Keep in touch
When summer ends
I took the
Bus it smelled
Of bone and
Birth the first
Day you left
Me I was
Drinking desire so
Long like memory
Like teeth
Elena Zhang is a Chinese American writer and mother living in Chicago. Her work can be found in HAD, The Citron Review, and X-R-A-Y, among other publications. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, and was selected for Best Microfiction 2024 and 2025.
the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan
The other of
the other
is the sky and
its sphere
of longing.
Kolaptō grew in
reverse,
roamed
dung-billed instead
of
bildungsromaned,
raised in a
house
with all its
mirrors pointed inward
to reflect only
their dark walls.
At the funeral,
he birthed his father
through the
vaginal coffin.
"Look at
this baby," he cooed
and crowned him
with a garland
of used
condoms, beautiful
with their
sheen of trapped light.
"Send my
regards,"
Kolaptō said
and put the
baby
back in the
box.
Mike Bagwell is a form of mutual antagonism towards the sky. He received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence, and his work appears in Poetry Northwest, Action Spectacle, The Texas Review, ITERANT, Sprung Formal, Afternoon Visitor, HAD, Tyger Quarterly, Annulet, and others. Recent chapbooks include Poem of Thanks: A Court of Wands (Metatron 2025), A Collision of Soul in Midair (Bottlecap), and micros from Ghost City and Rinky Dink. He runs the Ghost Harmonics reading series in Philly. Find him at mikebagwell.me, @low_gh0st, or playing dragons with his daughters.
the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan
“I’m
writing to you
all the time”
—Franz
Wright
you
may be moved to discover on a train
to
stockholm you hadn’t planned on—
the
other one having burst into flames
the
station before you boarded in malmö—
you
actually quite enjoy a thing
you'd
previously dismissed, for instance
the
poetry of a dead drunk austrian,
yourself, black tea with bergamot.
confronting
that you might consider
spiders,
sparrows, meditation, surviving
surprise
or a gesture, a ticket, an engine
ablaze,
a world weary with trying, my god—
all this love you may have missed.
Kristin Lueke is a Chicana poet living in northern New Mexico. She is the author of the chapbooks (in)different math (Dancing Girl Press) and here i show you a human heart. Her work appears in Sixth Finch, Wildness, HAD, Mizna, Okay Donkey, and elsewhere. She writes at www.theanimaleats.com.
the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan
