Reach into the cloud
architecture, almost to the stars.
I lived where they are made
growing up as a kid.
I just wonder what people
are thinking sometimes,
or what happens to ideas
too un evil to endure.
Out there near the edge
the ferocactus has begun to bloom.
I heard once some skaters
were murdered there.
Today I would only
take advice from an angel.
She says soon you will grow
into a beautiful girl.
Soon you will become a planet,
moons and everything.
Sometimes I feel so happy
I forget I’m going to die,
then I go to the desert
with just my sticks
and wait for the shaman.
He always comes.
And raises a temple up
from the dirt, to give to my life
a gleam of delirium, that I may
accept the final results with grace.
Cardinality 1. The shotgun shines ___radiant history across the mantle. 2. The wind rips through a rolodex of the names of the dead. ___It could be a litany, almost ______like the registers of Audubon societies ___and the Who’s Who of West Virginia 1974 ______begging for a trumpet in morning, a waltz and then a nap [...]
Anthropology, publishing houses in elementary school, estrangement, ants conferencing over Frank Zappa. Morgan Parker describes herself as equipped with the eyes of a surrealist, ears of an ethnographer, tongue of a cynical comedian, and heart of a brooding sixteen-year old. _ _ _ Morgan Parker, Part 1 Morgan Parker, Part 2
Epithalamium with Rust I remember the dream of rust on its own vague terms: dredging the canal as though it were oneself, hoping for trinkets that fix life to a landscape of flowers and trash, and settling for bothering the levee with a stick, notching my time card in the holy city. In the margins [...]
Sarah Schweig, neighbor to airfields, estrangement, mythology, imagination, opens up about how she came to be a poet of departures. Pardon my inability to pronounce Catullus. Sarah Schweig, Part 1 Sarah Schweig, Part 2
He’s just a west-coast boy, living in New York City, he took the express train to where good poems reside. I must be tired or going insane, but Josh Bettinger is without a doubt on his game in these five poems—five because he claimed they were all shorties, but it’s not long into the interview [...]
Of course, the first guest on the show to grow up in one of the largest wilderness preserves in the United States, Yosemite National Park, provides me with a photo of herself taken indoors. Dawn Marie Knopf’s poetry feeds off a particularly American mythos: old wives’ tales, Farmer’s Almanacs, the revered stories of American pop [...]
We’re pleased to announce that Ben Pease’s Scattered Rhymes podcast is going to become the official podcast of THEthe! Scattered Rhymes is a long-form interview podcast in which poets discuss and read their work. Ben Pease has been doing the podcast for several years now and has created a back log of work that THEthe [...]