Low Pile Fragments 

The words are plucking right there at my teeth, crowded inside
standing nervously like nape hairs that have
known Fear before
Sitting in crossed-leg confession to my best blanket friend:

a gay late night after-party : memory fractures

drunken, naked hot tub departure when they find out; start in
not a real man : pussies are gross : we can’t sit in this 
             dirty water

i see my hands on the carpet— low pile, beige carpet—
see them tensed, weight bearing
raw knee abrasions; scarred for months. gonorrhea from . . . . . . where? 

i see my hands on the carpet

Someone is kneeling behind me
someone enters the room, sees

Leaves.

resisting force, Someone’s hips pounding as cocained hearts; i’m there i’m    
not there   i   see my hands on the carpet : bang bang bang bang
ecstasy and booze? drugged?   immobile. i feel nothing. Just

my hands 
low pile carpet

: In silence, he bends at the waist, burrowing his bald head in my lap
a monk in wordless prayer. I was the boy burying his feelings 
arm’s-length underground, so our sorrow would not have 
a chance to grow

I gathered his heaviest pieces in my arms, those dampened elder tulips 
split open 
with the dwindling rains of Spring. And we danced to shift weight 

He made love to me there, in the day-lit room
holding my hand through full-body pleasurequakes
crafting a juxtaposition: Then and Now :wide as my weary, wintered sea 
—
He knew
—
but said not a word, just kissed me in his arms
and loved away what hurt 
just loved it all away

♨

Pink  

God gave me roses
pink roses
on my birthday

And God watched as I learned 
to grow thorns; protection 
proving more critical 
than care
Weeds creeping around stems
as a slower kind 
of fatal embrace
 
God was in my garden
when my lover felt the velvet layers
gingerly rubbing petals 
between his fingertips 
he comes to me
he arrives 
with/in me
Oh my, God
was in the garden 

♨

Independence Day	 

"Enchanté, come in"
tête-à-tête with my new 
Grindr conquest
His raised tongue forms the 
tip-less roof for Zhuh
to speak my grateful name
I learned fast, around here 
Jean’s call themselves Jeen in
Non-Haitian company
Stranger casual on my couch, chiseled like a legend
telling me about his family’s 
Kreyòl Ayisyen 
[Haitian Creole] 
Us second gen kids, we don’t know
too much         not like the old folks 
want us to
Told me Haitian Independence Day 
was yesterday
barbecues and block parties—
facts I didn’t know because 
je n’avais 
pas besoin 
de savoir 
[I didn’t 
need
to know]
He eyed my wispy wrist
resting soft like 
Québec snow 
his brawny arm in ancestors’ 
richly earthen hue, these
pieces of Us intertwined 
like an atlas we’d cracked open 
and laid flat upon the table 
His gaze rose, seizing my eyes
“kind of interesting that today
we’re sitting here together”
and together we fell motionless 
and felt that        apart

—Submitted on 02/13/2023

Jean-Denis Couillard Hale (they/them) is an emerging queer, non-binary trans poet originally from Vermont. Their poetry is forthcoming in The Write Launch. Couillard Hale holds a master’s in public health from the UMass Amherst.

Editor’s Note: The series title Flush Left refers to the fact that, due to our limited WordPress skills, we are only considering poems that are flush left. Poems already in our Submittable queue that have simple non-flush-left formatting may be considered for publication. Click here to submit. 

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You've lived many lifetimes like this:

holding back, hands folded,
embodying the family code: 
do not give yourself away. 

No wonder you let the Shadow 
lure you into fast cars,  
tilt the whiskey flask to your lips:

Girls like you like the sweet burn. 
No moon. Scent of cut hay. 
Gravel roads that end in trouble. 

As long as you succumb 
to the trance of he made me, 
who can blame you? 

A voice says, Remember this:
No one owns you.
You owe nothing to no one. 

Bats dive from the abandoned loft, 
arrow-winged, fork-tailed. 
Surely it has never been this dark.

