Beginning January 20, 2021, the Indolent Books website is posting a poem-a-day to celebrate the resurgent spirit of truth, justice, and democracy that awoke in our nation at noon on that day. We want poems about what we are seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling, hoping and fearing at the dawn of this historic presidency. Let’s use poetry to engage in a rich and layered conversation about the ongoing polarization of this nation and the opportunities for bringing the nation and its people together, for moving forward, for making a difference.

NOTE: This series succeeds Poems in the Afterglow. We will no longer be posting new poems under the Poems in the Afterglow rubric.

We value poems that use all the resources of poetry, especially in ways that are innovative, provocative, and risky.

IMPORTANT: Poems submitted for this series must be previously unpublished.

SUBMIT up to 3 poems or 3 pages of poetry in a Word file. NOT PDF. Word.

INCLUDE a brief bio that includes in the following order:

• Any books published (including publisher and year of publication);
• Any journals in which poems have appeared;
• Any anthologies in which poems have appeared (including publisher and year of publication)
• A few other personal or professional details of your choice.

PLEASE NOTE: This is a poem-a-day series, and as we work our way through the Submittable queue, we pick a poem and post it immediately without notifying the author beforehand. You’ll get your acceptance email via Submittable within a few minutes of the poem being posted, but generally not in advance of the poem being posted. Please be sure you are comfortable with that modus operandi when you decided to submit work.

A NOTE ABOUT DONATIONS: At the end of the submission form, we provide an option to donate from $2.00 to $100.00 to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press. Submissions are treated the same whether accompanied by a donation or not. We urge you to donate as generously as you can. Plain and simple, your donations make it possible for the press to continue its work. The more revenue we have, the more poems and books we can publish. If we don’t have revenue, we cannot publish poems or books. It’s as simple as that.

Click here to submit via Submittable.

Check out the series here.

We look forward to receiving and reading your work.

SUBMIT to A River Sings via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value our online series, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993. 

From November 7 until January 20, the Indolent Books website will publish a poem-a-day in celebration of the unprecedented presidential transition we embark up today. We want poems about what we are seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling, hoping and fearing in the aftermath of this historic election. Let’s use poetry to engage in a rich and layered conversation about the ongoing polarization of this nation and the opportunities bringing the nation and its people together, for moving forward, for making a difference.

We value poems that use all the resources of poetry, especially in ways that are innovative, provocative, and risky.

IMPORTANT: Poems submitted for this series must be previously unpublished.

SUBMIT up to 3 poems or 3 pages of poetry in a Word file. NOT PDF. Word.

INCLUDE a brief bio that includes in the following order:

• Any books published (including publisher and year of publication);
• any journals in which poems have appeared;
• any anthologies in which poems have appeared (including publisher, year of publication, and names of editors);
• a few other personal or professional details of your choice.

PLEASE NOTE: This is a poem-a-day series, and as we work our way through the Submittable queue, we pick a poem and post it immediately without notifying the author beforehand. You’ll get your acceptance email via Submittable within a few minutes of the poem being posted, but generally not in advance of the poem being posted. Please be sure you are comfortable with that modus operandi when you decided to submit work.

A NOTE ABOUT DONATIONS: At the end of the submission form, we provide an option to donate from $2.00 to $100.00 to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press. Submissions are treated the same whether accompanied by a donation or not. We urge you to donate as generously as you can. Plain and simple, your donations make it possible for the press to continue its work. The more revenue we have, the more poems and books we can publish. If we don’t have revenue, we cannot publish poems or books. It’s as simple as that.

Click here to submit via Submittable.

Check out the series here.

We look forward to receiving and reading your work. 

