When the River Speaks

27/07/2024

22/07/2024

tempo
by Ilyus Evander

the last bump was eight years ago i pray the man who sold it to me

goes to my heaven i want him clean i want to kiss him

yes yes i’ve been alive for centuries trespassing through the yuck

of every universe i’m still here i’m not here yet why even ask

such a tired question the body sheds the body in its sleep

time is the only thing that passes the more of it you’ve lost

the more of it you’ve gained

ABOUT THE POEM - “The saying goes, ‘Everyday is a new day.’ When in recovery from addiction, this can feel less true. Nothing truly ends—its existence simply moves from the present to the past. Each day becomes yesterday. My desire to relapse is always in competition with my need to stay sober; the only thing that changes is the date. This poem was originally drafted in the Undercurrent Workshop series, facilitated by Desireé Dallagiacomo.”
—Ilyus Evander

21/07/2024

DATES TO KNOW - Aug. 17th POETRY & POTLUCK at the San Marcos Public Library from 11am to 12pm.
Sept. 22th DEADLINE for submissions for October issue of WTRS - theme is RESISITANCE & REVOLUTION
Oct. 6th - COMMUNITY POETRY READING & PUBLICATION PARTY at Triple 666 Social
send in original poetry, photography and artwork (along with any questions or suggestions) to:
[email protected]

20/07/2024

anyways, i'm radicalized now
by aeon ginsberg

I’m not funding a war
if I pretend the money
in my taxes are only going
toward the roads that
are actively collapsing.

Did you hear about the soldiers
who stole all of those tractors?
Did you hear the company
that makes those tractors,
founded in a country not “fighting” in the war,
was able to brick the tractors
before they were at all functional?

for the rest of the poem, visit
https://poets.org/poem/anyways-im-radicalized-now

ABOUT THE POEM - “I am aware of the state of our world. How could I not become radicalized against it?”
—aeon ginsberg

19/07/2024

SAVE THE DATE - Saturday August 17th is our next POETRY & POTLUCK at the San Marcos Public Library from 11am to 12pm. Everyone is welcome - munch on snacks and enjoy engaging poetry prompts - no registration needed.

18/07/2024

Masculinity Ode
by Ally Ang

I used to think my body craved
annihilation. An inevitability,
like the slow asphyxiation
of the earth. Yoked to this body
by beauty, its shallow promises
I was desperate to believe,
too fearful to renounce my allegiance
even with its hand closing
around my throat. When I chose
myself, I chose surrender. God
is the river that remakes me
in its image. I didn’t know what
was waiting on the other side.
I swam through it anyway.

ABOUT THIS POEM - “I contemplated transitioning for many years before I took the leap, but I let fear—of violence and rejection, of how I would be perceived, of my own masculinity and masculinity in general—hold me back. This poem is a celebration of the divine and liberating act of choosing one’s happiness despite that fear.”
—Ally Ang

17/07/2024

Continuing on the History of Poetry - Ballads are one of the oldest poetic forms in English. Ballads were a popular form of verse and song in Europe during the Middle Ages, serving many purposes:
Entertainment
Performed for the masses and common folk.
Expression
Ballads allowed people to record their opinions, history, and world views.
Storytelling
Ballads were often plot-driven, with characters unfolding events that led to a dramatic conclusion. The content of ballads was often based on local legends, folk tales, metrical romances, or apocryphal gospels.

Famous ballads include Beowulf and The Iliad.

photo: An Old English enthusiast's translation of Beowulf.

