Special FeatureJoanna ValenteKristen Bulger, poetry, special feature

Kristen Bulger: Triptych of the Body

Special FeatureJoanna ValenteKristen Bulger, poetry, special feature
Kristen Bulger: Triptych of the Body
alex-grodkiewicz-133609-unsplash.jpg


Triptych of the Body

 

Never room inside another

            and make claim. Surely,

there is a hell of the body,

            and you,

the girl, having your own,

            straddle a place

neither heaven or earth,

            but carry that burn around with you,

and find only a dirt mouth

empty of its jokes

 

to rush towards.

You’re like the white bedsheet cast out

as a net to catch

the falling wind— it catches

nothing. Even with everything

            alive

in the streets, you go colliding

among the people living

with grassy heads, and the streetlights

            on early that pale the pavement

 with blurred leaves while

            cold rain steadies itself to stillness.

 

Not another day longer could you stay

            in the closed cabinet

of the cabinet of the body.

 

Here is the speckled wince

of the woman

            who waits by the bus stop—

 a pieta who cradles

            the empty air

like a flour sack

            in her arms— she says

do you see this body dying?

           

Do I?

 

Kristen Bulger is a poet from New Hampshire and currently lives in Boston, MA. She is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire. Her work has appeared in Salamander, Superstition Review, Houseguest, and elsewhere.

Special FeatureJoanna ValenteDevon Wootten, special feature, poetry

Devon Wootten: Worst. Threesome. Ever.

Devon Wootten is a faculty member at Whitman College. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Fence, LIT, Aufgabe, Colorado Review, Drunken Boat, Octopus, the tiny, Backward City Review, 26 – A Journal of Poetry and Poetics, and The California Journal of Poetics. A former resident of Yaddo and Anderson ranch, he is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Montana and ABD in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Iowa. He lives with his wife among the wheat fields of southeast Washington. He curates wikipoesis.com. He's at devonwootten.com.

Special FeatureJoanna ValenteDevon Wootten, special feature, poetry
Devon Wootten: Worst. Threesome. Ever.
Special FeatureJoanna ValenteCatherine Esposito Prescott, special feature, poetry

Catherine Esposito Prescott: To Forgive Us Everything

Catherine Esposito Prescott is the author of the chapbooks Maria Sings (forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press) and The Living Ruin (Finishing Line Press).  Recent poems have appeared in Pleiades, Southern Poetry Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Poetry East, MiPOesias, and elsewhere.  A graduate of NYU’s MFA program in Creative Writing-Poetry, Catherine is cofounder and curator of the SWWIM reading series.  She lives in Miami Beach with her husband, two sons, and daughter.

Special FeatureJoanna ValenteCatherine Esposito Prescott, special feature, poetry
Catherine Esposito Prescott: To Forgive Us Everything
Special FeatureJoanna ValenteTravis Sharp, poetry, special feature

Travis Sharp: No Body Is a Scapegoat

Travis Sharp is a queer writer, artist, and teacher living in Buffalo. He's an editor and designer at Essay Press and at Small Po[r]tions, the author of the chapbook Sinister Queer Agenda (above/ground press, forthcoming), and a PhD student in the SUNY Buffalo Poetics Program. Other work has appeared with Columbia Poetry Review, LIT, Bombay Gin, Puerto del Sol, Entropy, and elsewhere.

Special FeatureJoanna ValenteTravis Sharp, poetry, special feature
Travis Sharp: No Body Is a Scapegoat