SUBMIT to Transition: Poems in the Afterglow via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you value Poems in the Afterglow, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

J.D. Isip
Return

My White God, have me, a mess of sinew and intention
and blood, too, so much clotted me, black-speckled
simmering under the mass of heaven, of you, my god,
my judgment, misjudgment, offering myself cheaply,

the understory, transgression, down low, under
all the new flesh resisting domination, muscling
over bones, over years, over and over the hunks of us
hit the fire and the stones and the way he tastes at 3am

it’s thick and sweet, curls and billows beneath the white
cumulus bodies, nuzzles at their perfect curves, craves
that proximity to perfection, even attempts blasphemy
by mounting the god, trying this from another angle

oh, but there’s the thunder, the white sugar floss melts
sending you back to earth drop by drop, trembling
some electric curse that “we agreed” white is on top,
always on top, drop by drop, what you offer, all of you

gets sent back into the clay earth, into whatever exotic
“little” neighborhood he found you in, erasing pictures
and messages, reevaluating the men of earth, promising
yourself no more altars, no more cruel, white gods.

—Submitted on 04/30/2020

J.D. Isip is the author of Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). His work in all genres has appeared in The Rainbow Journal, Elsewhere, Dual Coast Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, Rogue Agent, and other journals. Isip is an English professor in Plano, Texas.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Jennifer Roche 
Shopping for My Mother

My mother put on a mask and rubber gloves,
drove herself to the Jewel, like a nurse thief,
to get eggs and half & half.
Mom, let me do that for you.
I’ll let you know when we get to that.
I think we are there.
I add a Heath bar.
Two bottles of white wine.
A blue-inked note
and a bouquet of yellow tulips,
picked up curbside from the florist,
bow-tied with twine:
Mom, I’m sorry I can’t come up to see you,
but I love you, and this will be over soon.
I towel down my missives
with a white disinfectant wipe
that wilts as I go,
and drive 45 minutes on a whispering highway
to leave the parcel on her front stoop.

As I depart, I picture her arthritic hands, freshly gloved,
lifting the brown bag gingerly from her stoop.
She will wipe it all down again in her kitchen.

Then, she’ll uncase her battery-operated corkscrew,
settle into her flower-upholstered chair,
and work her way through a backlog of Sunday Times.

We are going to be fine.
We are going to be.

—Submitted on 04/05/2020

Jennifer Roche is a the author of 20: Erasure Poems of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Alternating Current, 2020). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Storm Cellar, Tule Review, Footnote, Oyez Review, Rain, and other journals. Roche lives in Chicago.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Susan Landgraf
After A Bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon

We lose weeks, oaths

Despair turns down an icy road to Hawaii

We win the keys to Casablanca

We see Hawaii and beautiful bodies
luminous grape-colored
possibilities

we discover
yes, we discover
nothing is forbidden

until the next morning.

Susan Landgraf is the author of What We Bury Changes the Ground (Tebot Bach, 2017), The Inspired Poet (Two Sylvias Press, 2019), and other books. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Margie, Nimrod, Calyx, and other journals. A former journalist and teacher she is the Poet Laureate of Auburn, Washington.

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If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Carmeilina Fernandes-Kock am Brink
Journey

A second week confined finds me
Unearthing those sticks I
Use to steady my ascent
In the way of extra limbs that lend a spring. A goatherd´s step.
Finds me scraping old boots well
Broken into,
My feet rarely slipping on the
Bed of rocks I cross before bending, hands cupped
To quench my thirst.
I am so ready now to strike out and climb,
Soak in the grazing of plateaus, echo
The clonking of bells, belt out a refrain, inhale
The green meadows, meet
Ancient villages below. A lithe butterfly
Strapped onto my back the whole weightlessness
Of a single change of clothes,
Just one t-shirt that dries overnight
And a light raincoat. You never know,
The Camino stretches out one thousand kilometres to Compostela
Through mud and time. I would halt at plain or ornate
Pumps, in the centre of towns, fountains
Spilling wine.
And at night, from the pillow of my hotel bed
I´d mull over the nature of self,
Isolated. Imagine the lone
Pilgrim, plodding along, bent, until arriving home,
Santiago, where, arms outstretched from a body
Broken
He would have laughed, and wept.

—Submitted on 03/25/2020

Carmeilina Fernandes-Kock am Brink is of German-Indian background, grew up in Canada, and teaches English in Toulouse, France.

