Painted Bride Quarterly’s Slush Pile

Painted Bride Quarterly
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Take a seat at Painted Bride Quarterly’s editorial table as we discuss submissions, editorial issues, writing, deadlines, and cuckoo clocks.

  1. MAY 12

    Episode 156: The Challenge/Pleasure Ratio

    Kathy puts the kibosh on our introductory weather ramblings, Slushies. Instead we’re sharing what makes us grateful. Seems like, with our combined love of coffee, we’re keeping the baristas in business. Aside from java, Tobi’s thankful for poetry podcasts (not just ours), including Poem Talk from Penn Sound. Lisa’s grateful for the public library that gives her free access to novels like The Copywriter by Daniel Poppick. Eric appreciates his students. And we reveal the secret behind why we’re not on YouTube. Of course we’re thankful to YOU for listening, Slushies, and to the writers who allow us to discuss their work, like today’s featured poet, Sarah Brockhaus.   In the first poem, “Still Here,” Eric notes the honest intertwining of the writing and teaching life. And Tobi remarks how the flexible nature of the English language, with its ability to shift nouns into verbs, is on display in the poem. The poem’s nimble leaps reminds Jason of Richard Siken’s valuable advice to “focus less on the lyric leap and more on the lyric landing.” The second poem challenges us with its frequent use of enjambment and caesura, but the ratio of challenge to pleasure is high. We end with Jason’s sage advice on how to structure a submission. Thanks, as always, for listening, Slushies!   At the table: Eric Baker, Tobi Kassim, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle, Lillie Volpe (Sound Engineer)   Author Bio: Sarah Brockhaus is an MFA student at Louisiana State University. She is a co-editor of The Shore Poetry. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize and her poems are published or forthcoming in Guernica, The National Poetry Review, American Literary Review, The Greensboro Review and elsewhere. Website: sarahbrockhaus.com Social Media:    Instagram: @sarahb._23   Blue Sky: scbrock.bsky.social   Still Here   I try to teach  my students to exist outside  themselves and they email about double    spacing and panic apologize for 12:01 submissions  and I want to see them and say we’re real  people, all of us, we’re real. Do you see? But I stare    at my wall for hours and it means nothing. I’ve been losing  things in dreams, each shape afterimages on my lids  and I can’t see the space around enough    to place them. Perhaps there never was a hairbrush, a magnet in the shape  of Louisiana, a letter written springs ago. Fingers trace    the handwriting by heart like revision,  same stories and script but the wrong  heart. I’m translating farther and farther   from the origin. My nails grow too long. I imagine  myself bodiless, avoid reflections. I hold still  and myself.    There are eight taxidermied ducklings at the craft fair. So like life and so  still. I want to break    them from the cage, find a way  for their bodies  to hold again.   Phonagnosia   A wasp taps again against  the window. I imagine the hollow  clunk communicating other causes: an acorn    slouching from a branch into a pool. A man’s  head, drunk, hitting the wall lullabically, my hand  slid into the space between skin and cinder   -block, how one might protect a baby’s soft  skull from a corner. I try to tell the wasp I am not  home and everything from my body sounds    human. To sleep I make lists on the uselessness  of language: the phrase how are you? and how your doing well is a wall I trace my own name    on like tally marks, how the sea swallows  song and estranges it, how without air I am voice -less, how I haven’t trained my ear to echo locate,    and can’t even vibrate some signal through a        pane  of glass, can’t replay what you said years ago in any voice    but the one inside me, that won’t go, won’t sound  like anyone I know.

