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28

it's May tricking us through blue expansion, isn't this how it tends to go? April has poured out, leaving those odd marks from popped bubbles and scribble lines we slimed along. blue is the swoon coming down from its perch, blue craft devotion to the written word. where do all your voices go when we finish here and what waits for next time? who's out drying along the brick between storms? here's the blue ribbon of our voices added up, it means something else to take it off. oof. blue doesn't peel like other colors. wait here in the blue light for something slow to happen. no, slower than that, it follows the brilliant blue center into fog and then loses color entirely.
i have my fists out in the convergence room
because i have to be ready for anything. this does not deplete my tenderness. here i am pressing my fists into the floor to see what they can hold, what the floor can take, and what happens at either failure point. getting on the floor isn't only joyful, it's also the practice of falling down, understanding which parts of me are likely to hit first and how those parts disperse impact through the rest of me. sometimes this is called play, but not always. i leave a large margin around my body for the unknowable: no, i don't like it either, it makes me itchy, but when i don't postpone the movement for total readiness i get to find out the ways i am wrong, after which i can really vine out from the familiar forms.
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27

it's May but all hot soup hot tea hot sweater vest, trick of light increasing blue of eye, blue of stone, blue balloon of wandering around, blue cluster leftover from another holy Wednesday, make you a medicine bulb with true fingers and sure, some ritual should cross over, the blue that comes after plus those specific places the color moves in your face, blue spilling out or over making words tumble around stuck gears, oil's blue reserve ribboning through the unlikely machine tasked with designing alternative couplings. all the outliers have their heads together now, a fist full of unripe dandelions with flower crown dreams. what we do the most is sway.
i am suspicious of enduring forms
but fond of clustering. yes, i accept all forms of devastation and promise to feel them right through the soles of my feet, i keep loose roots just for these occasions. i keep my touch careful but sure, knots notwithstanding. if we've ever met i've already imagined us rolling across the floor toward each other. tell me the mistakes so i can chew them up, if that will mean the static resumes a viable tone, if that can postpone the after. hoya's told me not to photograph her, it stunts the vine. i wonder if there's reaching next.
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26

it's May and the cold air holds, blooming is slow but this trick of spring sets hoya's next round, tiny clusters of tight fingers easing into reaching open. she's older than us, spent more time with our matrilineal undoing than we did. letters arrived to greet our failure while hoya did or did not bloom, by the time we found her she'd become a corner where sediment went but not sentiment, only a little light let through. what did she hear? what could she witness?
i took a long time loosing her
unsure what she had become inside the pot. even now, in her beam of light, she stretches out to hold her own vines up, multiplying care by her own surfaces. i take the time it takes to count her. i keep my touch careful but sure. we are the same line. we both knot, i've seen hers, placed them in new dirt with a song. there's something she hasn't told me yet. i am patient. i am going to stay here while the flowers come, and after.
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25

it's May, held in by moons, held up by flowers. the poem was supposed to already exist. the farm has put fingers in the ground. what works doesn't work now. the stillness is hollow but not so you can get inside it. in the sea of voices you do your counting, they're comfort numbers without significant accumulation. you can do shoulders together with a solid agreement. someone dug up the moss in that one spot but what's behind it still fits.
i wonder where our texture went
while the poem was caught in my throat, while my saying shape pushed its fragments around the misshapen conclusion. i do not desire a map for this. i am doing these weekend studies of being lost in the woods for a few minutes, long enough for me to lean into my new life of becoming the forest. i could take the bit further than this. i could bite the stone i keep in my pocket to remind me i have hands. i could remember my knots, having never forgotten them. the poem hasn't moved yet, so i don't know if it's the kind made of everything i've ever swallowed rising to completion or the kind aiming belly-down, the kind that never becomes poem and just rejoins the poem of my body and its pulp.
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NO MORE NEW ADVENTURES

