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Ruth Danon, the Poet Laureate of Beacon and acclaimed author, continues her celebrated LiveWriting series at the historic Howland Cultural Center. This installment, titled “Poet-Publishers from Hudson Valley and Beyond,” features four distinguished literary figures who balance the creative act of writing with the vital work of independent publishing.

Curated and hosted by Danon, the evening will feature readings by Michael Broder, Stephen Motika, Elizabeth Murphy, and John Yau. Doors open at 7:00 PM.

The Featured Readers:

Michael Broder is the author of the poetry collections Drug and Disease Free (2016) and This Life Now (2014). He is the founder and publisher of Indolent Books, an inclusive press dedicated to publishing work that is provocative, risky, and socially engaged. He edited and produced the beloved online poem-a-day projects HIV Here & Now and What Rough Beast, and currently produces the poem-a-day projects Second Coming and Never Trump Poetry (with poet Dale K. Nichols).

Stephen Motika is the Director & Publisher of Nightboat Books. He was on the staff of Poets House in New York City from 2004 through 2017. The author of the poetry collection Western Practice (2012) and the poetry chapbooks Arrival and At Mono (2007), In the Madrones (2011), and Private Archive (2016), Motika is also the editor of Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman (2009) and co-editor of Dear Kathleen: On the Occasion of Kathleen Fraser’s 80th Birthday (2017).

Elizabeth Murphy is a poet and editor and cofounder of the online interdisciplinary journal The Straddler. Her edition of literary correspondence of American poet Donald Justice and novelist Richard Stern, A Critical Friendship, was published in 2013 by University of Nebraska Press. A collection of her poems, in the form of an exchange with the late poet Taylor Stoehr, was published in 2018 by Pressed Wafer. Her poems and essays have appeared in Salamander, Hopkins Review, and The Straddler.

John Yau is an award winning poet, critic, curator, and publisher of Black Square Editions. He has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism. After serving as the arts editor of The Brooklyn Rail, from 2007 to 2011, he started the online journals Hyperallergic, a leading voice in contemporary perspectives on art and culture. Yau teaches art history and criticism at Mason Gross School of the Arts, the arts conservatory at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

The LiveWriting series is made possible, in part, with support from Poets & Writers and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Howland Cultural Center • 477 Main Street, Beacon, NY, 12508

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Praise for the poet and his book

Poetry’s no slouch and Don Yorty is a master.
—Dennis Cooper

There is so much to enjoy in Don Yorty’s volume of selected early poetry, Fucking and Other Poems, it’s hard to pick. You could make a video of this book, or a string quartet. Or you could lie back and enjoy it.
—Alicia Ostriker

For all the passion (a lot) in Fucking and Other Poems, there’s an equal measure of compassion. Don Yorty sees with his heart. He walks with Whitman. His poems touch us in myriad ways.
—Elaine Equi

As I’m sure you know, there are all kinds of fucking. What the fuck. Fucking A. Fucked up. Fucked over. You’re fucked. But that’s not the kind of fucking Don Yorty’s Fucking and Other Poems is. This fucking is intimacy and vulnerability and emotion and clarity. These poems give to you as you give in to them and then you can give them away. This book is a gift.
—Bob Holman

In Fucking and Other Poems, Don Yorty liberates the poetic music hiding behind sex, love and relationships—behind art, nature and words. On every page you witness the celebration of a mind dancing with its body. What a gift it is to have this underground classic available in its entirety!
—Jerome Sala

Fucking and Other Poems, Don Yorty’s new poetry collection, has an acute awareness of the music inherent in language. The title poem, an epic-length meditation on love, sex, and mortality, propulsively weaves William Burroughs, Janis Joplin, and other alt-culture figures into a narrative whose structure ably draws upon his sensibilities as a classics scholar. Bookending this contemporary epic are smaller-scale works, including a selection of “dailyness” travel notebook poems, that display his impressive range. For Yorty, there’s music in the grand sweep of human history and there’s music in the sound of owls’ wings in the night.
—Peter Bushyeager

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Indolent Books reissue of the iconic 2013 memoir

Growing Up Golem
by Donna Minkowitz

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Books ship in Q1 2026

Praise for Growing Up Golem…

Brilliant, exciting, startlingly fresh. Donna Minkowitz comes to the conclusion that she must have been her mother’s golem, a manikin formed from clay and garbage and sacred letters, built to fall apart when it fails to serve its maker… She takes a dazzling leap of fancy and then writes a new bridge into being behind her for the rest of us to follow.
— Ellis Avery, author of The Last Nude and The Teahouse Fire

Rich and wild, dark and funny, as fearless as her legendary journalism and as scary as a fairy tale. A serious writer at the top of her game. I love this book!
— Terry Bisson, winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards

Holds nothing back… the same brutal introspection and clever humor [as Ferocious Romance] , but this book is much more personal and sexually explicit … Minkowitz brings a defiant, playful energy to writing about her difficult and dark past. Intelligent but not for the prudish or fainthearted.
— Kirkus Reviews

Fierce imagination and compelling prose. Captivating. Growing Up Golem contains all the power of her earlier work with its sharp social and political analysis, but it is written without the cloak.
— Julie Enszer, Lilith

Golem, schmolem — Minkowitz has sculpted a wonderful life for herself out of sheer dedication and grit, and her writing is magic. Two goyische maidel thumbs up!!”
— Lily Burana, author of I Love a Man in Uniform

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Imagine His Mother Witnessing
by Carolyn Cooley Joyner

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Books ship in Q1 2026

Here’s what people are saying about Carolyn Cooley Joyner’s
Imagine His Mother Witnessing

In Imagine His Mother Witnessing, Carolyn Cooley Joyner picks up where Langston Hughes left off in “Mother to Son,” to expand maternal wisdom into an epic journey. These poems read like a sacred text, a group of psalms both for the healing of loss and for the raising of a generation to come. Joyner, a master poet whose poems have inspired many for years, offers the gift of a long-awaited full collection, and the wait was well worth it: It’s “Now [we] need to hear [her] hushed voice speak.” Part elegy, part sonnet, part love poem, part Blues…it doesn’t matter where you enter; there’s a lesson, even a balm, for us all.
—A. Van Jordan

With heartbreakingly clear language, Carolyn Cooley Joyner counters platitudes of comfort with an unflinching account of her son’s final illness and her subsequent grief. Although “everything [is] backlit with his absence,” the son becomes vividly present even as the poet delves deeply into her own sorrow. Using a variety of strategies and forms, including a crown of “broken” sonnets that address the son directly, Joyner creates an emotionally complex blend of praisesong and lament that will be a welcome companion to anyone experiencing grief, and a gift to others as well.
—Martha Collins

Written after the devastating loss of a child, Imagine His Mother Witnessing is a work of deepest urgency. Over mortal thresholds, the text emerges as an act of continued mothering as Carolyn Cooley Joyner attends to the death of her beloved son, Damon. In facing the incomprehensible, imagination is forced into new shape. “This passing grows me around/ a jagged blade...” Incisive and honest—shining with lyrical wisdom—this book is a grieving, polytemporal record utterly forged by love and unceasing devotion.
—Aracelis Girmay

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In production at Indolent Books:

Penelope in the Car
by Laurel Brett

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Books ship in Q1 2026

Here’s what people are saying about
Laurel Brett’s Penelope in the Car

Reading Laurel Brett’s magnificent debut collection, Penelope in the Car, I was awe-struck by her ability to reach into my heart, somehow calling up my own experiences through the specific, perfect imagery of her own. Here is the fullness of a woman’s life in poems that bring us the universal—the encumbrances of the body, the wonders of time and place, memories of desire and love felt through the grief of loss—through the intimacy and concreteness of the particular. And isn’t that exactly what great poetry gives us?
—Susan Bordo

