I wish I could say
I left you behind when I
drove across country
Iris Groot is a non-binary artist in Aurora. Driving from city to city for poetry. Meeting amazing and skilled artist. So they have created a Facebook group called poetry people where everyone comes together to share poetry.
This poem is from the Thought For Food anthology,
a poetry collection benefiting Denver Food Rescue.
You can purchase a copy of the book here.
When you ventured out on
dates with men, we didn’t talk about it
what was there to discuss? It was something you
thought I couldn’t give you
even though my arms were out and so was I
your whole deal was believing yourself to be
too broken to offer your chalice like the
gift of drink it was and not think of curses.
I was always onto you. I played the game—truth or dare,
poison or water, top or bottom— and followed the rules
our friends warned me to take it down a notch to
wait for you to call me for a change.
That’s the thing about the “I told you so’s”
we were as rare as hens’ teeth
ear to a glass against our thin apartment wall
you slipped the l-word in and out then took it
back like the slapping of a bug bite against your shoulder.
I cleared my throat—my heart was so far down it
made the grossest noise to call it back to the cavity where
it belonged ‘cos no one has ever loved you
without a list of reasons why they shouldn’t
Rhienna Renèe Guedry is a writer and artist who found her way to the Pacific Northwest, perhaps solely to get use of her vintage outerwear collection. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Empty Mirror, Bitch Magazine, Screen Door, Scalawag Magazine, Taking the Lane, and elsewhere on the internet. Find more about her projects at rhienna.com or @chouchoot on Twitter.
The bacon sizzles in a silver pot on a spiral top that burns
To a tangerine orange beneath sweet cabbage.
Turn that stove down low, boy!
Collared greens unfurl to the size of elephant ears.
Let the water run rinsing them clean.
Hand me the knife from the drawer.
Get the strainer ready for rice.
Here are the scissors to cut the chittlins’.
They don’t smell as bad over rice,
Doused with hot sauce.
Seasoning salt is drizzled over
Honey- sweet ham.
It’s 6p.m. Time to make the cornbread.
Mama makes the wild berry kool-aid syrupy sweet.
Slices of Aunt Earline’s jelly cake
Lie like dominoes on a plate painted with porcelain roses.
Pork chops in a ceramic bowl
Sit sullenly next to store bought
Sweet potato pies.
I’m in my room writing poetry,
Waiting to sink teeth into chicken breast
While the Superfriends are on mute.
Yall can come on eat now!
Fifteen years old was when Shane Allison wrote his first poem. Since then his poems have appeared in countless kick ass literary journals such as Chiron Review, West Wind Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and others. He is the author of four collections of poetry. His new collection Sweet Sweat is out from Hysterical Books. He is also the author of two novels. Harm Done and You’re the One That I Want.
for those that feel
for the mind can not
…………..touch
you
me
we hold each other so close
we squeeze
merge
break through the distance
back from the moon
circle around the globe
I sit next to you
you ask me if the canyon spirit
is going to die
we shelter in place
on a small bench
by the fountain
in Civic Center
surrounded by trees
“we have to rely
on ourselves
to keep it alive”
I say
the wind blows
people are howling
and their loneliness
and yearning
for all that they once held
burns through the dusk
you ask me if
i can feel it
“feel what” I ask
“the wild return”
you say
“of what”
I say
“of everything we ever loved
and never could tame”
Ted Vaca Denver poet father lover crime fighter / semi holy somewhat sweet can be bitter / published here and there / Founder of The Mercury Cafe poetry slam / Coach of the 2006 Championship Denver Slam Team / Member of the 1995 Championship Slam Team from Asheville NC / Intergalactic Provocateur
This poem is from our first print collection
of poetry, “Thought For Food”, an anthology
benefiting Denver Food Rescue. To support
our fundraiser, please visit this link.
It is 6AM on a Monday
and I am standing in the kitchen preparing breakfast.
