Issue #24.1 A Poem by Joshua Zeitler
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Joshua Zeitler is a queer, nonbinary writer based in rural Michigan. They received an MFA in poetry from Alma College, and their work has appeared in Cutthroat, Black Fox, Aquila Review, Transients, and others.
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Issue #24.2 A Poem by Henry Gould
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Henry Gould returned to his hometown of Minneapolis in 2015, after 45 years in Providence, RI. His poems and essays have appeared in Mudlark, DiVersos (Portugal), Poetry, Jacket, Critical Flame, and elsewhere. His most recent books are : Continental Shelf : shorter poems, 1968-2020 (Dos Madres Press), and Holy Fool : a Memoir (Lulu.com). The complete Green Radius, a book-length poem, is forthcoming in 2024 from Contubernales Press.
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Issue #24.3 End of Summer Double Issue: Mary Elliot & D.A. Nicholls
A Poem by Mary Elliot
Home
The trees are budding and the seeds are scattered. My sister calls for me. My pockets are nearly empty. Nothing left under the mattress. More than three-thousand miles stretch between us.
In my bag are two packs of cigarettes and a dirty magazine. The essentials. Checking off three miles, I reach the corner store. The sun hasn’t broken through the horizon.
A trucker will travel from Alaska to Tennessee, and he has an open seat.
We sit in the repose of empty roads. Two packs last us the morning. Coffee and gas sustain us. Evening comes. The stars cleave to their positions, immovable fires of motion.
In the morning we arrive; the azaleas unfold.
My sister stands on the porch. Old age has cracked its floorboards and wrinkled its paint. She steps down, hands shielding her from the sun, eyes slits, grin deepening.
She has always looked like this. Every year the sparrows surprised her with their return.
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Mary Elliot holds a M.A. in Philosophy from Boston College. Her writing has been published in Macrina Magazine, The Peabody Journal of Education, and Academy Journal, among others.
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Two Poems by D.A. Nicholls
colic
there is a little lever that clicks to the one side or the other when your baby cries.
though, if unoiled, the lever will stick to the side it last did—though maybe you rise
anyway. you diaper her quick anyway. you check to see she seems alright,
even though the open lever admits thick rivulets of what else a cry could mean: just the sight
of the world is enough to intuit the most of what’s amiss; and it may be she, already wise,
is pulling down the switch on her own minute machine, and telling us it tonight.
discovery, or exaltation
i against every naysayer whom i love uphold the right of the cusperating chirracious noise-bartering cicada outside our windows and somehow gotten in the car rattling its body off
for surely if i do not hold the line here he will have nothing to say when my very own well ordered friends do muffle and shush me down from the shaggy leaves of our backyard trees
and when isn't it someone's sometime or another’s to perch upon the porch stoop and bust out of chiton and then not shut up about that either for a good long while
and anyway my beloveds just a little patience if you’ll tuck any exception under tongue your expectations far away all this percussive revelating takes the sap straight from a man or dare i say and i dare say from a clear-winged homely hunchfly and its hundredkin or more
it’s just a moment or a moment’s moment on then we alike will rest again among the roots conducting rods of an autumn god tipped up in summer for a song asleep within a song resounding with a song marked out in coming blooms
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D.A. Nicholls is a writer based in the American southwest whose poetry has been featured in Agenda, The Honest Ulsterman, CHEAP POP, The Pierian, and elsewhere. His debut chapbook is titled The Sky Today, and his website is danicholls.com.
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Issue #24.4 A Double Issue: Jacqueline Berger & Rebecca Moon Ruark
A Poem by Jacqueline Berger
I Wake Up at 2AM to a Girl
She and her friends, but her voice rising above the rest, wake me, laughing. Happy, or drunk, and from the displacement of dream it’s me in the street so late, so early, my life has barely begun.
I hold a grudge against myself, the missing bounty of my thoughtless years, missing, the sheer joy of being a body, keeping it up all night, why did I think I needed so much sleep? My death-bed self will likely look back with similar regret on me.
The girls have moved on, buoyant, sloppy, holding each other to steady. When I wake again it’s morning and my heart is heavy as an heirloom lugged from place to place.
Dear Future, I begin the letter I’ve been meaning to write, Do you call yourself old at 80? Are you still alive, still tending the storeroom of memory? Distance flattens the contours, so let me remind you that nothing was simple, why it took me so long to decide about Jeff, why I didn’t have an affair with A.
The girl is forty years behind me. Her future self will forget this morning’s pounding head and sour stomach, recall only, as it should, the reckless entitlement of joy.