16/07/2024

Over the next several weeks, we will exploring the definition and history of as well as the different forms of POETRY that exist. Poetry is a type of literature that conveys a thought, describes a scene or tells a story in a concentrated, lyrical arrangement of words. Poems can be structured, with rhyming lines and meter, the rhythm and emphasis of a line based on syllabic beats. Poems can also be freeform, which follows no formal structure.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is, perhaps, the oldest written poem on Earth. It comes to us from Ancient Sumeria, and was originally written on 12 clay tablets in cuneiform script (considered the oldest known form of writing). It is about the adventures of the historical King of Uruk (somewhere between 2750 and 2500 BCE).

photo: Tablet 11, British Museum in London

15/07/2024

Untitled 1975–86
by jason b crawford

after Alvin Baltrop & Frank O’Hara
Glorious! what mountain
of mouths i could boulder my tongue
from. what bountiful luck i must
have acquired to own a debt
from every man. i like this type of sweet;
tongue stained in mulberry
blood like new york concrete in june. and here
we are again in june. with all the summer’s
bees and root beer floats and boys screaming
laughter into the jaws of a sprinkler head. and i, too, am
so joyful here, i have forgotten that january
ever existed. can you smell the bark? the branches
and men slumping with fruit? i will miss this
come fall, when the wind turns
a sugared maple. it’s so cliche to cling
to the boys i once kissed, but i will admit it,
i have loved a boy ragged until the last
leaf fell from his gums.

ABOUT THIS POEM - .."This specific poem was written after reading Frank O’Hara’s “Song” and thinking about the lyricality in poems. There is joy in how O’Hara speaks of New York. Here I wish to honor the loudness and joy of q***r New York even in the face of losing loved ones. Oh, how we celebrate our dead.”
—jason b crawford

13/07/2024

After Mount Tamalpais, I Tell Etel Adnan About Supernatural
by Summer Farah

I make paintings and watercolors of Tamalpais. Again and again. Why do I insist? Am I trying to hold some image, to capture some meaning, to assert its presence, to measure myself to its timelessness, to fight, or to accept? —Etel Adnan, Journey to Mount Tamalpais
I understand, I tell her, the desire to not only return but to be consumed. I have had obsessions, I have been made small by those obsessions, I wonder if you would agree it is possible for something to be absolute but still unseen. I was Cassandra, once. I wanted dearly to go to the mountain. Instead of cliches, I design my pulse to loneliness anew. It’s different than ten years ago—I go outside, now, take its contradiction with me. Oh the most painful love-story of them all! These gaps between comprehension! I could never forget, no matter how many times they beg me to. The mountain was there before us and it will be there after. Yes, a return; each journey wrought another history, each day I try to capture its form; why do I insist? In lieu of a paintbrush, I sew my voice in its throat. In the Beginning, there was Blood, Horror, Myth, Obsession; and then there was Love, there was, I swear, when the static spilled! again and again, our eyes stained with its evidence, We find new proof uncovered on every return. We were all Cassandra, once, young and hysterical, oh, I hope you’ll understand I take it so seriously when I say the violence shifted subjects. Oh, we screamed! we screamed! We swore our eyes were true! Audience becomes the blood, the horror, the myth, the static, Again, and again, you said, again, and again, I say, again, again.

ABOUT THE POET - Summer Farah is a Palestinian American poet and the author of I could die today and live again (Game Over Books, 2024). She lives in California.

12/07/2024

against cleansing
Marlin M. Jenkins
if cleansing be needed for me
to be clean, i cling then to
the grime. the grit of sand
under my nails not interested
in the fire necessary to make
glass. i cling to hair grease and
skin oil, the fat seasoned into
the skillet. i want
to survive
the holy fire as impure
as marbling through good
meat, mixed as vinaigrette
on leaves of lettuce and
spinach. let us see sometimes
a little less clearly: you can
choose to be the diamond
cut into symmetry, rinsed
of blood; i’d rather be
the coal stuck in the walls
of your lungs.

ABOUT THE POET - Marlin M. Jenkins is a q***r Black and Arab poet. They are the author of Capable Monsters (Bull City Press, 2020) and an educator living in Minnesota.

