Painted Bride Quarterly’s Slush Pile

We’re going deep today, Slushies. Kathy and Tobi school us on the origin of the word “podcast” with its roots in both early Apple technology and agricultural lingo (think broadcast of seeds). In this episode we’re broadcasting our appreciation for poems by Erin Evans. We admire Evans’ sound work and her ability to craft powerful lines with plain language. In the first poem, the poet’s confrontation of medical jargon reminds Marion of Whitman’s poem When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer. An encounter between patient and doctor in Evans’ poem underscores the difference between learning and knowing that recalls Leslie Jamison’s book of essays, The Empathy Exams.    The second poem’s Japanese title evokes the film Rashomon for Jason, who takes issue with the notion that our writerly imaginations are limited only to the words available in our own language. Schadenfreude, anyone? We’re digging the close focus on language in these poems. Marion appreciates that the poem elevates a term she initially passed off as one from pop culture wellness. Meanwhile we conflate our Wabi-sabi with our kintsugi and poet Ross Gay with the poet Ross White (who is the actual originator of the gas station sushi theory). But don’t let our mistakes keep you from experiencing Evans’ powerful endings.   Slushies, if you’re attending AWP in March, please stop by and see us at the book fair. We’ll be at table 1272. We’d love to see you in person. Thanks, as always, for listening!   At the table: Tobi Kassim, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, and Lillie Volpe (sound engineer)  Author Photo:    Author Bio: Erin Evans was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis when she was one year old. Her work is greatly influenced by her experience living with chronic illness. She has had poems published in Defunct, Revel, A Mouthful of Salt, and Nimrod-International Journal, which awarded her its Francine Ringold Award for New Writers. Her work was chosen by Kwame Dawes for his American Life in Poetry column. She lives in Vermont with her beautiful and brilliant kids. Exacerbation She says the word quickly looking down at my file   then back at the x-ray clipped against the glowing box.   My scarred and patchy lungs, and all their flaws  on display, almost make me blush.   Embarrassed that I couldn’t do any better, have been better. I focus instead    on the soft ribbons of my ribcage that fan like ghost hands   lit up for Halloween. Again, she says it,   looking at me now  as she sits on the round rolling chair   and reaches for her stethoscope. Exacerbation, which I finally looked up   after years and years of hearing it, simply means a worsening.   But she was taught not to state  the obvious, to disguise the truth   in the language of textbooks, and lectures, years of learning   how best to look right through someone. And I was taught to breathe in when I was told,   to push past that pain in my chest  that has no name, nor chapter in any book.   Komorebi Scott nudges my kayak away from the shore.   The yellow plastic scrapes the sand and seashell bottom  until it glides to the open water, over deep-green seaweed that waves its version of goodbye.    A soft pushing away  a departing of one world, only to enter another,  so vast there are no names for things:   When I die  let it be like this.   Some languages have words for words we never even thought to speak.   In Japanese, for instance, there is a word  for the sunlight filtering through the leaves of a tree.   Tell me, why isn’t there a name for this: The ocean’s soft  pull, the gentle begging it does,      like a child tugging  at the tail of your shirt,    reminding you it’s time to go.   Riches  As I cradle my morning tea I watch her from the window.   Crouched down in the yard, with her hand outstretched. Even   from here I see the arthritis knot and bend her fingers   from years of knitting intricate sweaters and working late-night shifts at the hospital.   The chickens come to her  hesitantly, to peck the scratch from her warm hand.   She told me once that even when  she has nothing to give them   they still peck softly at her wedding band.   They surround her now, their bobbing and dipping beaks   and as they take the seeds she offers,  she smooths the long yellow feathers   that in the right light turn golden.   If I could inherit a single thing from her it would be this patience,   this trust that life will come to you even when your body    is leaving this world slowly, one cell at a time.

We’re so over the snow and ice, Slushies. Join us as we cozy up to three poems from Hilary King. We admire the first poem’s warm nostalgia towards old technology and its recollection of a burgeoning appreciation for art. Sam notes how well the poem’s title prepares the reader for the poem that follows. The pairing of the projection of art and the projection of memory intrigues Jason. The setting in an art history class sends Sam to the Julia Roberts’ movie Mona Lisa Smile, also set in 1953. Whether mothers or daughters, we consider how much we can know about another person’s interior life.     Kathy puts on her bad cop hat, but in the nicest way possible. We’re thinking about the importance of sharply observed details and how they can focus a poem from the general to the specific. In the final poem we’ll clarify whether we’re talking about drunk aunts or drunk ants and why either would be preferable to a drunk uncle. And Dagne questions what duties an epigraph can or should perform.   Slushies, if you’re attending AWP in March, please stop by and see us at the book fair. We’ll be at table 1272. We’d love to see you in person. Thanks, as always, for listening! At the table: Dagne Forrest, Tobi Kassim, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle, and Lillie Volpe (sound engineer) Author Bio: Originally from the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, Hilary King is a poet now living in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Salamander, The Louisville Review, Fourth River, Common Ground Review, and other publications. She was the 2023 winner of the Rose Warner Prize from Freshwater Review and the second place winner of the 2025 Common Ground Review Annual Poetry Prize. She serves as an editor for DMQ Review, and her book of poems Stitched on Me was published by Riot in Your Throat Press in 2024.  Author Website: www.hilarykingwriting.com   Instagram: @hilaryseessomething Facebook: Hilary Rogers King Bluesky: @hilary299.bsky.social   My Mother’s Scholarship Job, 1953   In the ivied dark, she rushes to keep up. The professor barks out facts, theories, slows only for art he likes, or to hiss when she fumbles a slide, sending a Renoir sideways, her face hot in the yellow projector light, rows of girls in store-bought clothes turning to stare at her. After she was accepted, her mother began sewing, made her six versions of the same dress,  full-skirted, round necked, good as any  that ever dressed  a mannequin.  She does fumble the slides. She hasn’t mastered  this machine, dazed by how it transforms a square into the magnificent. Monet’s shimmering train station, Van Gogh’s glowing garden at Arles. She never tells her mother she wears dungarees for the class she takes over and over again, the machine oily, trapping her in the dark, in the back, never up front, her pencil poised  like a fork for a feast. Nest She turned thirteen and shut her door on us. We let her, let her make a freedom of those four walls. What she did, watched,  heard, learned, hid– we had only outlines,  fear and hope filled in the rest. Mornings she stepped over the threshold, shouldered her childhood, cycled towards the gristmill. Afternoons she returned, spent, recovered only with the door closed. Gone just yesterday, grown enough to go, I leave her door open, let it swing like memory. How to Be Peonies              from Trader Joe’s   Enter the house in a shroud. Allow the presence of water. Exist as a fist. When no one is looking, peep out one pink petal. That night, alone again, unfurl another. Watch them walk past the golden pollen you fed the table. Get drunk on your own beauty, open your face wide as a drunk aunt’s smile. One day later, die spectacularly, fabulously your magenta remains scattered like broken glass.

