MIKE BAGWELL
Selection from The First Leg
After Zachary Schomburg
In my last life
I was a buoy
with googly eyes
googling a lake
on the sine wave
current, rise and break,
saying
buoy boy buoy boy
who am I?
I have a relationship
with the manhunt.
Me and the manhunt
play footsie,
tugboat each other off
in an eye-rolly way.
I’m in my prayer stance
whispering through my palms.
That’s right, my hands can speak.
The mail service has great hats
is what they are saying.
They are calling me on the black phone
so often I forget I am a bear
or I am a god or I am underwater
or I am the slashes.
I answer in every poem.
Diving into the Wreck is some bullshit.
What wreck? What direction is up?
How did I even get mid-depth
into this lake where everyone is
building small brick pizza ovens?
Light does so many cool tricks
it should win all the awards.
I’m sending it my purple
and not-purple hearts
at speeds I can’t comprehend.
––––
Means of Transport
my kill voice fixes things
on its own can picture
complex mechanical
forms in its head
all at once I spilled over
like rice which is probably
what you expected
what’s something I haven’t put
in a poem before? baby dolls
coca-cola—lots of brands actually—
swim trunks garden gnomes
snowmobiles snowmobiles
seem like they’d have a lot of potential
considering the white page
or the white moon or the white reflection
of the white moon or the white reflection
of the white moon in the whites of my eyes
and how fast it could traverse these things
oh and rice also
as a thing to traverse
I can whistle for my kill voice
and it will come galloping
––––
Mike Bagwell’s latest thing is exploring gratitude as a poetic form until it's overwhelming, having recently overcome a bout of mutual antagonism towards the sky. He is a writer and software engineer in Philly and received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence. His work appears in Action Spectacle, ITERANT, Sprung Formal, Heavy Feather, HAD, Bodega, Okay Donkey, and others, some kindly nominating him for a Pushcart. He is the author of the chapbooks A Collision of Soul in Midair (Bottlecap Press 2023), Or Else They Are Trees (El Aleph Press), and micros from Ghost City Review and Rinky Dink Press. Find him at mikebagwell.me, @low_gh0st, or playing dragons with his daughters.