    43 min

  2. APR 15

    Episode 154: Danse Macabre

    Jason takes the helm of our artisanal editorial process today when KVM is called away at the last minute. It’s always our hope that our discussion will be instructive for both the poet and our listeners. Come along as we consider two poems from Zachary Kluckman. In the first, “The Lineated World,” the haunting ballroom image reminds Sam of the medieval era’s danse macabre. This lyrical, reflective poem is full of memento mori once we start looking, from moths to meringue to the scent (stench?) of the corpse flower. Jason appreciates how the use of enjambment torques the line and adds pressure to each sentence. The haunting continues in the second poem with a memorably spooky scarecrow. We discuss how this poem’s structure, with its longer line and single stanza, impacts the poem’s pacing. And we ponder stillness versus inertia. Something in the poem’s ending recalls Naomi Shihab Nye’s The Art of Disappearing. Join us as we throw thumbs. Thanks, as always, for listening.    At the table:  Tobi Kassim, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Lisa Zerkle, Lillie Volpe (sound engineer)                Author Bio:  Zachary Kluckman is an award-winning poet based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. An alumnus of the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, he was selected by Oliver de la Paz as the winner of the 2024 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize. Kluckman has been recognized with a Thomas Lux Scholarship to the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, the Button Poetry Short Form Poetry Award, and multiple local and national slam poetry honors. His work appears or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Little Patuxent Review, Arts & Letters, and Wesleyan University Press’ Dear Yusef. He is the author of three poetry collections.                    Author Website: https://zacharykluckman.org/  Instagram: @physicalpoet  Facebook: Zachary Kluckman  The Lineated World   Rain keeps trying to tell me something.  Moths dissolve before I learn  their language of light. Every dawn  hundreds of bodies fall for another horizon. My sheets disappear into the walls when seen from the floor. Grandmother,   when you made your lemon meringues, did you count the times you beat the eggs? Did you ever worry each was a second vanishing  into the appetites of age? Were you jealous of the time you surrendered    every holiday? Our family tree is a vertical   line. A finger pointed up as if rebuking  our loud blood. For disturbing the peace between trees. For scaring the fish away from our kitchen table. My uncle  once took a man’s head off with a knife   in a bar fight. It was self defense, but  he chose to serve the full sentence because guilt is a worse enemy than time. What integrity I find in his decision. What integrity, in the stubborn silence of night blooming  jasmine. The corpse plant making us   wait a decade to suffer  its scent of rot and growth. The moths  return every night, an endless train of them.  Numberless as shadows, humble servants of a need they have no tongue to name. Imagine dying. Imagine death    as a ballroom full of footprints left trembling in autumn’s breath.  A Broken Tooth Is a Whistle and in the gap where the enamel is missing, a smile falls  through its own shadow. An owl is only wise because the night  has hardened it against the moon. What are you willing   to surrender for your next meal? When I spent the night  plucking the eyes from the scarecrows with a scissor, mother said it's not them you fear, but the potential. The last thing  she said before she took up her haunting. I wonder if  that’s what led me to the bottle. I still see her sometimes  in the dark bodies of hawks crossing the highway, when I  finally abandon the farm for the moon. When I move in  with you because you remind me of inertia, you say I love you.  It's not that I don’t believe you, but magic leads to disappearance.  How else would we know if it's working? Your voice is like  whiskey, or an ocean whose name I have forgotten. Each  sweeten the nerve where the tooth is missing. Both have tried  to kill me more than once. In the mirror, while you search  my face for cracks, I practice listening beneath the waves. If you listen hard enough, you lose weight from all the parts  that go missing. Everywhere we go, I am at the foot  of a lighthouse, but still I hear the corn waving from the past.  Sometimes, what scares me feels the most like home.  Some call this love. Three thousand poems away from you I still can’t explain the silence you catch me holding when no one  is looking. When you ask me if I’m listening,  my head is full of trees.

