April is National Poetry Month, so SPACE is revisiting the 2021 Poetry Hotline project by making the recorded poems available for all to listen to. The hotline was a screen-less remote experience in the middle of the pandemic, available to anyone with a cell phone or landline. It offered listeners direct access to poets across the nation and their visions for the future. The Hotline’s goal was to highlight the importance of poetry to speak to us in times of change and upheaval.
The 2021 Poetry Hotline leaned on art as both balm and bravery for the road ahead. These poets offered words of respite, reflection, radicalization, or regeneration to any caller, anywhere, when they needed it. Now, SPACE is making this available to all once more.
Of nervous ardor — of arboreal delight — stemmed bounty, bouquet tumbledown —
Of arrows & their Eros, a sticky web, honeyed, stirring a forest, spiraling messages from branch to branch
The swollen cream-colored buds of the southern magnolia tree: one blossom blooms overnight like a skirt splitting in the heat
Of as an echo, as is each season, in which we are always praying for water, where the ocean exceeds herself & fire season is now & always
Of being among the trees as an apparition, to withhold the transformation
Of being abuzz among florals, choral in their scents — spiced jasmine deepening the cerulean twilight
Of flight — a male Anna’s hummingbird hovers in hyperflutter, presenting his magenta sequined throat
An exhale — a breaking down — a release —
Desire as an awakening, you dart as if winged — exhausted lusting for a luster, glittering for a gleam
Startled by the body, its capacity to know without language, its return as rehearsing
Of gentleness — that feather touch — a flame that flickers & traces the air with its vanishing
Of the breath between us — that we may meet & close the distance —
IT SEEMED THAT WE HAD TO DIVE IN TO HAVE A LITTLE EFFECT by Stacey Tran
We assemble diagnoses of the days that mediate our outline. Those insecure pledges were revelatory. As ordinary as rain is to the walnut tree. The more sensitive the light, it exposes even us. Every seam has its own emergence, but not every seam has something to show off. Beyond the gulf a yellowish gain. A gathering of deductions made by airing out legacied expectations. Minor chords motivate the progression toward a center. The attic was a glimpse of a devotional galaxy. Salmon slip out of a flood as we suspected, a standard account of refusal. The sentence grew long and packed a feast. An attempt to appease the ongoing corruption. A crowd of people eating bags of boiled peanuts. A movie set in a sugar factory. What can a dose of rainbow not repair? The act of decorating defends virtuosity. There is a poem glaring from beneath the rubble. We scrapped our ambition to protest the penny, the hostage, the reporter, the party, the spoiled, the tower, the deficit, the balance. Throw it all off. The orientation of home is no longer defined by a river. It became an illusion and then we were held temporarily by pottery. The public became a fog, a facade of reversals. As if the defeat of absence or crisis must be defined. A goat grazing among the forget-me-nots heeds its keep. A game played with cherry pits after school. We mimicked the mess of illegibility. A motion, a creature, something in air, opaque with rules. What stains a random decision has no advice. For sermons exist, war prisoners exist, the state and its lice exist. A disgrace of declarations up for auction, a record of glaciers, budgeted dreams, censored love. Now onto the work of a true excavation.
Poetry graphics by members of Pickwick Independent Press.