Thrilled to have another piece in Bending Genres today. #CW suicide, sex, original sin, goats, dirty airedales. This is a big fat issue with lots of interesting writing. Reading tonight.
Koss Blog
Koss Poems in The Lumiere Review: Twelve Past Dead and Alternate Thanksgiving
Pleased to have two pieces from One for Sorrow published in The Lumiere Review today. “Alternate Thanksgiving” is the first piece in the book. “Twelve Past Dead” appears in a different form (two consecutive poems) in the book. Know that each contains references to grief and/or suicide. There are other poems in the issue that do as well. Note the content warnings in headers, a great idea that I’d like to see other journals implement. The poems . . .
Poem | Koss | Rat’s Ass Review
Pleased to have a poem released on a strange and difficult day of beginnings and endings. This piece is ritualistic and I started it in a CA Conrad workshop, then “workshopped” it in Lynn Melnick’s 92Y workshop last fall/winter. It incorporates bits of the ritual into it. Does that make it meta-ritualistic? I don’t know, but the timing of events reinforces my feelings of a strange order in the cosmos even when it is not what I would like it to be. “Still Life with Cherry Tomatoes No. 1, Singing Bowl,” a poem about endings and renewal. May the doors open somewhere . . . and life and all its struggles obtain meaning through story (Akasha) and metaphor. All of it. The beautiful, the heartbreaking, and the opaque, mysterious, and labile.
Asemic Writing Poetry
Screwing around tonight with some paint and pens, which I then digitized. These are possible inclusions in the book–Magpies of sorts with asemic writing, Wuthering Heights page, and a mysterious black package . . . I like digitizing the work and replicating, changing, introducing new variables . . . Yes, I’m still a bit of a punk. Update: It’s 2024 and I created a new Insta account just for visual poetry, collage, asemic art, and similar. Follow me here. Note this is different from my main Insta account. I will be adding an asemic art gallery some time this summer, but another place to find my work is at Diode Poetry. They published several suites of asemic and erasure poetry. The crow on the right below appeared in different forms on Up the Staircase Quarterly and in a recent issue of Mom Egg Review (print), spring 2024.
Koss | New Poem in Rogue Agent
Rogue Agent has released issue 72, which includes poetry by:
Jen Yáñez-Alaniz
Cassandra Griffing
Katie Darby Mullins
Melissa Fite Johnson
Alix Perry
INTERVIEW: Jessica Abughattas
Paula Ethans
Justin Vicari
Koss
Sara Luisa Kirk
Andrew Kozma
What a great list of contributors. My somatic poem, “Shoulder Story” is a song to my deformed shoulder. I know I’m supposed to be writing erotic landscape poems as a queer, but I prefer to bitch about things. In a universe where most thoughts have been had, I am pleased to be the only human to have called a psoas muscle, “rubber labile bitch band snapper.” On a more serious note, if Western medicine knew more about the psoas, there’d be fewer back problems and surgeries. It’s a very emotional muscle.
