7/20/26 Justin Karcher Before the Summer Concert, the Corner Store Cashier Told Me She Used to Be a Drug Addict I told her we all get addicted to something and she said she misses feeling good. I had no wise words as I bought JUUL pods to pour over my lungs like hot birdseed because we all want something pecking at our insides. Outside, I cracked open an Arnold Palmer and walked toward the parkway where drunk people were dancing to jazz, their bare feet turning the dirt into dessert. A woman told her Siberian husky not to bark at me, explaining that he likes to bark at everyone. I confessed that I crave the attention. She laughed into a wave of stuttering streetlights as menthol birds tried to lift me away, but they weren't strong enough.
7/16/2026 Maximiliano Guzmán A RIVER FLOWS THROUGH A river flows through the darkened room. A river that alters its flow so you can dream the dreamer. An act of love. A clumsy, unnatural way to ask for forgiveness. She sleeps in the arms of a God. Queen in her kingdom. Battle of metal birds and springtime dragons. Fishermen of our pain. The wreckage of my shipwreck sinks into your dreams. Listen... Listen to the river transforming under your bed. Transforming into the solitude of us both. Together.
7/13/2026 Zoë Davis The cold cuts hit like a second pulse gunpowder recoil into emboldened palms moral of your fingers curve at my neck why were you late again to my drumming my drowning in truth a devilled sound percussion a zip of coming home of raining timpani flooding brief amber fridge light leftovers haunted in taut cellophane mute at bedroom door denial floor cast view eyes sharp in our stolen flat lying but I have sung you I know your notes they are handfuls past victories past lust growing dull that red butcher’s string straining I swing rope legs over frame you play you da capo al coda morte strisciante
7/9/2026 DH Reed Copper Minds Forgotten pennies on the bar sticking on my ear Such a fever dream, they melt Copper slop forge of mettle I doubt you know war DH Reed is a San Francisco based poet and fiction writer exploring general abstract nonsense colliding with concrete life.
7/6/2026 Ron Arbuckle MONTY HALL PROBLEM #1 What hides behind Each of three doors? Self-love? Self-loathing? Self-acceptance? They all share a thin veneer Dividing walls so sheer you’d Mistake one for the other Pick your door and Live with the consequences
7/2/2026 Sarp Sozdinler it’s not scary if we all cross the red light together harder now rooms keep multiplying behind the door must remember how the mirrors begin inside him a hundred small hallways opening in his coat one leading to rain one to drought one to a laugh echoing in an empty kitchen until all our names come loose fall through the walls lands somewhere bright and wet with all its clouds changed for fields a night guard dreamed with his flashlight on I swept over sleeping statues that opened their mouths for a laugh Sarp Sozdinler is a Turkish writer based between Philadelphia and Amsterdam. His work has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Maudlin House, and Pithead Chapel, among other journals.