Laurel Brett is a metaphysical poet for our dark times. Her debut poetry collection, Penelope in the Car, maps both a deeply personal journey through a painful childhood and the loss of a beloved husband, as it nimbly traverses our stark political landscape. Although she draws on her expansive knowledge of literature, art, and history it is her deft touch with what is spoken and what she chooses to assign to subtext that makes these poems memorable “It’s true — at the foot of this peak / the very fabric of the earth unravels. / We each know this. No need / to speak.” And yet, Laurel Brett does speak in this book and we are richer for the words she shares.
—Jennifer Franklin

Laurel Brett’s remarkable debut, Penelope in the Car, unfolds in conversation with history, art, mythology, and the poetic voices that precede her. Reminiscent of O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, Brett’s verse charts the pulse of daily life, as it moves through an array of intimacies and fleeting encounters and honors the immediacy of lived experience. These poems inhabit the delicate tension between order and discord, inviting readers to dwell in its unease and to share in the speaker’s fear of falling “from the flat edge of the world.” This is a collection that encourages readers to cherish solitude, worship the creative spirit, persevere through loss, and trust in “the stubbornness of love.”
—Melinda Wilson

Laurel Brett’s debut collection marries the sensual and intellectual with stunning clarity and vulnerability. With passion and wit, she investigates art and myth, Einstein’s ideas of time, the beauty of Long Island, and the grief of widowhood. With the intimacy of a lover, she enters Rothko’s Pink, purple, blue. She makes every flower new as if she were Eve happening upon a garden for the first time. In search of wisdom to give to her grown children, Brett takes us to West Meadow Beach, where “the sunset transcends any postcard — all philosophy”. Penelope in the Car is everything you want from a debut collection: ambitious in scope, unsparingly self-reflective, and fiercely brave.
—Barbara Schwartz

Elegiac and vibrant, Laurel Brett’s Penelope in the Car explores womanhood in a complicated world of ever shifting relationships with people, things, and ideas. Her beautifully crafted poems remind us of the tenderness and vulnerability of the journey. She summons the reader to bear witness to a deeply felt and remembered life, to “the stubbornness of widowhood, / the stubbornness of love, of road, of paint, / of rock, of mind, of pi, refusing resolution.” Brett speaks in a truthful and emotional voice as a woman grappling with injuries, disclosures and wonders. Her poems paint a world in azure, scarlet, vermillion and a “promise of aquamarine” as the reader is awakened to “the silence between silences.”
—Buffy Shutt

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In production at Indolent Books:

RE-ANIMATOR
by Jeffery Berg

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Books ship in Q1 2026

Here’s what people are saying about Jeffery Berg’s
RE-ANIMATOR

Jeffery Berg’s Re-Animator comes at you with all the shock and surprise of a phantasmagorical horror movie, with ‘edits so quick it makes the
murders feel/ swift,’ a perfect way to encapsulate the 1980s for those
of us who lived through aids and the absolute indifference of the Reagan
administration. Reagan is re-animated here, too, as a sad and lonely
clown, along with the music, movies and fashions of that decade, ‘bygone
Big Mac days in rooms/ of erased people.’ The sexiness of pop culture
littered with a few Arby’s bags for verisimilitude and some Pier One
candles for flair lends this collection a richness of palette, the way
Bob Dylan and the Pointer Sisters and Willie Nelson enriched the sound
of ‘We Are the World.’ If you were alive and gay and ready for the world
in the 80s, you will get it, and if you weren’t, well...this book will
teach you about some of what you missed. Jeffery Berg is simultaneously
witty, funny, dirty, moving, eloquent and rhapsodic, like the lyrics to
a really good Queen song.
—D.A. Powell

In this incisive, deliciously specific collection, Jeffery Berg inspirits the relics and ghosts of an American childhood and youth that is at once arrestingly familiar, fantastical, and fraught. Whether he’s evoking Jason from Friday the 13^th or invoking the lyrics of “We Are the World,” he traces the masks and acts that disguise and reveal, while unraveling and reweaving the veils of identity, gender, and place. “I rewrite, I myth-make / the discos, cracked records, / Astaire, and bodies that didn’t make it / this long,” Berg writes. “I rework them into air, / into glass, shimmering, pricked / into a slivery frock / above pits of this earth.” Re-Animator takes us back and leads us forward, as we revisit our past and so reclaim our present, with generosity and wisdom.
—David Groff

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Imagine His Mother Witnessing
by Carolyn Cooley Joyner

Pre-order yours now at 20% off retail price

Here’s what people are saying about Carolyn Cooley Joyner’s
Imagine His Mother Witnessing

In Imagine His Mother Witnessing, Carolyn Cooley Joyner picks up where Langston Hughes left off in “Mother to Son,” to expand maternal wisdom into an epic journey. These poems read like a sacred text, a group of psalms both for the healing of loss and for the raising of a generation to come. Joyner, a master poet whose poems have inspired many for years, offers the gift of a long-awaited full collection, and the wait was well worth it: It’s “Now [we] need to hear [her] hushed voice speak.” Part elegy, part sonnet, part love poem, part Blues…it doesn’t matter where you enter; there’s a lesson, even a balm, for us all.
—A. Van Jordan

With heartbreakingly clear language, Carolyn Cooley Joyner counters platitudes of comfort with an unflinching account of her son’s final illness and her subsequent grief. Although “everything [is] backlit with his absence,” the son becomes vividly present even as the poet delves deeply into her own sorrow. Using a variety of strategies and forms, including a crown of “broken” sonnets that address the son directly, Joyner creates an emotionally complex blend of praisesong and lament that will be a welcome companion to anyone experiencing grief, and a gift to others as well.
—Martha Collins

Written after the devastating loss of a child, Imagine His Mother Witnessing is a work of deepest urgency. Over mortal thresholds, the text emerges as an act of continued mothering as Carolyn Cooley Joyner attends to the death of her beloved son, Damon. In facing the incomprehensible, imagination is forced into new shape. “This passing grows me around/ a jagged blade...” Incisive and honest—shining with lyrical wisdom—this book is a grieving, polytemporal record utterly forged by love and unceasing devotion.
—Aracelis Girmay

Order Yours NOW!

The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from this section, see instructions at the bottom of this post.

Today’s is the final installment of Secret Life. Herein, I finish telling the behind-the-scenes story of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. Having followed this story of love and loss, one or two of you may even want to read the book. So note the following—

In the 31 installments of this series, we have gone through This Life Now poem by poem, read a snippet (sometimes more), and chatted a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.

Today we look at the last poem in the book, “You see, the thing is.” You will never read a more sweet and tender love poem. Here it is in full:

You see, the thing is,

I’ve been in love before,
but never like this,
the way I lie, arm around him,
dark outside, can’t sleep,
thinking of mother in a hospital bed,
lying awake while dawn comes,
yellow, gray, and slightly stale,
the hundred and eighty
degrees I turn, the away I face,
clock I check as he rolls over,
fast asleep, and catches me.

I shared in an earlier Secret Life how my mother had a stroke in 2004, three days before her eighty-third birthday. She recovered well from that, but in the spring she was diagnosed with biliary cancer. The plan was radiation and chemotherapy, but then she had a heart attack while in the hospital. The doctors said she was too frail to continue treatment, and that, given the aggressive cancer, her overall health status, and her age, the best course of action was hospice, which meant keeping her comfortable until she died, which she did on June 23, 2005.