On any other Monday I would have recognized this obscurity
as the manic episode it is, pop a hydroxyzine
to ease the crushing anxiety of false optimism
washing over me like the covers I’d pull back
over my body until the doctor could see me again.
I’ve learned my emotions are like Mondays,
tidal waves that roll over me with a force I cannot control,
and I don’t know if its these smoker’s lungs
or a lifetime of coping mechanisms that never keep me afloat,
but swimming is an exercise
that has always resulted in drowning.
But on this particular Monday,
Love slinks out of the bedroom.
Love slinks out of the bedroom with the audacity to be perfect,
with tousled hair and sleep clinging to his eyes
that makes me fear perhaps I grasped too tightly in the night,
clasped on to his body like a buoy in the harbor
former sailors have mistaken for their sanctuary,
intending to restore their masts on the days when sunshine implores me
to be the band-aid on the world’s sails, only to hoist them up
in the gale of my storm ridden seas in search of calmer waters.
I am worried that if I share these things with Love
my words will flash like beams of light permeating
from some rocky outpost, imploring him to heed the warning
of ships drowned by waves that rose with no warning.
But Love’s smile breaks the shivering dawn
and he plants a weary kiss on my lips as if to say,
“Let’s be castaways together.”
I think that maybe, on this particular Monday,
it’s very possible Love and mania are the same.
I think that maybe, instead of medicating Love,
I want to cook him breakfast.
I think so what if I rarely have the resolve
to care for my own body, so what
if my queer is not culinary inclined?
I remember how it struck me suddenly
that he was a sunflower suspended
on an endless seascape horizon,
and what is a poet’s lot in life
save to nurture flowers?
Somewhere between the rich soil of black coffee beans
and the scramble of whipping eggs
I manage to burn the bacon.
The lighthouse is now a smoke alarm.
The ocean an iron skillet.
Monday is a Monday.
It is 6AM.
But Love,
Love eats the bacon anyway
Caleb Ferganchick is a queer slam poet residing in Grand Junction, CO. He is the self-published author of “Poetry Heels.” His work gravitates toward gender and sexuality expression, LGBTQI+ liberation, trauma, and mental health, though he is currently exploring nature writing inspired by rural Western Colorado through a children’s book series. Ferganchick hosts an annual poetry slam competition in Grand Junction, “Slamming Bricks,” during Colorado West Pride’s Festival in honor of the 1969 Stonewall Riots. When he is not writing, Ferganchick works for a non-profit organization dedicated to ending youth homelessness, and as a high school speech and debate coach.
This poem is from our first print collection
of poetry, “Thought For Food”, an anthology
benefiting Denver Food Rescue. To support
our fundraiser, please visit this link.
Let me show you
Where the poets live.
They gather in an alley, at midnight, under the full moon,
To read dirty haiku and make a ruckus in the streets.
Rebels!
But they are caring rebels.
Tonight, I found the alley poets
And took a dose of love.
How are you feeling? they ask.
Good, I say.
(Good is always the right answer, the work answer.)
No, tell us how you really feel.
Depressed.
That’s better, because it’s honest. Now come here:
“Every day, we’ll show you a moment so golden you must close your eyes to see it.”
I must stick around for that day.
Why is death such a theme in poetry?
Why does the depressed mind latch onto it,
Instead of the beauty in the words, the rhymes, the repetition?
Why is it so easy for pain to enter,
For negative feelings to take root like weeds,
For the analytical mind to try and rationalize the irrational?
The alley poets tell me a ghost story:
About the monster “that which follows”!
Stalking the cities, the towns, the towers
For those souls whose hearts have turned to stone.
It is insatiable, all-consuming, leaving destruction in its wake.
But they also tell me:
“That which follows” hates fire, warmth, light, love.
So, the alley poets light a campfire.
We sing and dance and read,
Keeping the darkness at bay.
Not to sound cliché
But the poems they recite,
Are the stars between the clouds at night.
They hug me tightly as I take my leave,
Encouraging: I must carry the ember until the next time
The community comes together.
