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PODCAST

VOICEMAIL POEMS

VOICEMAIL POEMS

Poetry via voicemail. Missed calls you need to hear. Open submissions accepted. Guidelines at http://voicemailpoems.org

arts literature

All Episodes

00:01:36

"Work Ghazal" by Jarrett Moseley

VOICEMAIL POEMS ·

2025/08/14

The last night we spoke, you said we could make this work.I sold the bed we used to sleep on, to forget, hoping it would work. I left the pink book you gave me on my desk, your letters in my drawer, the ones where you said love is work. I left the memory of us sleeping on a cliffside in my head but deleted the picture we took, dead-eyed from waking up to work at 5 AM on another coast, the night sea barely visible beyond your head laid against my thigh, sprawled black hair, it was easy work

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00:02:38

"We Promise to Protect Each Other" by Lauren Dotson

VOICEMAIL POEMS ·

2025/08/14

We promise to protect each other After Willie Perdomo which means we pinky swear it which means we draw our pinkies like switchblades from

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00:02:34

"Things I'd Still Do" by Dré Pontbriand

VOICEMAIL POEMS ·

2025/08/14

Get in vans with strangers: a Palo-Santo heavy Chevy G20 with a sonnet-spilling prophet; a red 70’s Volkswagen shaggin' wagon with three long-haired surfers headed South; a fuzzy pink and purple pimped out festival-goer’s fantasy stocked with the best candy—one taste and I make-out with God. Talk myself out of a felony on one side of the border, have my first lucid dream on the other. Skinny dip a bioluminescent shoreline with a nowhere-bound time -traveller, his touch the lightning that

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00:02:59

"these days, everybody wants to hear the prophecies...

VOICEMAIL POEMS ·

2025/08/14

"these days, everybody wants to hear the prophecies of yore at a mcdonald’s drive through, and i just don’t think that that’s what i’m after" & when my friend pulls up & the speaker starts crackling with some eldritch horror, & it asks, do you want to die with that? & my friend looks over at me & asks, well, do you? & i say i’m good with just the pepsi, thanks & the eldritch horror, profound & decrepit, wails like a thousand suns being born or the edge of a paper slicing through skin or your dad

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00:01:56

"The Goose: A Diptych" by Devan Murphy

VOICEMAIL POEMS ·

2025/08/14

I dreamed of a canoe, and of the two of us: I was new on the lake. Streaming through the murk, the cellar scent of blue and brown water, and you, my new love, saying nothing, only rowing us backwards deftly. At the lake’s deepest point: a miniature goose—a full grown adult, though not five inches high, resting on an island of ice, mid-June. Tenderly I scooped it. Its feet were frozen in a lump of ice, but it stood on my palm as quiet and unmoving as you, who waited with paused oars, seeming not to

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00:01:28

"The Dawn Raids" by Cindy Kurukaanga

VOICEMAIL POEMS ·

2025/08/14

Chocolate Polynesian brown was beckoned to the land of the long white cloud to work in factories, freezing works, docks, was beckoned to work hard, send money back to islands of hibiscus and frangipani But chocolate Polynesian brown got swallowed, digested in a stomach churning with acid-filled hate The outcome? That other shade of brown // But dawn, because you covered your eyes with the dark hands of night batons bashed on doors, scaring pregnant women, given barely enough time to dress

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00:01:29

"Sunday Tea" by Derrick Austin

VOICEMAIL POEMS ·

2025/08/14

I studied Italian painters, Giorgione, Titian. At one job, I’m a glorified secretary. I answer the phone in my professional voice and sell gaudy urns to luxe addresses. My neighbor listens patiently, amused by my young life. We’re the only Black gay men in our building, so he has me over for Sunday tea. I fill our cups. For the heart, he says, adding whiskey to his. In the 80s, on a fellowship in Spain, he practiced arias and translated Romani ballads. After a concert, he presented Leontyne

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00:02:23

"sometimes at 10:37pm you need to change your life"...

VOICEMAIL POEMS ·

2025/08/14

so you do the next best thing and you cut your hair you follow a youtube video and a confident-man-hair-stylist-type shows you how using a mannequin head and swift movements on your turn you take two ponytails and the shittiest pair of scissors money can buy and you snip away at your kinda-long hair until it becomes less long and hopefully more shape arms overhead you’re diving into what no one can say today was the first day of April you got rejected from a job opportunity you

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00:01:10

"Poem Written in iPhone Note via Voice to Text While...

