Two new poems of mine, “Sequence” and “Open Ticket,” are published in the spring/summer 2025 issue of the literary journal Subtropics. Please subscribe here! (A decade ago, Subtropics published one of my earliest stories, “The Usual Labyrinth,” so the journal and I have a history.)
The two new poems are pretty different in style. “Sequence” is dense and muddy, at least for me. The origin-story is that I wrote it after I dropped a window sash on my right index finger, got four stitches, and took a picture of the wound every day for a month. It’s about the deep weirdness of watching one’s skin grow back together scarred.
The content of “Open Ticket” is a little dark, too, but in a light-verse way. There’s a simple what-if, the ramifications of which I then methodically pursue, in rhyming quatrains.
These are just gorgeous, Caleb. Thank you!