Woogee Bae, Katelyn Oppegard, and Aya Bram have put together something special with the third issue of Snail Trail: An Ecopoetics Journal, as  a selection, arrangement, and object. Thank you for the journal and holding same space for my garbage-brained work–in print and online. Look at this cover: each is a different composition of paper scraps. Please support Snail Trail, how you can.

I mean, even the emoji set for my poem’s title—is perfect.

So, yeah, I’m real delighted to have these new poems about garbage, strikes, and rivers I’ve lived by in @SnailTrailPress III. The ones about waste and garbage strikes will be in my next book Fugue & Strike. I think waste flows and waste workers can really fuck w/capitalism, the ruling class.

Those rivers, specifically the Niagara, Buffalo River, and the Potomac. Remembering that house on the Potomac my friend rented with me—it was half boarded up. We couldn’t keep it heated over 55 deg. He was working as an addiction counselor and I was an adjunct making like <20,000 a year. Remembering the flocks of geese on an inlet burning w/morning sun, mucking along the banks in waders, clusters of muscles gasping on the shore, A describing to me how the landlord broke in and left a dump bobbing in the toilet (before the landlord took A to court for withholding rent in regard to all the things that made the house not safe or a house), the oyster ships a little down the river, their machinery hauling up nets. & what if these rivers the same standing as that landlord in the eyes of the law? Or, what if this were all liberated terrain? How do we unpack these words?

Anyway, the work of the other contributors – nanya jhingran, Jace Brittain, Katie Naughton, Pamela Santos, Amaranth Borsuk, and Terri Witek – is everything. Here’s a clutch of quotes:

“did you unplug / your hair straightener this morning? / cross the street, the sun / reddens against abandoned high rises, a hangnail, inflamed” – nanya jhingran, from “False Alarm”

“Each book is the sum of the misunderstandings      it occasions” – Jace Brittain from Permeable Fortress

“we harvest water where we can and share when we don’t need our full subvention” – Amaranth Borsuk & Terri Witek, from “Dear Denizen of Skyshot”

“the lily is / a moment the petal is a fraction / refractured inference the petal of/ the lily is a moment halved and / halved again consider” – Pamela K. Santos, from “Consider the Petal”

Katelyn Oppegard responded to the poems with poetry in her editor’s note:

“kit to keel / we cradle saplings that snap to sticks & / kindled together”

“a trawler through the threshold / dragging its own debris / please / come in”

“late at night / when all the heat is earthed the sun / the other side of the world” – Katie Naughton, from “Warming Ending What It May You Persist”