6/29/2026 Stephan Crown-Weber The Rain - by Paul Claudel, translated 2026 by Stephan Crown-Weber Through the two windows straight ahead, two on my left, and two on my right, I see and both ears hear the immensity of falling rain. It must be a quarter past noon: everything around me light and water. I dip my pen in ink, and I am writing this poem secure in my indoor water prison like a bug in the middle of an air bubble. This is not feeble, doubtful drizzle. The skies grab the earth and attack—tight and rough—hard, deep. You frogs, the air is fresh enough to forget the pond in thick, damp grass! The satisfying downpour ceasing is not something to fear. It would take a thirsty fellow, my brothers, for this wonderful draught not to suffice. The ground has vanished; the house is bathing; the submerged trees are streaming; the great river itself that ends my horizon like a sea seems drowned. My time does not drag and, attuning my hearing—not to any hour’s onslaught—I meditate on the neutral tone of psalmody beyond numbering. Yet the rain pauses towards dusk; and while the amassed heavens ready a grimmer assault, like how Iris from out of the sky’s zenith used to melt straight into the heart of battles, a black spider stops, head lowered and suspended from behind in the middle of the window that I have opened onto the foliage and walnut-casing-green North. It is not light out anymore, and I need a lamp. And I am offering the storms a libation of an ink drop. LA PLUIE Par les deux fenêtres qui sont en face de moi, les deux fenêtres qui sont à ma gauche et les deux fenêtres qui sont à ma droite, je vois, j’entends d’une oreille et de l’autre tomber immensément la pluie. Je pense qu’il est un quart d’heure après midi : autour de moi, tout est lumière et eau. Je porte ma plume à l’encrier, et, jouissant de la sécurité de mon emprisonnement, intérieur, aquatique, tel qu’un insecte dans le milieu d’une bulle d’air, j’écris ce poème. Ce n’est point de la bruine qui tombe, ce n’est point une pluie languissante et douteuse. La nue attrape de près la terre et descend sur elle serré et bourru, d’une attaque puissante et profonde. Qu’il fait frais, grenouilles, à oublier, dans l’épaisseur de l’herbe mouillée, la mare ! Il n’est point à craindre que la pluie cesse ; cela est copieux, cela est satisfaisant. Altéré, mes frères, à qui cette très merveilleuse rasade ne suffirait pas. La terre a disparu, la maison baigne, les arbres submergés ruissellent, le fleuve lui-même qui termine mon horizon comme une mer paraît noyé. Le temps ne me dure pas, et, tendant l’ouïe, non pas au déclanchement d’aucune heure, je médite le ton innombrable et neutre du psaume. Cependant la pluie vers la fin du jour s’interrompt, et tandis que la nue accumulée prépare un plus sombre assaut, telle qu’Iris du sommet du ciel fondait tout droit au cœur des batailles, une noire araignée s’arrête, la tête en bas et suspendue par le derrière au milieu de la fenêtre que j’ai ouverte sur les feuillages et le Nord couleur de brou. Il ne fait plus clair, voici qu’il faut allumer. Je fais aux tempêtes la libation de cette goutte d’encre. Paul Claudel (1868-1955) was a French diplomat, playwright, and poet. Stephan Crown-Weber (@ crownweber ) is a writer and translator based in Central Kentucky.
6/22/2026 The poet swoons, and the audience swoons back. Yep, they still snap their fingers at these things, and all are in thrall to the passion, the emotional display of the reading. Later, backstage, the kid who loved poetry spied the poet reciting the lines in the mirror, mimicking themselves in the throes of the reading: each gesture, gesticulation and tear, all rehearsed and replayed and so very calculated.
6/21/26 In the aftermath of a car crash I walked away from, I went sober for a while. My head cleared. I started running. One day I noticed myself actually feeling good. It didn’t last, but I think about that particular run– around a manmade lake, in the hot evening of Phoenix as the sun went down. I don’t think a poem has to be the occasion for gratitude, but I’ll put this down as one.
6/17/26 Jason Diaz Channel thy self from the seat of Fear. Recognize the "sovereign anguish". I am hypnotized by the transit of bees; Human Love outside the blood is Achievement at long last.
6/10/26 Trevor Egg Urns Firstable, for all intensive purposes, she should of listened. It's an old wise tale: a pre-madonna, with a new deep-seeded leash on life, hurtled toward a hair-brained scheme. She became a social leopard; I told her, "Its a doggy dog world out there,". "Curve your tongue," she replied. With so much free reign, little did we know it was the death nail. We celebrated with Holland Days sauce on eggs and corn.