VOICEMAIL POEMS ·

2025/08/14

People fell in love during the fall of the Roman Empire and people were falling in love in 1930s Germany, the Nazis were coming into power and regular German citizens were going on dates and falling in love. I have new tires on my car so I feel invincible driving to you through the snow, I am driving to you and a song is on the radio that reminds me of you and I’m passing all these other cars because I have new tires and it’s snowing so hard but maybe I’m in love and I have to remind

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00:01:12

"My Last Summer with Dad, 2023" by Annie Powell Stone

VOICEMAIL POEMS ·

2025/08/14

Dad was on the couch, mostly starving to death in front of us cancer, stage IV (for this type, many don’t catch the earlier stages, and of course there aren't later ones) we hung pinecone bird feeders close to the house, bringing Nature near when he couldn't go out we talked about our shared favorites: the praying mantis, female cardinal, blue herons, black cats we talked about Chris Christie taking a swing at the Bully, about what the hell would make someone crazy enough to walk into

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00:01:40

"Let's Be Monsters" by Maia Brown-Jackson

VOICEMAIL POEMS ·

2025/08/14

Let’s be monsters. Let’s be witches and bitches and crones and just hideous. Let’s be powerful. Let’s take and take and take and grab the world, just fucking hold on with claws and teeth and refuse to let go. And let’s be gluttonous. Let’s devour. Let’s see what we want, what delights us, and let’s inhale it with no regard for propriety. With no regard for you. Let’s be insolent. Let’s be wanton. Let’s be ugly. Let’s show our teeth as a warning sign before we sink them into your neck. Let’s be

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00:01:33

"Keep your Popcorn on Fridays, We Want a Living Wage"...

VOICEMAIL POEMS ·

2025/08/14

Three weeks to Christmas. We bide our time on the line by conjuring posties of the past— side-burned and handcuffed, the ones in ‘81 who dared to defy back to work orders. Got the whole country maternity leave. Now we fight traffic in trucks that hit 40 degrees, deliver an endless stream of Sephora and Nespresso, spend hours alone with the clang of keys on metal, compete with the Amazon drivers for free parking spots and as we pass each other on the street they sometimes stop to ask: It’s a

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00:01:24

"guide to melancholy (ft. jar of olives) by Annabelle...

VOICEMAIL POEMS ·

2025/08/14

if you are sad: sit, silent, and bathe in the brine of an olive jar. let the salt consume you till you are preserved in acidity rather than memory, and the blood in your veins might well be that of the ocean. if they ask you how it happened, say: “i didn’t know how to swim.” this is false, but so are the teeth they blatantly lie through. (you do not owe them the truth if they don’t give it to you. do not sacrifice your bitterness for these saps.) return to the olives. swallow the pits: wrinkled

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00:01:06

"First Cumbia" by Tatiana Chaterji

VOICEMAIL POEMS ·

2025/08/14

Lake Berryessa, azure at our backs the man from Toluca slips me lozenges from under his tongue Spanish alive in my mouth touches the screen reaching deep lights from his phone plays me my first cumbia: chee chih chih woodsmoke unfurls decomposed flesh dusted bones awakening at his cue turning slight curving threaded magnets loop khee ki-ki khee ki-ki khee

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00:01:54

"decline mantra (aldi at 46th and market)" by Diandra...

VOICEMAIL POEMS ·

2025/08/14

"There is a look one sees, the mouth somehow desperate– … the fear of death, taking as its form dedication to hunger…" - Louise Glück b/c one day i will want for nothing b/c one day i will not want b/c one day i will need nothing to want for b/c one day my body will cease to function b/c one day my body will function outside itself b/c one day my body will cease functioning as a vessel for causeless desire b/c one day my body will cease desiring cease to function b/c one day the flesh of the earth

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00:01:08

"Bench Clearing" by Marissa DeSantis

VOICEMAIL POEMS ·

2025/08/14

My dad died and sports came back. We wore masks at his funeral to avoid being next, I guess. The night before Joe Kelly fired at Carlos Correa’s head and cleared the bench and I get it, because what other response is there to feeling cheated than bearing witness to your hate blossoming from your body, your spite-filled fingers gripping the splitting seams, your hurtling release spitting seeds that will line the graves of generational grudges. What song do you serve your ears the morning after your

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00:01:19

The Laughing Cinder Block - Marlanda Dekine

VOICEMAIL POEMS ·

2025/05/03

The Laughing Cinder Block - Marlanda Dekine by VOICEMAIL POEMS

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00:01:32

Psychography - Birch Wiley

VOICEMAIL POEMS ·

2025/05/03

Psychography - Birch Wiley by VOICEMAIL POEMS

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00:01:04

Monter Drive - Colette Love Hilliard

VOICEMAIL POEMS ·

2025/05/03

Monter Drive - Colette Love Hilliard by VOICEMAIL POEMS

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00:03:00

Survivor Audition Video Number 3 - Isaiah Newman

VOICEMAIL POEMS ·

2025/05/03

Survivor Audition Video Number 3 - Isaiah Newman by VOICEMAIL POEMS

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