The poem above was written while my mother was still in the hospital, before she was moved into hospice care. The poem requires no explanation.

And that’s how the book ends—a declaration of love for my ex-husband, the precocious poet, and also of gratitude for his having come into my life, his being there to catch me on this night in the spring of 2005 while my mother lay dying in the hospital.

Somewhere, at some point, I intend to write more about our relationship, our marriage, and our divorce. But not here. It is the book, This Life Now, that is the intended subject of this finally concluding series of essays.

So it’s a 2014 book based on a manuscript that was drafted in 2006. I submitted it to virtually every contest in poetry world two years in a row. Not even an honorable mention. Then I shelved it, because I was finishing my doctorate in classics. In particular, I was working on a kick-ass dissertation on a cutting-edge topic.

I was also very involved in student government and program governance. I was instrumental in getting my program to include students on standing committees, which was CUNY Grad Center policy, but was not honored in my program. With other students, I organized our program’s first-ever graduate students conference, which became an annual event, and I started a chartered organization—a type of interdisciplinary affinity group—that gave us access to student government funding for our annual conferences. Working on that doctorate from 2005 until my defense in 2010—including the scholarly part of it as well as the service part of it—made for five of the best years of my life.

I recounted in a recent Secret Life how things went for me in the years after I earned my PhD. Pretty well, at first, with the one-year postdoc at the University of South Carolina. But downhill after that, as I came off the academic market and settled into a life of—gag me with a caduceus—freelance medical writing. A freelance career which, mind you, I was eager to embark on in 2003, when it meant freedom from corporate cubicles, and time to work on my poetry, my MFA, and my PhD. But by 2013 I wanted to be past that stopgap, and the universe did not seem to be cooperating.

Then, in the spring of 2013, my ex and I went to the Rainbow Book Fair—a putatively annual LGBTQ+ event—at the Holiday Inn Midtown on West 57th Street. He introduced me to Julie Enszer, who was staffing the table for Sinister Wisdom, the trailblazing lesbian feminist journal started in 1976 that Julie has edited since 2010. Julie had a close personal and collaborative relationship with Lawrence Schimel, the founder of A Midsummer Nights Press. Apparently my name had come up in a discussion Julie had with Lawrence about gay poets he might like to publish in the coming year. Julie suggested I send him a manuscript. And I did.

Before I go further into this story, I want to make it very clear that Lawrence was, is, and always will be a great publisher and a great friend. (In fact, Lawrence later became an Indolent Books author as translator from the Spanish of the poetry collection Impure Acts by Ángelo Néstore.) The bottom line of the tale I am about to tell is that I sold myself short in various ways that ended up leaving me very sad and very disheartened about my poetry career. It’s nobody’s fault. Not even mine. I made decisions. I regretted some of them. I suffered. And now I feel better. That is an occasion for gratitude. I am grateful for that. So here’s the story….

The books in Lawrence’s Body Language series were poetry collections about queer existence and queer experience. Frankly, I did not realize that as I sent him my manuscript, which was about sixty percent gay existence and gay experience stuff. The rest of it was far ranging—for example, a straight couple’s poignant struggle to conceive a child safely when the man had HIV; some 9/11 sonnets; an officer delivering news of a death to the next of kin during the Iraq war; a poem about so-called “killer algae”; God’s sense of betrayal in the Garden of Eden; and so on.

It was perfectly reasonable for Lawrence to send me back a cut of the manuscript that aligned with his vision for the Body Language series. Perfectly reasonable—but I had not expected it. I was alarmed. More than that, I knew I had probably another thirty or so poems—gay existence and gay experience poems, if you will—that would have fit quite nicely into this newly conceived configuration of This Life Now. And I said as much to Lawrence in my reply email.

And here’s the crucial thing—In his response, Lawerence wrote, “I’d be happy to look at any additional poems you wish to send me,” or words to that effect. I can no longer find that email—I think it’s from too many computers ago. So all good, right? Right. Except I choked. I didn’t want to jinx it. I did not want to scare Lawrence off. I did not want him to think I was a problem child. I did not want to do anything that might jeopardize the publication of the book. Again, again, again, I want to reiterate—Nothing he ever said, did, or put in writing ever gave me any reason to have any of these concerns. Never ever ever. I did not need him to sabotage me—I was perfectly capable of sabotaging myself. And I did.

From then, design and production rolled along through the winter of 2014, and the book was published in March. I was thrilled. I organized a blowout book party for myself at the now defunct reBar in the super hip Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) neighborhood in Brooklyn. It was fabulously well attended. I sold lots of books.

But something happened. It is not totally clear to me what happened, but it happened. For one thing, as time went by after the book’s pub date, I started to feel worse and worse about the poems I did NOT include in the book. But that is far from all that was going on with me emotionally. In fact, after not keeping a regular daily journal for many years, I started one on January 1, 2014. I started keeping a journal on that date because I felt that something was going on with me, and I wanted a record of whatever that something was. In that first entry, I wrote, “My major themes right now are getting old and feeling like a failure.”

Then, on November 14, 2014, I wrote this:

I had such a nice day yesterday. Just a regular day—fed the outside cats, made breakfast for J—, went for my run, and worked all day (with a break for a nap in the afternoon). But that’s the whole point. Enjoying a regular day. I used to enjoy my regular days. Then I stopped. Stopped enjoying my regular days. It happened some time in the spring. Shortly after the book came out, apparently. It feels like it all started the day I read Timothy Liu’s review of my book on Coldfront.

Ah, Timothy Liu’s review of my book on Coldfront. Again, not unlike what I said about my publisher and friend Lawrence Schimel, Tim Liu is a dear poetry friend. Similarly the two poets who founded and edited Coldfront—Melinda Wilson and John Deming—are not only dear friends, but are now both Indolent Books authors (Headline News in 2018 by John, and What It Was Like to Be a Woman in 2024 by Melinda). So this is not about people with whom I have any beef or towards whom I harbor any grudges. It’s just shit that happened, that none of these folks—Tim, John, Melinda—even knew was happening.

That being said—Here’s Tim’s review in full. The exact date of the review is hard to pin down at this point, but it appears to have been within a few weeks of the book’s publication. The reason I am posting it in full is to make clear the fact that it’s not a bad review. It’s actually a pretty good review. See if you can figure out the part that got me down. I’ll disclose the answer after you read the review. (The number 15 indicates that my book was fifteenth in Tim’s series of 100 reviews in 100 days.)

15. This Life Now
Michael Broder,
A Midsummer’s Night Press, 2014

What I keep returning to in this too-short book (my one big quibble: the thirty-plus manuscript pages make more for a fat chapbook than a slim volume of poems retailing for $13.95!) are the Tony Poems, Tony as the Beloved Messenger of Viral Peril who haunts whatever comes after. A few decades in the making, Broder’s debut is beyond resentment. Having cleaned up his side of the street, we are left tenderly haunted by his “normal” suburban homo childhood as prelude to the AIDS pandemic followed by Broder’s long lyrical postlude that bears witness to survival without glorifying it, looking back wistfully instead on a time when reckless passion was at its height.

Disclosures: Back in the day, MB curated a fine reading series at the Ear Inn on the East Bank of the Hudson.

Favorites: Prologue; Tony Poem; Another Tony Poem (“But tonight, if I went down”); The Remembered One.

Can you guess what really galled me? It was Tim’s assessment that my “too-short book” was suited “more for a fat chapbook than a slim volume of poems,” and he had to throw in the “retailing for $13.95” just to twist the knife a little bit more. As you can imagine, seeing Tim’s comments about the whole fat chapbook thing only reinforced the regret and self-recrimination that I already felt about letting my beloved 60-page manuscript get whittled down to 35 pages.

