VOICEMAIL POEMS

ài yɑ, I gasped in a foreign language he laughed, taking off my socks toes without nail polish, he kissed the sweat beads on my back without a photographer a woman in white dress a man in linen suit held the turquoise river and their breath fit bodies running shirtless under the sun poured molten gold made me stare, ài yɑ he left before we wrinkle ————————————– Elena Wu called us from Chicago, IL. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

Warning: do not think this bed will bear your weight across the bay. What holds you at night may not carry you in the morning. The air might already be leaking. It may not be what it seems. Run your hands along the seams. Check every fold for hidden faults. Feel for well-meaning pokes and jabs. Caution: be wary most of holes. puncture holes/nail holes/eyeholes/keyholes/pinholes/drainage holes/armholes/loopholes/pie holes/watering holes/hellholes/wormholes/rabbit holes Help with finding the holes: place your ears to the surface. Listen for sounds of escaping. The culprit may be close to quiet, whispering in the farthest corners. Be cautious about what you hear. It may not be the truth. None of this will be worth the tides of sleepless nights, bailing out the water rushing over your dreams. ————————————– Kathleen Granados called us from New York, NY. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

BERLIN (Reuters) - A swan has fallen in love with a plastic swan-shaped paddleboat on a pond in the German town of Muenster and has spent the past three weeks flirting with the vessel five times its size, a sailing instructor said Friday. He's not half nuts, this German swan, to love Something so near the actual, you might squint from shore, squishing sand beneath your toes, to see its broad white belly part the shining green, neck angled always toward the clouds deflecting every antic of its frenzied, mini-suitor. This happens, right? Who among us with a single red corpuscle hasn't dug in and waited the whole doomed thing to its conclusion, wanting some chill beauty to paddle its slow turn toward us on the man-made lake? In your case, not a Muenster tourist boat, let's hope, but more like the narcissist with lovely eyes and a voice to unzip things to, or the one that cut the right profile but sank like a Petoskey stone. But still, in spite of tearstains, sucker punches, fists to the glass jaw, the dumb heart beats, and tries again. See, there he goes, beak agog and hissing at the rival birds, wings spread to seem more menacing, black webbed feet paddling frantic through the algae. Then night sets and a silver moon beams down on bird and boat, afloat alone, and in the pale light looking for all the world like the shape of love. ————————————– Christina Kallery called us from Ann Arbor, MI. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

Con·tain·er /kənˈtānər/. (noun). 1. An object. 2. An object that can be used to hold. 3. An object that can be used to transport something. Synonyms: Vessel. Do you feel like a vessel? Ves·sel /ˈves(ə)l/. (noun). 1. Ship. 2. Hollow container. 3. Cask, Barrel, Ship. I think of myself as a container. in august i started eating myself into myself. this isn’t a metaphor. i was actually hungry. a barrel of hunger. i didn’t even know it could rain like this. i collected rain in the barrel of my Stom·ach. /ˈstəmək/. (noun). 1. An internal organ. 2. An appetite. Stom·ach. /ˈstəmək/. (verb). 1. Consume. Did you ever think of yourself as a daughter? A son? Con. /kon/. (noun). A Vietnamese noun meaning: 1. Daughter. 2. Son. 3. Child. Wasn’t I a vessel, then? Con. /kon/. (classifier). A Vietnamese classifier meaning: 1. Specifying the act of being an animal. 2. I am of animal. 3. To classify animacy. Wasn’t I a container? i wanted to be a container. until i became a container. to beg a small god to turn me into a prayer. i watched myself become a container. over and over. over and over. wasn’t i a good daughter/son/child/ Con. /kon/. (noun).? A Vietnamese noun meaning: 1. Daughter. 2. Son. 3. Child. 4. Animal. I watched my mother become a Con·tain·er /kənˈtānər/. (noun). 1. An object holding grief. 2. An object holding grief. 3. An object holding grief. An object holding daughterhood. my mom was a daughter. the way i was a daughter. to contain a prayer. to consume— a barrel. vessel. con. animal. daughter. over and over. over and over. wasn’t i a good [daughter/son/child/]? ————————————– Blue Đào Nguyễn called us from Saigon, Vietnam. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

