Come on out and hear these Fabulous Poets read their poems!
Kristin George Bagdanov earned her M.F.A. in poetry from Colorado State University and is currently a PhD candidate in English literature at U.C. Davis. Her poems have recently appeared in Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Puerto Del Sol, and other journals. Her poetry collection, Fossils in the Making, was published in April 2019 by Black Ocean. Her second book, Diurne, won the 2019 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, was published by Tupelo Press in September 2019. She is the recipient of fellowships from Phi Kappa Phi, Lilly Graduate Fellows, and the Vermont Studio Center. She is the poetry editor of Ruminate Magazine.
PROOF OF HUNGER
I feed my body less and want more the surplus
I was promised storehouses of grain plains of locust
don’t signify a thing without hunger
telos that defers its own ending
Which isn’t to say I’ve a vision
or can calculate a head of grain against a golden calf
in a crisis or pinch or hitch in which a child (there is always a child)
born tomorrow judges me for my lack
of discretion, brings legal action against my hunger, which wouldn’t have existed
were it not for the child’s face always looming
before me asking me to materialize what won’t
I stock my dreams like cans in a bunker I wait
for doom siphoning off a day here and there I store the future
in a sack with a hole through which a mouse lives and dies happy
I eat its shit knowingly and with envy of its tiny gut
Which isn’t to say I’ve promised anything
only that I’ve considered the balance I weighed the future
against my hunger and found it wanting found the surplus was only
my own body working twice as hard then harder hardening itself
against a future I had already consumed
Kristin George Bagdanov
Can’t wait to see you!
Michael Mlekoday is the author of one book of poetry, The Dead Eat Everything (Kent State University Press 2014), winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Mlekoday is a PhD candidate in the English Department at UC Davis, where they study plants and minds in American literature. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Indiana Review, Washington Square Review, The BreakBeat Poets, Verse Daily, and other venues, and has been translated into Polish.
Self-Portrait with Gunshot Vernacular
All summer was one wet weapon
after another: barb of sweetgum
in the ankle, stranger’s knife blade,
the wasp stuck in your sneaker.
Rainfall kept the crack addicts
asleep in the church basement
amid remnants of the broken window.
O window, come again in glory
and the block will put a piece
of itself through you,
makeshift spear to the side,
stone to the back of the skull,
thunder of gunshot. Here,
we all know that sound.
If somebody flinch at firecrackers,
they may as well mispronounce
your name. This place is old
as a mother tongue.
Here, the world is always saying
Ya mama, Ya mama,
and you write poems
like they brass knuckles
or empty 4o bottles of O.E.
Believe that. Believe in wildlife,
that snarl and sex, glimmer
of I, I, until death.
Most people stop believing
in lions after visiting the zoo,
but you seen too many broken locks
and this neighborhood is bordered
by a jawbone made of light.
Rhyme or die. Shoot or die.
Smuggle yourself out
like a banned book or die.
This is the voice
calling to you in the wilderness,
its dark milk like blood in the throat.
Michael Mlekoday