So, yes, 2014 was a bad mental health year for me. In fact, I dubbed it The Great Depression of 2014. I think there were other factors that contributed, but a big part of The Great Depression of 2014 had to do with the negative emotions that were dragged up by everything surrounding the publication of This Life Now. There was a sort of false start, false alarm kind of feel to the whole thing.

But most of it seems to have been generated between my own two ears. For example, I think of my participation in the NYU creative writing program alumni reading in September 2014, six months after the book came out. I read with fellow poets Nicole Callihan and R. A. Villanueva. As with Tim Liu, both are dear poetry friends. I wanted nothing but the best for them. And yet, I could not help but notice that each of them sold a number of books after the reading, while I sold none. My fellow NYU alumni in the audience did not seem to be particularly jazzed about my too-short fat chapbook that was posing as a debut full-length collection.

Upon leaving the event, I told my ex how awful I felt about the whole thing. My qualms about the book itself. The fat-chapbook-ness of it all. He responded, “There’s no such thing as a bad book.” I get it. I get what he meant. Take the win and start working on the next book. Which was probably not bad advice. But it was not what I needed from him in that moment. What I needed was for him to see me, to see my pain and sadness, even if he thought they were unwarranted, and simply to comfort me. Not advise me. Just comfort me. Just love me.

And I think I’m going to more or less leave it there. Except to say the book was ultimately a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2015. I lost to Danez Smith, which was as it should have been—I mean that with all my heart and soul, and I meant it at the time, having read his work in journals and having witnessed Danez doing his thing at an offsite reading at AWP in Minneapolis in April of 2015. That was his year, and he deserved it.

So here we reach the end of The Secret Life of This Life Now. All 31 installments of it. One for every poem in the book. Things are much different for me now. I have done a lot of wonderful things in the past ten years. Whatever was going on with The Great Depression of 2014, it abated. Things got really good again for a while. Then they got really bad again. Then I got divorced. And now it’s now. I could even say, “now it’s this life now.” But I’m not going to say that. That would be cheesy.

À la prochaine. Whenever that may be.

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The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from this section, see instructions at the bottom of this post.

Today is the last Thursday of Secret Life. Next Monday, I finish telling the behind-the-scenes story of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. Having followed this story of love and loss, some of you may even want to read the book. So note the following—

This is post #30 in the series. We go through This Life Now poem by poem, read a snippet (sometimes more), and chat a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.

We are up to the penultimate poem in book, “Buffy Rerun Poem.” My ex and I were great fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the TV show based on the star-studded 1992 movie. Below is the first half of the poem.

It’s one a.m. and I’m lying in bed,
watching a rerun of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
talking to you on the phone.

I tell you Buffy is ice-skating,
and you tell me it’s the episode from season two
where the assassins come to attack Buffy on the

skating rink,
and Angel leaps onto the rink to save her,
and afterwards they kiss

and Angel pulls away in a moment of self-loathing
and says,
I still have my vampire face on,

and Buffy touches his bumpy vampire forehead and says
I didn’t even notice.
You are right, of course, about every detail—

they unfold on the muted screen at the foot of the bed
as I watch and you narrate from 200 miles away;

As I did so many other things we shared during our marriage, I was the one who discovered Buffy. Often in the fall of 2000, while the precocious poet was at workshop in the second year of his MFA program at NYU, I would do laundry in the basement of our pre-war apartment building on the northwest corner of 57th Street and 8th Avenue, just off Columbus Circle. One night, while folding laundry in our bedroom and flipping channels on the old-school TV set atop the dresser facing our bed, I came across an episode of Buffy, a show I had never watched. It had started in 1997, so it was already in its fifth season. I was immediately captivated, and told my ex all about it when he got home after post-workshop pizza and beer (I can’t remember the name of the bar on University Place where the poets used to go after workshop).

The following week, we watched Buffy together, and from then on, we were hooked. Season five—no spoilers—proved to be highly consequential for the series as a whole. We needed to catch up! And again, pre-streaming—so we bought all five seasons to date on DVD, and watched them in rapid succession (“binge-watching” avant la lettre).

That fall, my ex went off to Provincetown, where he had been awarded a prestigious fellowship to a seven-month residency along with 19 other emerging writers and artists. It was on his list of dream bio blurb credits—along with Yaddo and Bread Loaf—and he ultimately attained all three (including the coveted “work-study” positions as waiter, assistant head waiter, and head waiter at Bread Loaf, before that aspect of that program was shut down in 2019 over concerns about sexual harassment and racism).

So there you have the real-life background for the poem’s reference to the speaker talking to the beloved on the phone past midnight one evening, recounting a detail from an episode of Buffy, which the speaker is re-watching on DVD, perhaps to assuage his loneliness in the absence of the beloved.

The contrast between my persistently poor memory and my ex’s “powers of recollection” are a theme in a number of my poems. Here is one, in full, that first appeared in the journal Softblow and later in my book Drug and Disease Free under the title “The Rock.” It refers to the speaker’s same sense of P-town abandonment as “Buffy Rerun Poem.”

Was it mine before it was ours,
this rock we call our own,
where we perch with coffee and bagels weekend mornings?
I can't remember that far back, or what I did
before I had you and your powers of recollection.
I must have invented the past, yesterdays that had to be,
to suit the mood I was in or provide a clue
to whatever happened next.
Today I sit here alone and ask myself if you exist
or if I only imagined you, without you here to tell me
whether or not we ever met.

Okay, why stop now? Here is what I think is the final poem in this sequence of abandonment poems, this one having less to do with memory and more to do with sheer pain and sorrow. It, too, appears in Drug and Disease Free.

I can’t blame you

for cheese left out on the counter
overnight, hat left on the subway seat
as I dashed from local to express.

Can’t blame you, away in your manger,
nestled in some swaddling, doing your thing.

How unfair of you to leave me like this,
accountable to no one but myself,
left to my own devices—

We know where THAT leads.

When I visit you there, it is analgesia only,
not healing.

You must come back to me,
to the nest I feathered for you,

the blanket-lined cardboard box
where I dropped you by the scruff of your neck.

You must doff your charade of being anything at all without me.

You must come home, and be my due.

I was proud of the precocious poet for having been awarded the Fine Arts Work Center fellowship; but at the same time, I was baffled and sad and felt abandoned. He had a perfectly good apartment around the corner from Central Park with an entire bedroom as his own private workspace! I thought of residencies like FAWC as essential options for writers and artists just getting out of school and facing uncertainty about where they would go and how they would pay the rent. That wasn’t the situation the precocious poet was in. The precocious poet primarily wanted a fellowship/residency credit in his bio when it appeared on his forthcoming first book of poems.

Do I sound bitter? Well, I mean—It took 20 years, but we did, after all, eventually get divorced.

Don’t worry too much—You’ve only got one more of these essays headed your way. After that, you can shower off the toxicity for good. And I assure you, the book ends on the most sweet and tender of love poems. À la prochaine.

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Another Monday, another semi-weekly edition of Secret Life. I started this series to sell off the remaining 90 or so copies of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. Now I simply want to finish what I started 28 essays ago—telling a story of love and loss that some of you may find intriguing. That being said…

This is post #29 in the series. We go through This Life Now poem by poem, read a snippet, and chat a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.

We are up to the eighth poem in the final section of the book, “This Life Now.” The eighth poem in this section is “Confession.” In keeping with recent Secret Life practice, here is the poem in full.

