle and shriek like death Metal. Don’t fucking brush another woman’s hair From her mouth. A hole’s a hole, darling, But tenderness is non-renewable. Bottle your affection for only me. I’m sorry. I have to get up again. I hate when there’s only one outcome. ————————————– Jamie Hood called us from Brooklyn, NY. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

I have been made aware of the fact that you died in 1846, but am hoping this will reach you regardless. I have heard you are the foremost expert on solar activity, weather patterns, and astronomical cycles, as well as the best times to fish and how to build a community. I have heard you lived and worked in New Hampshire, which is where I have recently come to live and sometimes but rarely work. Did you know that ticks no longer freeze here, in the winter? The annual mean temperature has increased by about 2.6°F since your days. I check my ankles in both August and January, and am disappointed by how little it snows. I read about you on the Almanac’s website (a website is like a book that’s in the air) and wanted to reach out. They have a biography on you, they praise your name, they say there were two total solar eclipses in the US in your lifetime. They publish a new cake recipe on your birthday every year. They sell things now, too, like a Fruits Vegetables & Herbs 1000pc Puzzle for $19.95 and a Jeffersonian Brass Kinetic Wind Vane for $119.99. Don’t worry, that’s inflation, mostly. I know you just wanted to help the travelers, sailors, bookkeepers, beekeepers, and prognosticators. I don’t know if those people exist anymore. Robert Bailey Thomas, I fear summer now rots into last ditch efforts and expletives over the softness of peaches, so I’ll wrap up with some questions I hope you can answer. Why can I only see some stars out of the corner of my eye? Was your America much greener? Why, even when I am so quiet, and so good, can I not catch a fish? Why did you die, when you knew every psalm by heart and every benefit of witch hazel? Do you ever feel like July has forgotten your name? Do you know what I mean? Hey, Robert Bailey Thomas, please say you know what I mean. ————————————– Lauren Mills called us from London, UK. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

Solidarity is pissing in adjacent stalls. A godly marriage is a throuple with Christ. Dude was a real trove of sword lore. We cheered for the biracial babies. At the racist wedding, the pastor praised Korean cars & submissive wives. Cousins snuck liquor into the dry reception while sober Christians gnashed their teeth. So began the diaspora. One spent a year in Singapore; another posted pics from Botswana. Were we the first to get divorced? At least on that side of the family. For twelve years she was my grandmother too. Remember how we buried her in the rain, & how afterward we ate crab cakes. ————————————– Alexa Vallejo called us from Philadelphia, PA. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

April 2024 Wish you were here is no synonym for I miss you, though of course I do. Wish you were here Like I know you would love this LIke I want to remember this with you, not to you Wish we could rebuild the subtleties to each other and build the details Fall over each other in the telling Want you to feel this first hand, absorbing it too Count you among the partners here along for their own rides Drinking in the soprano soloist, a bringer of comfort, this time firmly hand in hand I said I wish you were here because I WISH YOU WERE HERE This time, I’ll settle for one of us November 2024 I miss you jumps to my mind and tempts my tongue, only for strangers to hear it. To be somewhere alone is to be there unseen, thoughts unheard, except by their thinker. Their thinker, like The Thinker, sits unseen by any he knows, his crowded head superimposed on whipsering autumn plane leaves. Surely I am beheld as I behold, traversing sunlit plazas, long skirted and parasol shielded If only as Narcissus in mirror-black windows. My thoughts have value even if no one reflects on them. These mountains scrape the sky even after the sun dips behind them, the gardens keep growing in darkness even after the dykes who dressed up for the art have wandered out Jesus and Mary Magdalene remain trapped amid rough marble after I stop circling them . And I grow softer and stronger by the day, even though at the end of it there's no one to feel it for a thousand miles ————————————– Juniper Danger called us from Philadelphia, PA. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

“There can be but one teacher – nature. She must always be consulted.” - Camille Pissarro I’m wondering how best to preserve this day when I find myself summoned outside into the warming light, tossing my net beyond the low islands and the jagged edge of the Sound, hoping its threads return in gilded attire, yielding a tangle of blessings culled from both sea and hollow that are a mix of old-growth splendor and the commonplace, while I fall back to silence, watching the way the morning light breaks apart and is then quickly redrawn by wind gusts that blur and wrinkle the surface of the water, and entranced by the soft rustling of the beach grass and taste the tang of salt-scented air while white-capped tides are suffused with the same mussel-blue hue as the open fist of sky and seeing how both air and water are stitched together by these clamorous gulls rising in rapture then swooning towards shore and asking what more can be done other than to try and somehow slow earth’s hurry and call summer back. ————————————– John Muro called us from Glastonbury, CT. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

"4-tongue poem" by Chiara Crisafulli by VOICEMAIL POEMS

The last night we spoke, you said we could make this work. I sold the bed we used to sleep on, to forget, hoping it would work. I left the pink book you gave me on my desk, your letters in my drawer, the ones where you said love is work. I left the memory of us sleeping on a cliffside in my head but deleted the picture we took, dead-eyed from waking up to work at 5 AM on another coast, the night sea barely visible beyond your head laid against my thigh, sprawled black hair, it was easy work to be in love with you, but it was impossible to love you in a way you felt. We were two felled trees attached by thin string, trying to work gravity against itself. In a Key Largo parking lot, years ago, before we ever fell through each other, your hand brushed against mine. We worked so hard to be that simple again. B, forgive me. I would have given myself away (I did) just to make it work. ————————————– Jarrett Moseley called us from Charlotte, NC. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

