Michael Russell : the water-logged hard drive

 

 

my only friends are porn stars
whose soggy spines line the files
on my water-logged hard drive 

     shame     i’ll never know them

beyond pixels     cells     the cybernetic
virus that swells into my bank account
nibbles the frayed edges
of all my precious coins & bills
credit cards     debit cards     magic cards
that rumble & roar     shrivel
like a famished stomach     

             ugh     the shame

         this file     that file
         inaccessible & unreadable
         my priceless porn files
         water-logged & water boarded
         into corruption

i miss my bank collection!

the salt-ripe heist
of a masked stick up
                      the ass!

blood rushed & boned up
with Calvin     Brock     Riley     Andy     Beaux     Brad     

                 Boomer

stands on the periphery like a father     harnessed angel in leather     wings hovering above the nameless     he strokes his strong daddy dick like a cocky boy     edges me through movie star lighting & terrible acting     o! the smut! when he nails a willing sub     foreskin knifed into anal skin     lube sheen with halloween scream    

       once     i caught a glance

                   the back of his neck
                   clutched in the muscular jaws
                   of Sean Zevran’s palm

                   his face     pressed into hiding
                   crushed
                   by the perfect chisel of another
                   porn star    

i searched the internet for his pictures & uncovered a rose bush     inked flesh     blood bulbs & blossoms     thorns     each tattoo     an ode     love softening his knuckles     wings     clinging to his shoulder     throbbing above his infamous hard-on    

styled in a mosaic     a checkered jockstrap feasts on his hips     ass     i wonder     will i ever be able to love the cobwebs draped between worship     envy?

my basement troll body
rolls with dinner rolls against the laptop screen
buttered & oily     i sprout moldy broccoli
fuzzy-wuzzy     cutesy-wootsy sour patch kids
sugar seeds grow & troll my muffin cup folds 

     see my cauliflower tits
     turnip nips
     mushroom hair everywhere

oh     Boomer
if i dropped ½ my weight
½ my sadness     ¾ of everything
piled on my plate
do you think an ab or two might punch through
the bulletproof shield of my stomach? 

& what’s the point?

you’d still curdle at my flesh     wedged between this unlit room

& Sean Zevran

mounting the beast of your body     fucked senseless & moaning

 

 

 

 

NOTE: Calvin, Brock, Riley, Andy, Beaux, Brad and Boomer are all gay porn stars that perform with the surname “Banks.” Boomer Banks performed for the gay porn studio CockyBoys, their models are described as “cocky boys.” Sean Zevran is a gay porn star that did a scene with Boomer Banks.

 

 

 

 

Michael Russell (he/they) is the queer, mad mother monster behind two chapbooks, gallery of heartache (845 Press) and Grindr Opera (Frog Hollow Press). He’s the coauthor of chapbook Split Jawed with Elena Bentley (forthcoming from Collusion Books). When not entering the queer Speed Force and walking way too fast, they like long walks in the park and platonic dinners over flameless tea lights. Now, he’s reminding himself a bio is not a Grindr profile. Insta: @michael.russell.poet

Jérôme Melançon : …more songs the radio won’t play…, by Stan Rogal

…more songs the radio won’t play…, Stan Rogal
ECW Press, 2025

 

 

 

Stan Rogal is very serious about not being serious – even when interviewing deceased poets who briefly return to this plane to mess with him. Sitting down with his latest collection, …more songs the radio won’t play…, I didn’t know what not to expect, and it turns out I wasn’t wrong. The concept behind the collection is simple: take a song, use the song title as title, mention the singer or group’s name, and use the lyrics, or any aspect of the song, really, and transform it into something that is more than the song and more than a poem. Let’s get the verdict out of the way: most of the resulting poems function on their own, without knowledge of the original; the other ones will send you running to the song; and all will heighten your appreciation of the song and by your capacity to relate back to it.

But there’s no formula here. Not one way for Rogal to depart from the song, to remix it, to weave himself in and out of it. The book lets itself be read like a song, but it also begs to be studied, for the reader to read it like a musician would listen to a song so they could figure out the parts by ear, find allusions to other songs, understand the texture, and hit those notes.

I won’t give it the satisfaction.

I won’t! I won’t dissect “Shock the Monkey” and compare it to the song even though it’s much shorter than most other poems and I’m more familiar with it. I won’t, even though Rogal is dangling Wittgenstein explicitly on four separate occasions. The Wittgenstein who’s given up on order and sees everything as a game, is impressed by the games, and kind of wants people to come up with more, better games. The book wants its academic article, subtitled “Reading popular music through Rogal through Wittgenstein,” titled with a witty popular cultural reference.

Because that’s also what happens to the title of the collection, a deformation of Kathleen Edwards’ “One More Song the Radio Won’t Like.” The first trick is to make the allusive (won’t like) into the descriptive (won’t play), all the while adding to the original titular irony by attaching it to poems which, of course, the radio won’t play, seeing as they are poems. The second is to get rid of the capitals in the title so it’s 2020s poetry (in spite of the poems having titles). And then Rogal makes it seem like the title is part of a larger text by adding in ellipses. AND THEN the cover makes us believe there’s nostalgia in this collection by setting up cassette tapes in an artful tableau. The tape is even let out of one cassette (and an old cassette, not the late 90s type!), in a shape that evokes eyeglasses on a string or a baby carriage. More feigned nostalgia: side B is almost done playing. It’s almost time to flip the cassette and start over. Old life returns to new life.

I don’t know Rogal’s age but I can see there’s at least a decade between us just by the choice of songs. Again, there’s no nostalgia in the poems: there are newer songs in there, and the songs from the 1970s and 80s are very much alive, present as they are in their corresponding poems. They’ve stayed with Rogal, he didn’t stay behind with them (and isn’t that the dream for someone whose musical taste belongs to a past era, I was thinking, a Smashing Pumpkins song stuck in my head). He isn’t afraid to spend time with Duran Duran or A Flock of Seagulls and reminds us there are several reasons why their songs were so popular. But I’m NOT going to analyze these poems’ relationships to the original in depth. You figure it out.

Because after all, these are poems. Look at this, in “Hungry like the Wolf”: “Here exists the condition of besidedness / A grammatical sense of adjacency / Do do do do do do do dodo dododo dodo.” Rogal floats an idea, throws us into the song, messes up the meditation, takes us away from the proximity the poem was going to create. Instead, we are pulled behind the scenes of a music video. The dododo line reappears and we are clotheslined, thrown down into an exploration of fascination. Simon Le Bon might be comparing himself to a wolf; Rogal instead subsumes the pop star and the animal under a common concept (take that, Wittgenstein), as mysterious and beautiful but not alike in the least, but nonetheless comparable – the birth of symbolism. And then we get back to the poem’s chorus, with the explicit naming of red riding hood which the footnote informs us was the claimed inspiration for the lyrics; we get back to the singing.

Because yes, these poems have choruses. Things happen in poems when lines repeat, poets have used this device sparingly or quite formally. There’s a modulation, a return, renewed meaning, emphasis. But poems don’t have choruses like songs do, do they? Have you found yourself raising the intensity of your reading in a poem because shifts in its atmosphere led you to understand that a change was coming? Speaking along enthusiastically with the repeating stanza? Reciting part of the poem in your head all day? What’s the poetic equivalent of turning up the volume and tapping your feet while singing your head off? Rogal gives us the chance to give it a shot, to move along with the poems to be moved more than metaphorically.

But also he doesn’t, not always at least, but that’s also on purpose. “I Ran (So Far Away)” appears twice in a row: first as a poem in free verse, then as a prose poem that mixes reviews of the song with descriptions and impressions. In the first iteration, the dynamic from “Hungry like the Wolf” is reversed, we find ourselves on the other side of fascination when the speaker (oomph) says he can’t get away. There’s an end of the world feel to this poem, with nuclear obliteration diction and a knowingly misplaced focus on linguistics. There’s such beauty here, like in these lines: “looking back over your atomic shoulder / you play a beam of alabaster across your face / give me your hand, try to find some surface of yourself / that doesn’t impose too much upon / too late, too late.” How’s this for fascination and desire at the end of the world?

The second iteration of “I Ran” takes a step back and shows us what creates this fascination. Chord progressions, guitar techniques, technical observations, descriptions, songs it references. It all seems helpful and correct, but also extraneous, and through this cascade of details and quotations and additions we get the simple pleasure of enjoying a song, perhaps in spite of all we can know about it and what makes it just another pop song (but isn’t that also the essence of everyday pleasures?).

Wait.

I didn’t do this on purpose. The pulling back, pushing back in… There’s a pattern in these poems. I discovered it while writing. I picked the poems because the songs made sense together for me. I can’t help it. And I’m not even done! Check this out: both poems (this one and the Duran Duran one) share a line: “are you a wind instrument, are you breath?” Who says it to whom? The fascinated, or the fascinating? Isn’t this the essence of fascination, the presence of something beyond the corporeal? And of our relation to singers, given the life they breathe into us? I had to look it up, since it’s so striking. Should I tell you where it’s from? Where Rogal found it? Fine – a 2017 poem by Meredith Striker in the chapbook anemochore. But it’s not the first time he’s brought it up in a poem, so it’s also self-referential. Or is it parallel? Online journal publications are much faster than book releases.

There are other more explanatory poems, more references beyond the songs, more replacement of meaning. Take “Sweet Emotion”: a mention of class consciousness and then “It’s so serious today, the party’s over, or haven’t you heard? / We’re bleeding out, & while you deliberate, bodies accumulate.” (A Perfect Circle, really?) With an injection of Marxism and existentialism (no really, check it out). Take the rewriting of “Radio Ethiopia / Abyssinia” by Patti Smith or “Mama He’s Crazy” by the Judds where Rogal makes new poems and explores what analysis can’t do.

These poems are smart, clever, and they laugh at that part of themselves. They’re fun. They push the poetic experience into the extremely familiar. They attest to the life and staying power of other people’s words and songs, to everything we receive from our mediated relationships with others. And they push the poetic forms by destroying the single line of thought and making the presence of the past known and deeply felt.

So yeah, this is good stuff.

 

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, is now out with Prise de parole. Let us not forget his three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020), his occasional translations, and his book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has also edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.

Claire Marie Stancek : Four poems from Double Life

 

 

suddenly the flowers

 

// Soft whistle window                     draft // YES reads a merry
yellow sign // Posted on a              garbage bin // Sun sun yellow, odd odd
tangelo // Traffic rumbles                                           both outside and in,
heavy trucks thundering                          up my wrists, in my bones
// D is sick and                                          I search inside myself for
more mothering                                capacity, come back with
nothing but a corkscrew,                                     a torn puzzle piece,
the letter Q, a dusty marble,                                and a beetle’s leg
// Stitch vigorous                           embellishment, double rows, darts, this
buttonhole holds an empty center              // With all my heart, the girl replied
// With smarmy art, the squirrel chattered back,                     throwing acorns
// Isn’t this the corner café                             I often frequent
when in this dream                        // With extravagant fare
where // I wait to meet you,                           with an escalator gliding
luxuriously yet nonsensically down                                   between the tables
// Amid gaudy umbrellas,                             and soup tureens, and lithe
lizards, and glossy goslings, and                                bathers by the crab
dip // Dipping their toes                            // The beauty of the beautiful
poet is a precious vase                                  that he walks holding, glowing,
catching the light                                       // Auratic radiance
whose rays flirtatiously mix                   subject and object // There’s
the color of a thing, and then there’s                  the colors laid onto it by
light // White of the lampshade,                       yellow sheen of the bulb,
blue shadows edged in darker grey                      // Columnar story,
story I tell myself                                          // Instructions for the day,
get up, don’t scream                                   // As a frilled, fluted, grenadine
drizzle on velvet                                               yolk / as a brocade
on a round low table / as a thumb                on a low level yoke / ambery
nape / vellum myself from                                         // One thumb
one thumb drumming on a drum                        // Unconscionable form
worm / warn // Song                                               song song, the bird calls
// In wind and rain                                    the petals rollick,
the rain makes petals stick                                     against themselves
like nipply shirts                                  // But the flowers never
break, the branches                                                    thrash and flail,
and the flowers are stubborn                              and they are strong and
not a single petal falls                                   // Guttural engine revs
rhythmically along the avenue                  // And what other than night itself
parses new moon                                               from bassoon
// Snot festoons                                the nose and upper lip
// A flying fuck                                     // A kid in the bath says,
When I drank from your nipples,                                      you had no face
// Frolic and flounce                                       // I forgot the password
// Another sock snags                                           on that same nail
// And rising from the artificial mist,                            a “suggested memory”
// “what I was thinking about”                         is a noun clause,
acting as the subject                                         complement, explaining
what “The end of the world” refers to

 

 

all the trees will fall down 

 

// I read the poems                                          of the man who at the party,
I read the poems of the man                                         whose mouth the,
I read the                                                    poems of the
man who saw me from across the                              street, who stood
waiting and said                               // Whose eyes whose hands
whose light                                                    whose holes
whose name                                                               for me
was // Tempest tost sauce,                               an American sense of
play // Autumn jackets                                         this piercing morning
// Train punctuation,                                          a siren constantly
underneath // Buffeted by disquiet                               I lope along, and then
alone // Doubt all                                         decisions made on the train,
where the track is                              a line that runs both forward and
backward // Raspberry                                         rhapsody in lips that leer
// I listen for the life                              silenced / in extinct voices who voice
no longer // A “rest”                                          as a pause in music
by which music is sustained                                         // But this is not
a waiting area                                                    // The narrator
coughs uncontrollably,                               upsetting the scene’s gravity
// In his poems                                         I find only heckled speckles,
an oily beetle, and                                         a // Light shifts, intensifies
again, again subsides                                         // Go down the escalator,
then all the way through                                                               to the back
back until you reach                                         blue-white reality or
something like it,                                          faces faces and a memory of
rushing through the tunnel, of                           death or of the space between
lives, a roaring sound as of                                                    a waterfall or
wings and all the faces rushing                              // Full sun orange brown
against the window wall opposite;                                    in one version,
a green ladder triangle on which                                        a shining
torso and sunlit arm proffer spackle,                                  flourish
a broad putty knife; in another,                               potted plants punctuate
a green line; in another,                                              faded curtains frame
flat obscure grey; and in another,                              reflection of a reflection,
fast tendrils of white smoke whipping by                     // But who here is
the pattern-setter // Imprint                                          of time, shadow cast
by the false omniscience                                             against which I stumble
// Mine the shadow side                                           looking out // I wore
a string of                                       stars to indicate I was dreaming
// Women (even those who are bearers                              of children) are not inherently
non-violent or                                                               life-affirming
// Dried sunflower                                                    heads on high stalks
rustle // Call the free                                                             will lockdown
// Messages got their wires crossed                                     // At night,
the plants hear each other                              in Latin // The “other side” is
merely another window facing,                               not opposite but what—
apposite, in continuity,                                          in conversation, in relation
// Your free trial will end                              soon // Teaching their relevance
while maintaining their                  irrelevance / The statues rearrange their
draperies // A fuzzy                                                  thought teeters into the
room, backs out again, bumping a                               book to the floor // I
thought I heard you                                                  say fine book patchwork,
liturgical texts                                                  themselves the counterpane
marbling // The best                                                  is the bus. The bus is
for us // I carry                                this pink coffee thermos and against its
blank reflective                                                                  sheen I hurl
thought // Buoyed by                                           urgency, strung along by
desperate hope                                                                   // Thought
comes back                                                                 pink and flat // Where
do these feelings                                                                      come from,
the clouds, the glass,                                                          the traffic outside,
I am flung about by                                     futility // The moment splits,
two terms burst                                                         into a third bursts into

 

 

 

suddenly the flowers

  

// I found a bowl of crispy noodles                        under the tree
where I had left them                               in the last dream
// Shadowy, through windows              glutted with reflections and
 reflections on reflections and                      reflections of
reflections, I see                              mothers, nannies,
grandmothers flowing into the                       library with a crowd of
kids, and I am drenched with                                 shame // Light traces
movement over stasis,              dancing shadow,
obstreperous shimmy,                         pattern over what was
already there // What was                                waiting for light,
what will remain                                            when light goes
// When you lose someone you love,                             it’s as though you live
a double life, the life you have now, and                       a feeling of another life
 not lived // Knotted                                  against each moment,
and in this way                                                        each moment
 becomes double                                            / in the heart,
fastened, fashioned,                                     given over
// Sky brighter this morning,                when I peel back the curtains,
chasm // Fathom,                               phantom plasm, who’s there?
a peek of barely lighter air,                                     good morning
 // It is so simple,                                         to live—but to live
profound, whole, and honest,                           that is a spasm
ransom under whose surface                        whorls vast
clouds // Yet                                 at the moment most bereft,
missing you, not                                        feeling you
near, feeling                                    instead a brutal
emptiness and mocking                                        lack, I turn and see
sunlight playing                                               on the wall,
as though quickly making                              something there
// Busy light fingers                                   // Linen mine / a fine
line in / dirty loose                                           design in // Fireflies
flicker float, crickets sing,                                   night song // Triumphantly:
Poop in the bath today! // I                               coil a chunky
weight yarn around the                                    abortion
ban, I wrap the                                                          abortion
ban up briskly                                      in my two hands, deep
inside a yellow lightly flecked                                 thick strand, I wind
swiftly until the abortion                           ban // Floats deep
inside unseen // A maroon                              SUV eases to a stop in the
 intersection while the cat squats in the                  litterbox, her
back modestly turned, her                   tail flowing out // At the library, the
sign says, The nest is ready and                   waiting. Can you guess what it’s
waiting for?                                          // For the child, or for
the book, or for anyone, really                                   anyone, to see me
// Weaver’s warped yarn                         twists taut the line
doubles back and again                          doubles back // Although I have
not helped or understood, I have                            been there all along
and this, I suddenly and certainly know,                  is motherhood; this mere sufficiency,
this presence // Braid                                rough russet /
garlands children                                         // Will be shown
how / a funeral bier                                    to willow-weave /
birds and rabbits // Oaken               branch and arbute spray / with bloody
 hands with fingers                              dripping // Flowers on the pear tree
shake and quake,                                    robust and ebullient
// Dishes sit beside                                their neighbor
dishes on the shelf                                // An electronic voice intones,
Passengers should proceed                    to the other side of night
// Amid clothes racks like                      infinite unfolding
concertina bellows, I seek                  a very very fancy dress, though
I cannot afford it, yet                                suddenly I know
it will be free // A green pencil lying                    on a blue notepad
// In youth I could                                      walk into an opportunity and
wear the charm of my                               desire mixed with
alchemical glitter                                           potential // But as you age,
 potential becomes                                       unseemly // I wish
to hear from you, I wish                                 for your name to appear
in my inbox // A non-sequitur                               is a song
of experience // Then                                               a young man
enters the garden,                            strides quickly by
and smiles, and a fear                                  grips me // Somehow
he knows // He sits                                       on a bench
nearby and the garden                                     fills with the incense
                             of cigarettes

 

 

suddenly the flowers

 