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Jacqueline Berger is the author of five books of poetry, including Left at the Ruin, recently published by Terrapin Books, The Day You Miss Your Exit, published by Broadstone Books in 2018, and The Gift That Arrives Broken, winner of the 2010 Autumn House Poetry Prize. Selected poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac. She is a professor emerita of English at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California, and lives in the California Central Coast.
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A Poem by Rebecca Moon Ruark
Satie Sestina: YouTube Comments on Gymnopedies
For forty years, my husband played Satie’s Gymnopedies and Fugue when we made love. He passed away in twenty-three and now his birthday finds me listening again. The rests, the breath are loud enough to hear and wonder that the world is groping still.
From sweating, wild horses they fall still, my second-graders, listening to Satie. They write of sun and sky, not what they hear, know not of chords and keys but much of love. Transfigured by the sound, they call, “Again,” and play the part of earthly angels now.
Been listening since the 60s, god, an’ how this song is helping me recover still! The Wawa, working nights, the fugue again, and some things don’t resolve: past loss, Satie. The ravers and the metalheads, they love the flights of sanity that we sell here.
Could play this on a loop for hours and hear it new. The Velvet Gentleman, gone now— “nude dances” robed in distance, time, and love dance on. His monocle—a seer still. Where velvet and a bowler for Satie, stripped down to bones, our song begins again.
A miracle of mother-love, a gain: my nursing baby, like a nestling, hears the song that makes her wide eyes call, Satie! Devouring sound, we breathe in time, and now we rise like singing, flying full but still like feathers. Love is love is love is love.
This song was one of Father’s favorites, Love, our Christmas morning present, and again, a miracle of melancholy still plays loud enough, beyond the grave, to hear. At eighty-eight and happy—gone for now. So too the muse, the scrabbling Satie.
The rest’s not death but love held fast, and here again, we widowed orphaned donkeys now turn fledgling and resplendent. Still Satie.
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Rebecca Moon Ruark draws on her experience as a performing artist for much of her writing across genres. For this poem she combined the relatively new medium for performance and critique—YouTube—with the very old form of the sestina. Newer to poetry, her poems have been featured in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry and in DASH Literary Journal, which nominated her prose poem, “Six Places I Have Slept,” for a Pushcart. When she’s not working as a higher education writer, she’s busy running her blog, Rust Belt Girl, where she hypes the writers of her native region. Today, Rebecca lives in Maryland with her family. Right now, she’s probably still obsessing over Erik Satie and most things French.
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Issue #24.5 A Double Issue: Harold Bowes and Meghan Sterling
A Poem by Harold Bowes
Fun with Fossil Fuels in a Pacific Wonderland
The plane that goes from my town to the nearby city has eight passenger seats, and one for the pilot, another for the copilot.
The flight is full this morning, and there’s a lot of luggage, too -- some of the passengers are transferring to an international flight.
Donna from the counter walks across the waiting area. Says, “Harry you’re going to have to ride up front with the pilot.”
With a plane this small, it’s about the right balance, from front to back. They start loading the luggage onto the plane.
I remember when I was a toddler, or a little older, in a ferry boat, blue water out to the horizon, meeting the sky, those two surfaces,
those two apparent planes that, incongruously, curved.
When a poster exhibit at the local art center wrapped; this was a few years ago.
The art director said, “This is for you Harry,” a poster that we purchased to hang in our entertainment room:
David Byrne at Roseland Theater, a split image, his young version on the right, old version on the left.
After the plane lands in the city, I drive a rental car to the coast – the railroad tracks parallel the highway.
Crab boat lights hover on the blue-black horizon. The boundary between ocean and sky blurs.
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Harold’s recent collection Detached Palace Garden (Ravenna Press, 2017) is available from Powell's Books, the legendary bookstore in Portland, Oregon. Powell’s has been a literary touchstone for Harold over many years. When his publisher placed two copies of his book there, he took a proprietary interest, frequently visiting the small press shelves to check their status. One day he found that the book buyers had acquired a used copy, now shelved next to the new copies. Another day he found a copy of the book left on a table next to a reading chair. Someone had been reading his book!
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Two Poems by Meghan Sterling
Sonnet for the Nighttime Grovel
Those hours of the night I feel flesh against my flesh, still wanting touch, still asking the questions I would have thought would be answered. Burned out by the heavy tax of the sun. Tamped down by the sexlessness of parenthood, that floodplain of middle age and years of lost sleep. Still, I want. The long hallway of desire has led me to trouble before, the shadows I dread having to explain. Shouldn’t I know better? Those hours of the night my body only knows soft, moonlight’s fingers prying open all that is closed. Long legs, long arms, secret fur, the body’s sour musk, those hours of the night I wait for something to come and stroke me like a hungry dog.