Joy can survive climate change. Radioactive baby crawling on all fours. So full of movement and color. Half the animals are gone, but baby finds other creatures to play with. Their gills are on the outside, their eyes haunting and heterochromatic. Their skin glows, too. Sharp, variegated ecstasy. Exuberantly fat lines aglow with graffiti ethos. Taking the world as it comes, not as it ought to be. Radiant Baby, sainthood may be possible, and if it is, bless this unholy poet who looks around the disappearing world and finds only despair and not beauty in the orange- yellow-red pollution moon. You do not even cry, baby, just burble in comic sans. You just climb towards nuclear proliferation chanting dada, dada. You grant us serenity on the subway. You model for us commercialized innocence. We buy you, our joy. We buy you, our hope. We smile at your innocent determination. A cave painting for the end times, depicting a Neanderthal dreamscape — a pictograph that will survive the inevitable collapse—but beautifully, a chunky butterfly kick away from annihilation, a stroke towards JOY! ————————————– Sean Hanrahan called us from Philadelphia, PA. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

I’ve always wished God could grow me down into an egg in the snow. White on white. Piles of drift. Back in Cincinnati my tongue grew red in the midday cold, waiting for someone to suck it like cherry popsicle. Those were the days I danced like Jesus was coming. I took off my clothes and I felt very good about it, like it was the only thing in the world. Once I petted a farm chicken so softly she believed she had a greater purpose than egg production. We sit cross-legged in her coop, whistling this world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through as reminder, as prayer. We pass through the world’s largest rubber band ball. We pass through Penn State. We steal away to California and sit on the hood of my car at Pebble Beach, watch a group toss breadcrumbs at seagulls under a sign reading NO FEEDING. They’ll approach us, ask if I saved her from the butcher board or if her quivering eyeballs remind me of my own. I’ll tell them she wanted to find herself outside of her children, that the only quiver in my eyeballs is from the wind. People don’t realize there doesn’t always have to be some kind of tragic backstory. We could just be happy together. It could just be that. ————————————– Carolene Sarah Kurien called us from Fort Lauderdale, FL. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

"paul wall drives me home after our sade concert date" & names me his favorite dime. rubs his hands on my jukebox thighs & bobs his head to dj screw along the lake. i lean into the purple of midnight & take his palm to my cheek. suck in the freezing drip of platinum rings. we sail the shore south in a topless whip, my lollipop mouth matching its lacquer. he, my bourbon smooth guide, diamond dipped & dazzling, sips on the slow syrup of evening. grips the wheel & flashes a mouthful of mansion. serenades me with sweetest taboo & turns the car into a quiet southern storm. my hurricane on 44s, eyeing my heart & sweetening my tea. love is a 2004 vixen fantasy and he is my lone star. we glide on chrome, chasing the glisten of cosmos, riding along the asphalt’s bass. ————————————– Musu Bangaru called us from Chicago, IL. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

Between months of silence, my father sends me communist TikToks from Chinese accounts. I assume they are pro but can’t know—I don’t have the app. What is between us remains unwatchable. But I want to look at him across our dimming country, water and wheat becoming one expanse of night. If I could drive to him, I would begin the wrong way. When he sends me a video of Anne Hathaway giving a speech about her father, all I can see is her face, unmoving, and I’m left to imagine what she might say the way my father in the dark is holding closely his phone and trying to remember my voice. ————————————– Andrew Chi Keong Yim called us from Queens, New York. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

