poetry

Rough Cut by Tas Tobey

Follow these fourteen poems through the brine of memory’s streetlights and locker rooms, tenderly prodding the edges of early grief as Tas Tobey looks unflinchingly into the fist of urban adolescence. Each line crackles with friction as our speaker tunes himself to each threat and mercy, ultimately coming to rest in the promise of a hard-won future.

From our contest judge, Alicia Mountain: Rough Cut brings readers into a reflective and confessional reckoning with manhood, sonically and imagistically alive. This chapbook is equal parts rough cheek and clean-shaven, muscle and softness, mumble and holler, benediction and doubt and knowing. Through its wholehearted and clear-eyed speaker, Rough Cut makes the case that even the grown are still growing. We readers are given permission to be in process, too, with a bold, earnest voice as our companion.

$14 (Shipping included)
Venmo: @FlumePress
(Please specify your shipping address in the purchase notes.)

Tas Tobey is a writer pursuing an MFA in poetry at the City College of New York. His poems have appeared in Ghost City Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Eunoia Review, The Carson Review and elsewhere. His criticism and reporting has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and Complex. He lives in Brooklyn.

the thing about not watching my father grow old

is I’m never sure what I’m gonna get, cuz
if you don’t have your folks around
to look at––if all you have to look at is a picture
of a man standing at the edge of a meadow
lined with chicory holding a shotgun––you
don’t have a good idea really of where
you’re headed. What I like most about rage is not
its teeth-gritted warmth but the way it soars thru
the bones clear into the swing of our shadows &
what I like most about death is the smoothness
with which it muffles & blurs the outside world
like a rain-beat windowpane
while inside an entire orchestra moans
catastrophe & everywhere you go
all you can hear is this chorus of violent so after
a while you don’t go anywhere anymore you
just sit in a parking lot in your used up ride &
chainsmoke Parliaments & you
don’t bother rolling down the window cuz
you actually like the smoke––how it swirls
& hangs in the still air like an answer
& the whip fills up like a soul & your jagged breath
slows & the world too & all becomes background
noise & there’s this cozy distance separating you &
every other organism on earth
& in the strange arms of this new quiet
eyes you’d forgotten snap open & from here
you see everything––poplars swaying
like teenagers in the dark, breeze rustling them
towards song & it’s been said that singing is the
closest some men come to crying & who can
resist the beauty in that?
that unlike my father most of these trees
will die standing.
Some, if you can imagine it––even
while dying, even dead––will dance.

Sixteen Stories By Jeff Whitney

Winner of the 2021 Flume Press Chapbook Contest

Improvisational. Imaginal. A bestiary of familial revision and dark hope, Sixteen Stories is a collection of poems that challenges our commonplace understanding of narrative, of fable, and the potential healing found in new ways of telling.

Jeff Whitney is the author of several chapbooks, most recently Sixteen Stories (Flume Press, 2022). With Philip Schaefer, he co-authored Radio Silence (Black Lawrence Press, 2016), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition. His poems can be found in 32 Poems, Adroit, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, and Sixth Finch. He volunteers as a reader for Black Lawrence Press, and has served on the staff for CutBank literary magazine. He lives in Portland.

$14 (Shipping included)
Venmo: @FlumePress
(Please specify your shipping address in the purchase notes.)

The Animal

It was growing wings, the animal between us.
It was grey, and large, and mistaken for anything—
a pair of tombstones, movie theater seats.
So there was this thing between us, this animal,
and as it grew wings it got bigger. In fact,
the house we lived in was starting to break,
first a window pop, then splintered beam. The sun was raining
red cherries and thousands of miles in another direction
men took turns kissing landmines on a beach.
The animal kept growing, and we didn’t know
if we should be impressed or worried. You sat
in your favorite chair, I in my second-favorite chair,
and we each had something important to say
but instead said how about those stars? We do not think
to mention the animal that is growing. It has, in fact,
already grown wings, and now it’s the size of one
football field. The house is destroyed. We are in
some crease in the animal’s belly, hugged warm
like rodents. It has in fact grown wings and yet keeps
growing. Actually, it is the size of two football fields.
Three. It is the size of the boat history books forget
because it was smaller than the Titanic and kept the ocean
below it. It is growing because we won’t say what
it is. It is growing and people in the neighborhood can tell
that even it is surprised. Eventually a brigade of
lesser animals formed. They were worried or awed
or both. They needed a king or punching bag or tremendous
calamity. They carried leaves in slings on their backs.
They wanted to bless something. We kept sitting
there, the animal now the size of One Dakota. It was learning
language. It ignored the brigade of animals below. It was lonely
as a sky before an air show, it was a tornado stripped of venom.
It was, in fact, still growing, but those wings it grew first,
they stayed the same size, which made the animal sad. We could hear
something that must have been its first word but we don’t
speak that language. Suddenly we were being carried
by the brigade of smaller animals trying to follow
where the large animal went, the one that was still growing
between us that we could not understand, though now
it was speaking whole sentences and the sound that came
forth was like wind in space or the quiet after the asteroid
hits. We were being carried by these small animals
who were following the larger animal, blessing the ground
it covered. The house was long pulverized. We had no home.
The neighbors formed a caravan behind us doing something
amazing with their tongues that has no translation in English.
The whole world was becoming very small. At any moment,
we were certain, our chests would open and out we would tumble, stunned
as time travellers or a green bird charging the shoulder of god.
Our chests would open and we would tumble out believing
the antlers we wore had grown from us, not into.
Had set us free, and not the other way around.

For The Compost by Stu Nolan

Winner of the 2022 Flume Press Chapbook Contest

A collection of seventeen verdant poems, Stu Nolan’s For the Compost graces readers with naturalistic imagery and deeply personal vulnerabilities. Nolan yearns for transcendence from physicality, and asks us to consider, “When / was the last time you were / your whole self?” With rapturous diction, Nolan’s collection blurs the binaries of machine and flesh, while holding the scalpel that separates them.

From our contest judge, José Antonio Rodríguez: “How do you language a self into being?” asks the speaker of these poems early on and then offers the reader a courageous attempt suffused with grace. This collection, an investigation of queer identity, looks to the ever-evolving quality of the natural world as an evocative metaphor. Rich with imagery and sound, its pensive and probing voice questions the relationship between the corporeal self and identity, seeking metamorphosis and investigating its parameters. The body or, as the poet calls it here, “borrowed atoms,” dances at the center of this lovely collection.

$14 (Shipping included)
Venmo: @FlumePress
(Please specify your shipping address in the purchase notes.)

Stu Nolan is a queer writer and aspiring documentary filmmaker based in the mountain buttes and basin brine of Salt Lake City. They have a love for growing things, going on tangents, and exchanging stories with with strangers. Their work has been published in Scribendi, GirlsRightTheWorld, Arcturus Magazine, Leopardskin&Limes, and by Torrey House Press. They are working on starting a podcast and dream of being in a punk band. For the Compost is Nolan’s first published chapbook.

Tending

When the world is wintering,
I fanaticize my own hibernation
set in some lovingly dug hole or hollow
in some loam soil lined
with sawdust, leaf litter,
and moss to gently molt me.
A space to stay for some time
until I’ve learned or slept,
how to slink out of it,
how to shed my fastenings,
how to unbecome.
No mortal test but to burrow
and rest, bury and nest away.
My lungs could stack like rubber stamps
to keep my ribs from rattling
when the earth splits open and shakes
every living thing back awake.