It’s not often that it happens, Slushies, but it’s always a treat when it does. We’re switching to fiction for the day with “Colfax,” a flash story from Patricia Q. Bidar, author of the short fiction collection Pardon Me for Moonwalking. Spoiler alert: read the story first in the show notes or listen to the story in full at 41:50 before our discussion ruins it for you. Something about the story’s theme and concision reminds Sam of Louise Glück’s prose poems in her late collection, A Faithful and Virtuous Night. Sam also appreciates how the story allows a female character the same kind of recklessness found in Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. Jason shares his surprising childhood connection to Vacaville, CA, one of the story’s locales. And in his role as bad cop, Jason raises a question about uncanny children. Tune in to find out what he means by that. While we’re all bracing for winter storms, we’re happy to dwell, for a moment, in California Central Valley’s humid and fertile atmosphere. As always, thanks for listening! At the table: Tobi Kassim, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle, and Lillie Volpe (sound engineer) Bio:        Patricia Q. Bidar is a western writer and Port of Los Angeles native. Her novelette, Wild Plums (ELJ Editions), was published in 2024 and collection of flash fiction, Pardon Me for Moonwalking (Unsolicited Press), in 2025. Patricia’s work has appeared in Waxwing, Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Pinch, and Another Chicago Magazine; in the Wigleaf Top 50, and in many anthologies including Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton), Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. Visit patriciaqbidar.com   Website www.patriciaqbidar.com   Facebook         https://www.facebook.com/patriciaqbidar Instagram        https://www.instagram.com/patriciaqbidar/ Bluesky              patriciaqbidar.bsky.social     Colfax Cristina swallows the last of the loose pills from Julian’s glove box. Within a few minutes, fresh energy blooms and fizzes within her; the sensation is of tumbling backward into space.  Julian: a drug dealer so giant and peevish the floor mats on the driver’s side are bunched and ruined. Underneath his criminal veneer, Julian is just a mundane mammal who’s driven Cristina, an animal woman, to flight.  Half an hour later, she’s reached Colfax. In this heat, this fecund place. The car has mashed against the gas station’s cashier hut. Years ago, when Cristina was growing up here, this was a drive-in theatre, with a massive image of a vaquero on a rearing steed. Sweltering nights, Cristina would watch movies with her lonely mother, car windows open wide, clasped in the smell of tomatoes, melons, and insecticide.  Rain begins to pepper the hood. Cristina rises into vegetal air. She doesn’t recall opening the door.  The window to the hut is dirty and rain spattered. She peers between cupped hands at the empty stool inside, the bank of cigarette packs. Lightning cracks; after a few seconds, thunder rumbles. Cristina presses her hand over her heart. Is she alarmed? Are the pills goosing her pulse? But she feels calm. The sky is a tight lid. It was a mistake, stealing Julian’s car. Julian, who took her in. Identified and claimed her after Cristina finished her time and was so adrift and alone.  Cristina was working as a server in a West Sacramento brewery. Her last customer on a slow Tuesday night was a black-haired guy in a cowboy hat. Stiff-looking jeans and a pearl-buttoned shirt. A face that seemed not to match the hair. “Lady,” he said so low she had to incline her head. “You think no one sees you. I do. I do.” She joined Julian that very night on one of his quests. He was what her mother would have called a peeping tom. He wanted her to wear nylon hose, like he did. Why not? No one was getting hurt. It was simply watching. Watching women. Women when they were themselves and unaware they were being observed. In a word: seen. Julian was no Rawhead, no Slenderman. Not one of those serial killers roving California freeways in the nineteen-seventies, the ones Cristina’s mother had been obsessed with. Now she imagines someone peering in through the car door and seeing her, Cristina, slumped behind the wheel. People idealize farmland, farm girls as wholesome. Green, yellow, and blue.  The sky is cobalt now. Fifty feet away is a bus shelter, sagging and white. A small form is hunched inside. Lightning again, and then, immediately following, that bass sky-rumble. Cristina runs. Inside, a child of about nine swings its legs. Windbreaker, hood up.  "Hello there?" Cristina ventures. "I'm studying these ants," the kid returns. A girl. "Would you like a churro?" Cristina cannot see the girl’s face but is struck by the way she sits. A bell buried deep inside of her tolls. "Is this the bus stop for town?" Cristina asks. The churros smell nice; hot grease and cinnamon. Cristina used to make them for her little sisters. She thought she might become a baker one day. At least, when anyone asked, this was what she had answered. She should be hungry. "That's my car, in case you were wondering,” Cristina says. Nothing. She crouches down beside the girl. “Dead at the service station. Lucky, I guess.” The child considers this. "Well, not really." She speaks patiently, the way Cristina used to speak to adults at her age. As if they were her younger sisters or the kids in the slow class at school, or the witless ladies in the school office. “On second thought, I’ll take one of those churros." Cristina says. But the girl has returned to her task: surveilling a line of ants. Cristina’s mind unspools the types. Velvet ants. Pharaoh ants. Argentine ants. Thief ants. The odorous house ants, and then — wasn’t there a sugar ant?  The smell of water-heavy crops and soil and chemical fertilizer thickens the air. All of the choices Cristina has made in life have led her to this place. "There’s nothing left," she says aloud. "It depends on how you see it," the girl returns, pushing her eyeglasses up into place with a forefinger. Cristina squints at the obscured face. Then the girl daintily lifts and lowers her hood. And bares the side of her left pinky finger. The small oval scar is exactly like Cristina’s.  “Did your mother tell you that people with six fingers and toes are giants sired by angels and human women? Something apart from God,” Cristina said. Those surgeries when she was four.  “She says I’m a monkey.” Cristina remembers a long-ago birthday party, her ninth, attended by zero children.  She feels the sky drawing her up, then. At the same time, the inverted bowl of sky pushes down. It is like that optical illusion where you can’t tell if the black horse is headed toward you or walking away. Hail pounds the roof of the shelter. The discs of ice flash under the bright lights of the gas pump island. The girl returns to dropping pinches of dough onto the ants. Obeying their internal imperative: a perpetuation of their kind.  Cristina sees Julian preparing for bed. Applying his eye cream. Clapping twice to extinguish the bedside light. He refers to himself as cerebral. But what is so deep about dealing painkillers during the afternoon shift at the One Stop Spy Shop in Vacaville? Life with Julian had amounted to a slow and downhill slide, and that was for sure. “We live our lives with our ancestors as witness,” the girl says at last. Her words hang in the air like wet almond blossoms.  Cristina has to ask. “Am I that? Am I alive?” And a roar consumes the sky. A silver bus is careening toward them from behind blue oaks. And a metal monster slips from the asphalt. Rolls end over end. Sky-blotting. Deafening. Images rise and blend and collapse. The blanched face of the driver. The silhouettes of passengers. One of whom is standing. Julian? Something blooms and expands in Cristina’s head. But there is no bus. No careening crash. Only a fecund silence. And the girl tears a piece of the churro, nudging Cristina’s lips with the sugar and cinnamon confection. It is absolutely delectable and somehow still warm. Like the corner of a golden kitchen in bygone evenings. A humming mother, changing her dressings. An iron stove and a gray kitten, satisfied and warm.  Cristina really, finally, is free. She has made it back to the beginning.  Apart from time, the girl and Cristina stand in the little windbreak like gingerbread children or figures in a Frida Kahlo painting. The girl takes her hand. And then it is she and Cristina and the animal female chain, extending into and past the vanishing point: Girl Girl Girl Girl Girl Girl Girl.

We welcome in the new year with a full house today, Slushies, as we discuss two poems from Cal Freeman. The first poem’s title glacier reminds Kathy of this year’s epic snowfall in Juneau, Alaska (though it’s forty inches, not forty feet, of snow). All that snow reminds Lisa of Boston’s Vile Pile of snow that would not melt until July. Kathy deftly segues that memory back to our own slush pile. We admire Freeman’s use of sonics in “Glacial Erratics” and the poem’s subtle gestures towards relationship strife. We all agree we’re stealing the poet’s apt description of “overwrought craft beer.”    Since the second poem, “A White Bird,” is a classic Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, the discussion of iambic pentameter that ensues might be helpful to any teachers in the listening audience (as well as KVM’s brother, Dave). Have a listen as we nerd out on meter. All the sonnet particulars lead Marion to admit what it is that gives her a secret intellectual boner.    We end with lots of fodder for your TBR pile. Listen through the end of the episode for everyone’s recommended reads, linked below. As always, thanks for listening!   At the table: Dagne Forrest, Tobi Kassim, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, and Lillie Volpe (sound engineer) PBQ’s Recommended Reads:   From KVM:  Lili is Crying by Hélène Bessette  Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell   From Jason: Little Rot by Akwaeke Emezi   From Sam: Flesh by David Szalay   From Dagne: When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O’Neill   From Tobi: Sally Rooney’s novels Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space by Catherine Barnett Midwood by Jana Prikryl   From Marion: Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture by Jason Schneiderman Teaching Writing Through Journaling by Kathleen Volk Miller To learn to describe the animal by Guillermo Rebollo Gil   From Lisa:   Modern Life by Matthea Harvey Author Bio: Cal Freeman (he/him) is the author of the books Fight Songs (Eyewear 2017), Poolside at the Dearborn Inn (R&R Press 2022), and The Weather of Our Names (Cornerstone Press 2025). His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Atticus Review, Image, The Poetry Review, Verse Daily, Under a Warm Green Linden, North American Review, Willow Springs, Oxford American, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Advanced Leisure. He is a recipient of the Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes), winner of Passages North's Neutrino Prize, and a finalist for the River Styx International Poetry Prize. He teaches at Oakland University and serves as Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit.    Instagram @johnfreeman5984 Photo credit: Shdia Amen Glacial Erratics I’m walking the rocks of mid-coast Maine and thinking about leaving, haze rolling in off Penobscot Bay nearly enveloping, but I can see my hands, swollen, red, silver ring in folds of skin. It’s been five days of lobster, haddock, and overwrought craft beer. Sarah’s in a nimbus on a bluff. I can’t see her. These tidal patterns strand sponges and shellac seaweed to the stones. The tide’s waning now, an hour past its peak. We arrived five days ago in a Tecnam T2012, in a two-prop puddle hopper. You get in the way you get out. I’m scared Cape Air will strand us in this fog. I don’t want another day. You get in the way you get out unless you don’t. An alabaster boulder rests at the foot of the bluff, a glacial erratic only special because of its geographical and visual context. Glacial errata, I thought I heard our tourist captain say, though Sarah corrected me. A glacial erratic’s when the ice deposits stone of another realm to punctuate a scene in a distant future epoch– Sarah perched on a gunwale with a lighthouse at her back, the centenarian Cape Cod schooner they call the Olad meandering Penobscot Bay on a quiet afternoon in summer, and how I loved the way those seals on the Nautilus Island rock appeared to sweat (she said the song for our third decade should be “Me and You on the Rock”), their bellies gold as riesling in the sun. Their kind of torpor rests on the precipice of bathos and delight, their porcine bodies commas, long pauses between dips. At intervals they swim like dogs, like dogs they also growl, yet they dive with a gymnast’s grace into the depths. A White Bird A rustic cottage on a kettle lake, shells of zebra mussels on the boat lift, a couple loons, a lone white bird adrift on combers in a pontoon boat’s slow wake. Their time is short, they get what they can take. He reads a short story she wrote to sift for common nouns and proper nouns to lift for a poem. He settles on the drake and hen that dove their lithe bodies below and resurfaced a hundred yards away. Such secret lives of love, such dull regret. In the story, she says he cannot know what kind of bird they saw floating that day, as he insists it was the rare egret.

To allow our team time for a holiday recording hiatus, we’re sharing an encore episode from the Slush Pile archive. This episode, from December 2022, features two poems by poet Nick Visconti, “Burial” and “Unmake These Things.” It also marks the first appearance on the pod by our managing editor, Dagne Forrest. We’ll be back next time with new poems and new guests. In the meantime, enjoy this look back. As always, thanks for listening.   How much meaning do you need, Slushies? When language lingers, when images form a spiral, a murmuration, might a poem’s mood hold meaning close to its heart and simultaneously at bay? And, also, how do you pronounce ‘ichor’? All this and more in a rollicking conversation about poet Nick Visconti’s new work, “Burial” and “Unmake These Things.” And speaking of things, listen for Samantha on Anne Carson’s zen koan dollop of insight from Red Doc>: “To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.” Or for Kathy and Marion confessing their North Carolina ritual groping of the Dale Earnhardt statue in Kannapolis, NC. And finally: geese. Nick Visconti’s poem triggered a reverie-- that time when we accidentally stumbled into the annual Snow Geese migration in Eastern Pennsylvania.   At the table: Dagne Forrest, Kathleen Volk Miller, Alex Tunney, Samantha Neugebauer, Marion Wrenn.   This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show.    Nick Visconti is a writer living with an artist and a cat in Brooklyn. He plays softball on Sundays.   Burial It is love, not grief, which inters the deceased in a hill made of clay.   Sod embraces crossed arms, legs, eyes shut looking forever   at nothing beneath our feet—a container for men unmade, no boat to speak of.   No oars darkly dipped in water as we pictured it would be. Instead,   a single shred of light piercing every lens it catches. Instead,   a pathway none cross, just follow through   and up and up—the cusp of ending, nothing at all like the end.   He isn’t in this yard when his children roam. Still,   they dig,   they expect to find him: braided leather, steel-wound aglets, his black opal intact.   Unmake these things The sand before me like water, fluid and holy under the cratered crown nearly half-awake, circling   as I draw the one way I know—stick figures in a backdrop scenery, thick- headed and content, wheeling   psalms of birds, wide-sloping M’s grouped in permanent murmur. I don’t bother with the sun’s face, bare in the upper   left corner of the page. I’ve made a habit out of hoarding ornaments, given them their own orbit like the russet   ichor dashed with cinnamon I choke down every morning and afternoon. The city’s puncture-prone underbite nips   the sky, consuming the bodies above—thunderheads, billboards notched, alive in the glow of that always-   diurnal square. There’s been talk lately of irreversible chemistry, an acceptable stand-in for cure among believers and experts   in and on the subject of Zoloft-sponsored serotonin. A first weaning is possible. Do not bother with a second.

It’s a banner day here on the pod, Slushies. We welcome a very special guest, American Poetry Review’s Elizabeth Scanlon to the table as we discuss three prose poems from Sara Burant. Dagne sends out birthday wishes to Canada’s own Margaret Atwood while Lisa shows the team her Margaret Atwood-as-saint candle. We note the recent poetry trend towards raising the profile of female visual artists whose work has been overlooked during their lifetimes. Artists like Sonia Delaunay, mentioned in Burant’s poem “Fields,” and Hilma af Kilmt, whose art inspired Didi Jackson’s recent book “My Infinity.”  The mention of a clay pipe in one poem sends Marion running for a treasure her husband found while mudlarking. Kathy cops to her blue-collar resistance to a precious ars poetica and we discuss what it takes to win her over in the end. Elizabeth relates how John Ashbery likens waiting for a poem to a cat’s finicky arrival. We note Frank O’Hara’s notion of “deep gossip,” name checking his own friends along with celebrities in his poems, a gesture Burant employs in her poem “Heat wave.” And we come full circle with a shout out to American Poetry Review’s own podcast where Elizabeth interviewed Margaret Atwood during the pandemic. As always, thanks for listening! At the table: Dagne Forrest, Samantha Neugebauer, Elizabeth Scanlon, Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, and Lillie Volpe (sound engineer) Bio: Sara Burant’s poems, reviews, and collaborative translations of Paul Éluard’s poems have appeared in journals such as OmniVerse, Pedestal, periodicities, Ruminate, and The Denver Quarterly. Her work has been honored with a fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts and a residency at Playa. At 55, she received an MFA in Poetry from Saint Mary’s College of California. She’s the author of a chapbook, Verge. Fields after Frank O’Hara And the truck driver I was made in the image of has a tattoo reminiscent of a Sonia Delaunay on her chest. And on her upper left arm, a nude torso of Apollo reminiscent not only of Rilke but of the male figure who loved her passionately in a dream—my god, he knew how to kiss and be kissed and knew her better than she’ll ever know herself. Nobody sees these tattoos except her, looking in the mirror in a cheap motel’s bathroom. At home she has no mirrors, just the phone she occasionally snaps a selfie with to make sure she has no spinach or gristle lodged between her teeth before heading to the bar. Actually, the truck driver I was made in the image of is undercover. She’s really a Jungian analyst. Those cows in another dream, her heaviest self, chewing the cud of the past, farting, trampling the delicate vegetation, forming a tight circle around the calves when threatened, bellowing when all else fails. Hauling 30 tons in her 35-ton rig, she speeds past field after field which are all the same field. Oh field of dreams, why hasn’t she built you? Instead she deletes photos to make room for more photos, wondering why this sunset, that face, this puddle’s reflection, that abstract painting. She fished and caught and couldn’t filet the tender meat that smelled too much like drowning. One rainy winter in Paris she nearly did drown. Creeping water-logged from museum to museum, finally she clung to Cézanne’s misshapen fruit as if to a buoy. The apples and pears, just one man’s apprehension of apples and pears, not thoughts inside thought-balloons, not some parable of ancient September. Just tilting tabletops, shapes, colors, the suggestion of shadows and light. Ars poetica For the chickens I save tidbits, potato skins, and the outer cabbage leaves which make me think of hats. The red wobble of the hens’ combs and the smell of their fecal heat, unaccountably dear to me. Awaiting a match to warm me, I chew on a clay pipe’s stem, contemplating the waning moon of its bowl and my pink lipstick past. The silence behind words spoken or thought clucks softly in my inner ear. Sitting inside, I can’t help looking out, a lifting, carrying blue, the wind’s little pull on the earlobe of my heart. Lately I’ve been cutting paper into shapes that mean Feed me or Take me to your leader, wishing I’d been taught to name feelings as they arise. Tenderness for the apple still hanging from winter’s limb. Loneliness drunk down with morning’s darjeeling. There are conspirators for beauty. Like rabbits, they leave tracks in the snow. Like geese, they arrow through hallways of night. Without sentiment or self-pity they gaze at certain slants of light. They chip away the ice with a pick to get at the lock. Then they pick the lock. And oh, what a view. I want to walk in the dark to get there, not following anyone’s directions. To enter the fortune teller’s crystal ball with bread in my pocket and a botanist’s loupe. Though I don’t know your name, I move forward only beside you, your imaginary hand in mine.  Heat wave The woman at the table next to mine gives up loud-talking in favor of song, but it’s not looking for love, it’s looking for FUN—& feeling groovy. Maybe I should warn her—today’s theme isn’t love or fun, it’s submarine & skedaddle, it’s danger-danger, hold your breath & sound. This avalanche of heat, these record-shattering days. See the breakage piling up on sidewalks so hot the barefoot babies weep as they learn to toddle. Maybe, as you like to point out, I’m catastrophizing, when what I really want is to feel groovy again. To butter my skin with baby oil & sizzle, walking barefoot along the burning sand, Bradford Beach where I fell in love unrequited for the umpteenth time. Back then, who was counting? Back then summer lasted for years & still wasn’t long enough. 1978, despite Mother’s reservations, I saved my babysitting money for a ticket to Fleetwood Mac at County Stadium. Eilleen, Maggie, Liz, Jean, Mary, me—& Stevie Nicks & Christine McVie, the elm trees & long summer dusk of those women’s voices. A dusk so filled with the orange, violet & chartreuse silk of its immense flag flying above, beside & through you, you neglect to notice shadows splotching the periphery & forget your curfew. I didn’t notice much, so stoned I was, we were, melting into the moment’s spotlessness, our adolescent hips grooving, our tan arms waving, here, now, this, this, this—I mean there, then, that, that, that—no one yet suspended for drinking, no one yet strung out, dropping out, running off with boys to Oregon or Wyoming, limping home pregnant or in rags. The elms, gone. Mom, Vince, Rob & Christine McVie, too. I’ve had to swear off many things due to poor digestion—but oblivion, I’d still like to indulge in that sometimes, diving into it like a bee into a flower, a morning glory, its dumb, purple, one day only show. 

Early winter weather has us pondering an alternate definition of “slush pile,” albeit the mucky, grey residue remaining after a city snowfall. Our Slush Pile is far more fresh, but still a wintry mix as we discuss the short story “Catherine of the Exvangelical Deconstruction” by Candice Kelsey. You might want to jump down the page and read or listen to it in full first, as there are spoilers in our discussion!   The story is set on the day of the Women’s March, following 2017’s Inauguration Day, but only references those events in the most glancing of ways. Instead the protagonist glances away to an array of distractions: Duolingo, a Frida Kahlo biography, a bat documentary, European architecture, banjo music, a stolen corpse flower, daydreaming, and actual dreaming. In the withholding of the protagonist’s interiority, Sam sees a connection to Rachel Cusk’s Outline, while Jason is reminded of early Bret Easton Ellis. The editors discuss how fiction might evoke the internet’s fractioning of our attention, by recreating the fractioning or reflecting it?   We’d like to offer congratulations to Sam whose debut book of short stories, “Uncertain Times,” just won the Washington Writers Publishing House Fiction Prize. As always, thanks for listening!   At the table: Dagne Forrest, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle, and Lilllie Volpe (Sound Engineer)   Listen to the story “Catherine of the Exvangelical Deconstruction” read in its entirety by Dagne Forrest (separate from podcast reading) (Bio): Candice M. Kelsey (she/her) is a bi-coastal writer and educator. Her work has received Pushcart and Best-of-the-Net nominations, and she is the author of eight books. Candice reads for The Los Angeles Review and The Weight Journal; she also serves as a 2025 AWP Poetry Mentor. Her next poetry collection, Another Place Altogether, releases December 1st with Kelsay Books. (Website): https://www.candicemkelseypoet.com/ (Instagram): @Feed_Me_Poetry   Catherine of the Exvangelical Deconstruction Catherine’s thumb hovers over Duolingo’s question, her mind dim from doom scrolling, chest dead as TikTok. The green owl stares. She swears its beak is twitching.  “Got 5 minutes?”  She swipes Duo, that nosy bastard, and his taunting French flag icon away. “Non.” The apartment is dim, the air too still. Days feel hollow and unhinged, as if she’s Edmond Dantès tossed off the cliff of Chatêau d’If, a brief and misplaced shell weighted to the depths of the sea. So much for learning a language to calm the nerves. Frida Kahlo's face stares from the page of a book she hasn't finished reading. “I should just return this already.” There are days she commits to her syllabus of self-education and days she resents it. Kahlo’s eyes pierce her, and giving up feels like large-scale feminist betrayal—how she has shelved the artist, her wounds, tragic love, and all. But even sisterhood is too much this January 21st, and of all people, Kahlo would understand. Catherine opens her laptop and starts a documentary about bats instead. Chiroptera. A biologist with kind eyes speaks of their hand-like bones, the elastin and collagenous fiber wings. The chaos of nature is its own magic realism. She learns bats are vulnerable like the rest of us. Climate disruption and habitat loss. Plus white nose syndrome and the old standby, persecution by ignorant humans who set their caves aflame. In the documentary, there is a bat with the liquid amber eyes of a prophet. Maybe that’s what this world has had too much of, she begins to consider. Mid-deconstruction of decades in the white, evangelical cesspit of high control patriarchy, Catherine sees the world as one big field day full of stupid ego-competitions like cosmic tug-a-wars. And prophets were some of the top offenders. King Zedekiah, for one, had the prophet Jeremiah lowered into a well by rope, intending he sink into the mud and suffocate. All because he warned the people of their emptiness. Her mind wanders to Prague, to art, to something far away that might fill her own cistern life. “Maybe next summer,” she whispers. “Charles Bridge, St. Vitus.” The rhythm of bluegrass hums through the speakers, enough to anchor her here, in this room, in this thin sliver of a world she cannot escape. “That could be the problem; I need to learn Czech. No, fuck Duo.” J'apprendrai le français. J'irai à Prague. Je verrai les vieux bâtiments. But then, something strange. The banjo’s pluck feels different, deeper, its twang splitting the air. She Googles the history of Bluegrass, and the words tumble from the page, layering like the weight of a corpse settling into the silt off the coast of Marseille. The banjo isn’t Appalachian in origin but rather West African—specifically from the Senegalese and Gambian people, their fingers strumming the akonting, a skin drum-like instrument that whispered of exile, of worlds ripped apart. American slavers steeped in the bitter twisting of scripture trafficked them across the Middle Passage, yet in the cruel silence of the cotton fields, they turned their pain into music. How are we not talking about this in every history class in every school in every state of this nation? The akonting, an enslaved man’s lament, was the seed of a gourd that would bloom into the sounds of flatpicking Southerners. Still, the banjo plays on in Catherine’s apartment. A much more tolerable sound than Duolingo’s dong-ding ta-dong. But she can’t quite cleanse her mind of the French lessons, of Lily and Oscar. Il y a toujours plus. Her voice is barely a whisper, trying to reassure herself. There must be more. A recurring dream, soft and gleaming like a pearl—her hands moving over cool clams, shucking them on a beach house in Rhode Island. It’s a faint memory, but no less ever present. Aunt Norma and Uncle Francis’ beach cottage and the closest thing to a Hyannis Port Kennedy afternoon of cousins frolicking about by the edge of a long dock lured back by the steam of fritters. But this time, Ocean Vuong stands beside her. He’s talking about the monkey, Hartford, the tremors of the world. And the banjo has morphed into Puccini’s La Bohème, which laces through the rhythm of Vuong’s syntax like a golden libretto. They notice a figure outside the window, a shadow in the sand—the new neighbor? He’s strange. A horticulturist, they say. Catherine hasn’t met him, but there are rumors. “Did he really steal it?” Vuong asks. She practices her French—it’s a dream after all—asks “Le cadavre fleuri?” They move to whispers, like a star’s breath in night air. Rumor stands that in the middle of California’s Eaton fire, the flower went missing from the Huntington Museum in Pasadena. The Titan Arum, bloated and bizarre in its beauty and stench, just vanished. Fran at the liquor store says the new neighbor, gloves always pressed to the earth, took it.  At night, she hears him in the garden, talking to the roots. She imagines his voice, murmuring something incomprehensible to the moonlight. Like that’s where the truth lies—beneath the soil, between the cracks of broken promises, smelling faintly of rot. She recalls the history she once read, so distant, so impossibly rotten. During WWII, when the Nazis swept through Prague, they forced Jewish scholars to scour their archives. They wanted to preserve the so-called “best” of the Jews—manuscripts, texts, holy materials—for their future banjo-twisted Museum of an Extinct Race. She shudders. The music, the wild joy of the banjo, now seems infected with something ancient and spoiled. The act of collecting, of preserving, feels obscene. What do you keep? What do you discard? Whom do you destroy? She wakes from the dream, her phone still alive with French conjugations. The bluegrass hums, but it’s heavier, like a rope lowering her into Narragansett Bay. The neighbor’s house is dark. But she thinks she can see him, a silhouette against the trees, standing still as a warning. Everything is falling apart at the seams, and she is both a part of it and apart from it. Like each church she left, each youth group and AWANA or Vacation Bible School where she tried to volunteer, to love on the kids, to be the good follower she was tasked with being.  She leans her forehead against the cool glass of the window, closing her eyes. The ache is there, the same ache that never quite leaves. It’s sharp, it’s bitter, it’s whole. The small, steady thrum beneath it all. Il y a toujours plus. Maybe tomorrow she will satisfy Duo. Maybe next fall she will dance down a cobbled street in Prague. Find five minutes to feel human. Perhaps she will be whole enough, tall as St. Vitus Cathedral, to face whatever is left of this America. She closes her eyes to Puccini’s Mimi singing Il y a toujours plus and dueling banjos while her neighbor secretly drags a heavy, tarp-covered object across his yard under the flutter of Eastern small-footed bats out for their midnight mosquito snack. A scene only Frida Kahlo could paint.

In this our second episode discussing work from poet Eli Karren, we’re shifting timelines, story lines, wine time, and coffee time. We welcome special guest, Tobi Kassim, as part of the podcast team for the day. (We’ll be “sprinkling” special guests throughout the upcoming season!)   We dig into Eli’s richly detailed poem “Franchise Reboot” which nods to David Lynch’s nineties TV phenom, Twin Peaks, along with the Museum of Popular Culture, Ikea furniture, Matthea Harvey’s poem “The Future of Terror,” and Wandavision, among other touchstones.   The team questions some of the advice we’ve received on what should or should not be included in poems: dreams, color lists, center justification, cicadas. It’s an airing of pet peeves, Slushies. And then we decide to get over ourselves. Tune in with a slice of cherry pie. As always, thanks for listening.   At the table: Tobi Kassim, Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, and Lillie Volpe (Sound Engineer)    @eli.james.karren on Instagram  Eli Karren is a poet and educator based in Austin, TX. His work can be found in the swamp pink, At Length, Palette Poetry, and the Harvard Review.   Franchise Reboot     We sat at the diner in Snoqualmie  quoting lines back and forth to each other. Saying what we could remember,  without fidelity, without  choosing a character or a scene.  We got the coffee, the cherry pie,  took pictures with a piece of wood  that the waitress passed across the bar,  cradling it like a newborn.    Earlier, we had gone to the waterfall,  and I confessed that I had been falling in love with a coworker.  Or rather, that it felt that way.  Melodramatic. Full of will they  won’t they tension. You said, expertly, that that  was probably the only exciting thing about it.  That not everything in life  has to be a soap opera.    Later that night, when you went off  to chaperone a high school dance I saw a movie  about a woman who fucks a car.   Outside the theater, some guys smoked cigarettes and wondered aloud if originality was dead.  I told them that the only glimmer of the original is the terroir,  the local language, the dialect and vernacular.  All the shit you suppress when you move away from your childhood home. The things  you pay a therapist to excise from you in a room comprised only  of Ikea furniture.        On the long Uber back to your house I thought about the future of nostalgia, the car careening through downtown Seattle, past the Shawn Kemp Cannabis shop,  and the Museum of Pop Culture,  which held a laser light show on its lawn.    The whole drive I had the words  tangled in my brain and was trying to recite  Matthea Harvey’s “The Future of Terror.”  I remembered only the generalissimo’s glands  and the scampering, the faint sounds of its recitation humming below the car’s looping advertisements  for Wandavision. In my head  the possibility of infinite worlds thrummed.   Once, at a farmers market,  I watched an elderly man wander through the stands,  past the kids playing with pinwheels and eating ice cream,  a VR headset strapped  to his face, his hat in his hand, the muffled sound of tears in his vicinity. I always wondered what he had seen.  What reduced him to tears on a May afternoon,  his hands splayed forward, a little drunk with sun  and regret, reaching out  towards something.   III.   This, I tend to gussy up at parties.  A lie I tell myself because I want  to believe in true love. As I say  in the diner the owls are not  what they seem. But at what point  does the false supercede the real?    When you came home, I was crying  on the couch, rewatching  its rejection of closure. Its protagonist catatonic  for sixteen hours, a walking  talking middle finger.  Just so we can have this moment  where he says the line  and has the suit and we hear the famous song  and are embraced again.  Seeing you, seeing old friends this is how I always feel.    Reminded of this pond deep in the woods. Somewhere I went to only once  but keep returning to  in dreams.  I remember how we hiked  an hour out and slipped below the water as the sun began to set. In the dream, sometimes  there is an island. Sometimes  we swim to its surface.  Sometimes the moon arises, its gravity pulling us deeper out above the blackness where the shale slips to the bottom. I’m never sure if it is when I sink into the water or exit  that I become someone else. Wake always with a lyric  on my lips. This  is the me I’ve missed.    The one that survives the factory reset, the franchise reboot. The one I dreamt of every morning when closure was something to be evaded, treated  like the cars in a Frogger game.  But not here, with you,  halfway across the country. If I grasp gently,  I can take the headset from my eyes.  I can almost see  where the red curtains part and the sycamores begin. 

At the table: Dagne Forrest, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle   This recording had a rough start, Slushies. We’re talking technical difficulties, disappearing dogs, and tomato-eating cats. But we rallied in time to discuss two poems from Eli Karren. Jason hails the Whitmanian, associative line found in these poems. We’re taken with the specificity of detail, right down to botanical names and brands of beer. And speaking of Whitman, Kathy shares this scathing review of his then newly published Leaves of Grass. Lisa gives a shout out to Asheville as they welcome visitors one year after Hurricane Helene. Sam remembers that nearby North Carolina mountain towns stood in for the Catskills in the movie “Dirty Dancing.”  And we close with a poetry book recommendation, Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s The New Economy, just named to the National Book Award’s Short List. Stay tuned for our next episode, also featuring a poem from Eli Karren. As always, thanks for listening! Eli Karren is a poet and educator based in Austin, TX. His work can be found in the swamp pink, At Length, Palette Poetry, and the Harvard Review.    Mountain Laurel Last summer I drank until blackout, then chatted about Cronenberg with my neighbor. My head lolled over the fenceline. Even the ivy judged me. In the morning, I woke early to go to the pool, imagining a polar plunge as the ideal hangover cure. Really, it was a baptism. The purple light erupting first, over the city, mirrored back across the water, like a shattered jar of preserves, before the orange took hold, a tiny flame cupped between hands, being blown full to life. How Old Testament of me! To dip my head beneath the current, still in the blackness, and rise to the light. To watch the old men, naked and shriveled, towel off in the cold air, speaking of a tree that was to be sheared, their bodies backlit by roosting bats and mountain laurel. I don’t remember the last night I didn’t drink. For the longest time I said it was a response to the boredom. To the loneliness. I had kept myself distracted with NBA highlights and foreign films. With amateur pornography and snapchat filters. In a way, I felt as though I was already dead. A ghost wearing a human suit. That at any moment I could be cracked open. That inside, was the rising tide of a summer storm, turning the sky ominous and teenage. Maybe, feathers. Stuffing. Packing peanuts.   Elegy for the East Side Just tonight, walked from one end to the other, sequestered to the sidestreets, skipping over puddles and burned books Everything clumsy and beautiful and new Popped in for a drink at the garden supply store Noticed all the young couples sipping cocktails from flowerpots, kissing over pinwheels & lawn gnomes Could make out over the sound of small talk, the DJ spinning Plantasia The wisteria and wilted chard seeming nonplussed noncommittal This place isn’t the same since you left it Outside Mama Dearest the Cryptobros try to film themselves jumping a Cybertruck on a Lime Scooter Their wives hold Hamms in a semi-circle and look slightly like a Midwestern coven So elegant in their clear disdain Inside the parlor, the shrill recreation of a hunting cabin Taxidermied deer heads pepper the space between pin up girls, creating a dichotomy of destructive desire Nothing a shot of Malort and some curly fries couldn’t handle On the corner, telephone pole advertisements proffer mass ascension and a wet T-shirt contest A candlelit vigil at the American Sniper’s grave A shotgun of Lonestars chased down with a shotgun of Modelo The Texas sky somehow wider than ever The frequencies of bluebonnet giving way to indigo and periwinkle The quiet streets to house shows and seances This, so unlike the night we met No stars No fireworks No strangers in the street holding sparklers as we find each other in the handsy cocoon of porchlight No, only the moon sitting on the treeline like the egg sac of a wolf spider But on the water a cross between a duck boat and a pedal pub tied together with purple fairy lights Someone new, pumping her legs beside me The first to stir more than leaf litter and carcinogenic pollen Licking the salt from the rim of my margarita and shrugging A shorthand to say she is taking me home

When Marion pops up on Zoom with her curls blown out to smooth newscaster perfection, it’s a hot topic and one that offers a perfect lead-in to the first poem up for discussion, “Your Hair Wants Cutting” by this episode’s featured poet, Michael Montlack. The three poems we’re considering take inspiration from the Mad Hatter character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. We discuss, Slushies, how much, if any, contextual framing is needed to guide the reader when poems refer to a character who resides in our collective imagination. We also talk about local and regional idioms, and for Kathy, how difficult they are to unlearn (shout out to Pittsburgh!). Marion accidentally bestows a new nickname on Jason. Dagne has an opinion about how speech is rendered within a poem: italics or quotation marks. She’s team italics, Slushies, which are you? While thinking about the line in these poems; Marion refers to Jason’s excellent essay on the history and theory of the line from his book Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture. Another poem in the batch has Marion recalling Jason’s poem “Wester.” As always, thanks for listening! At the table: Dagne Forrest, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, and Lisa Zerkle Michael Montlack's third poetry collection COSMIC IDIOT will be published by Saturnalia. He is the editor the Lambda Finalist essay anthology My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (University of Wisconsin Press). His work has appeared in Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, Cincinnati Review, Lit, Epoch, Alaska Quarterly Review, Phoebe and other magazines. In 2022, his poem won the Saints & Sinners Poetry Contest for LGBTQIA+ poets. He lives in NYC and teaches poetry at NYU and CUNY City College. https://www.facebook.com/michael.montlack https://www.instagram.com/michaelmontlack (website) https://www.michaelmontlack.com/ “Your Hair Wants Cutting” my grandmother would say, sitting there at her window, monitoring the restless crows. Her robe nearly as ancient as she. Since when are you concerned with fashion? I once dared to ask. I was seventeen, restless as those crows. I knew she wasn’t talking about my curls. Plumage, she used to call it when I was a boy. Sit down, little peacock—your hair wants cutting. Even then I knew it was a cutting remark. Laden. Throwing cold kettle water on my fire. I reminded myself that she was a widow. And was glad that at least I would never cause a woman to suffer such grief. I reminded her how I donned a hat most days. She stared me up and down, her eyes like the ocean’s green cold. Clever. Your kind seems to have a clever answer for everything … I swallowed the indictment. Why not make yourself useful, she said, putting down her tea cup, eyeing the trash on her tray. I was glad to oblige, happy to depart before she could notice the low waist of my trousers, let alone the height of my heels. Muchier Picture me on a grand terrace, tipping my hat. Crossing a bridge over the river of defeat— it’s definitely a state of ascent. Being owed rather than owing. A blatant triumph against the conventional. A la Lord Byron. A monocle without glass, worn for style. It’s an advance for a memoir about a life you haven’t yet lived. Bound to be lost on some but admired by all. Likely absent during the lessons on common subjects: Algebra, Classic Literature, Biology. More devoted to the mastery of the quaintest arts: Porcelain, Calligraphy, Tapestry Weaving, Drag. As ephemeral and ethereal as a bubble. It’s not something you adopt. It’s something that abducts you. Enviers call it utter madness, but the muchiest of the muchier won’t even fathom the phrase. Inheritance There wasn’t much to leave—my sister, also suspiciously unwed, took the cottage and the wagon. But our mother had insisted that the tea set should be mine. “It’s dainty and a bit chipped. Like you,” she chortled on her deathbed. I failed to see the humor but took it just the same. Knowing my sister would likely surrender it to the church, where the nuns might put it to good use but never appreciate its finery, as that would be vanity. I much rather hear my motley chums slurp from it as they sit steeped in my ridiculous riddles. I never admitted how I crafted them at night, alone in bed, in the quiet twilight, the hour I imagined reading bedtime stories to the children I never had. An apprentice son would’ve been nice, to hand down millinery techniques. Instead I had the ghost of one, there in my workshop, where imaginary fights erupted over whose turn it was to sweep up the felt or sharpen the scissors. Of course, I appeared mad, a much better impression to leave than the riddle of my bachelorhood. Sometimes I wanted to smash the porcelain cups, chuck them at that bloody caterpillar stinking up the forest with his opium. Why not? There was no one to inherit my pittance. No one to be trusted with my legacy… until the appearance of this girl, at once strange yet so familiar. I quite liked her. The way she held her own with me. If ever I had a daughter, I would have wanted her to be as brave as she. Defending the poor Knave of Hearts, accused of stealing the Queen’s tarts. There in that courtroom, I almost lost my head but finally found a beneficiary.

Episode 143: Do They Still Have Bulletin Boards?     Our discussion of Alyx Chandler’s poems has us considering the liminal space between girlhood and womanhood, summer and fall, print and digital cultures, good bug and bad, Slushies. With these poems, we’re swooning over summer’s lushness, marveling over kudzu’s inexorable march, and thinking back to steamy afternoons running through sprinklers with skinned knees. Set at the end of girlhood, these poems makes us think of the Melissa Febos book of the same name. Jason is charmed by the poet’s hypotactic syntax and her control of the line. Be sure to take a look at the poems’ format at PBQmag.org.     As our own summers wrap up, Lisa saves monarch caterpillars while Sam smushes lantern flies. Kathy shares her new secret for a solid eight hours of sleep. Looking to the future, we’re celebrating forthcoming chapbooks and books. Dagne’s chapbook “Falldown Lane” from Whittle, Jason’s book “Teaching Writing Through Poetry,”  and Kathy’s “Teaching Writing Through Journaling,” both from a new series Kathy is editing at Bloomsbury. As always, thanks for listening.      At the table: Dagne Forrest, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle          Author bio: Alyx Chandler (she/her) is a poet from the South who now teaches in Chicago. She received her MFA in poetry at the University of Montana, where she was a Richard Hugo Fellow and taught poetry. In 2025, she won the Three Sisters Award in Poetry with Nelle Literary Journal, received a Creative Catalyst grant from the Illinois Arts Council, and was awarded for residencies at Ragdale and Taleamor Park. She is a poet in residence at the Chicago Poetry Center and facilitates workshops for incarcerated youth with Free Verse Writing Project. Her poetry can be found in the Southern Poetry Anthology, EPOCH, Greensboro Review, and elsewhere.    Author website: alyxchandler.com    Instagram @alyxabc    Love Affair with a Sprinkler   I’ve only got so many days    left to wet this face to rouse enough   growl to go back  where I came from    to build a backbone  hard as sheet metal   from the engine of  dad’s favorite truck   the one I can  never remember    though it carried me  everywhere I needed to go    and of course where I didn’t   short-shorts trespassing  abandoned kudzu homes    scraped legs inching   up water towers   creeping down stone church rooftops   girlhood a fresh-cut lawn where secrets coiled   like a water hose  stuck in kinks   spouting knots  writhing in grass    begging to spit at every pepperplant    sate all thirst I want to drown   to be snake-hearted again my stride full   of spunk and gall half-naked in an    embrace with the  spray of irrigation jets    their cold drenching my kid-body good    and sopping-wet  in hose-water rivulets   under its pressure  I shed regret   molt sunburn squeal hallelujah    in a hot spell— such a sweet relief    I’d somehow  after so many years   forgotten. Once I Lived in a Town    where grocery stores dispensed  ammunition from automated machines,    all you needed was an ID and license, the sign advertised, but there are ways    around that, a cashier told me, snuff a bulge  half-cocked in his cheek. But my target?    The choose-your-own-adventure  bulletin board. If you were brave,   you’d let some guy named John shoot  you with their dad’s old Nikon film   camera. Girls only. No tattoos, the ink of the red-lettered flyer bled. Those days    I craved someone—anyone—to lock and load my rough-hewn beauty like    a cold weapon. Ripen the fruit of  my teenage face. Save me. Instead I   washed the ad in my too-tight jeans, let it dye my pocket grapefruit pink.    Once I lived in a town where daily I wore a necklace with a dragonfly wing    cured in resin, gifted from a lover,  a lifelong bug hater. Love can live in    the crevice of disgust, I found, but  lost it within the swaths of poison oak    where I shot my first bullet into wide- open sky and felt death echo its curious    desire, automatic as the gun’s kickback.  My legs mottled in pocked rash. Then a    hole I didn’t know existed. A souring.  Bitter and salt the only taste craved,    a rotten smell in the fried fatback I ate.  Once I lived in a town where the first    boy I kissed in the wreathed doorway of my childhood home left Earth too   soon from a single shot. I can’t ask: is this what the military taught him? I only   know the cruel way high school relationships  end, 5-word text then never again. His fine-   line dragon doodles and i-love-you notes  still in my Converse shoe box in an attic,   twelve years untouched. I once lived in  a town where obits never contained   the word “suicide”—everyone is a child of Christ, and I mean everyone, our pastor   used to say, a joke staining his sincerity.  God, how I undercompensate, use safety   pins for my grief when I need weapons-grade  resistance, a cast-iron heart. Once I lived   in a town where I found a primed handgun under the bed of a boy I cheated with.   Delirious, I buried it in a dumpster until he cried that it was his great-grandfather’s,   an heirloom he couldn’t forget or forgive and after that I never saw him again. I didn’t   have the language to ask him what I needed to know, Prozac newly wired in my brain,   a secret I could barely contain. Once I  crushed my trigger finger between the   door of who I wanted to be and who I actually was; I let that town press me    like a camellia between a book, inadequate  as a cartoon-decorated band aid trying to   stop the blood flow from a near-miss bullet. The Brooder   beneath nest boxes a squawk sinks out  so docile it turns me over both startles and   settles me this sudden birdbrain  how domestication is a brawl    inside me: the cockatrice papering my chicken heart with pockets of wire  I peel back its cuticle remove the bloom   to clean the coop   and find a little yolkless moon  an eyeball I push open and memorize then chuck over my roof   until a hen digs a crack with her beak breaks speckled curtains    of turquoise consumes her newest creation without pity or pause  

While our team is on a brief recording hiatus, we’re sharing another encore episode from the Slush Pile archive. This one is from late 2017 and found Jason still in his bathrobe. Nick Lantz published a new collection of poetry in 2024 “The End of Everything and Everything That Comes after That”, and we love an opportunity to celebrate our past authors. Sidle up to our virtual editorial table and take a listen to an episode that considers three poems by Nick Lantz.   In this episode, the editors review three poems by Nick Lantz: “An Urn for Ashes,” “Starvation Ranch,” and “Ghost as Naked Man.”  As a child, Nick Lantz was obsessed with paranormal phenomenon and the unexplained, from cryptids to aliens to ghosts… Present at the Editorial Table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Tim Fitts, Sharee DeVose, Jason Schneiderman, Marion Wrenn, Samantha Neugebauer, Joe Zang (Production Engineer) For the first and possibly only time, we were in a recording studio within Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business, which made us feel like we were on an episode of The View. This week, the editors review three poems by Nick Lantz: “An Urn for Ashes,” “Starvation Ranch,” and “Ghost as Naked Man.” As a child, Nick Lantz was obsessed with paranormal phenomenon and the unexplained, from cryptids to aliens to ghosts. These days, he tells people he’s writing a book of poems about ghosts, though that’s only sort of true. His fourth book, You, Beast, won the Brittingham Prize and was published by University of Wisconsin Press in 2017. He was also the recipient of a 2017 NEA fellowship for his poetry. He lives in Huntsville, Texas, where he teaches at Sam Houston State University and edits the Texas Review. “An Urn for Ashes” gets us started off on our a conversation on past lives and reincarnation. Lantz’s impressive use of language and imagery draws up ideas of present beings possessing remnants of those far in the past. Moving on to “Starvation Ranch,” the editors reflect on what memory and recollection look like in the modern era. The poem layers alluring images that are beautifully constructed and give us a front seat in recounting many summers past. The final poem, “Ghost as Naked Man” offers a reimagined commentary on gender as a social construct. Seemingly in conversation with other works on the topic, the poem conveys frustration and destruction, then pride, as expressions of manhood. It also brings to mind Ada Limón’s “After the Storm,” published in Issue 66 of Painted Bride Quarterly. Listen in for our takes on these poems and the verdicts! An Urn for Ashes The atoms that made up Julius Caesar’s body, burned on a pyre, spread by wind and time, have since dispersed far and wide, and statistically speaking you have in you some infinitesimal bit of carbon or hydrogen from his hand or tongue, or maybe some piece of the foot that, crossing a river, turned a republic into an empire. But that means you carry with you also the unnamed dead, the serfs and farmers, foot soldiers and clerks, and their sandals and the axles of chariots and incense burned at an altar and garbage smoking in a pit outside a great city at the center of an empire, that you are a vessel carrying the ashes of many empires and the ashes of people burned away by empires, their sweet, unheard melodies. And look how finely wrought you are, how precise your features, your very form a kind of ceremony for transporting the dead through the living world. Starvation Ranch Frank Hite, my mother’s father’s mother’s father, named his farm Starvation Ranch, and one July, I balanced high on a ladder to repaint those white letters on the same red barn where they’ve been for a hundred years. But that summer is a sketch, a note written in the margin of a book I gave away. I shot rabbits and learned to drive and listened to the same Lou Reed tape on loop in the upper bedroom of my family’s farmhouse. In a closet I found my grandmother’s high school yearbook in which she had crossed out the name of each classmate who had died. I learned there are three kinds of garbage— the kind that goes in the compost heap to feed the garden that grows the peppers and the corn, the kind that goes in the ditch to feed the coyotes who howl at night, the kind that goes in an old oil drum to burn I learned to love the indentation my grandmother’s pencil left in the paper over a name, like the tally marks I carved into a tree for each rabbit I shot. I learned that a stone arrowhead, taken from a newly plowed field that has held it for hundreds of years is still sharp enough to cut my palm. I learned to love the hiss of silence on the tape after a song ended, the sound of time like the susurrus of insects at dusk, like a broom whisking clean the floor of some upper room. I learned how to walk the perimeter of the house and feel in the grass the edges of the old foundation, a version of house that burned, that disappeared, that was rewritten, and I learned how to walk farther out into the pastures, to spot the earthen mounds left behind by people who remain only in names of rivers and country roads. That was one summer. Decades later, I learned that the barn I painted was not even the original, which had been replaced, board by beam, years before. And I learned that barns are red because red paint is cheap because iron is abundant because dying stars sighed iron atoms into space and those atoms gathered here on earth, became the earth, became blood and arrowheads and steel girders holding up towers and the red paint of barns. Ghost as Naked Man “Gender is a kind of imitation of which there is no original.”—Judith Butler Take away his beard, his hairy flanks. Lick your thumb and smear off his Adam’s apple. Lift away his penis like a live bomb, and bury it under a mountain. Hide the testicles behind a broad leaf. But look, he still goes around town pointing at things he wants and moaning, rattling his imaginary chains. Every time he sees his reflection in a shop window, he cuts a thumb and with the blood paints over gaps in his shimmering reflection. Then he takes a brick and breaks the glass. There, he says, look what I made.

Summer scrambled us, Slushies, from UAE to North Carolina, from D.C. to Scotland and back, from North Carolina to New York City, and to Philly, of course. Phew! Sam has just returned after a month-long residency through the Hawthornden Foundation in Scotland in an actual castle where she worked on her novel. The crew came together on Zoom to discuss two poems by Elvira Basevich, “Beautiful Girls” and “Pallas Athena”. The first poem transports Kathy and Marion to their teenage days on the Jersey shore. For Marion, the ending of the poem with its Beauty in the bathroom mirror, recalls the energy of Ada Limón’s “How to Triumph like a Girl”.     The discussion of “Pallas Athena” notes the poem’s foresight to mark a memory as it’s made, which sends Marion to Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey and has Lisa mis-marking that poem as the one with daffodils. Imagining the future while in the past also reminds Marion of André Aciman’s discussion of arbitrage and Tintern Abbey in the New Yorker. We talk about endings, Slushies, and how hard it is to nail the dismount. Last but not least, we celebrate the release of Marion’s new book of poems, Gladiola Girls, with a group photo. Be sure to check out the picture to peep how Kathy’s chrome manicure matches the book’s color scheme.   At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Samantha Neugebauer, Lisa Zerkle, and Sebastian Rametta (sound engineer)   Elvira Basevich is assistant professor of philosophy at University of California, Davis. Her first poetry collection, How to Love the World (Pank 2020), was shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award. Her poems have recently appeared in Pleiades, On the Seawall, Diode, & The Laurel Review. Lately, she’s been writing a lot about her father who returned to Russia years ago without saying goodbye.   Website:  www.elvirabasevich.com   Instagram: @elvirabasevich   BEAUTIFUL GIRLS   I used to line up with teenage girls on the boardwalk like oysters on the half shell. We kissed each other  for practice. We guessed how much nakedness we  could fit inside our mouths, swallow whole or spit out.  These are some of my best memories. Sitting on  lifeguard chairs till dusk talking about life.  Dates, gulls, the milky surf came to us, but they  had to climb a ladder to our perch. Bring an offering  of beer and cigarettes. Even then, we admitted few.  Our bodies were a salvation then, a cause for celebration, something new to smell and taste and touch every  morning, the threshold of a pagan’s afterlife:  an all-you-can-eat buffet of physical pleasures. All these  years later, even without the hours of applying makeup  in the bathroom mirror, matching mesh crop tops to low risers, taking selfies, I feel so beautiful.  I don’t mean that metaphorically, as in Plato’s description  of a beautiful soul as a chariot pulled by two winged  horses, but the real, pulsating thing: the Beauty  who looks back from the bathroom mirror and smiles.   PALLAS ATHENA   We tracked deer in the snow, studied philosophy  and mathematics. Like you, I inherited  my father’s passions: the love of war, physical beauty,  America’s Funniest Home Videos. I can still hear  his laughter in a hotel in upstate New York  on our only family trip. Soviet émigrés with blue hair and adult grandchildren preferred to speak in English and eat hot dogs and hamburgers rather than piroshki and cold cuts with slivers of wobbly jellied fat. We ice skated among pine trees and rooks. Napped in cots before waiting in a buffet line  in a wood-paneled cafeteria. Pallas, that weekend  you took care of me like a big sister.  You showed me a bloom of wildflowers by  the frozen river, a dusk replete with angels,  reminders that this too won’t last, but  it will become my favorite memory of my father.  That was your greatest strength: to have  the foresight to remember a moment as it faded.  You didn’t judge me when I left all my doors  and windows open and called out to my father,  Come in. That sometimes we don’t choose  the angels that we believe in, as a house  does not choose the ghosts who wander its halls.