Confession

Sometimes, when people are hungry,
I still want to eat; when they are naked I want to dress.

Sometimes, even though people are homeless,
I prefer to sleep in my own bed,

and when there’s a war, I certainly don’t want to fight.
Sometimes, knowing there is suffering,

even the worst kind of oppression all over the world,
I don’t want to bear witness

or speak out or be counted or make amends. Sometimes
when you are gentle I want it rough and when you’re here

I wish you were gone; sometimes I want him back
and it has nothing to do with the hungry,

the naked, the homeless; sometimes it has nothing to do—
nothing whatsoever to do with you.

Another poem about the now ex-husband. But also about Tony, who is the “him” of the penultimate couplet. I wrote this in Marie Howe’s workshop in September 2003, my first semester in the MFA program at NYU. A couple of months before The New York Times published my letter in defense of same-sex marriage, the letter where I said, “I want my partner to get my Social Security check when I die,” which was true. But clearly, even three years into the relationship, there were flaws in the weave.

I was somewhat surprised that my ex never asked me about the sentiments behind this poem. Then, in the summer of 2018, I was a last-minute stand in for another poet at the legendary Monday night poetry series at KGB Bar on E. 4th Street, the series started by Star Black and David Lehman in 1997, and in 2018 co-curated by my ex-husband. Walking towards the F Train after the reading, he said to me, “That reading sounded very angry,” or words to that effect. I answered with a vague, “Oh, did it?” or something like that, but the fact is, I had very consciously poured anger into that performance that evening, and I remember doing it most vividly when reading “Confession.” By that time, there were a lot of flaws in the weave.

Speaking of weaving, in these last few installments of Secret Life, we’re sort of weaving together two sections of one timeline. The timeline described in the poems, which is childhood to 2005 or so; and the timeline of that life which is described in the book itself as “this life now,” from about 2000 to the time the book was finally published—or some version of it, at least—in 2014.

I ran through some elements of this condensed bio in an earlier Secret Life, but in a vein both more whimsical and more wistful. Here I just want to bang out the facts—and more about me than about us. The precocious poet and I meet, date, commit, and get married between 2000 and 2004. I get my MFA in poetry at NYU in 2005. When I resume my long-deferred PhD in classics at the CUNY Grad Center in the fall of 2005, I begin adjuncting at Brooklyn College, which I continue doing continually, including summers, through 2011. I defend my dissertation—Mensura Incognita: Queer Kinship and Camp Aesthetics in Juvenal’s Ninth Satire—in August 2010.

We almost split up that summer, but we win by a nose and, in fact, I recall 2010 to 2013 as a truly lovely stretch in our marriage. I interview for classics jobs at national academic conferences (the American Philological Association, later rechristened the Society for Classical Studies, primarily because nobody knew what “philological” meant by then, which made marketing the organization to younger students and scholars difficult), but fail to get any second interviews. I think it’s a combination of the Great Recession, ageism, and a syndrome I call What-The-Fuck-Is-He-Talking-About (with reference to my dissertation that was too cutting edge for most search committees’ comfort).

In October of 2010, my ex, whose six years of grad school funding had ended that spring, received a fateful phone call on which he was veritably begged to start working immediately as interim writing center director at a local community college. A new hire had not worked out, the writing center was in the lurch, and they knew my ex from his years as a fellow in the school’s writing across the curriculum program (part of his grad school funding). He had had other plans (we’ll save the details of that for the memoir), but those plans did not come with a salary, so he opted for the writing center job—which contributed mightily to the blissful sense of forward motion in our relationship at this time, after a perilous brink.

At the same time, I land a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC, for the 2011–2012 academic year. The facts that (1) I lived in student housing and (2) did not drive in a city that was about as pedestrian unfriendly as you could get and (3) did not seem to know how to cultivate or nurture meaningful relationships with colleagues—All of those things made for a difficult nine months. But I loved the job. I loved teaching. I taught Latin 101; an upper level undergraduate class in Plato’s Symposium; Introduction to Classical Mythology; and a graduate seminar in research skills that was required for all students entering the MFA or PhD program in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures (which was chaired by a Paul Allen Miller, one of the pivotal mid-career classics scholars of that era, and the guy who gave me the job).

When the spring semester ended in May 2012, my ex drove down to take me home, and the road trip from Columbia to New York—which included my first-ever breakfast at a Waffle House—may have been the best, most loving, most memorable 48-72 hours of our entire relationship. We loved each other so much that weekend.

That summer of 2012, I teach in the Summer Latin Institute, a ten-week beyond-the-intensive team-taught program offered jointly by Brooklyn College and The CUNY Graduate Center, the program in which I first studied Latin in 1982, and to which it was always my dream to return as faculty. There was a toxic fellow faculty member with whom I could not restrain myself from tussling, and so, on balance, it turned out to be a pretty awful experience—but it was an awful experience that fulfilled a cherished dream, so I was grateful for it, and remain so to this day.

During Hurricane Sandy, we hole up in our apartment—Bed-Stuy is high ground, and is not affected by flooding or power outages—and I proofread and copyedit my ex’s dissertation on molested boys in the postwar gay novel. It’s another very close, very loving, very sweet time that encourages my belief that maybe we will get through this—whatever “this” is, exactly—after all.

In the fall of 2012, I resume teaching at Brooklyn College, now as an adjunct assistant professor. I’m also teaching the noncredit basic Latin class at the CUNY Grad Center, designed for graduate students in the humanities who need to pass a Latin proficiency exam as part of their degree requirements. Meanwhile, my ex gets a full-time, tenure-track position as an assistant professor of English at the same community college where he has been directing the writing center while finishing his dissertation. We did it! Yes, I say WE—WE DID IT. From the moment I met my ex, I had a sense that my job was to love him, nurture him, and support him while he went from MFA to PhD to full-time academic job. And now he had it. I some respects, I felt that my job was done.

That’s a nice note on which to end this, the longest Secret Life I have written so far, by far. In Thursday’s installment, you will learn about how This Life Now hooked up with its publisher in 2013 and made its debut in 2014.

À la prochaine.

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Another Thursday, another semi-weekly edition of Secret Life. I started this series with the goal of selling off the remaining 90 or so copies of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. But now I’m here to finish what I started 27 essays ago—telling a story of love and loss that may resonate for some of you reading this. That being said…

This is post #28 in the series. We go through This Life Now poem by poem, read a snippet, and chat a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.

We are up to the seventh poem in the final section of the book, “This Life Now.” The seventh poem in this section is “Civil Union.” In keeping with recent Secret Life practice, here is the poem in full.

When I die, you say, you can take
hot young Russian boys home
and have sex with them in our bed;
but you must tell them about me.

Here I should capture you
in a deft array of telling details
that bring you to life in the reader’s
imagination; but I will not—

while yet you hold me in your arms at night,
let me betray nothing more intimate
than the roommate who blamed you for his cat’s diseases,
or the police raid on the Moscow discotheque.

That, you may have guessed, is a poem about the ex-husband, the precocious poet. I am not going to go into the details of his time in St. Petersburg, the police raid on the Moscow discotheque, or the roommate who blamed him for his cat’s diseases. Those are his stories to tell.

How convenient for “Civil Union” to be the poem for this edition of Secret Life. Just the other day, I was giving you the sort of back-of-the-envelope version of our meeting, courtship, and marriage, with a brief coda about our divorce. I was so in the tank for same-sex marriage. Here’s a letter of mine that was published in The New York Times in 2003, about three years into my life with my ex-husband.

To the Editor:

I appreciate David Brooks's support for gay marriage (column, Nov. 22), but I am dismayed that he minimizes the significance of the constitutional issues at stake, complaining that liberals frame gay marriage as a civil rights issue rather than as a moral imperative.