No more day trips
No more gadding about
No more pioneer shit
No more EXT. ARMY AMMUNITION PLANT – DAY
No more loitering while the coal train passes
No more fights on the walkway over the interstate
No more Sunday small towns shut down for God and football
No more EXT. UNDER THE BRIDGE OVER THE MISSISSIPPI – DAY
No more bookshop rack full of gun magazines
No more muscle-shirted men loitering between empty shop windows
No more cafés with manic blonde “welcome in!” echoes
No more EXT. ABANDONED HIGH SCHOOL – NIGHT
Let’s go back home to our sunset walk down the hill
Let’s go back to the nature trail by our old house
Which isn’t the same since they hacked the overgrowth
Instead of sneaking away, you see houses across the creek
And they see you
And you are overgrown
No more crosstown haunts, either, then
I’m calling it
Let’s go home
Before it’s time to leave again

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30

Dear harpies, hello
Are you spooling obliviously
in longitudinal lines
or a stack of little belts

Summering so voraciously it felt
like it fell from the pocket
of Long Overdue & a rando
kindly handed it back to you

Your kick pleats are so cute
& your silver curls little cups
of needle shine that smell like sage
& cedar or pine & lavender or seawater & hay

They shine like turquoise tinted glass in the sun
or the stone with the white veins running though it
or that time we came upon each other in the woods
behind the house each thinking the other upstairs

I’m sorry I putter I’m sleepy not sorry
to be soon sleeping so sleeping so so
so shuteye so moondrool so deeply lapping
the plum-colored lake into which
I now deliciously drop
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SEX ADVICE FROM HIPPIES

Mental toolkits are the color of brown paper bags 

I’ve never sued anyone! she said at the party

I’ve never pulled a tick off my dog’s butt!

I pulled one off my husband’s butt!

I squeezed into a dumbwaiter and got stuck!

Why do they stand around

passing out candy and screens to children

wondering what real power is

and why students can’t sit still

The saddest part about summer is summer

I could tell she lost empathy when she said she didn’t care

I know exactly the motivations of my son’s bully

Reaching for a balloon the same thing as reaching for oblivion

So charged by the new freshness we voted for it

This wet towel is so moldy it can speak

Poets define sameness generation after generation

Sometimes there’s little evidence you’ve been bitten by a bat

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Truthcraft

Were revelations velled
You could have un-velled them

To dance the seven
With your head on a plate

Tongueburger
Satiated apricot

The joke in poems
Is pronunciation

Elocution probe
Moon’s moon

The neutrals have won
A little channel runnels

Down flatland
Through the marsh

Skyly
Stroked by the feather

Heart-ear
Swallow your pilgrim pill

On pilot’s checklist:
STAY ALIVE

Dignity, always,
Dignity

Magellan flagella
Muriatic blurb

I assure you
Says the crocodile

Rude with mouth full
These tears are mine to give

Clocks never say midnight only 12
Dring droses ring bells

Stow the bleachers fold the dais
Ribbon the scrolls

Nothing is permanent
Just very very long

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SMALL BATCHES

If you stare at a spreadsheet long enough 

it will come alive

and turn into colors that must be fed with yeast in little bowls

Picking her up by the corset is the same thing as licking my brain

He can’t change anyone but he still has no friends

Beep beep red warning with no one near me on the open road

Don’t get hit by a car is really good advice

A sleeping woman is only the color of her hair

Nothing showed up on the x-ray 

His real toe hovered around the bone

like a screen door to the afterlife

Why didn’t I write everything he said down

What would you do with all these tuition dollars

At a certain age freedom becomes a new kind of work 

lifting your heavy body on the rings at the playground

At least we’re not in seventh grade anymore

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Regular Actor

There is chaff around my rags
and a swoon in my nodal moon.
A deep horror of petrichor
greets me daily at the bar.
I don’t go to San Diego
for burritos anymore and
Ikea’s cult-fave bookcase
sits undelivered on my porch.
A friend said there’s no code for rolling
from The Darkness to The Flood 
though we both know full well
what black be the beauty of
this last rain date in April.
Maybe I do make magic bad 
and if true I want a tattoo of that 
to rouse the piss out of this 
slow-dance/burn tune
of foopah cosplay musing.
On the other hand
my other friend said
puddles and slush
still prism the sun
to weather the scent
of wet cement 
and there are twenty-seven
as-yet-undreamt-of 
broad transcription diphthongs
left to invent.
And because of all thus
I will continue to wonder
what bright flux
might come.


