The night of infinite piss
Jordan Hamel
Water waste hiss against porcelain, a wooden fence,
a statue’s foot, an office pot plant, a stranger’s mouth.
I’m not here to kink shame, only to reimagine
small town trauma as camp southern gothic theatre.
With my thick stream, I am the last authentic foley artist.
I fry bacon to mimic rain, I rattle sheet metal
and conjure thunder, I bang coconuts
as our protagonists trot into this two-horse town,
two boys for the horses, pigweed streets, bacon swells,
it’s pissing down, but dry inside the country pub,
wine barrel tables, bare-knuckle stools, some stormy lads
at the bar, sinking piss, crushing cans in cyclone fists,
they make eyes at our boys: broke, no pot to piss in,
unlike these meaty good-time jackals, they chuckle,
call the boys lovers, call them broken, tell them
to piss off, get on their way, the boys stay, getting pissed
off. Cut to later, in the bathroom, our boy finds a jackal
alone now, jeans unzipped, holding his
weight, shifting against the urinal wall. I prepare
the props for the confrontation, pre-shattered
glass bottles, records to scratch, but there is nothing,
and more nothing. I have nothing to mimic
body tremors and averted eye contact, gaze locked
on a steady flow, rancid mist on a grate, the nothing
before a wet paw slaps the boy’s back
and says, relax mate, I was just taking the piss.
Our boy clenches. I panic, drop everything,
break a plate for the shattered face, sheet metal burns,
bacon rattles, horses clap in the distance.
from the journal NEW DELTA REVIEW 
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This poem arose out of an etymology prompt. A lot of my work recently has been focused on the idiosyncrasies of post-colonial New Zealand vernacular. The frequency and flexibility of the likes of "piss/shit/fuck" in my home country never seeks to amaze me, especially in situations where language escapes or fails us. It can offer levity or escalation. It can distill or distract. Piss as booze, piss as water, piss as anger, piss as mocking, piss as bonding, piss for all!

Jordan Hamel on "The night of infinite piss"
Cover of Good Dress by Brittany Rogers
Review of Good Dress by Brittany Rogers

"From the pews to the avenues, Brittany Rogers declares her own freedom and presence. She busts the rhetorical space wide open for every Black woman she has ever wanted to be, be with or bemoan. This book is 'rows and rows of gold pendants' forcing us to look at and remember the beauty and the pain, the mundane and the extraordinary, the progress and the paradox that is Black womxnhood."

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Cover of the issue of the Iowa Review in which David Gorin's poem was first published
What Sparks Poetry:
David Gorin on Life in Public

"The surface of the moon in winter is a figure for isolation. It could be a happy isolation, the kind that writers and artists often seek to do their work, which we often dignify with the name 'solitude.' Its 'winter' could imply what Wallace Stevens had in mind in 'The Snow Man,' a state in which one sees 'nothing that is not there'—that is, without projection or illusion. But that isolation might also be the kind that isn’t happy. It could be the kind that comes with being close to people in the wrong way, or the one to which you flee when you have experienced wrong closeness, where intimacy is a vector for harm." 
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