What the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision put in play is same-sex civil marriage, which is indeed a civil rights issue.

As a gay Jewish man, I can already marry my male partner in a synagogue and obtain a traditional Jewish marriage contract. What we lack is the ability to obtain a state-issued marriage license that would give us rights of inheritance, visitation, custody and entitlement.

Yes, I want my partner to get my Social Security check when I die, and that is no trifle, but rather the equal protection of the Constitution of the United States.

MICHAEL BRODER

New York, Nov. 22, 2003

Ironically, perhaps—or perhaps it is only poetic justice—our being civilly married made splitting up infinitely harder than it would have been had the state not recognized our intimate partnership. And infinitely more costly just in dollars and cents terms, which even we poets have to think about now and then, especially when our access to essential needs like housing and health care are at stake.

Be all of that as it may, here we are. Wow, did ever a sentence mean less that that one? But that’s kind of how it is. One big shoulder shrug. I thought…but nah. I’ve become fond of saying I was a volunteer, not a victim. My therapist looked at me a bit quizzically when I said that at a recent session. “I want to preserve a sense of agency,” I explained. Which led me to compose and text myself the following poem as I waited for the bus after my session:

I said volunteer not victim.
She said it can be hard to see what’s going on underneath.
I understand your desire
to preserve a sense of agency, she said;
but that complicates your ability
to see what was really happening.
I felt my expression transform, my face.
That’s what makes it a story, I said.
She seemed unsure where I was going with this.
The story, the novel, the movie—
That’s what would make it compelling.
That the victim’s desire
to preserve a sense of agency
prevents him from seeing his partner
as a predator and himself as prey.
Pardon me, I said. I’m always looking for what makes the story a story.

I mean, in the end, I think that’s what this whole Secret Life odyssey has been about. What makes the story a story. Can’t that be said to be the driving force of all poetry in and beyond the Anglo-European world since Whitman and Dickinson? The modernists, the confessionals, the New York School, the Beats?

Yes, I missed my calling as a literary theorist and critic. Or have I missed it after all? Last I checked, I’m not dead yet. Another new poem, very little this time:

Everybody dies — Stephen Sondheim
I’m still here — Stephen Sondheim

Twenty-eight down, three to go. We’re almost done with this Secret Life thing.

À la prochaine.

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Another Monday, another semi-weekly edition of Secret Life. While those remaining 90 or so copies of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems, sit in that box, I’m finishing what I started 26 essays ago—telling a story of love and loss that may resonate for some of you reading this. That being said…

This is post #27 in the series. We go through This Life Now poem by poem, read a snippet, and chat a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.

We are up to the sixth poem in the final section of the book, “This Life Now.” The sixth poem in this section is “Later Than I Would Like It to Be.” Okay, Secret Life is feeling generous in its old age—Here is the poem in full.

Shadows lengthen on the cold pavement,
October stains the leaves on dry, rustling trees,
you become loam in the ground—
dissolve, disintegrate,
like words that made no difference on first hearing—

Words like:
Nobody has the flu for nine weeks;
see another doctor;
drinking will kill you before the virus has a chance.

Words like:
You do not have to die;
I love you;
I love you anyway.

Words like:
It’s okay, it’s okay.

Guess who? If you thought you would’t see Tony again, well, as Tony would say, “later for you, hon.” This poem is sort of a companion to “The Remembered One,” in which Marcos came back to me in a dream to invite me to join him in the nether realms. I don’t think “Later Than I Would Like It to Be” needs any explanation. I missed Tony and I wanted him back. I still do.

But that’s the Inferno. We left off last time when I was just about to enter the Purgatorio. Just after the precocious poet pressed his card into my palm with his number written on the back, flashed his impish grin, turned on a heel, strode briskly away, and left me there on the dance floor of the LIT 2 launch party at The New School, wanting more.

This is not the place for an exhaustive account of our courtship and its aftermath. My mother—who delivered eleven boys (no girls) in the course of seven pregnancies, of whom four were live births—called me her Last of the Mohicans. The precocious poet was the last of my boyfriend Mohicans.

From roughly ages 20 to 40 there had been Randy, Chet, Erving, Tony, Michael I, Michael II, the unnamed social worker, the opera director, the merchandiser, and the boyfriend in San Juan. Opera director was very short-lived (the relationship, not the man, thank you God—the man is alive and well and directing opera to this day), but for some reason he gets on the list. Not on the list is the dog-walking photographer from Mexico—It was too brief, and having lost him makes me too sad. And mind you, that is a list of people I dated, watched South Park with, whose family members I met. Recounting my purely sexual adventures with guys I never actually dated would require many more installments of Secret Life. There were also a number of men who fall between those two categories—men from whom I wanted even a little bit more, but did not get it.

But from roughly ages 40 to 60, there was the precocious poet, and only the precocious poet.

We met in March, boyfriended in April, and shacked up in May. I put a ring on it in 2003. That year, we organized a World AIDS Day reading at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City with an incredible lineup of poets. We got married—civilly, legally married in the state of Massachusetts—in 2004. We bought a house in 2005. Life ensued. There were MFAs and PhDs all around. There were jobs, academic and non. There were books published. Essays in academic journals and edited volumes. We travelled the continent. We saw the Patti LuPone production of Gypsy both at City Center Encores! AND on Broadway. We had it all.

And then…not so much. He moved out of our house in 2021. We signed our divorce agreement in 2023. Our divorce was finalized in 2024. And now it’s now.

And that’s really all I’m going to say about that. Maybe more later, maybe not. Secret Life is never planned in advance. I often pick up where I left off, but, seeing as how I have already cut to the chase of divorce, I’m not sure where I would pick up from.

There will probably be poems, memoirs, autofiction. Or not. I feel like this is a good time to quote the wonderful Spanish expression, el mundo es un pañuelo, life is a handkerchief, which I learned from one of my graduating seniors at the Rudolf Steiner school on New York’s Upper East Side in 1988. But it’s probably completely irrelevant. I like saying it, anyway. And I like saying À la prochaine.

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At the end of this planet is a single bench
above a canyon, near a border
ringed with teeth and bone,
close to a depth of water
making no sound.

I step away for some moments
while the grey skies turn
and the red smoke burns,
while the world rumbles and groans,
while it swallows and spews.

I watch and stay quiet
as it begins to come near
and I turn to its instants and outcomes.

I return each day to the edge of the world,
sink down to the sidewalk and listen.

Susan Goodman’s poems have appeared in What Rough Beast, Nixes Mate Review, The Columbia Review, Barrow Street, Corvus Review, and elsewhere. As a Barnard College undergraduate, she received the George Edward Woodberry Poetry Prize. Now retired, Goodman worked as a magazine and nonprofit copywriter. She lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series as a creative response to the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House. The plan is to continue for all 1460 days of the 47th American presidency.

Find out how to submit poems or flash prose pieces to Second Coming.

If you like Second Coming and you want to support it, consider making a donation to Indolent Arts, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor of Indolent Books.

Use this link to visit our donation page where you can donate as little as $1.00 or choose titles from the Indolent Books catalogue as thank-you gifts for donations starting at $25.00—The more you give, the more thank-you gift books you get, up to six books for a donation of $100 or more.

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Another Thursday, another semi-weekly edition of Secret Life. Let those remaining 90 or so copies of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems, sit in that box. I’m here to finish what I started, to tell a story that may resonate for some of you reading this. That being said…

This is post #26 in the series. We go through This Life Now poem by poem, read a snippet, and chat a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.