Mom is sitting cross-legged on the hard kitchen floor, slicing cabbage and green onions for kimchi, covering her mouth as she laughs. She’s watching 7-year-old me in the living room, lip-syncing to Madonna and Whitney Houston, holding my Walkman like a microphone, grabbing my shiny Michael Jackson glove suspenders, pretending I am the next winner on Star Search. My brother, who is two years older, is practicing taekwondo with G.I. Joe action figures. A few feet away on the couch, dad’s holding a can of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, watching a scary VHS tape he rented for the weekend. Mom is still angry at him for showing us The Exorcist, but that’s how we spend quality time together. To be together. The year before the 1988 Seoul Olympics, we leave with mom for America. There will be no more walking off base to open street markets where vendors sell made-to-order spicy rice cakes, or giving my allowance to that elderly Korean lady who sells packs of Juicy Fruit gum from a broken hand basket. I will never again squat on a dirty public bathroom floor, or be taunted by Korean school girls for being a “mutt.” My brother and I will miss the walk to school, past the movie theater where we saw Return of the Living Dead, with other kids whose future is also unknown. No more origami classes or writing our names in Korean. Dad will stay where duty calls, while we move to a city in Virginia nicknamed Bad News. Heaven is no longer a place on earth. We are no longer together. ————————————– Trish Broome called us from Sykesville, MD. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

They say I appear in different places, to different people, at the same time. Saints bilocate too. If I had wings, my flapping would make every verb a we. Pain has splintered me. I am detached, restless, scattered to the wind of people’s wants. I am the necessary monster, the needed threat, the whispered warning. I am forever in your mouth. I do penance. Nothing is ever anyone’s but a woman’s fault. Have you never wept? Throat empty tired, so much squelching over the past? Lucky you, if you’ve never walked against a current until you turn the river red. But I know, even if we do it in hot, locked cars, us cryers are many-numbered, numinous. Underneath the waters, underneath our skeletons, there is ancient hunger, a shared and staggering scream. What if instead of inconstancy, a man let us throw these hands that mother and matter and mutter around a sturdy neck? What if we had floated downstream together, nothing good getting away? We could have kissed our children like they didn’t know what kisses were. We could have sung. Love has made me small. ————————————– Cristina Paul called us from Los Angeles, CA. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

When I tuck my hands into the wool fingerless gloves, close them into fists, then open them again to the world When I drive to CVS to pick up my dad’s antibiotics, for healing the stitches Under a puffy bandage on his cheek When I walk in the biting 36 degrees, come inside with a crimson face, and find that the frost has expelled the damp muck from my mind When I taste the bitterness of a cappuccino and the softness of Quiche Lorraine When I stir ground turkey in the skillet pan, add southwest taco mix, And fix a plate of it for my mother When I encourage my friend to share her singing, because singing is giving When I string gold, red, and azure beads onto a necklace to wear into town And at night, when I soak in the shower under the pelting hot water thinking, “Thank you, thank you.” ————————————– Claire Kenny called us from Philadelphia, PA. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

I want to own that electric blue Ford Fiesta again. Drive all night, & all day, & all night through. Let the odometer eat the miles it takes to marvel at an endless Texas, until the car runs out of gas, & I am staring down the old shingles on the gazebo in the town square in Calhoun City, Mississippi. Back to the place where my grandmother was raised (the last of eight), & my grandfather is known by his middle name. Where we spent a sweet tea summer bottle feeding the puppies sprouting from under the neighbor’s porch & I learned to play checkers on black & paint picket fences white. & got good at using the old broom to knock down hornets nests in the attic bedroom. & there was still time to sit in Bayne’s back garden, call him great granddaddy once more, while he stood between the vines of his tomato patch, peeling away each soft leaf to reveal the globed fruits. In the palm of his hands, the army knife from his daddy, the great-great unknown, unfolded to divide orb from stem; those hands, blue-veined & knobby at the end of August, that stayed clasped together while he waited. I remember, I wanted to dig down into the loam & take a piece of that place, craggy & soft, with me. Wanted that earth to know me, the ridges of my tongue, the way I took communion. How I too knew what Piggly Wiggly was & how to dress when called for Sunday Service. Proof that I knew the patience of that harvest, ripened in those hills. The red clay, no, maybe, maroon, like the tomato, served on a paper plate between white bread, or bitten through the flesh right there in that garden, where wet tracks from the seeds ran down my cheeks; my voice, a lullaby, humming for the trees. ————————————– Jordan Cobb called us from New York, NY. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