(I just want to thank everyone for this month of incredible poems! Every year I’m so happy and honored to be joining in here — and maybe this year especially, with all the daily — hourly — attempted whittlings-away of our souls by the forces of freakin’ evil. I wish you all beauty and success in whatever ways they sustain you. Personally, I will have some [hopefully] really good news tomorrow. Shine your light-thoughts my way, please?? THANK YOU ALL again and again.)

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🔥♾️

It’s the final day of April! I just wanna jump in and say THANK YOU and OMG to all of you who have been absolutely on fire this month. What a delight & daily pleasure to come peek and your genius. (And thanks to our readers too, and everyone who shared a poem on socials.) April poems forever!

PS: If you’re on a streak and want to continue beyond today, please feel free. The space is yours. ❤️

—Shanna for Bloof

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24

you'd been doing your animal asking, dipped your whole head into the creek and then poured out onto the dirt. it would be easier like this, dulling extremes, waking up with mud lashes. it would be a short time more, then a stillness you can only agree upon with yourself. screaming has always stuck in your throat, it's why you scratch and husk, it's how you can be the static on the other end of the line. it's round, this rolling off feeling into a splash. someone's made the perfect ice ball so you pour and pour, you're not going to waste its slope, you're going to pour you out.
i sing the anger refrain on the new low line
while i mother the poems into shape. one has guts, i tuck and untuck them until there's enough room for breathing but not so much that the body will pulp off. i've torn up my contract with gawd but we're amiable: i know you're not real and you know i let a letter spiritualize anyway. the only thing we talk about's the bottle, the bottom. when you're the ship you have to be taken out piece by piece. some feeling comes up to my chin, i keep my lips dry. wasn't it me who asked to feel it? it would be so easy to put me in your pocket, please don't do that.
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gravity

grief is a giraffe who
glides among the grove in a gangly
and gentle gloom, gnawing
leaves, stripping uppermost
green with its greedy lips
its black tongue

through the gaping all
good goes, longing
clinging to
margins in sluggish ghost
everything weighs, nothing aggregates

agony is a gift            the galaxy is

divulged in that
gap—gutted
glistened

 

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Scream Crossed Meadow

First town then town again then hotel key what comes next 
First town then town again then pie & coffee also Bob also terror
Next town remains first town once quiet town a missing person town
A missing key town a folksy kind of town a weird town then a terror town
A once quiet town with a mill a mill town with typical stratification of teens
Then becoming a terror town a terror again in the first town the town again
First town then town again then hotel key what comes next
First town then town again then pie & coffee also Bob also terror
Next town remains first town once quiet town a missing person town
A missing key town a folksy kind of town a weird town then a terror town
A once quiet town with a mill a mill town with typical stratification of teens
Then becoming a terror town a terror again in the first town the town again

A lake nestled deep in a trail dotted with firs That melody in the distance do you hear it too

First a town then a town then a terror a terror town of bored kids with unspoken
desires
It was as if a terror had settled into the town the town with peculiar tourists
The town with decent cup of coffee the town with lake where bored kids maybe swam
Maybe did lots of things their parents shouldn’t know owl shadows upon an evening
lake
An evening lake as if terror had settled in a backwoods kind of terror a terrible
kind of terror
As if the town was now terror town body washed against shore body dragged along
shore
A murder in a once quiet town a murder of a girl an attempted murder of a girl
Misunderstood kid a murder of secret desire a secret desire washed upon shore
lust of terror
Sound at the edge of a lake in a town of weird tourists peculiar pies cold coffee
stratification of teens
Some shook by murder others enthralled by murder others too busy just being teens
a melody
In the distance a Bob in the distance a town encased in trees a mill in flames
Where does this leave me
First town then town again then a secret then what came next
Once quiet town then terror then coffee & pie then again town
Then town first next come what then pie then again town
Then town first then terror Where does this leave me

Sorry, been busy with end of the semester grading, etc. so I just decided to try and revise an older poem that I’ve been fussing with for the last year or so. Obv. shout-out to Twin Peaks.