11/07/2024

Stonewall to Standing Rock
BY JULIAN TALAMANTEZ BROLASKI

who by the time it arrived
had made its plan heretofore
stonewall it had not a penny
thats not true it had several pennies

can you make a sovereign nation a national park how condescending
instead just tell them to honor the treaty

what can poetry do it
cant not not do nothing
it must undulate w/ the 2:30 pm dance music the sole
patrons at stonewall

there was a shooting in ohio today
the music made me feel a little anxious it was
hard thumping dance music a notch
upwards of 100 bpm notoriously the beat of life
the optimum tempo for cpr
I consider downloading a metronome real quick to test it to tap it out but
I don’t want to be ‘anywhere near’ my phone
meaning it’s in my bag on the stool 2 feet from me

there is an amy winehouse video on no sound at least...

to read the rest of the poem, visit Poetry Foundation at
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147082/stonewall-to-standing-rock-5b1fea9b288ef

10/07/2024

ENJOY this gem from our April issue - the current issue of WTRS is available at the circulation desk of San Marcos Public Library.

09/07/2024

Our theme for the next issue is REVOLUTION & RESISTANCE. "Pithy and powerful, poetry is a popular art form at protests & rallies. From the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, Black Lives Matter, [support for Gaza], poetry is commanding enough to gather crowds in a city square and compact enough to demand attention on social media. Speaking truth to power remains a crucial role of the poet in the face of political and media rhetoric designed to obscure, manipulate, or worse."
Poetry Foundation

Caged Bird
by MAYA ANGELOU

08/07/2024

Imago Dei
by Nora Hikari

We cannot help but be students
of our fathers’ disciplines,

mine an avid disciple
of scripture and royalty.

What else can I confess?
That I was a child? I carved myself

into the civil shape of a knife.
Pared until only the edge remained.

I killed things because I could.
Magnifying glass and the sun

and the silent crawling things that
could not fight back.

That had no choice but to only
hope for mercy. Unable themselves

to beg. I confess. I was desperate
to know that I was not alone. Every day

we are made once more in the image of God.
Every day God asks, Cruelty again?

And every day we say, Oh Lord of Heaven,
please, yes, yes. Cruelty again.

ABOUT THE POET - Nora Hikari is a Chinese and Japanese American poet. She is the author of THE MOST HOLY DAY OF THE TR*******AL CALENDAR (Game Over Books, 2025) and Still My Father’s Son (Sundress Publications, 2025). A 2022 Lambda Literary Fellow, Hikari lives in Philadelphia.

07/07/2024

Loom
by Bradley Trumpfheller

My mother says when she is anxious she finds a seam,
finds stitches on her clothes, on furniture she’s near, always
a verge has that feel, birch joints, wrinkles. It’s a relief
to think with the hands. Not with what years do,
not with rings or someone else’s sadness. With the repair
in a sheet her sister tore, breeze-fretted in the yard.
Finds exactly where the hickory trees start themselves
against the yard. And shows me on the photograph
which is only one of several, where though again
they did not touch each other, standing on some shore,
her mothers’ shadows touch each other.
She shows it to me now to soothe me. As if soon
it will be that blue in the air. Soon is what
she thinks with. What she runs
the edge of her thumb, her index finger over.

ABOUT THE POET - Bradley Trumpfheller is a trans writer and the author of Reconstructions (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020). A National Endowment for the Arts and MacDowell Fellow, they are a bookseller and events director at First Light Books and live in Austin.

07/07/2024

Emceed last night for another brilliant gathering of WTRS poets! So much fun to be a part of a team of awesome people and a beautiful community of real poets 💕

07/07/2024

Great night with When the River Speaks at Wake the Dead as we celebrated our 13th issue! A big thank you to all who attended.

06/07/2024

Hope to see you there!

06/07/2024

We are excited to share new work submitted for our July issue - hope to see you tonight at 6:30pm at Wake the Dead for poetry reading & publication celebration!