// A sound, in illness, of                               inner life splitting from outer, so
that noise becomes intolerable, and                               in their music class I
leave the children with D,                               flee to the car,
where a quiet cocoon muffles me                      in stuffiness // Leaf blowers
all around                               blaring // You can’t
fix or change other                                people // Out of sticks and ground-
fallen fast food wrappers               I structure a generative dissonance
//I’ll be the mommy and you be                   the baby // By chance, she got down
on all fours right here,                       and happened that a
waylaid                                      slant cast a glimmer there,
and that was how                                         she found what was lost
// The word bound means                             several different things, and
when I think of my daughter,                                            I think of all of them,
simultaneously                                                          and, also, discretely
// After all these years,                                         the stranger
// Rag rug / bag bug /                                         slug blub / drub hub
// At night, all the gadgets shine their                 lights of varying shapes,
sizes, and colors                                       // By which each gadget declares
the particularity of its voice                                // Swiftly the dream
 overturned itself                                         and all its figures
// Its figures continued                        dancing, but upside down,
on swiveling heads                                 // Hands clacking
// Skull clapping                            //The hardback book rattles
its gums, guffawing roughly and              smacking its pages together,
shaking the table and                                  upsetting the manuscript
 pages, which fly                                         around in a gust of dust
and leaves, smell of gasoline                 // I thought you said the classic
book // I thought                                         you said the rancid
fuck // I thought                                                 you said Jurassic
duck // Upside down at the stop sign,               someone has abandoned
an enormous soup pot and                         its rotting contents
// Spew stew,                                                 a mottled mash
from curb to gutter                             // Windy, the children say,
scrunching their eyes                               against the gusts, their hair
everywhere, and for a moment they            cannot walk, so strong is the
wind, so staggering its                               personality // The fridge
grumbles                                                     softly to itself,
as though trying                                                      to remember
something // Branches of the pear tree                      bow and flail, new
 green translucent leaves look                    like flowers themselves
// The cat grooms my arm                                      in the night,
her rough, dry, assiduous tongue                      appears in my dreams
as a mother // A motorcade                       blares through the intersection,
flashing, honking, halting,                                    streaming, jerking
// The sky today a bright green                murk // So the goblins came.
 They pushed their way in                                     and pulled baby out,
leaving another                                                    all made of ice
// Pattern the clothes make                        when they are shucked
off in a heap, pattern                                           in the hamper, pattern
in the washer, round and                        around, which the children
watch, rapt // A grey                                            shelf, its grey dust
// Mama, do you see                                  me? Boo! // A rolled up rug
holds its pattern to itself,                                       turns it around
like a thought // A mite                         marches through folds and whorls,
 a mighty mite // Bite                                                 an apple and
a star appears, bite                                            a star and a pile of bones
// Jump just a little                                                       in the frame
                      // In the flesh 

 

 

 

Notes 

suddenly the flowers

“One thumb one thumb drumming on a drum”: Al Perkins, Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb, illus. Eric Gurney (New York: Random House, 1969).

 

all the trees will fall down

“women (even those who are bearers of children)…”: bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984). The full sentence reads, “We who are concerned about feminism and militarism must insist that women (even those who are bearers of children) are not inherently non-violent or life-affirming.”

“The best is the bus. The bus is for us”: Michael Rosen, The Bus Is for Us!, illus. Gillian Tyler (Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2015).

 

suddenly the flowers

“fireflies flicker float, crickets sing, night song”: Ruth Forman, Glow, illus. Geneva Bowers (New York: Little Simon, 2021).

“Although I have not helped or understood…”: Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (New York: Picador, 2003).

“A non-sequitur is a song of experience”: Lyn Hejinian, The Unfollowing (Richmond, CA: Omnidawn, 2016).

 

suddenly the flowers

“The word bound means several different things…”: Camille T. Dungy, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017).

“So the goblins came. They pushed their way in…”: Maurice Sendak, Outside Over There (New York: Harper & Row, 1981).

 

 

 

 

Claire Marie Stancek is a writer, editor, and educator. The poems included here are taken from her forthcoming Double Life (Omnidawn, 2027), which is a book of 36 poems, each in 36 sections, written in her 36th year, an homage to Lyn Hejinian’s My Life. Claire Marie’s poetry collections include Operating Moon (Pinsapo, forthcoming 2026), wyrd] bird (Omnidawn, 2020), Oil Spell (Omnidawn, 2018), and MOUTHS (Noemi, 2017). With Jane Gregory and the late and much-missed Lyn Hejinian, Claire Marie co-founded Nion Editions, a chapbook press that she and Jane now co-edit. Claire Marie lives in Philadelphia. Learn more at clairemariestancek.com