The upbeat music starts to play,
Because…”that which follows” has no chance
Against the alley poets!
This poem is from our first print collection of poetry, “Thought For Food”, an anthology benefiting Denver Food Rescue. To support our fundraiser, please visit this link.
Melissa Ferrer is a renegade with hippie tendencies. Through poetry she seeks to provide a sense of solidarity to all people, encourage people to act unto peace and love, and foster community among both the like and unlike minded. Recently, she’s been yearning to set down her ego and replace it with a jubilation of the spirit. She wants you to join in, in whatever capacity you can.
This poem is from our first print collection of poetry, “Thought For Food”, an anthology benefiting Denver Food Rescue. To support our fundraiser, please visit this link.
An award-winning photojournalist once told me
anyone can learn to take a good photo.
It’s not technique.
It’s access.
Access:
to a riot breaking out on an angry street.
to a woman who has just lost her finger
climbing over a chain-link fence
crossing the border into Texas.
to the dusty rubble,
and everything beneath,
moments after a bomb
has incinerated a home.
to a sun-washed bedroom
where a seven year old child
has just died of cancer
in his mother & father’s arms.
Poetry is not just metaphor and meter,
allegory and alliteration.
Poetry is access:
to the secret hobbies of protozoans.
to the color of chlorophyll.
to the lover you secretly yearn for
but know will destroy you.
to enough magic to bring
your cat back from a velvet
bag of ashes embroidered
with his name.
A poem can only be
what it can access.
Cortney Collins is a poet living in Longmont, CO. A four-time winner of Fort Collins’ First Friday Poetry Slam at The Bean Cycle, her work has been published by South Broadway Ghost Society, Amethyst Review, Devil’s Party Press, Back Patio Press, 24hr Neon Mag, The Naropa Vagina Monologues Zine, and is forthcoming in Tiny Spoon Lit Mag. During these strange and surreal times, she hosts a weekly poetry virtual open mic, Zoem. She shares a home with her beloved cat, Pablo, and tries to eat just the right amount of kale.
This poem is from our first print collection
of poetry, “Thought For Food”, an anthology
benefiting Denver Food Rescue. To support
our fundraiser, please visit this link.
after Nicole Sealy’s “And”
morbid savior born
on the doorstep of a corporation
the poor, voracious,
gorge the forfeited thorns
of corrupt senators
opportunistic authoritarians they
savor disproportionate offshore fortunes
worship
incorruptible corpses
while gormandizing landlords orbit
our torn world
i am the disorder in my aborted
forty fourth form
orthodox corpus
my torso deteriorates at the crematorium
or by ordinary worms
elaborate airport territories
vacant expanses for corona
dictatorial
not for foreign territories or shores
commemorate our glorious world
commemorate our glorious world
André O. Hoilette is a Jamaican born poet living in Denver. He is a Cave Canem alum and former editor of ambulant: A Journal of Poetry & Art and Nexus magazine. Hoilette is currently pursuing MFAs in Fiction and Poetry from Regis University. His work has been published in Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander (A global anthology of social justice poetry) , Role Call, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Cave Canem 10th anniversary reader, milk magazine and other publications.
Our grandchildren are in the vanguard
of human evolution, autism possibly
the latest mutation, since change
has one leg up on adaptation.
Trouble is, the microbes
mutate faster than we do
and have had more practice.
In the matter of intelligence they
have outguessed us more than once.
It will require our best to see this through.
The past two Halloweens
my autistic grandson has gone
trick-or-treating as a hazmat zombie,
as if he owned a crystal ball
for the coronavirus.
Maybe we should turn our welfare
over to children, who might be
more adaptable than
millionaires over seventy
masquerading as world leaders.
Gerry Sloan is a poet and musician living in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He has two poetry collections: Paper Lanterns (2011) and Crossings: A Memoir in Verse (2017), recent work appearing in Elder Mountain, Cave Region Review, Xavier Review, and Slant. He often defaults to hot tea and old movies for solace.
south broadway press 