We are up to the fifth poem in the final section of the book, “This Life Now.” The fifth poem in this section is “The Old Meaning/Moaning Dichotomy.” Here are the first two and a half stanzas of this poem in eight quatrains.

On bad days I seek a theoretical basis
for my actions, a point of origin, a strategy,
a thread to pull me through,
family tree, concentric circles,

dates of birth and death, lists. Because
meaning is not so much in things
as in the story the thing implies,
like melody implies harmony,

a setting that makes the pattern perceptible,
lets the tune make sense.

“Meaning/Moaning” (as I affectionately call it for short) was written prior to 1995, and was published in spring 2006 in the now-defunct roger, a journal edited by undergraduates at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island.

The genesis for the title, if not the poem overall, was an article in The New York Times magazine of February 9, 1986, about the so-called Yale Critics—Harold Bloom, Paul De Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller. Titled “The Tyranny of the Yale Critics,” the article included the opening sentence of Harold Bloom’s essay “The Breaking of Form,” which was included in Deconstruction and Criticism (1979), an influential volume that included essays by Bloom, De Man, Hartman, Miller, and Jacques Derrida. It reads

The word meaning goes back to a root that signifies “opinion” or “intention,” and is closely related to the word moaning.

I loved that idea—of the ineffable and inescapable connection between body and mind, feeling and thought, emotion and intellect. Now, mind you, I read that article in that issue of the Times magazine in 1986—I may still have it somewhere in my file cabinet. What’s more, I was a total theory head in college (1979–83), and I know I read Deconstruction and Criticism from cover to cover at some point, although that might not have been until the mid 90s. So this idea was in my noggin for a long time.

So it feels inevitable that at some point I would write a poem about those mind/body, thought/feeling, emotion/intellect dichotomies, and allude to the Bloom quote in the title.

But enough about that for now. Last time, I left you hanging just as I was about to hit on the man who would become my husband, whom I spied from across a crowded room at a journal launch party at The New School in March of 2000. Just as the boyfriend in San Juan was planning to leave his tropical island for my Manhattan island. And just as I was letting the dog-walking photographer from Mexico—with a heart as big as Mexico City—slip through my fingers.

As you may remember, I walked up to poets Mark Bibbins and Ravi Shankar and said—suggestively, I will admit; seductively, some would argue—“Hi, guys. Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”

The precocious poet, J, would later describe that moment by saying he had not worn his contacts that night, nor was he wearing his glasses at the moment, and so when he looked up at me (I’m an inch taller), my face alone was clearly visible against the background of the out-of-focus room. I remember it as everything else fading away in the glow of his expectant smile. “Hi,” he said, not totally without his own hint of seduction.

In the days, weeks, months, and years that followed, neither of us could restrain ourselves from referring to that moment as love at first sight. We knew from that first glance—at once improbable and inevitable—that we were destined for each other.

We were glued to each other for the next couple of hours, talking—well, he mostly talked and I mostly listened, raptly—sitting through the reading (during which he seemed to have some insult-comic-of-poetry barb to hurl at every reader, quietly leaning over to vituperate in my ear), and dancing afterwards to the DJ’s tunes. Given that it was 2000 at an MFA program in NYC—with a lot of gay people—the music was probably some mix of Third Eye Blind, REM, Madonna, B-52s, Pet Shop Boys, Clash, Britney, Whitney, and Cher. In any event, suddenly he was gone. When he came back a moment later, he was wearing his pea coat and thrusting a business card at me, the back of the card face up so I could see that he had written his number on it, and then he was across the room and out the door.

When I got home—the incredible rent stabilized apartment that the social worker boyfriend had snagged for us in the prewar building off Columbus Circle—I wrote, by hand, in my composition notebook journal, “I met this cute poet tonight at the LIT party at The New School. He’s in the MFA program at NYU. He was kind of sassy, but I liked it.”

And…that’s a good place to leave it for today. As many of you know, there’s more. Quite a bit more. À la prochaine.

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Holding onto the thread of freedom,
a bright red streak of embroidery thread
that my grandmother used to create
an imaginary bird,
slow stitches in and out.

Now I see that bird
soaring through city streets
as I look up at the still clear sky
while concrete crumbles beneath it
and tears fill the cracks in sidewalks.

Our bookshelf is empty, the books stacked
against the window,
the words fortresses, concealing
the view of the bird,
red as my grandmother’s heart, flitting its wings.

Olena Jennings is the author of the poetry collections The Age of Secrets (Lost Horse Press, 2022) and Songs from an Apartment (Underground Books, 2017), as well as the chapbook Memory Project (Underground, 2018), and the novel Temporary Shelter (Cervena Barva Press, 2021). Her poems have appeared in KGB Bar Lit, MicroLit, The Common, Tupelo Quarterly, Live Mag, and other journals. She is the translator of collections by Ukrainian poets Kateryna Kalytko (co-translated with Oksana Lutsyshyna), Iryna Shuvalova, Vasyl Makhno, and Yuliya Musakovska. Her translation of Anna Malihon's Girl with a Bullet is forthcoming from World Poetry Books. She lives in Queens, New York where she founded and co-curates the Poets of Queens reading series and press.

Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series as a creative response to the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House. The plan is to continue for all 1460 days of the 47th American presidency.

Find out how to submit poems or flash prose pieces to Second Coming.

If you like Second Coming and you want to support it, consider making a donation to Indolent Arts, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor of Indolent Books.

Use this link to visit our donation page where you can donate as little as $1.00 or choose titles from the Indolent Books catalogue as thank-you gifts for donations starting at $25.00—The more you give, the more thank-you gift books you get, up to six books for a donation of $100 or more.

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—after Meryl Natchez

It’s Wednesday. The President says, “We don’t want ‘em”
as he expands the travel ban
and our neighbors crank up their stereo loud
enough for us to hear The Beatles
preaching love.

I suppose I could start with forbearance
towards my dentist’s hygienist
who voted Red.
But would that make a difference, really?
Would anything make a difference?

“Still, I’m uneasy doing nothing,”
I say to my husband
as we stand on the porch at twilight
watching the dragonflies
zigzag over the peonies and pines
stitching up the dusk
and taking out the mosquitos with their bloodthirsty goals.
While we go on doing the best we can.

Laura Ann Reed is the author of the debut poetry collection Homage to Kafka (The Poetry Box, 2025). Her poems have appeared in One Art, The Galway Review, SWIMM, Willawaw Journal, Sheila-Na-Gig, and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies including Poetry of Presence II: More Mindfulness Poems (Grayson Books, 2023), edited by by Phyllis Cole-Dai and Ruby Wilson. Reed is a contributing editor with The Montréal Review.

Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series as a creative response to the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House. The plan is to continue for all 1460 days of the 47th American presidency.

Find out how to submit poems or flash prose pieces to Second Coming.

If you like Second Coming and you want to support it, consider making a donation to Indolent Arts, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor of Indolent Books.

Use this link to visit our donation page where you can donate as little as $1.00 or choose titles from the Indolent Books catalogue as thank-you gifts for donations starting at $25.00—The more you give, the more thank-you gift books you get, up to six books for a donation of $100 or more.

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Holding onto the thread of freedom,
a bright red streak of embroidery thread
that my grandmother used to create
an imaginary bird,
slow stitches in and out.

Now I see that bird
soaring through city streets
as I look up at the still clear sky
while concrete crumbles beneath it
and tears fill the cracks in sidewalks.

Our bookshelf is empty, the books stacked
against the window,
the words fortresses, concealing
the view of the bird,
red as my grandmother’s heart, flitting its wings.