After a Discussion of Horror Movie Plots
What hides in the dark? Moon’s sister, the shadow. A moon, millimeters away from your mouth. A child’ brightly colored rainbow with fangs. A star in the shape of a mother. A father in the shape of a monster. Water pooling along the walls of a bedroom, light shivering as if shaken in the snowglobe of your house. The way water angles its light like silver worms. Where did the worms go when dawn hid its face? Mother was weeping. The dark was always hungry. All you can imagine will eat away at the life you have built. A moon, millimeters away from colliding with your teeth.
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Meghan Sterling (she/her/hers) is a Maine writer whose work is published in Los Angeles Review, Colorado Review, Rhino Poetry, Hunger Mountain and many journals. Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions), Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press) and View from a Borrowed Field (Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize) came out in 2023. Her next collection, You Are Here to Break Apart (Lily Poetry Review Press), is forthcoming in 2025. Read her work at meghansterling.com.
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Issue #24.6 A Double Issue: Whiskey Radish and Isaac George Lauritsen
A Poem by Whiskey Radish
Two Poems by Isaac George Lauritsen
Metal Show
Oh, this scream is like the deep roar of an ancient forest
of verbal trees or a Norwegian warlord escaping history
through the throat of this dude on stage
surrounded by coworkers (i.e. his bandmates). They
and the modern stage lanterns cover in sound and light
the crowd launching each other onto beds
of arms to carry the horizontal bodies
making bull horns out of hands to the edge of the stage
for one look stored for a story. At half the age I’m now
I saw how metal music could cover a venue
in synchronized foreheads smashing the air.
I could never remember a single song but my mind hummed
an electric feeling I swore shared its buzz
with those around me. Older now I wonder
from my aerial view in the mezzanine
if metal bands would consider matinees for those of us
who haven’t felt the spirit it seems in a century
of a mosh pit’s flailing limbs and circular jogging
summoning some odd primordial dance.
Always the Wall of Death that perfect square
inside the crowd forms two sides with people
who collapse the shape as they sprint then lovingly shove
those who too know their bodies are only briefly their own.
On Two Planets
I never hulk out of my sleep. My eyelids open only one lazy way, letting down my dream’s attempt at an action sci-fi film. Though I patrolled in sleep that planet like the desert beige of Phoenix with a shitty fluorescent saber, all the thunderstorms and birds singing songs of chainsaws made me want to wake up to a desk job. Thanks, dream, but I’ll not know more about the battalion I was of or the enormous forehead’s gorilla lurking below the water line. I’m sorry I can’t be the balloon eyes of a pink elephant for you, dream! I’m sorry I can’t speak to your language of fireworks with my admiration for a perfectly loaded dishwasher. If it’s any consolation, everything is appropriately strange on this fully conscious planet. There is no mystery in the daily way the woman who lives above me walks on her fists, punching her way from room to room to room to sidewalk where the worried parents and gravitational laws have collaborated with the local legislators to ensure she walks solely on her two feet. Because if she doesn’t, she will receive a fine.
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Isaac George Lauritsen’s acts of writing, drawing, and living most often take place in his hometown of Chicago. His words and images can be found or are forthcoming in Afternoon Visitor, fugue, Oroboro Lit Journal, Puerto del Sol, Rubbertop Review, TILT, Trampoline Poetry, and elsewhere. A micro-chapbook, Advanced Delivery Machines: 10 Picto-Poems, is forthcoming from Tilted House. You can look at his photos and photos of his drawings on Instagram: @ig_laurit
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Issue #24.7 A Double Issue: M.J. Arcangelini and Elizabeth Joy Levinson
A Poem by M.J. Arcangelini
PETTING THE WAVES
“it was the ocean I wanted, waves like pets.” – Maureen Seaton
Curling at my ankles, Purring, wet and cold, leaving Grit in my shoes, wet socks, a Calling card of sand, ground shells. Glass fragments polished smooth, Translucent shreds of jellyfish Sparkle in the wet sand and sun. Ribbons of dark green kelp Strung down the beach, along The tide line as it slips out Hesitant, halting. Or pushing, Moving in instead, shoving That line further up the beach Toward the base of the bluff, Marking how far it was willing To stretch, perhaps to rub against The cliffs like the cat who Used to pull herself along my Ankles, rubbing and purring.
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M.J. Arcangelini, (b.1952, Pennsylvania) has resided in northern California since 1979. He has been writing poetry since age 11 He has published extensively in both paper and online venues as well as over a dozen anthologies. He is the author of 6 published collections, the most recent of which is PAWNING MY SINS, 2022 (Luchador Press).
