Phoenix
Need you like fire
needs air in order to destroy
everything in its obsession
like floating 36 inches off the floor
and having nowhere to lay
your head as it drops
another anchor
into the fire to slow
down the smoldering
yet the smoldering
just burns
hotter more jagged more air
into the head
into the lungs
into the back
into the pelvis
into the eyes
black and thick cough
into the star
swollen night
into the note you wrote me
that said
hey
and that was it
and that was the last
time I tried to fold my heart
into an origami organ
I mean crane
flying 36 inches off the ground
making a sound that seems
to be
hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey
lookout there’s a phoenix
flying towards you.
Tripwire
Found a pet jaguar
as a kid,
brewing in the bathroom
at school wondering
what actually made me a boy
and why my body
held such a steaming vehemence,
towards drinking and popping
pills and sports and haircuts
and sitting under willow trees
and people getting older, when
things can be so exotic and rare,
that when you find a diamond
you feel like you’ve really found
a diamond, not a box of cereal
for wizards,
or broken teeth,
for macaroni necklaces.
***
Logan Roberts is an artist and writer in Florida. He tweets @hello_im_logan
***
image by Dylan Willoughby: I am a permanently disabled LGBTQIA+ poet and composer, born in London, England and currently living in Long Beach, CA. Chester Creek Press has published 3 limited-edition letterpress poetry chapbooks, with illustrations by the hyper-realist painter Anthony Mastromatteo. My poems have appeared widely in literary magazines including Agenda (UK), Stand (UK), The Interpreter’s House (UK), Shenandoah, Salmagundi, Denver Quarterly, CutBank, Southern Humanities Review, and Green Mountains Review. Recent poems appeared this summer and fall in The Laurel Review, Fahmidan Journal, Goat’s Milk Magazine, Sledgehammer Lit, Sparrow’s Trombone, and Bloom Magazine, and are forthcoming in Amethyst Review and Ample Remains. I have received residency fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell, and earned an MFA from Cornell University, where I studied with A. R. Ammons and Robert Morgan. My music, as “Lost in Stars,” has been featured by The Los Angeles Times, NPR/PRI program “Echoes,” KCRW (LA NPR station), Entertainment Weekly, NYLON magazine, XLR8R, Insomniac, Earmilk, and many other venues.
Rejection Letters 