    32 min

  3. APR 1

    Episode 153: Rouged in Dandelion

    At the table: Eric Baker, Dagne Forrest, Tobi Kassim, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle, Lillie Volpe (sound engineer)   We made it back from AWP, Slushies! Welcome to any new listeners who have joined our audience since seeing us there. And please join us in welcoming our longtime reader, Eric Baker, to the table.    We’re honored to discuss three poems from Jane Zwart. Once again, we call on Jason’s knowledge of meter and syntax. Here we look at how the recursive syntax, like the memory of the woman in the poem, loops back on itself. The poem’s epigraph places the reader in the cultural moment of the Great Depression and World War II era. Inherited family treasures, like Noritake China, carry memory. The poem echoed, for Dagne, one of Michael Montlack’s poems from Episode 144.   The team is charmed by Zwart’s use of unexpected words like “redoubt” and “hypotenuse” in the second poem. Kathy notes that the poem is successful at conveying sentiment without slipping into the sentimental. She admires the use of the word “startlement” and we realize we’ll be seeing more of it given Ada Limón’s new book of the same name. Jason admires the ending’s gentle touch, which lands on a lilt. In a happy synchronicity, the final poem’s take on springtime’s fickle nature matches our exasperation with the changeable weather. While the poem’s postpositive placement of adjectives sends us back to elementary school grammar, we’re enthralled with how such a simple reversal refreshes our attention. Thanks, as always, for listening!   Author Bio: Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University and co-edits book review for Plume. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, and The Nation. Her first collection of poems came out with Orison Books in February 2026.   Author Website: janezwart.com Blue Sky: @janezwart.bsky.social   Inheritance for Janet Knol, 1922 - 2019 I took the china from occupied Japan just as my uncles took seconds of corn. It wasn’t about taste. Or want. When it came to last helpings, the starving children were conveniences, the tureen gratuitous, and if they were about wanting— Janet’s divestments—wanting was nothing so forthright as hunger: my uncles eating for two, themselves and their mother; my wishing that teacups edged in corsage were my cup of tea; or, reared to hoard and abhor waste, my grandma’s berating herself for an ingrate when each windfall knocked the wind from her, the handsome earner she wed, the sons they made. My grandma didn’t dare ask for more, and God knows she didn’t dare ask for less. There were reasons, of course. Some, in an expansive mood, she could name. Hunger, her father, and from that summer so hot no one slept, one extravagance— to drive, windows down, for the relief of a breeze. From her, my dad learned to waste nothing. But on what more to ask of life she left no instructions, so my dad cannot say what he wants for his birthday. Instead, he’ll tell you he has all he needs, as if need were the whole of deserving, as if all the years’ wisdom were getting on with what was. And from him, I learned. Waste nothing; get on with what is. Of the heirlooms, these come in handy. Still, if they were about wanting— Janet’s divestments—they were not about choosing, though, in the end, my grandma had enough of pretending that what she had was enough and asked her sons to brush her hair when it didn’t need brushing and left the corn on her tray. Hold my hand, she told me, then slipped in and out of knowing I held her hand until she slipped out and out and back into her father’s car, its windows were down, and I’ll tell you the breeze forgave everything: hunger and waste, want and wanting things to be otherwise, betrayal, demural, even the mezcal— even the time we sipped it from her Noritake when no other glasses were clean. I steal from children who do not hide their tests with a forearm, and I steal from those who do. I steal the soft redoubt an arm makes around a field of tents, their calculable heights, and I steal the stickman roughing it in a lean-to of unknown hypotenuse. Of my sons’ wonder, I’m the chief plagiarist. Of their neologisms, the unauthorized scribe. Without asking, I borrow a kid’s ardor for tire swings, his grief for lost dogs. I steal what I’ve mislaid: the art of startlement, the art of artlessness. Rabbit Redux Not spring, but its fickle scout: from the park, the smell of skunk and the skunk of weed; in gardens, exhumed saints and righted gnomes. Robin redux, rabbit redux—season of small resentments, the hassle of jackets, the discrepant grass. Of pent-up revving, of soft-serve soft openings. Season of ephemerals, the old bundled as if for the tundra. Season of warblers, the young rouged in dandelion, riding the oaks bareback.

    46 min

  4. MAR 19

    Episode 137: Collective Effervescence (ENCORE)

    Episode 137: Collective Effervescence (ENCORE) While we're on AWP hiatus, we’re bringing back an encore episode of the Slush Pile. Listen to Episode 137, Collective Effervescence, where we dive into poems by Han VanderHart. If you want to hear more of their work, Han will be reading at the Virginia Festival of the Book the weekend after this episode drops. Info about festival : https://vahumanities.cventevents.com/event/bookfest/summary?session=397b14b2-a8e5-46e5-97ab-05730c0f5466   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

    54 min

  5. MAR 4

    Episode 152: Say it Plain

    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.

    57 min

  6. FEB 18

    Episode 151: The View from the Outside

    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.

    33 min

  7. FEB 4

    Episode 150: PQB on PBQ!

    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.

    51 min

  8. JAN 21

    Episode 149: A Secret (Intellectual) Boner

    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.

    53 min
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