Black Vulture Song
by Cynthia Hobson

O Black Vulture! Your long dark formal robe
Your wise bald head
Your neat feathers in flight, revealing the sharp line between black and white

The fact that I can always tell you from your friends the turkey vultures
And see you wheeling overhead almost any time of day

05/07/2024

DON'T MISS OUT! Join us tomorrow, 6:30 to 8:30pm, at Wake the Dead Coffeehouse for our community POETRY READING & PUBLICATION PARTY as we celebrate the July issue of WTRS. Bring a friend and a poem to share as we unite our creative voices with art, poetry and fellowship :)

04/07/2024

As the country celebrates this nation's independence day, it is good time to reflect on what values we as a people truly embrace.. it is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

03/07/2024

Fear
by Liv Mammone

If the pain doesn’t come back,
what will I write about? Will the poems
have tendon and teeth? I didn’t get
right the sonnet of all its colors.
I did not find the exact dagger of phrase
about the long loss of my life.

Hope is all I do and am.
I don’t think I’m poet enough
to make you taste this mango;
or see that sutured sunset unless
from a hospital bed.
I was good for carving.

There will be kisses, music, street names.
Loved ones will go where the gone do.
What if I don’t want to (write it: can’t)
write about these things.
What if I would rather feel
than create feeling?
What then? Go ahead.

ABOUT THE POET - Liv Mammone is a q***r, disabled poet and the author of Fire in the Waiting Room (Game Over Books, 2025). A recipient of fellowships from Brooklyn Poets and Zoeglossia, Mammone is a freelance editor and lives in Long Island, New York.

02/07/2024

Sonnet for what ages and does not
by Sam Rush

My mother is older. My father, older.
The pack of us now sober. Or soberer.
The last of us left reaching daylight less
alive. And once. I could’ve sworn to more.
Older, we run towards the oceans.
Passers-by check their pockets for rocks and guess
at what we’ve left behind. They answer, older.
The pockets, older. Rocks, older. The undertow.
My first and only child. When we were young
the earth was dying like a hero in a streetlight.
Sirens. Screams. A Sassafrass I knelt beside,
when I was small, to think. And all, older.
The girl who, for a year, kept all her trash
beside her in a single bag, refilling jar after jar

ABOUT THIS POEM - “I don’t know what it means for a species, a people, to grow older. If we are lucky enough to age, perhaps it means we see the line that leads out of our own existence growing clearer. The grief of this human era is something I have not found a way to hold. But age brings, as far as I have seen it, a kinship in mortality. To watch us grow—clumsily—older, even through this sadness, feels quite a gift.”
—Sam Rush

01/07/2024

Dream Job
by Nicole Connolly

Editorial Assistant. Executive Assistant. Administrative Assistant. Writing
Center Director. Writing Teacher. Receptionist. Poetry Fellow. Technical
Writer. Barista. Waitress. Applying for three jobs a day doesn’t get me a
job. I get an offer from the diner and then the diner burns down. I flop an
interview at the local Subway. I make a couple hundred a month writing
blogs for hotels I cannot afford. I write a blog about Benjamin Franklin’s
Ghost House. It’s a chalk outline in the ground where his house was torn
down. I have a Ghost Life. My friends all get jobs. I know because they
each come to the bar with a polished eye around their neck. The eyes can
foresee only positive futures. In the future, my friends eat takeout and
rescue a dog. They have children they’ve made on purpose and call by
fashionable names. I try to look into their job-eyes, and the eyes close
their bulbous lids. The lids make a horrible smacking sound like someone
closing their mouth to go hmmmm—then not saying what everyone knows
they want to say. Was my phone voice too weak? Did my neck look too
brittle to hold a full-size job-eye? The lease is running out much faster
than my life is. Every day, my apartment gets one-cubic-inch smaller. The
walls get so short I only have room for the bed. I lie there and dream of
having any real job.
ABOUT THIS POEM - “This poem is essentially about the personal madness of unintentional unemployment. Life moves forward, and it seems everyone else moves forward with it while you are regressing...." Nicole Connolly

30/06/2024

Don't forget to join us Saturday for our community POETRY reading as we celebrate our 12th issue.

30/06/2024