What’s a person to do when they love visual art, but don’t share the gift of creating it themselves? Poet Janée Baugher, whose work we discuss in this episode, displays her love of art through ekphrastic poetry. She’s even written a book on the form, The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction (McFarland, 2020). Slushies, you’ll definitely want to take a look at these poems and their unique formatting before you listen to the podcast. The poems we discuss center around Andrew Wyeth’s paintings and come from Baugher’s forthcoming 2026 collection The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles, selected by Shane McCrae to win the 2023 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize.   Along the way, Jason shares his travel mishaps and coins a memorable new moniker for Greenville-Spartanburg. Our South Carolina diversion leads Lisa to Hub City Writers Project and Kathy to The Swamp Trail. We talk about poetry-as-footnote, which we also chatted about in Episode 110. Dagne, in thinking about artist’s models, recommends a Decoder Ring podcast episode about Andrew Wyeth’s muse, Helga. And Jason reveals his own secret past in front of the sketchpad!   At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Dagne Forrest, Lisa Zerkle, Jodi Gahn, Sebastian Rametta (sound engineer)     Author bio: Janée J. Baugher is the author of the only craft book of its kind, The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction (McFarland, 2020) and an assistant editor at Boulevard magazine. She won Tupelo Press’s Dorset Prize for her third poetry collection, The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles (2026).   Website: www.JaneeBaugher.com   Instagram: @ekphrastic_writer    

Like the movie of the same name, the poems we discuss here, Slushies, take on the cares of the world in an unrelenting torrent. In this episode, we discuss three poems by Harriet Levin which reference the Haitian writer and artist Frankétienne, Barcelona’s as-yet unfinished Sagrada Familia cathedral, and the constellation of Orion, (for starters). We think about how poems featuring babies can avoid the sentimental (as we ultimately decide these do). We end considering the picture book chaos found in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are as a counterpoint to real-world displacement. At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, Lisa Zerkle, Jodi Gahn, Lillie Volpe (sound engineer)   With thanks to one of our sponsors, Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Lorraine” opens our show.  Harriet Levin is the author of three poetry books, The Christmas Show (Beacon Press, 1997), Girl in Cap and Gown (Mammoth Books, 2010), and My Oceanography (CavanKerry 2018). Her honors include the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, The Barnard New Women Poets Prize, Nimrod's Pablo Neruda/Hardiman Award, The Ellen LaForge Memorial Poetry Prize, and a PEW Fellowship in the Arts discipline award. Her debut novel, How Fast Can you Run, a novel based on the life of Lost Boy of Sudan Michael Majok Kuch, was excerpted in The Kenyon Review and chosen as a 2017 Charter for Compassion Global Read. A 2022-23 Stein Family Foundation Fellow, she holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and teaches writing at Drexel University. Website: harrietlevinmillan.org

Slushies, we invoke the retelling of a ghostly experience shared by Kathy and Marion at the Hotel Figueroa in California earlier this year partway into this episode. Two poems by Jen Siraganian are at the heart of our discussion, and it’s the first of these that puts ghosts into our heads. This poem also causes us to consider at some length the physical form chosen by or for a poem, and how this can utterly enhance the experience of the poem when it’s just right. It’s also an opportunity for Jason to raise the spectre of the virgule (or slash) once again, and we even pause briefly to recall when WYSIWYG was a useful acronym. We end the episode with an ekphrastic that prompts an on-the-spot tie breaker (thanks to our sound engineer Lillie for saving the day!).   https://whitney.org/collection/works/2171 https://www.nga.gov/collection/highlights/gorky-the-artist-and-his-mother.html  At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, Jason Schneiderman, Dagne Forrest, Jodi Gahn, Lillie Volpe (sound engineer)   Jen Siraganian is an Armenian-American writer, educator, and former Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Barrow Street, Best New Poets, Cortland Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, Smartish Pace, and other journals. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won the 2024 New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. A former managing director of Litquake: San Francisco’s Literary Festival, she is a current Lucas Artist Fellow. jensiraganian.com      Social media handles:   Facebook @jen.siraganian, Instagram @jsiraganian, Bluesky @jsiraganian.bsky.social, Website

Episode 137: Collective Effervescence   Don’t be jelly, but we’re having a blast with three poems from the poet Han VanderHart in this episode! You can join in on the fizzing of our collective effervescence by just tuning in. We find the conversation naturally turning towards John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, taking in the pipe as a fairly recent newcomer as a punctuation mark in poetry, and the concept of absolute zero, alongside much, much more. Poetic themes of truth, love, and the power of “No” sit at the center of our conversation. Oh, and Marion deftly keeps Kathy in the conversation when technology unexpectedly steals her voice! (Be sure to check out the painting Truth Coming Out of Her Well, the inspiration for the first poem, an ekphrastic, that we discuss. It’s a painting that has inspired some cool tattoo art!)   At the table: Marion Wrenn, Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Divina Boko, Lisa Zerkle, Dagne Forrest, Lillie Volpe (sound engineer)     Han VanderHart grew up on a small-scale farm in Virginia, and now lives in North Carolina, under the pines with their long term partner, two children, four cats, two dogs, and a Diva koi Beta fish named Caroline (long I). Their favorite flower is all of them, with the exception of the gerber daisy, which looks fake. Han is the author of Larks (Ohio, 2025) and What Pecan Light (BCP, 2021), and hosts Of Poetry Podcast and co-edits River River Books with Amorak Huey.   Insta: @han.vanderhart Bluesky: @hanvanderhart.bsky.social Website: hanvanderhart.com

Episode 136: Mapping Experience Part II   Here’s a first for PBQ, the second of a two-part series on a single poet! We’re calling this two-parter the The Maggie Wolff Experience. We delight in spending more time with Maggie’s exceptional series of abcedarians, “Surveys, Maps, and Mothers”, which share an unspooling narrative of intergenerational trauma. Kathy notes the similarity to experiencing an anthology series, with each of the four poems we’ve discussed offering a complete experience, while added depth and richness emerges from reading multiple poems (this makes Episode 135 or Part I optional but still recommended listening!). Jason calls attention to the skillfully created sonic waves that appear in sections of some of the poems, notably “S” in this episode. We touch on the “lore” of the people in our lives (thanks to Divina for the Gen Z lingo) and Sam makes the connection with Philip Larkin’s This Be the Verse (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”). All of that and even a quick moment referencing Billy Joel’s Movin' Out (Anthony’s Song) from 1977 – if you listen, you’ll know why!   At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Samantha Neugebauer, Dagne Forrest, Lisa Zerkle, Jason Schneiderman, Divina Boko, Lillie Volpe (sound engineer) Maggie Wolff is a poet, essayist, fiction writer, and Ph.D. student. She recently won an AWP Intro Journal Award for her poetry, and her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Juked, New Delta Review, and other publications. Her chapbook Haunted Daughters has just been released by Press 254. When she isn't spending her time stressing about Phd-ing, she enjoys long walks, horror movies, and hibernating at home.   Instagram @m_wolffwriter

Episode 135: Mapping Experience Dive into the first of a two-part series (a first for us!) of what we’re calling The Maggie Wolff Experience. In this episode we dig into the first two of four poems from her exceptional series of abcedarians called “Surveys, Maps, and Mothers”. These plainspoken, unvarnished poems, which structure painful experiences in multiple dictionary-style entries within each poem, are skillfully crafted. We notice the calm sense of order the form brings to the experience of deconstructing this narrative of intergenerational trauma. We also appreciate the careful attention to lineation, which intensifies meaning, alongside the subtle layering of sound. You’ve got give it a listen!   Links you might like: Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Mercator Projections   At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Divina Boko, Lillie Volpe (sound engineer) Maggie Wolff is a poet, essayist, fiction writer, and Ph.D. student. She recently won an AWP Intro Journal Award for her poetry, and her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Juked, New Delta Review, and other publications. Her chapbook, Haunted Daughters, is forthcoming from Press 254. When she isn't spending her time stressing about Phd-ing, she enjoys long walks, horror movies, and hibernating at home.   Instagram @m_wolffwriter

Episode 134: Tidbits & Trolls  Join us for a conversation about new poems by Kelly Egan and a discussion about line breaks, image systems, and the surprise turns poems make. Keep your eyes and ears open, Slushies, the landscape is full of lore. Egan has us pondering possibilities. Once upon a time folks believed in Selkies, shapeshifting seals who make folks fall in love with them in their human form. Who knew it's bad luck to open the door on Christmas Eve for fear trolls will maraud your house? You've been warned. Check out Danish artist Thomas Dambo's mammoth sculpted trolls hidden in plain sight. And if you want to deep dive into another legendary landscape – aka a brick-and-mortar bookstore – be sure to check out Parker Posey's documentary The Booksellers.    At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Samantha Neugebauer, Dagne Forrest, Lisa Zerkle, Divina Boko, Jess Fielo (sound engineer)    Kelly Egan writes from dream, reverie, and long drives. She is the author of two chapbooks—Millennial, from White Stag, and A Series of Septembers, from Dancing Girl Press. Her poems can also be found in Maiden Magazine, Interim, Colorado Review, Laurel Review, RHINO, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. Kelly has an MFA from Saint Mary’s College of CA and has participated in writing residencies in Iceland and the Peruvian Amazon. She lives in California’s Bay Area. Find her at kellyjeanegan.com.