Olena Jennings is the author of the poetry collections The Age of Secrets (Lost Horse Press, 2022) and Songs from an Apartment (Underground Books, 2017), as well as the chapbook Memory Project (Underground Books, 2018), and the novel Temporary Shelter (Cervena Barva Press, 2021). Her poems have appeared in KGB Bar Lit, MicroLit, The Common, Tupelo Quarterly, Live Mag, and other journals. She is the translator of collections by Ukrainian poets Kateryna Kalytko (co-translated with Oksana Lutsyshyna), Iryna Shuvalova, Vasyl Makhno, and Yuliya Musakovska. Her translation of Anna Malihon’s Girl with a Bullet is forthcoming from World Poetry Books. She lives in Queens, New York where she founded and co-curates the Poets of Queens reading series and press.

Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series as a creative response to the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House. The plan is to continue for all 1460 days of the 47th American presidency.

Find out how to submit poems or flash prose pieces to Second Coming.

If you like Second Coming and you want to support it, consider making a donation to Indolent Arts, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor of Indolent Books.

Use this link to visit our donation page where you can donate as little as $1.00 or choose titles from the Indolent Books catalogue as thank-you gifts for donations starting at $25.00—The more you give, the more thank-you gift books you get, up to six books for a donation of $100 or more.

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The vanishings occur in daylight
or late at night
in schools or outside courts,
in churches or in stores,
on street corners,
old basements,
behind simple screen doors,
or off of a playground, or
in a car, or
at an intersection,
every day, more and more
these vanishings become
swift vanishings, vanishings
in vans, in SUVs, with dark windows,
shoved in the back
with handcuffs locked
until the vanished vanish in a plane.
The vanishings go unexplained and those
who are left behind remain uncertain
what to do,
who to ask and
who to call. Some witnesses say
they saw it all,
but would rather not give their names.
The men who came
cannot explain,
why the vanished
are detained and for
what reason they are blamed.
The men are dressed in black,
wear black masks of black netting,
have black shades over
that, wear black
boots and hold black
guns and some would say
they hear them laugh,
and some would say
that no one’s coming back.

Walter Holland is the author of the poetry collections Reconstruction (Finishing Line Press, 2022), Circuit (Chelsea Station Editions, 2010), Transatlantic (Painted Leaf Press, 2001), and A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992 (Magic City Press, 1992) as well as a novel, The March (Chelsea Station Editions, revised edition, 2011). His poems have appeared in Poetry Bay, Impossible Archetype, About Place Journal, CutBank, The Rappahannock Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthology In the Footsteps of a Shadow: North American Literary Responses to Fernando Pessoa (MadHat Press, 2025).

Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series as a creative response to the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House. The plan is to continue for all 1460 days of the 47th American presidency.

Find out how to submit poems or flash prose pieces to Second Coming.

If you like Second Coming and you want to support it, consider making a donation to Indolent Arts, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor of Indolent Books.

Use this link to visit our donation page where you can donate as little as $1.00 or choose titles from the Indolent Books catalogue as thank-you gifts for donations starting at $25.00—The more you give, the more thank-you gift books you get, up to six books for a donation of $100 or more.

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The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from this section, see instructions at the bottom of this post.

Another Monday, another semi-weekly edition of Secret Life. Forget about my selling out the 90 or so copies that remain of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. I’m here to finish something I started, and to tell a story that may resonate for some of you reading this. That being said…

This is post #25 in the series. We go through This Life Now poem by poem, read a snippet, and chat a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.

We are up to the fourth poem in the final section of the book, “This Life Now.” The fourth poem in this section is “Cases.” I’m not sure how it escaped my publisher’s chopping block, as I don’t really think it belongs in this book.

The poem goes through the cases of noun declensions in Indo-European languages, giving an example of the characteristic usage of each in a sentence about a river. It’s a lesson in syntax in couplets.

What the hell, I’m going to include this whole thing here:

Cases

Nominative, locus of being;
the river rises, the river falls.

The genitive’s whole, that of which one is part,
as the river’s breath that sweetens us.

To the dative we abject ourselves,
as to the river we bring what we love.

Accusative: what we inflict upon another
as we enter the river.

Ablative—case of separation or, paradoxically, accompaniment:
We emerge from the river whole.

Where is the locative (vestigial in extant languages)?
Where our children wait patiently in the river?

By means of the instrumental we achieve our end:
With the river we enter eternity.

Vocative, whom we supplicate or implore:
River; oh, River; you, River!

Imagine that! A poem in This Life Now that has nothing to do with AIDS, homosexuality, or adolescent angst! Or does it?

“Cases” was written in April 2005, just a month before I finished my MFA at NYU. I may have written it for Phillis Levin’s craft class. I thought she would appreciate its preoccupation with the mechanics of linguistic syntax.

I promised juicy stories and home truths for this edition of Secret Life. Not sure I am up to delivering that, with federalized National Guardsmen patrolling Los Angeles county, and an ICE officer deliberately shooting an Australian journalist in the leg with a rubber bullet.

I will just pick up on a bit of the boyfriend timeline from my last post, where we touched on my breakup with the social worker in 1997, followed by the fling with the opera director and the six-month relationship with the merchandiser. For a while I really did lay off the boyfriend sauce. Then, in the summer of 1999, I took my first ever real life grownup solo vacation to San Juan, and of course met this guy on the beach outside my gay guest house, and proceeded not only to date him, but to fly back and forth to San Juan a few times to see him, and ultimately I invited him to come to New York to live with me and be my love.

During that same period, I met one of the most courageous, creative, imaginative, and honorable young men I have ever known. He grew up in an affluent farming family in Mexico. He had a physically abusive father who would not accept him or even tolerate him when it became known that he was gay and had HIV. So he ran away. On his own. By himself. Made his way to New York. He supported himself as a dog walker while building his photography portfolio. Yes, I met him at a bath house—the now defunct West Side Club, to be exact, which some readers of this essay may remember fondly. We started seeing each other. The chemistry was…so healthy! Looking back, I think that was the problem: He saw me in the way I wanted to be seen, and I wasn’t used to that, and I pushed him away. My excuse was the guy from San Juan. But I think that was just an excuse.

I think that was just an excuse, because a few months later, with the guy from San Juan having quit his civil service job in preparation for coming to New York to live with me and be my love, I met the man who would become my husband. At a launch party for the second issue of LIT, the journal of the New School MFA program in creative writing. I was there with my roommate, a young woman who, in fact, had dated my social worker boyfriend back when they were college kids in a southwest city that shall remain nameless.

We stood at one end of the room munching on crudités, and I spotted this guy in a charcoal grey turtleneck sweater with a thick head of curly dark brown hair, sort of darting around, air kissing Fran Gordon at one end of the room before alighting beside Marc Bibbins and Ravi Shankar, who were students in the program and whom I knew via my duties at the weekly reading series I hosted at the Ear Inn on Spring Street (more about my Ear Inn gig perhaps in an upcoming Secret Life).

“Who’s that cute little Jewish guy,” I said to my roomie. She flashed the smile of a friend who had now known three to five of my most recent boyfriends, including one who had been her boyfriend.

I had quite the smooth move for finding out who the cute little Jewish guy was. I walked over and sidled up to Mark and Ravi and said, “Hey, guys. Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”

The rest is a once celebrated, now infamous chapter of New York City Gay Poetry Mafia History. But I’m over 1200 words here, so we’ll come back to this fateful meeting next time. I guess this edition of Secret Life turned out pretty juicy, after all, despite my gloom in the face of the burgeoning police state. And there was even a home truth.

À la prochaine.

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