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Michael Broder
First Thing in the Morning of April 13, 2020

You sip your coffee. You take your meds. You
feed your kitties. You check your email. You
check your Facebook. You check your Twitter.
You used to get straight to coffee and your poem.
Now you are far more distracted. Now before you
write your poem, you check the headlines. Cannot
start your day without knowing yesterday’s death
toll. Cannot start your day without knowing if a new
clinical trial started treating patients with an
investigational new drug. You anticipate the governor’s
daily press briefing, live streamed on Facebook
or watched later if you miss it. It’s your Mr. Rogers.
It’s your fireside chat. One of your backyard feral
cats looked sickly, and then stood off and looked
at dinner but did not eat, and then just did not come
back—you assume he’s dead; that’s how they do it;
you’ve seen it before. And it (most likely, although
based on current information, not definitely) has
nothing to do with the pandemic, and yet it seems to,
with everything that happens during this time—a
new TV show you start watching, a book you read
for a few minutes at bedtime before your Ambien
kicks in—everything seems to be Covid-19 edition,
everything seems connected to the…you like the
term health crisis, which nobody seems to use.
That’s what they called AIDS—the health crisis.
Then you were marginalized and the federal government
dismissed your plight. Now you have marriage rights
and characters in TV shows, movies, and stage plays—
and the federal government fucks you right along with
everyone else. Plus ça change.

Michael Broder is the author of Drug and Disease Free (Indolent Books, 2018) and This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for gay poetry. His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies. For several months, he has written a poem of at least 25 lines every morning; this was the poem for April 13, 2020.

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Marjorie Moorhead
In Silence

after Ilya Kaminsky

How is it I can hear a neighbor’s lawnmower, buzzing like a fly,
watch the sunlight from my front room windows,
see the breeze in leaves…

How is it I can breathe with ease,
when a small body washes up on a shore,
alone?

(forgive me) I take in the sunlight.
I block out the body (forgive me).
I eat my lunch, in silence.

Marjorie Moorhead is the author of Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and Survival Part 2: Trees, Birds, Ocean, Bees (Duck Lake Books, 2020). Recent poems have appeared in Verse-Virtual, Amethyst Journal, and Sheila-Na-Gig, among other journals. Her poems have also appeared in several anthologies, including Planet in Peril (Fly on the Wall, 2019), edited by Isabelle Kenyon, and From The Ashes (Animal Heart, 2019), edited by Amanda McLeod and Mela Blust. An AIDS survivor and mother, Moorhead found a voice in poetry. Her work speaks of environment, survival, attention to the “every day,” and how we treat each other. She writes from the NH/VT border.

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Lynn McGee
Crush, 5

I’m leaning back against the ropes
and the mat is blue leather, my hands deep
in red gloves, swollen tongues. Punching bags
swing like giant capsules; white on top, black
on bottom. There’s a row of hanging lights,
and beneath them, a row of stars that hatch
across the glossy floor. I’m leaning back
against the ropes, heart hammering
in the call-and-response that keeps my pulse
sprinting like a rabbit across a football field.
I’m calm as that field, and lean back
against the push of braided cable, a lot
of spring in its wrap. I blame you
for how good that feels.

Lynn McGee is the author of Tracks (Broadstone Books, 2019) and Sober Cooking (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016), as well as two  award-winning poetry chapbooks, Heirloom Bulldog (Bright Hill Press, 2015) and Bonanza (Slapering Hol Press, 1996). Here poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, Ontario Review, Phoebe, Painted Bride Quarterly, Sun Magazine, and The New Guard, among other journals, as well as in the anthology Stonewall’s Legacy (Local Gems Press, 2019), edited by Rusty Rose and Marc Rosen. With José Pelauz, McGee wrote the children’s book Starting Over in Sunset Park (Tilbury House Publishers, 2020). She serves on the advisory board of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and co-curates the Lunar Walk Poetry Series with Gerry LaFemina and Madeleine Barnes. Online at lynnmcgee.com.

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If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.