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A Poem by Elizabeth Joy Levinson
Vivarium
Fifteen, locked under glass, worthy of observation, finally. Your long sleeve shirts your shitty scars. Creature with a new language, tapped out in pin-pricks. What rosetta stone could have unlocked their meaning? Did you even understand what all that blood meant?
You were no real danger, easy little risk even the 3 am piss tests, you didn’t fight. This destiny, your own doing, you were not the girl who tried to escape, not the girl who tried to hide a broken spork in her sheets, not the girl who smuggled cigarettes back in her ass when given a day pass. Even the one who had OCD, who came to breakfast with caked mascara because she just could not stop, even she was more interesting than you: you chose routine, the same breakfast each morning, and you were the only one whose parents visited nightly, and there it was, your audience — were they your captives, or did you trap yourself in your own performance?
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Elizabeth Joy Levinson is a biology teacher in Chicago. Her work has been published in Whale Road Review, SWWIM, Cobra Milk, Anti-Heroin Chic, and others. She is the author of two chapbooks, As Wild Animals (Dancing Girl Press) and Running Aground (Finishing Line Press), and a full-length collection, Uncomfortable Ecologies, available from Unsolicited Press.
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Issue #24.8 A Double Issue: Kathleen Hellen and Susan Johnson
A Poem by Kathleen Hellen
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Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, Kathleen Hellen’s work has been nominated multiple times for Best of the Net and the Pushcart. She is the author of three poetry collections, including Meet Me at the Bottom, The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, and Umberto’s Night, which won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House prize, and two chapbooks.
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Two Poems by Susan Johnson
Grave
We were hiking along the river,
the river through the mountains,
the mountains revealed by melting
glacier, the glacier turning into river—
feedback loops wherever we go
that never let go. Cascades that
can’t get out of town fast enough,
popping like a kettle roiling, mud
boiling, water rushing through forest
cleared of forest. The entrance is
closed which means the exit is too.
We stop to shovel one pile of dirt
into another pile of dirt. We want
to smooth things out but there’s
too much dirt and our shovel is so
small. Unlike our vows to solve it all,
which balloon into clouds. We head
for the summit, the idea of summit
that we carry in our heads. Three hundred
years ago it was chestnuts. Now it’s
houses, one behind the other, behind
the other then hills of sawdust so hot
they burst into flames as the world
looks on, looks into its own grave.
In Lean Times
In lean times they felled trees.
In plentiful times, they also felled trees.
In-between times as well.
Seems felling trees is all people do.
Whole forests brought to their knees.
We plant two. Two. White birches
that begin red-skinned with green
toothed leaves. Will we live to see
them thrive? Is that too much to presume?
We sit on a bench constructed from
a tree felled one afternoon. After it
thumped the earth, a startled starling
circled the air where it had stood
for decades, straw in her mouth,
confusion in her wings. Where’s
my nest? Gone in the time it took
to fetch more hay to weave into
its base. We watch her from our
wooden home heated by woodstove
and are felled again and again.
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Susan Johnson's poems have recently appeared in The Meadow, Dash, Front Range Review, and Aji. She lives in South Hadley MA.
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Issue #24.9 A Double Issue: Clay Matthews and Jennifer Overfield
Two Poems by Clay Matthews
Psalm [A friend shows me a picture]
A friend shows me a picture of an angel he saw shining in his rearview mirror at the Dollar General parking lot. I’m struggling to make it through the book of Ezekiel, waiting for my next CT scan scheduled the day before Thanksgiving. To be clear, I give thanks and work to be present with my breath, words, family— even the new graffiti on the apartments across the street this morning: cock and endless balls. I’ve been burying things in leaf piles, though, and hoping the wind might do the work for me: to be felt and not seen, known and not formed, to breathe but speak only through sense. I practice a literacy of letting go and sit a little longer in my truck now before going into stores, waiting to catch some glimpse of light hovering over the asphalt behind me.
Psalm [I am running out of ways to say]
I am running out of ways to say my heart is breaking. The dead limb stuck in the Maple tree, the crickets on the sticky trap I put out of misery with a pencil eraser: the end, I’m sorry, it’s spitting ice and snow today. Here was a tower of hope torn down to a dismantled storage shed and rusted nails, the skeleton of 2 x 4s and grief, cold beer and a bible on the bedside table. It gets dark, the lights at the gas station flicker on and hold a small circle against the dark. A small circle against the dark. I pray for a friend who can’t breathe and for God to make everything right, for a child crawling dumbly into death and my marriage falling slowly into torn envelopes and silence. Lord, I know you’re more beautiful than this—more even than last lines of poems and long windowpanes.