6/8/2026 John Rake April 4th the end of the world. Far enough on that road you’ll find a windmill and a stock tank out there in the high plain. So close to the center of wyoming you can balance the whole state on the point of a knife. You can’t build a fire. No trees. No wood or brush. Just grass and a wind that lifts the snow into the sky. It is cold. Far enough out there it is nothing but cold. The buffalo are gone. The antelope are gone. Far enough out there everything is gone. Far enough out there you’ll blow past the windmill and the stock tank. Pretty soon you’re on a road that lays down in the dead grass and dies. Far enough and the road is gone. Far enough and the dark and the stars and the night are all there is. Far enough and the wind and the universe take the high plains away. Stop the truck. Put it in park. Get drunk in the driver’s seat. Work your way through what was left of yesterday’s case. Your only passenger to the end of the world. A cardboard box of cheap beer. Drink it like all the women and people and memories and lives you drank before this night. The wind will sing you to sleep. The great architecture of night will cover you. It’s too windy to smoke. It’s too cold to step outside. It’s too far to pick up a signal. The numbers ticker away when you push seek on the dash. There are no stations at the end of the world. Whatever you used to listen to is gone. Whatever man you used to be is gone. Whatever the future was is paid out like bills in the palm of a bigger man’s hand. They’ve got you by your credit and your mortgage. Mom can’t use her right side. They took her car. Your brother stopped breathing behind an omaha rest stop. Your sister married a tech guy. Far enough on that road you’ll think the thoughts you once put away. Time to pull them back out again. Like why is it these people always dish out the losses and the losses add up the way they do. Always underneath the great big sky. You used to learn about the oceans that once covered this land. You used to learn about the stars boiling life awake on a cooling planet. People like you once hunted all the lands on that living earth and now there’s nowhere to go but the end of the world. Far enough out there on the high plain where the high plain ends and the world falls into the night sky. Far enough you won’t put away the thoughts you used to think. You’ll light them like a fire in your hand on a windy night. Why not. Get deep enough in that case and you might even make a plan. Far enough on the high plain. Far enough in the future a choice is all a man has got. Far enough you’ll burn a batch of thermite through a data center pipeline. Far enough and you’ll put everything you learned in iraq to work again. Far enough in the future a choice is all a man has got. Far enough on the high plains. Far enough, you say to yourself. Drinking in the driver’s seat, listening to the winds at the end of the world.
6/7/2026 Caroline Cameron Knitting O, let me teach you how to knit again This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf, These broken limbs again into one body. Teach me to braid the sheafs and thresh wheat from wheat berries, teach me the techniques of harvesting the self from a broken body: the student knows from two limbs must one body rise.
6/6/2026 Trevor кот My cat is a little standoffish but I know his heart. When he sits down by my feet, like a hounddog, and just shares the refreshing dullness with me, we both seem to understand something together. We stare cooperatively. As for him, he sleeps, half-sleeps, cut his eyes at bugs and motes of dust. Not much seems to bother him. If he’s not a sage he sure acts like one.
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6/2/2026
Tristan Jones
I Should Have Told the Bees
I should have told the bees,
like the old wise women whispering in days of yore,
I should have stated to them in plain English the direness of the situation,
The direct line of mistakes and calamities caused by human greed
That will bring Hell to Earth.
In encounters past I have told the bees about my peaceful intentions,
My personal ambitions and philosophies to not bring harm.
Well, that was all quite useless as I should have relayed stark warnings of catastrophe.
Those poor little guys, we really don’t stand a chance, do we?
I will say, it does bring me satisfaction to hear when bees chase and sting humans.
Including myself, when I get stung I probably deserved it-
A little subcutaneous fire as a reminder of my failures.
I used to tell the bees about us, about our shared love of garden flowers and reading by sunlit windows,
The way you laughed at my jokes over a cup of tea.
A lot of good that did them, buzzing along ignorant of how bad it’s going to be.
No, the bees do not need mild introspection, gossip, or chatterings of gratitude for friendship,
As much as they love listening to those things,
A wake-up call would be best for everyone involved.
6/1/2026
Trevor
Second Summer
The second summer arrived and I was full anachronism to myself.
I was on the wrong side of things lately, and I was foolishly
waiting on a third summer. In my great waiting, I am waiting
on perfection giving ground to peace, I am waiting on surrounding
myself with what must be music. A pale pound of sunlight
illuminates the half-dark of seeing past your own eyes,
and why should solitude be a solution to loneliness?
badlands poetry 