I come in knowing where you are, hunched beneath the showerhead, breathing hard, swaying under the spray, eyes unmoored. I enter the tub soft-footedly, into the shallow water, circling your ankles until I become a small ocean, and you, shuddering in my tide, hold yourself hostage with the strength of your arms wrapped around your knees. the window fogs over, steam on the glass keeps crying as if it’s trying to drown you. and the tub swells inside me then rests within me. you raise your head. mist softens around you, and you remember how to breathe. ————————————– Montana Tiatia-Sefilino called us from Auckland, New Zealand. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

I was minding my own business when it happened. A flash of brown. A single ringing blow, then a dull thud. That was all it took to end the mourning dove. How our window shook to look upon its brutal work. At least it was quick. A useless mercy. To spend a life singing just to go out making that sound. To have the entire sky, wide open and die trying to fly into a room. I did the only thing I could: go outside to make sure. I knelt by the lifeless body, feathers all askew. It seemed to look back up at me. Its eye a planet — gone still, its final act an accusation. Days later, what happened on the other side of the glass never touched me. I touch the window, stained now. A casual stroke of red like a hurried kiss goodbye. ————————————– Grace called us from Midland, Canada. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

He left his toothbrush on my sink— a reminder so slight, yet it haunts me as surely as his touch. I pointed it out, as if I wished to free myself of it; he smiled as he walked out my door, and chained me with his leaving it there. And I, a fool to my own heart, left my razor in his bathroom— a blade as sharp as he sees me, as useless as hope, bound to rust with the hours wasted. ————————————– Lilly Purdon called us from Miami, FL. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

plush meadow thick, like the mop of an evergreen love speckled instinctively with dandelions marking its fertility –i bring my palm to my duafe which beast of the divine bestowing her highest honor releasing it all carried; re-entering the soup time’s folding us all into the dawn of my thirty-fourth –yes us all, broken down. ribs sprouting with floral aplomb tufts of fur and moss matrimonial i don’t wrestle my angel we kiss sweetly after sharing the heavenly cup she shares with me the burden of misattributed humanity we swap prophetic missives of beauty at once, a faithful servant angel asks “do you know how it feels to die and be re-born?” i tighten my grip and stare off into rigid dark my death never quite holds how naive i was in youth our lessons never far behind us a raven honks “amelia, it was just a false alarm” i soothe earth angel i say “we’re reflections of each other” i pray it’s really true sitting where god’s feet once were grass bearing phantom heft tears shed for wilder rebirths and to be rid of the pain ————————————– beatrice bee called us from Philadelphia, PA. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems

i was born lake, formed lake even before that, the dig deep landscape before the motor, pine letter making berms where the snow retreats, so many parts of me are containers for water i had to move, i didn’t know this from outside of my body, from outside of any body, didn’t want to be the sloshing water, didn’t want to be the wake, didn’t want to wake to know who gets the water who gets the water out / i was born lake, formed lake, filled up and emptied out lake, decades lake and what to show for it, miles lake with bubbles forming, lake approximating water until it finds flow earth comes in, not base of lake but base of skull, base of over- whelmed body made of dirt so sinking, so water makes the mess glow, the messbody, its liquid-solid partnership going all directions finding music under lifted heel mud’s facial structure finally doing it right, you’re new to the community play so the role isn’t going to fit you but with the ground under you you can really put on your water you can happen to yourself in the time it takes to happen, you can partner your gender on its own twos are everywhere and nowhere / i was born lake, formed lake and something else happened something else happened something else happened something else happened something else happened something else happened something else was happening my first time body worked up to the edge, this first time waking, not first time water not only water not only waking curious bloom waiting under the waves / i was born lake but figured land, as though you could just tip and get all the water out, as though the water would go nowhere and the land would remain empty my enduring liquid seemed to cause others fear, confusion, discomfort they couldn’t make the water mean something for themselves (or worse: they could) some people believe water to be the worst that could happen, some sort of consequence just tell me you know nothing about submerging, tell me you refuse curiosity toward your own flow being lake depends on the land this is not called spectrum this cannot be placed on a line this cannot be plotted, is always moving my waterbody taught me that ————————————– jj rowan called us from Laconia, NH. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems