Original Poem: Flesh Theater

Flesh Theater by Fred Slusher

The cliff’s edge,
a salty drink;
cerulean & white foam; 
home, love, & road all have four letters. 
Home, love, and road all have four letters &
I tore me apart: 
limbs, cells, sinew; all held together by so little, 
a little blood, oil, & water. 
Every scrap of paper shredded,
every thread unraveled.
Living in the empty 
in-between is easy when 
you’re unsure of your own tepid 
existence. How can you tell someone 
the truth which is that you feel nothing & 
everything at once?; a whole cosmos 
made corporeal, flesh theater. Applause, 
applause! Exeunt all. There was a summer 
I became obsessed with fragmentation, 
fading into the woods of autumn where 
I discovered restoration & took a job 
selling bundles of violets by the 
old movie house on the corner of 9th & Vine.
All the customers were wine-drunk & in love;
not necessarily with each other but with the idea 
of love itself, the feeling of a mouth & a neck &
decades-old spit on celluloid.

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Poem for the Day: August 19th, 2021

It Goes Away by Linda Gregg

I give everything away and it goes away, 
into the dusty air, 
onto the face of the water 
that goes away beyond our seeing. 
I give everything away 
that has been given to me: 
the voices of children under clouds, 
the men in the parks at the chess tables, 
the women entering and leaving bakeries. 
God who came here by rock, by tree, by bird. 
All things silent in my seeing. 
All things believable in their leaving. 
Everything I have I give away 
and it goes away.

Poem for the Day: August 18th, 2021

Poem Beginning With a Retweet by Maggie Smith

If you drive past horses and don’t say horses
you’re a psychopath. If you see an airplane 
but don’t point it out. A rainbow,
a cardinal, a butterfly. If you don’t 
whisper-shout albino squirrel! Deer! 
Red fox! If you hear a woodpecker 
and don’t shush everyone around you 
into silence. If you find an unbroken 
sand dollar in a tide pool. If you see 
a dorsal fun breaking the water. 
If you see the moon and don’t say 
oh my god look at the moon. If you smell 
smoke and don’t search for fire. 
If you feel yourself receding, receding,
and don’t tell anyone until you’re gone.

Poem for the Day: August 17th, 2021

I Was Minor by Olena Kalytiak Davis

Today’s poem is one of my favorites. I hope you love it as much as I do.

In this life,
I was very minor.

I was a minor lover.
There was maybe a day, a night
or two, when I was on.

I was, would have been,
a minor daughter,
had my parents lived.

I was a minor runner. I was
a minor thinker. In the middle
distance, not too fast.

I was a minor mother: only
two, and sometimes,
I was mean to them.

I was a minor beauty.
I was a minor Buddhist.
There was a certain symmetry, but
it, too, was minor.

My poems were not major
enough to even make me
a “minor poet,”

but I did sit here
instead of getting up, getting
the gun, loading it.

Counting,
killing myself.

Original Poem: bluster & melodrama

bluster & melodrama by Fred Slusher

You’re all bluster & melodrama 
Empire State of Eden’s 
Rejects, Mama 
You can still be a racist even though 
You voted for Obama (Twice)

And I take meds to be a little 
Less me in melancholia 
Debutante in repose, 
Rhinoplastied nose your dad 
Bought you in Santa Fe but 

I had to keep my ugly 
And my secrets and my sighs tucked
Like a melody on a dusty piano 
While you were in Reno 
Getting turnt & twisted on the boulevard of broken dreams 

You told me in aught three my 
Songs were poorly written but I kept 
Sparring with my demons & writ 
My lonesomeness into dust & made myself free

Poem for the Day: August 16th, 2021

*There Should Be Flowers* by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

There should be more to life 
than disruption 
and survival 
but there isn’t. 
There should be birds 
singing your name. 
There should be paintings 
the size of skyscrapers 
memorializing your body. 
There should be love 
for you 
in everything. 
There should be a billion women 
jumping at the same time 
to move the earth off its course. 
There should be parties 
to celebrate 
the end of this world. 
There should be flowers 
to welcome 
a new one.

Poem for the Day: August 15th, 2021

*Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth* by Warsan Shire

Questions for Miriam by Warsan Shire

Were you ever lonely?


Did you tell people that songs weren’t 
the same as a warm body, a soft mouth?
Did you know how to say no to young men 
who cried outside your hotel rooms?
Did you listen to the songs they wrote,
tongues wet with praise for you?


What sweaty bars did you begin in?
Did you see them holding bottles by the neck,
hair on their arms rising as your notes hovered 
above their heads?
Did you know of the girls who sang into their
     fists 
mimicking your brilliance? 


Did they know that you were only human?


My parents played your music at their wedding. 
Called you Makeba, never Miriam, never first 
     name,
always singer. Never wife, daughter, mother,
never lover, aching. 


Did you tell people that songs weren’t the same
as a warm body or a soft mouth? Miriam, 
I’ve heard people using your songs as a prayer,
begging god in falsetto. You were a city 


exiled from skin, your mouth a burning church.

Poem for the Day: August 14th, 2021

As If I Am Someone Else by Douglas Piccinnini

so much depends 
on the authority 

of a reality 
to guide me 

in a logic 
of circumstance -   

to live comfortably 
yet desire differently.

Poem for the Day: August 13th, 2021

From the Long Sad Party by Mark Strand

Someone was saying
Something about shadows covering the field, about 
how things pass, how one sleeps toward morning 
and the morning goes. 

Someone was saying 
how the wind dies down but comes back, 
how shells are the coffins of wind 
but the weather continues. 

It was a long night
and someone said something about the moon shedding its 
     white 
on the cold field, that there was nothing ahead 
but more of the same. 

Someone mentioned
a city she had been in before the war, a room with two
     candles 
against a wall, someone dancing, someone watching. 
We began to believe 

the night would not end. 
Someone was saying the music was over and no one had 
     noticed. 
Then someone said something about the planets, about 
     the stars, 
how small they were, how far away.

Original Poem: Holding Onto a Reason by Fred Slusher

This is the first time I’ve posted my own poetry on my blog so naturally I’m terrified. Here you go.

Holding Onto a Reason by Fred Slusher

i write memoirs of crushed rose petals and 

poetry aided by artificially 

-intelligent algorithms predicting 

what it is my thumbs want to say 

next but sometimes a different agenda

takes root. on an island of one, there is 

no need for a king or a dream because 

in the world of the self, there is only 

the now — no need for dreams or sleep or 

dreams or dreams or dreams or the sound of 

rain slapping the truth out of the earth. the 

closest i ever came to nirvana was the first 

time i saw lady gaga perform yoü and i 

bearing down on a baby grand in heels higher 

than heaven studded in leather and the 

glimmer of the stage lights brighter than 

broadway than all the stars in the sky. 

somethin’ ‘bout lonely nights and my lipstick 

on your face. i swam through a river of my own 

blood to wash up on another unforgiving 

shore. i clutched years like shards of glass 

in my clenched fists and decided to keep 

holding onto a reason.