VOICEMAIL POEMS

I felt like masturbating I felt like crying It was the twenty-first century Already A quarter over There had been artistic movements & wars My debts had been repackaged Countless times The enemy of my enemy Followed me On Twitter, now called Ex-Marines shot themselves in the head in their aunts’ basements We lost touch almost as a whole Category We listened to music for evaluative purposes Had to turn off Shostakovich a recording of quartet #10 that churned too fast like history A

Aishvarya Arora called us from Queens, NY. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems twitter.com/voicemailpoems instagram.com/voicemailpoems

He gave up looking for a town, gas station, or house off a road or driveway The desert unfolded further than his eyes could see. In the stillness, the ground spread in glare, broken only by shrubs now and then. A swell of dunes lay below a jut of mountain range bulking up from beneath the surface. They were told it could take hours to traverse this section. That they should have a full tank, a functioning radiator, and plenty of liquids. No warning was offered about the middle hours of the

To hate yourself and have sex makes you a movie director on a street corner, seeing everything in slow motion, scouting for bodies. When it’s too dark to see we clock out to edit more. After work, every night becomes dance. Re-cuts of thighs and light shows. A supercut is a cheap haircut, not filmmaking technique. But I know montage because I put movement over belonging, dwell only in breath, each a one-time use. Montages aren’t romantic. They are light shot through crashing tunnel,

The cut on my ankle bleeds into the shape of an exclamation point You speak and it comes out ornate swirling, as if from an an ancient book I’m trying to follow those letters which are, inevitably, words, through the tall yellow grasses at the edge of the lagoon where your charm bracelet lays splayed in the sand and my nose disappears into the blue Let me tell you about swimming: The bleeding stops The world ends long enough for you to miss it The cold snaps, like a spell from the end of a

How their branches seem to extend without burden in the lengthening light, their star-shaped leaves of deepest burgundy, weightless, more form than texture, surrendering to autumn air in such a way that it’s difficult to discern where leaf-tip ends and shade begins; until, wind- jostled, they flutter like wisps of cordovan dust out into a blue expanse of emptiness – traversing the chasm between having been and soon becoming – showing us a way forward, letting go without regret or

I hope all my books are banned books, like, so contraband they start trappin’ them out the bando— people fiendin’ for my words with such fervor clawing at the door for just one more taste someone keeps the lookout to make sure twelve don’t see the weight: tiny baggies filled with poem scraps pushed out from every corner I hope my books become so obscure that someone’s biggest flex is telling you they’ve read me and then you search for my Wikipedia page and all it says is