—Submitted on 02/13/2023

Debra Kaufman‘s most recent collection is God Shattered (Jacar 2019). Her poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, The Phare, The Healing Muse, North Carolina Literary Review, and the anthology Crossing the Rift (Press 53, 2021), among other journals. She lives in North Carolina.

Editor’s Note: The series title Flush Left refers to the fact that, due to our limited WordPress skills, we are only considering poems that are flush left. Poems already in our Submittable queue that have simple non-flush-left formatting may be considered for publication. Click here to submit. 

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Pre-order the book right here on indolentbooks.com.

Spectators		
          after Rilke

The surrounding spectators
have us badly paired,

too much of a calculation.
Suddenly we are falsely colored

in metallic silk
under heavy weights,

confused in our windowed skin.
We chase a cloud of tears.

Some of the spectators
already lie in the graveyard,

yet they stare at this suburban sky.
We are wanderers,

shrunk in our skin, living on 
despite the fruit of displeasure.

The spectators bend and twist us
in the oiled slippery air

of infinite space
while we convalesce 

with our scarcely trying mothers,
our affectionate toys.

♨

Coyotes

bent on prey
sidle into the woods 
near my house 
soundless indifferent
gray among grasses

what have they taken
from me at the edge 
of the field what 
part of me stays
with them in the brush

♨

Let Me Not Say

I will not tell you how relieved I am 
when I don’t have to cook,

or how much I need to be alone,

or say how determined I was to turn on 
the car radio and listen to politics 
though I knew you’d hate it,

or tell you how I sink into violent 
cop shows as into a soporific soup,

or how it annoys me sometimes 
that you’re so kind, so organized,

how you never forget to mail the letter 
or wake me before you go to the store,

not say how in your excellence, so modest, 
I feel my own pallid aspiration

(again I forgot to call my brother),

or how I need so many hot baths 
to stay calm in these terrible days,

not say that most of our stuff 
is mine mine mine, old stuff—
my grandmother’s Chinese screen, 
my father’s platinum whale, his set of Kipling—

not tell you how much I wish 
you had piles of things too, 
just because you wanted them!

—Submitted on 10/31/2022

Cammy Thomas is the author of Tremors (Four Way Books, 2021). Her debut collection, Cathedral of Wish (Four Way Books, 2005) won the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Recent poems have appeared in On the Seawall, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Porch, Ghost Quarry, Sixth Finch, and Amsterdam Quarterly, as well as in the anthologies Poems in the Aftermath (Indolent Books, 2017), and Echoes From Walden (Wayfarer Books, 2021).

Editor’s Note: The series title Flush Left refers to the fact that, due to our limited WordPress skills, we are only considering poems that are flush left. Poems already in our Submittable queue that have simple non-flush-left formatting may be considered for publication.

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Aftermath 

I am aware of all the ways
In which I am not aware

Grace is more than a notion 
It is a condition of being in a body

And what is a body?
And are you listening for what the question is really asking?

And are you certain that you don't want to be here anymore? 
Is there perhaps not something more beneath that feeling?

Tell me, who stole your joy? 
In whose hands were held carelessly the things you were made of?

And if you could, would you go back and fight even harder?
You couldn't have won, you know.

It's not your fault 
That the sound of rain triggers something in the body

The unexpected ping
And washout 

And a war is more deadly once the war is over, 
And what is a war

And aren't you here, still
Though the odds were so great against it

I am aware of all the ways
In which no poem, or prayer or hand reaching out in the dark

Is ever enough.

❡

A poem for my father while he's still living 

My father's laughter
How can I make you see
It was just the air we breathed
Tethered us
Dowsing body of sweet joy
Shoulder to shoulder on the worn couch 

Picture us 
Tired and beautiful 
Around the television's warm glow 
Mad TV, Grace Under Fire, House of Buggins,
I want to bottle his laugh 
An amulet of holy sound 
Worn for the rest of my days
Around my neck 

I want him never to leave 
This world we're in 
My father 
Want a heaven full of televisions
God must know this man's laugh 
Must know how much he had to suffer and lose
To find his way to it 

I refuse to imagine a world without this sound 
All around 
Like the blues
It's sung with the whole body 

Corn swaying in the cool breeze
He jumps and he makes that shot from the 3 point line 
And everything is just fine
Not fine, almost fine
beginning, ending, beginning 

My father, lost in the bins
Records from way back when
In his hard working hands
We skip church in search 
Of that sweeter music 

Walk along the road
Honey buns and chocolate milk from the corner store 
Say what you want
That was my heaven 
Right there between pump number one and pump number two

Me and him 
Out along the road

I did not know I was in the holy moment
How quickly time passes 
That you can't go back
To the precise feeling 
Of the two of you 
Up along the road
Searching for the promised land 
In the dusty light of the bins 
A river of sound run through us 
Washing us clean and new 
And whole and home. 

I refuse to imagine a world without all of this.

❡

A big, beautiful dark

There's a tree, Charlotte
A big dark beautiful tree 
Between you and me
Right along the road, little bird,
And we are running 
Still, a tree, and the world,
Charlotte, the world 
Remember how it felt
To stand where once we stood 
Light in the field
Such breeze could carry one
Charlotte, the world, then-
It's not the same world now
Still, there's a tree 
A big beautiful dark in me
The world, Charlotte, a big dark beautiful field, oh little bird, in all that light,
Burning. The world, Charlotte, the world,
Burning in light. 

—Submitted on 01/28/2023

James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018), All Things Beautiful Are Bent (Alien Buddha, 2021) and Motel Prayers (Alien Buddha, 2022.) Diaz’s work has appeared most recently in Thrush Poetry Journal, Wrongdoing Mag, Sugar House Review, and Rust + Moth.

Editor’s Note: The series title Flush Left refers to the fact that, due to our limited WordPress skills, we are only considering poems that are flush left. Poems already in our Submittable queue that have simple non-flush-left formatting may be considered for publication.

Visit our Kickstarter for A MONTH OF SOMEDAY, the debut chapbook by Gerald Wagoner. 

The Lake of You

Love, I can see so clearly to the bottom
of you. Pearl scaled fish swim by and I imagine
a feast in my bed—you pick up a bite
with your thumb and forefinger, offer it to me. 

I can see the pennies I threw in, hoping 
you would be patient and kind about my anxiety, 
lining the soft silt bottom of you. 

As a child, I dug my tender feet
into the lake bottom to feel the supple
sediment between my toes. Then, a sharp
prick of pain and I looked down to see blood
feathering out into the glassy, sun infused water. 

This evening I will go fishing on Howard Lake. 
I will catch one, pull the hook from 
its translucent mouth, and throw it back—
watch it swim away from the boat. 

I think about how you have released me too 
into the shallowness of you—how I am scared
and in pain, but swim toward deeper waters.

—Submitted on 10/18/2022

Erin Lynn Marsh is the author of I May Never be Able to Stop Writing Love Poems (Jackpine Writers’ Bloc, 2022) and Disability Isn’t Sexy (Jules’ Poetry Playhouse Publications, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Post Road Magazine, Sugar House Review, Paper Darts, CRE8, and Emrys Journal, among others. She holds an MFA from Lesley University in Boston. She lives in Bemidji, Minn.

Editor’s Note: The series title Flush Left refers to the fact that, due to our limited WordPress skills, we are only considering poems that are flush left. Poems already in our Submittable queue that have simple non-flush-left formatting may be considered for publication.

Visit our Kickstarter for A MONTH OF SOMEDAY, the debut chapbook by Gerald Wagoner. 

The Qualia of Souls:  Apocrypha 

That the transcendent, life-giving radiance that daily reaches down 
to us from the celestial heights also reaches up to us from far below 
the ground. That there’s a Holiness that dwells and dreams 
at the very center of the Earth.
                                                                                            —David Abram


Winter is their season, summer too bright for disclosure. 

Flickering shadows: their home movies. 

Do not confuse them with spirit, that frantic city, clay breathiness.

Beyond life, beyond death, thumbprint inked in mystery.

They know one word that lodges like a locket in the heart. It’s a noun.

It’s always about food or eyes or music. Nobody ever talks 
about their love of textures, wools especially.

They are shaped like O’s, of course. 

Are they really halved as Plato declares? Doubt it. We can only 
die solo. Which is not to say they don’t like companionship.

They start out ancient. Even if we live a long life, 
we never catch up with them, nor should we.
  
They take themselves very seriously. 

When they do speak, they gong, in rippled circles. 

They often visit the cave paintings, amuse themselves with labyrinths,
spelunk darkness. 

We must let them rise and set within us.  

They can disguise themselves as any mammal.

Sorrow grows them, nurtures their long dark roots. 

They’re prone to weight gain.  

They respect pure thought but only as the satin lining in the heavy coat of feeling. 

Not to their taste, flowers, birds, wind. 

Not heavenward, souls point down. They go low. 

Dog or horse escorts at the end. Please, no aspirational angels!

Where do they go at our death? They stay with the body. It’s their duty. Until.

Traveling, traveling, arrived! At their destination, the Earth’s magnetic core.

Attracted like shavings, down through thin crust and furthermore mantle, 
millions and millions of miles, to the planet’s heart.

They congregate around the sun in the center, twin to the one we know,
the molten wreath, the nest, the fire in the metal drum. 

Around that fire star, ore and origin of being, iron souls sit cross-legged in a circle.

Do they reincarnate? We don’t really know.
 
All that terrible softness up there, the squishy wet matter, vacuity of blue. 

Around that open fire, they tell stories about us, one more unbelievable than the other.

—Submitted on 10/15/2022

Deborah Gorlin is the author of Open Fire (Bauhan Publishing, forthcoming), as well as of the prize-winning poetry collections Bodily Course (White Pine Press, 1997) and Life of the Garment (Bauhan Publishing, 2015). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Bomb, New England Review, and Prairie Schooner, among others. Emerita co-director of the Writing Program at Hampshire College, she served for many years as a poetry editor at The Massachusetts Review.

Editor’s Note: The series title Flush Left refers to the fact that, due to our limited WordPress skills, we are only considering poems that are flush left. Poems already in our Submittable queue that have simple non-flush-left formatting may be considered for publication.

Visit our Kickstarter for A MONTH OF SOMEDAY, the debut chapbook by Gerald Wagoner. 

News of the Unconscious

They have crammed us into a windowless van
for the short ride to Tompkins Square Park.
Are we prisoners of war, refugees, both?
The rules at this camp are vague. If we run
across the lawn, reach the basketball court
and race back through the tents and pushcarts,
sign a couple of forms, the guards will let us go “soonish.”
Under a jagged splay of clouds and filthy gulls
the guitar in my hands snaps with a crunch.
Everybody claps along to the tune I manage to extract
from the mess of splinters, strings, and feathers.
∴
Cots and stretchers are laid out in the lobby or wedged
between bookshelves. But it’s on the mezzanine
of this library turned into a makeshift hospital
where I find my friend face up reading
The Night Face Up by Cortázar. And
as I help him to his feet our bodies begin
merging with one another, his full bladder becomes
my about-to-burst sac, the pain in his phantom
left arm bleeds into mine. And what I think
it’s my voice is just his own coming out of my mouth,
one among many more rising from the beds, alive.

—Submitted on 10/06/2022

Guillermo Filice Castro is the author of the chapbooks Mixtape for a War (Seven Kitchens Press, 2018) and Agua, Fuego (Finishing Line Press, 2015). His work appears in Allium, Barrow Street, Brooklyn Rail, Court Green, Fugue, The Normal School, and other journals. Born and raised in Argentina, Castro lives in New Jersey.

Editor’s Note: The series title Flush Left refers to the fact that, due to our limited WordPress skills, we are only considering poems that are flush left. Poems already in our Submittable queue that have simple non-flush-left formatting may be considered for publication.

Visit our Kickstarter for A MONTH OF SOMEDAY, the debut chapbook by Gerald Wagoner.