Eric Kocher: “A little over ten years ago, my friend Mark made a joke. He said that I should try to be the first person to publish a poem in Sky Mall Magazine. There was something about shopping for the most inane, kitschy stuff on the planet while flying 30,000 feet above it, just to avoid a moment of boredom, that seemed to be the antithesis of poetry. The words “Sky Mall” got stuck in my head—lodged there. This is almost always how poems happen for me. Language itself seems to be in the way just long enough to build tension before it can open into a space that pulls me forward. These poems finally arrived while I was traveling, first alone, and then the following year with my wife, as a new parent in that hazy dream of the post-pandemic. Writing them felt like going on a shopping spree, of sorts, so I tried to let myself say yes to everything.”
Clint Margrave: “I bought the guitar off my friend for $400 back in the ’90s. At the time, music was the most important thing in my life. I played in bands and like a lot of young people in their late teens and early twenties, awaited certain rock stardom. The friend I bought the guitar off of did end up playing in a famous ’90s rock band later, and even borrowed the guitar to take on tour with him. For years I watched it travel the world, be played in front of arena crowds, make appearances on television before finally coming home. By then, I’d already switched to playing a different kind of instrument, one whose strings were words.” (web)
Diane Seuss: “I was raised in a place that seems to me now to have been the maternity ward where archetypes were born. Bull snakes and milkweed pods, vitamin factories and cement churches with ‘God’ stuck over the door with vinyl mailbox lettering. I was saved, and saved again, and saved again and again, but it never took. Then I fell in love and in love again, and again. I was to be married on the Vernal Equinox on the Bowery in NYC, but I walked away. Things tumbled from there, as if love is ruled by the laws of physics, which it is. I now live in the gut of aloneness like a tapeworm. I quite like it here.” (web)
Sue Fagalde Lick: “I have been playing music as long as I have been writing poems. I have lugged my guitar to theaters, clubs, galleries, senior centers, and street fairs, offering my original songs and covers of others. I have sung and played piano at weddings and funerals. I led the choirs at church for pay and for free. The rhythms and sounds can’t help but seep into my poetry. It’s a good line, but can I sing it?” (web)
Lexi Pelle: “Frank X. Gaspar wrote, ‘It’s never the aboutness of anything but the wailing underneath it.’ This poem, although based on a relatively uncharged article, was a slow settling into that wailing.” (web)
You got the tattoos you always wanted. The two betta fish on your arm, sunk in red, the black spider lilies across your stomach. You love the kids you teach now. First graders who will do anything you want as long as you say, you really disappointed me last time! but you love them so much & know that they can do so much better. I saw online that you finally learned how to do liquid eyeliner. No more smudging, no more muddy brown eyeshadow. Every photo of you featuring just a flick upwards like another eyelash. Maybe you finally started writing people back, even though I’m not included on this list. Maybe you finally told your parents you changed your major—do your cousins at church know? Does your mom love you now in the way you want, now that you’re baptized? Can you live with yourself? I know you don’t pray to God. I know you don’t believe in yourself either. I know it’s been a while since you said anything real, following every shot by the rule of thirds. Do you remember when we first met. Two years ago right before summer came down on us hard. April a prologue to our sleeplessness. Our regret, the correspondence of it, how it multiplied, we said a lot of things like, please try therapy, and, basically, think like a social media safety guideline. I’m still downing three fistfuls of melatonin every night. Still stripping back hangnails like wallpaper, hoping for the raw of it. I keep running myself into the direction of your house but that’s nothing now. Isn’t it. I’m so glad you’re doing well now. You and your dog and an impossible view, the way Phoebe Bridgers sings it, even though you still forget to eat. Even though us. Even though you don’t remember don’t you remember / don’t you still want us? Do you even need to think about how it felt? 4am, trading messages back and forth until our typos began tripping into themselves, dawn just another alarm to shut out. Every confession that curdled in our arms. The truth was, our parents could both get better. They could have been nicer. Picked us up from school and came clean. You could have loved me, and I would’ve let you.
Ruoyu Wang: “I like poetry because it allows the intimacy for me to create a transitional space where these fragments from my life and my identity and the people I love are able to emerge into a fuller, lighter truth.”
Miseong Kong: “I once lived to play classical guitar to the best of my ability, to the scrutiny of the masters, and that life produced some beautiful sounds but sacrificed my love of the guitar. Then I tried living to take small moments of life into poetry and that life produced some beautiful poetry but sacrificed too many small moments. Prompt poetry sacrifices the joy of freedom and, of all joys, maybe that is the easiest to let go? Let then the music flow in response, as words, constrained.”
