Category: poetry

Low-key Midwest Girl Dad Vibes: My Wardrobe is Mostly Kohl’s Middle-Class Casual & My Skin Care Routine is $1.59 Men’s 2-in-1 Total Body Wash | Bob King

            For Izzy

But once a month the soap is on sale for
a-buck-29 so I usually stock up in threes,
& only once it was Buy-One-Get-One
& yes, I still carry regrets that I didn’t
get more. When I think about it, my
college freshman & her friends use
low-key far too often & mostly incorrectly
because OMG, Tiffany, there’s nothing
low-key about having a drink thrown
right in your face. And Oh my god, Becky,
look at her butt has never bounced from
their boom boxes & that’s truly a low-key
tragedy. Most things are BOGO when you
stop & think about it. Nonbiodegradable 
blue bags with every supermarket trip
& lingering regret is free with every pint
of Ben & Jerry’s. Cortisol with every cup
of coffee, which is weird because why
would you want to trigger a stress hormone
when you’re low-key trying to destress
from another restless night of sleep
spent overthinking all the things
you cannot control? Bro. That’s
a low-key bummer. With every
Amazon box that is set to arrive
on your front porch also arrives—
at no extra charge—anticipation.
Anticipation of, Did it come yet &
what’s the hold-up & wait this isn’t
the size or color or fit & I better low-key
hide this before a neighbor or loved-one
makes another comment about my
spending habits. Honey, I don’t think
the UPS man thinks about you, your
boxes, or what might be in your boxes
as much as you give him low-key credit for,
so that’s another part of the complex loyalty
rewards program, as if loyalty itself is ever
really rewarded in the noncommercial
sense. You really didn’t buy the house,
your bank did, & when you’re done paying
them back, they’ll pay their bank back, &
that bank will pay its bank, & eventually,
depending on your system of government
& afterlife, someone is paying, plastering
over, creating another layer for a future
archaeological excavation where a future
civilization is going to make wildly
complex & yet-also-incredibly-oversimplified
conclusions from inadequate evidence,
evidence that suggests cave art isn’t
cave art at all, but an early representation
of a stop sign, as in: Proceed no deeper
into the cavern because deeper is where
the bears sleep. Someone is paying
the piper & if not well then you’re gonna
have to hire that injury & malpractice
attorney with the billboards & commercials
all over town, because nothing says I’ll
make them pay like a baldpate & arched
eyebrow. Or as when that French philosopher
said, When you invent the ship, you also invent
the shipwreck; when you invent the plane
you also invent the plane crash; and when
you invent electricity, you invent electrocution.
Every technology carries its own negativity,
which is invented at the same time as technical
progress. Like when you bought the patriarchy,
you not only bought institutional misogyny,
but you also placed men in competition
with each other, perpetual cutthroats,
even as when a grandfather looked at
his adult grandson with an infant in his
arms, diaper bag slung over his shoulder,
drippy-nosed toddler hiding behind
his knee, & questioned what men had
become, just two generations removed
from what he thought stern reticence
could buy. Yes, when you save money
at one store, that enables you really
to splurge on things at other stores,
Girlmath you think, you think as you
cry, standing under the new Lowe’s
showerhead—maybe a Cure song
about boys not crying on the portable
speaker—a low-key power-washer,
epidermis-remover, an extravagance.
But, admittedly, this is only a low-key
understanding of how economics
or emotional intelligence might work.

+Inspired by Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher (2024), On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed (2021), “Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-a-Lot (1992), Cave of Bones: A True Story of Discovery, Adventure, and Human Origins by Lee Berger & John Hawks (2023), & “Boys Don’t Cry” by the Cure (1979).

about the author:

They Put the Graffiti On | Matthew James Babcock

they take the graffiti off
around here, when every
autumn sky rusts at dusk

and every blue prelude
of swollen moon
brings symphonic gusts

of spring sunrise and stricken
willows swaying as if
kicked about in hurricanes

where the same untended
riverside walkway ends
near the standing shell

of a refurbished building
that was a soft yogurt shack,
was a cheap burger joint,

is now a Hawaiian grill.
The trouble with surfaces
is another surface surges

beneath the first, so no
crust of carbonized pain
contains the luminous

lava of overflowing
laughter, like restraint damming
urge. Ever the slow march,

ever the upward dermal
thrust of layer purging layer,
as no obscene slogan

in hot pink paint, swerving
like the sexy hieroglyphics
of the future across

the steel footbridge arch,
escapes the disc grinder
scouring its temporary face

to a spinning shower
of orange sparks that hiss
into the river still throbbing

like a vandal’s vein.
Before the palimpsest heart,
before onionskin lung,

before busted plumbing
stained deranged watercolors
on drywall backstage

or translucent dandelion
leaves glowed in
black asphalt ruptures

like the savage signatures
of mad street mages,
where did the angry

and disillusioned scrawl
their fluorescent green rage?
On what insubstantial

page of fresh black primer
in refinished space?
Lash quickly, scribes and taggers.

Deface and be replaced.
No phase is more than erasure,
no displacement less than trace.

Bonus audio of Matthew reading his poem…

about the author:

Prairie Witch | Rayni K. Wekluk

Tea leaves, fragrant in a small trash can. I see
Kansas and Lake Wabaunsee. Myself with all
the farm animals, square dancing at the fire
station. This watermelon season is infused
with last summer’s blood. Here now, I chant
lake and drown in it. Dark magic–a photo 

of an old lover easing into 
graphite, erasing itself.

As if we were never thankful. As if I wasn’t
on my knees in our cabin’s shower chanting
him, drowing in him. As if it were me who lifted
up my dress in the basement closet. How long
until I have nothing left to say? Until Kansas
stutters and I’ve cast a spell that sticks?

Bonus audio of Rayni reading her poem:

about the author:

The Year I Carried You | Sara Shea

The beauty of the land was blinding.

Bees drowsed in the pear blossoms,
           tulip poplars blazed green-gold,
      mountain laurel blinked open, soft pink.

    Carolina silverbells trembled, light as breath,
        shedding their white skirts to the wind.
      Flame azaleas split like lips exhaling.

   Monsoon rains soaked the hills until
    waterfalls roared and maitake danced
        soft, tender, fruiting at the root
             of moss-laden oaks.

       Serviceberries swelled purple in the heat.
          Jasmine and magnolia thickened the air
       to a slow honey that clung to my skin,
 sweetness pooling in the hollows.

  It was the year I managed historic
        Bald Mountain Farms in the Blue Ridge.
           The chickens laid warm brown eggs,
         and every morning, I cracked them open,
    yolks spilling, gold as the sun.

       Twelve calves staggered into the world
       that season; wet and blinking, their breath rising
     in the cool mountain dawn.
  Peaches hung heavy, their skins splitting,
    cherries darkened to a blood-red gloss.

        The June strawberry moon
              swelled on the solstice that year; the sky
       pulling itself into perfect alignment.

 We took the pontoon out on Lake Lure,
    rocked in deep water as the gorge blushed pink,
         then glowed solstice gold. We watched the light stretch
       its long fingers
                over the ridges,
                         over my body,
                               over you.

       That moonrise!
                Huge, full, ripe.
              You turned inside me then-
       a slow somersault,
the tide answering the pull of the night.

about the author:

Red and Yellow Light Over the Top of Houses | Dolapo Demuren

In one of my student’s essays on Hamlet,
the father in the introductory paragraph
is dappled, like a boy with daylight sewn
onto his chest. Like a boy with daylight sewn
onto the back of his arms. The student writes,

before Hamlet’s father was a ghost, he was all
of the leaves around Denmark, he was red and
he was yellow. He was on Hamlet’s roof, fallen
from the trees, the student writes. I remember
when I found my father fallen in his office,

his voice raised like a child whose address
is written on a slip of paper in his breast pocket.

Read by the author:

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