We promise to protect each other After Willie Perdomo which means we pinky swear it which means we draw our pinkies like switchblades from brassy knuckles which means i hold your hands between the pocket space where we keep the taser between the thumb & index the hammer between the index & middle the cross between the middle & ring & the middle is my weapon of choice which means i talk a lot but my face says i can’t fight your face says we should run which means i face you standing still pressing my switchblade into yours wishing the switchblades were switchblades & not pinky promises we draw from brassy knuckles want brass knuckles but don’t want proximity want a gun but don't want that smoke want incense but only handmade want these hands to be protection enough that’s what space in poems are for: to store arsenals in this ars poetica keys between my fingers never felt comfortable like i would get sliced too if it came down to it i am walking across a blacktop i could tar myself into the sun is saying i should get home but home is on my hip i am aware of you & all the things that follow to follow & nothing more which means we promise to protect each other we pinky swear it ————————————– Lauren Dotson called us from Chicago, IL. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

Get in vans with strangers: a Palo-Santo heavy Chevy G20 with a sonnet-spilling prophet; a red 70’s Volkswagen shaggin' wagon with three long-haired surfers headed South; a fuzzy pink and purple pimped out festival-goer’s fantasy stocked with the best candy—one taste and I make-out with God. Talk myself out of a felony on one side of the border, have my first lucid dream on the other. Skinny dip a bioluminescent shoreline with a nowhere-bound time -traveller, his touch the lightning that strikes me sober, makes me want to remember. Take LSD blessed by a Mayan shaman on a Panamanian beach. Find out the only love I’ve ever known isn’t free—my softened gaze on strangers spinning around me, I love them not because they’re mine but because they never will be. Get all my shit stolen and backpack for three months without a backpack. Dance callouses onto the bottoms of my feet. When strangers barge into the van, I learn that boundaries don’t need to be barbed wire fences, a purple velvet rope is all you need. The prophet heads North and Tara asks Are you sure he’s not the one who stole all your shit? Nope. Hand what’s left of me to a golden-haired dreamer who hymns any instrument he holds. Change my mind about building a home in the gap between his front teeth. Leave him carving our initials in the rearview like the one before him left me. Fall in love during a solar eclipse. Let a wizard undress my notions of pleasure in the stolen darkness at mid-day, melt into the world of tantra without knowing what it means. Yes, a nameless rose does smell as sweet. I’d forego the forever my college sweetheart promised when he said he’d ask my dad, like I was an 18th century commodity. I’d handpick the same bouquet of brief eternities, still slam on the gas pedal—my rose-coloured windshield shattered to pieces when I travel to the final frontier to find the lights in his Northern eyes out of order those nights. Kintsugi: the Japanese art of repairing broken items with gold lacquer; freesias swooning over the fallen vase—her slow dance of shimmering scars. Given the chance, I’d still fling myself off the shelf, bless the falls that broke me golden. ————————————– Dré Pontbriand called us from Antigua & Barbuda. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

"these days, everybody wants to hear the prophecies of yore at a mcdonald’s drive through, and i just don’t think that that’s what i’m after" & when my friend pulls up & the speaker starts crackling with some eldritch horror, & it asks, do you want to die with that? & my friend looks over at me & asks, well, do you? & i say i’m good with just the pepsi, thanks & the eldritch horror, profound & decrepit, wails like a thousand suns being born or the edge of a paper slicing through skin or your dad shutting the door on your family the morning that he dies & my friend says, oh, i think they only have coke products here, & i say, hm, then i guess a cherry coke & my friend says, okay, a mcchicken, a cherry coke, plus can i get an answer the question unspoken in my heart? because my friend is always saying shit like that, especially in the mcdonald’s drive through & this time the voice from the speaker is sweet dulcet caramel dripping off a spoon, a siren song in symphony, & my friend says, damn, i think i’m a dollar short, but it’s okay because i have two dollars in my pocket, & anyway, the prophecies are free here, free like the way any of us are, free as a man with an albatross around his neck, free as an albatross around a man’s neck, since the albatross is dead, and isn’t death a kind of freedom?, free like a limited time only BOGO sale at the Gap, free like you’ll still have to give up your firstborn son, but whatever, who’s having babies in this economy, anyway, not to mention your firstborn won’t be a sun, if anything they’ll be the MOON, & we drive to the window & my friend’s camry sounds like it might fall apart right there & so might i, if i’m being honest & i look into the black hole at the first window or rather, it looks into me, i blink first & it becomes a murder of crows, silent, except to say second window only tonight, & then i say it, just for good measure, second window only tonight, & we’re at the second window, which is a little grimy, with a freckled bespectacled teen behind it, & she looks like me, a study in personal time travel, but when i ask my friend he says, hey, doesn’t that guy look like me? so it could be the whole world, or nothing at all (like most things) & i’m handed the cherry coke without much fanfare & the teen leans out the window to whisper in my friend’s ear & i strain to listen but all i hear is the rustling of the first breeze that ever swept this earth, & when my friend turns to me, he says, the prophecy machine is down tonight. can i get a sip of your cherry coke? & we drive away, dial-shifting through static, as the world dissolves into whipping wind, fresh fizz, & our laughter, spilling into empty eternity ————————————– Aparna Paul called us from Cambridge, MA. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems