Episode 128: Put Your Pants Back On!

We just had to start this episode with a reassurance that everyone was dressed, which you’ll understand as soon as you read or listen to “Pneuma”, the poem by BJ Soloy that kicks everything off. The bonkers energy of a country and a world overflowing with bad news and tragedy is juxtaposed with some very real tenderness and self reflection in two astounding pieces by Soloy. These astutely paced poems are brimming with the overwhelm of modern life while threading in historical references (Brown vs. Board of Education, Troost Avenue, and scud missiles, for starters).

 

Some other links we think you’ll like:

Sapphic stanzas

Marion's IMDB credit

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Samantha Neugebauer, Dagne Forrest, Jason Schneiderman, Lisa Zerkle, Isabel Petry

BJ Soloy is the author of Birth Center in Corporate Woods (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press), Our Pornography and other disaster songs (Slope Editions, 2019), and Selected Letters, a chapbook out with New Michigan Press. He lives and dies in Des Moines, home of the whatever.

 

Pneuma

 

Put your pants back on, America.

It’s four in the morning & also

 

five, three, & two, simultaneously,

you big lug. Plus, there’s snow. 

 

In this light, really any light,

my nose looks like a tired potato

 

got punched in its mute mouth.

With any light on, I want to see other people

 

when I look in the mirror, when I slouch

in this bathroom booth where I hope to die

 

on the shitter, like an American,

like one of yours. Clinton, TN is any other frowsy town

 

with a cock & balls scribbled on its playground slide

& square pitbulls straining at their chains. 

 

America, I came to bed late as always.

You roll over, softly surprised & then delighted, 

 

offering, “I forgot where I was.” I’m yawning,

breathing just to get oxygen on this fire. 

 

 

Well, tonight is not the only place I am

tonight. Beyond me & between me

light bulbs hiccup & burble 

 

& a frenzied squirrel loses its map

of maples & restarts. Maybe we ought to 

take what we’ve still got & laminate it in frost 

 

& then salt & then the gold leaf over spring’s pat rapture.

 

There are things I’ve learned already this young

soft year I don’t know what to do with: one 

gets a pregnancy test when in the ER

 

for their attempt on their own life. What to name that baby? 

 

I worry I’m doing this wrong. I’ve got beans soaking, sharps 

& meds hidden, the last dank well swill of our bank account 

miraculously transformed into boxed wine. Winter’s here 

 

with its expressive eyebrows & doomed neighborhood cats 

under every car. You yawn so I kiss you & you taste better 

than free food, but you can’t sleep & I try to stay up reading 

 

but layers of exhaustion—wet blankets on this piss whisper 

of a fire—keep accumulating. I worry you’ll do it right next time 

& I’m still attached to this day of ours, whatever day it is.

Benesh

 

It’s been a long night & your mouth already tasted like rain an hour ago. Writing

often of the sky instead of tasting it, I look to the sconces & the sconces

look fake & their light looks fake & I hav