We just had to start this episode with a reassurance that everyone was dressed, which you’ll understand as soon as you read or listen to “Pneuma”, the poem by BJ Soloy that kicks everything off. The bonkers energy of a country and a world overflowing with bad news and tragedy is juxtaposed with some very real tenderness and self reflection in two astounding pieces by Soloy. These astutely paced poems are brimming with the overwhelm of modern life while threading in historical references (Brown vs. Board of Education, Troost Avenue, and scud missiles, for starters).

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At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Samantha Neugebauer, Dagne Forrest, Jason Schneiderman, Lisa Zerkle, Isabel Petry

BJ Soloy is the author of Birth Center in Corporate Woods (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press), Our Pornography and other disaster songs (Slope Editions, 2019), and Selected Letters, a chapbook out with New Michigan Press. He lives and dies in Des Moines, home of the whatever.

Pneuma

Put your pants back on, America.

It’s four in the morning & also

five, three, & two, simultaneously,

you big lug. Plus, there’s snow. 

In this light, really any light,

my nose looks like a tired potato

got punched in its mute mouth.

With any light on, I want to see other people

when I look in the mirror, when I slouch

in this bathroom booth where I hope to die

on the shitter, like an American,

like one of yours. Clinton, TN is any other frowsy town

with a cock & balls scribbled on its playground slide

& square pitbulls straining at their chains. 

America, I came to bed late as always.

You roll over, softly surprised & then delighted, 

offering, “I forgot where I was.” I’m yawning,

breathing just to get oxygen on this fire. 

Well, tonight is not the only place I am

tonight. Beyond me & between me

light bulbs hiccup & burble 

& a frenzied squirrel loses its map

of maples & restarts. Maybe we ought to 

take what we’ve still got & laminate it in frost 

& then salt & then the gold leaf over spring’s pat rapture.

There are things I’ve learned already this young

soft year I don’t know what to do with: one 

gets a pregnancy test when in the ER

for their attempt on their own life. What to name that baby? 

I worry I’m doing this wrong. I’ve got beans soaking, sharps 

& meds hidden, the last dank well swill of our bank account 

miraculously transformed into boxed wine. Winter’s here 

with its expressive eyebrows & doomed neighborhood cats 

under every car. You yawn so I kiss you & you taste better 

than free food, but you can’t sleep & I try to stay up reading 

but layers of exhaustion—wet blankets on this piss whisper 

of a fire—keep accumulating. I worry you’ll do it right next time 

& I’m still attached to this day of ours, whatever day it is.

Benesh

It’s been a long night & your mouth already tasted like rain an hour ago. Writing

often of the sky instead of tasting it, I look to the sconces & the sconces

look fake & their light looks fake & I have authentic responses to both,

which is how storms start. As seasons

digest themselves (a short talk on short talks), holiday cards become

less applicable & so more affordable & Fox 8 or whatever news vans circle

the weather or immanent site of tragedy tourism. Some nights I go out & walk

the sidewalk in socks or bare feet

longer than I’d meant to & notice the crystal glass & homely bends

& feel deeply the Troost neighborhood. My ears circle in on themselves, stereo

sinkholes, by which I mean I’m eavesdropping & I’m sorry. I’ve had bad teeth forever

& so got online & bought God’s vibrator

as a toothbrush & sunburned my mirror & stood boldly before the middle-aged self.

White as I am, I trust most the islands that kill their first tourists. Three weeks’

swim away, a cargo ship full of luxury cars continues to burn in the Atlantic.

A mother about a mile from right here

killed her dog & decapitated her son after calling the cops on the devil. The news:

The snows. The Olympics. Rubble-crusted outskirts of Kiev. The soft snoring

of our toddler. What do we do? I dither. I stand numb before the light.

I look deeply. I look like Fabio

if, instead of an angular chin, his face flesh just sort of dangled & then if also 

that formless dangle continued on down the rest of the frame. My point is

I have long hair right now. A Hadean earth. A wobbling star. A thought floating in

like pickled nimbus, ghost fart. In the mirror, 

I am an amplified echo of my middle school self making muscles at himself, waiting

for hair to grow, SCUD missiles arcing across the nightly news downstairs. 

Tonight, I got news off Facebook, which makes me middle-aged again

& sad. You’d already gone to bed when I found out Robert died. I didn’t wake you up. I

didn’t even check you were asleep. You needed 

a night & this news is not the night you needed. A neighbor is yelling at something, 

maybe himself, & the still-lengthening night repeats. I rarely call in favors, but every 

time I do, I claim to do it rarely, but still, please sleep. Please go to sleep or 

keep sleeping. He was thirty-three. It’s later still & your mouth is full 

of rain. I’ll tell you in the morning.