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Clay Matthews’ books are Superfecta (Ghost Road Press), RUNOFF (BlazeVox), Pretty, Rooster and Shore (both from Cooper Dillon), and Four-Way Lug Wrench (Main Street Rag Books). He currently lives in Elizabethtown, KY and teaches at Elizabethtown Community & Technical College.
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Three Poems by Jennifer Overfield
You’re young. Maybe not young but
definitely
symmetrical. Like reproductions of the
big wave that hang
in empty restaurants,
and the types of people who are
alone there, who sense they feel alone
insufficiently.
These things take practice.
***
I could be this lake
trying to remember you
to death.
***
And then it was no
longer possible to care,
except for the way
air flaps it’s winged seeds, and the
sounds you make and then make again
when you’re asleep, having forgotten
the blue shirt on the floor.
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Jennifer Overfield is a poet and multimedia artist. She lives and works in Houston, Texas.
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Issue #24.10 A Double Issue: Gabriella Lindsay and john compton
A Poem by Gabriella Lindsay
Sorrow is Wet
The leftover spit between Louisiana humidity and cold window panes creates a canvas of fog diced into rectangle frames perfect for painting faces.
We drag our fingers in the condensation and draw laughing mouths and smiling eyes and scowling frowns but all come down in tears which run to the window sill warped due to uneven expansion or contraction caused by changes in moisture content like our coastline buckling in on itself cracking its knuckles for a fight even as it sinks.
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Gabriella Lindsay is an artist, librarian, and poet. They hold an MA in Information Science. They are the editor of the collaborative Louisiana queer art zine, Cher. They are a Librarian at the LSU Libraries and work on their art between links expiring.
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A Poem by john compton
cancer rattles my grandfather's body—
a violently gentle
deliberation. the ghost
of my grandfather, a marionettist,
pulls heartstrings inside the chest
to gift my dad a few last breathes
to help him translate
goodbye into an understanding.
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john compton (he/him) is a gay poet who lives with his husband josh and their dogs and cats. his latest book: my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store (Flowersong Press; dec 2024) and latest chapbook: melancholy arcadia (Harbor Editions; april 2024)
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Issue #24.11 A Double Issue: Sam Rasnake and Stephan Delbos
A Poem by Sam Rasnake
One
“We are a thought being. One” – Joy Harjo, Facebook, Nov. 2023
In the long, seamless cover of the cosmos – vast ripples of light and shadow, a wrinkle, a shifting with no end – we, in our circles of pain so tiny, so difficult, so impossible,
at times lost, can’t help but swim rivers of hate and silence. They’re everywhere, but they aren’t the only rivers we’ve known or can know. We always carry the skulls and
bones of a thousand unanswerable questions. There’s no other way. Everything becomes one thing. The breathing in and out, slowly. Eyes following a bird’s shadow across fallen leaves.
Drinking water on a cold day, the sun blinding in its one beautiful, terrible gift. Traffic slipping into rhythms of darkness. Someone opens doors. Someone walks past. Skies of charts, dots, empty
spaces. We’re the snake eating its own tail, perfect chaos in a murmuration of starlings with swirls of ovals and bells, feet walking Escher’s impossible staircase. If not, there’s only small, smaller, smallest…
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Sam Rasnake is the author of Cinéma Vérité (A-Minor Press, 2013), World within the World (Cyberwit, 2020), and Like a Thread to Follow (Cyberwit, 2023). His works have appeared in Wigleaf, Drunken Boat, Poets / Artists, MiPOesias, Best of the Net, Southern Poetry Anthology, A Cluster of Lights, and Bending Genres Anthology. Follow Sam on Bluesky @samrasnake.bsky.social or X @SamRasnake.
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Stephan Delbos is the author of the poetry chapbook In Memory of Fire (Cape Cod Poetry Review, 2016); and the poetry collections Light Reading (BlazeVOX, 2019); Small Talk (Dos Madres, 2021); and Two Poems (The Literary Salon, 2021). His translations from Czech include Vítězslav Nezval’s The Absolute Gravedigger (Twisted Spoon, 2016) and Woman in the Plural (Twisted Spoon, 2021); and Paris Notebook by poet Tereza Riedlbauchová (Verse Chorus Press, 2020). His scholarly study, The New American Poetry and Cold War Nationalism, was published by Palgrave in 2021. He is a founding editor of B O D Y (www.bodyliterature.com). From 2020 to 2024 he served as the first Poet Laureate of Plymouth, Massachusetts.
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