Read Two New Poems by Aaron Fagan

DON’T PANIC WHEN YOU PANIC 

Permanent loss woven into cloud gestures traversing
The green pasture. Try to escape the smell of the water
From the pool in which you drowned. I nearly had a heart
Attack when I was born to die where I’m fated to be. Art
Handlers, lowering a painting from the balcony, await their
Applause. You know this is a dream because it’s the only
Place anything real occurs. The paint knows who you are.
My head is on a sandwich plate pinned together with club
Frill picks with all kinds of sauces, meats, and vegetables
Running down my face. Moments you hold dear and must
Surrender—it’s letting go when you stop trying to make
Sense of why things around you are changing. I put these
Dead-air moments throughout to say something true—
Not lost but safe in the future of other people’s hands.



CARPETS IN THE MUSEUM 

A glance at so-called history proves nothing can be done 
Where enlightenment, spiritual education, and similar 
Absurdities are concerned: one preaches and is praised 
Or spat upon, one is promoted king or sent packing 
To the afterlife. And everything will remain the same. 
What priests and professors shove into children’s heads 
Under defenseless names today is unconscionable filth.  
You’re already dead if you don’t become supernaturally 
Cheerful when someone mentions the word revolution.  
Who cares what your name is or where you’re from?  
Thousands of years of people who have tried to dress 
The part practice prayer and are deformed by form. 
Through the present, with its sloppiness of the senses, 
On one great strangeness of the mind: elaborate mishap. 

Aaron Fagan is the author of three poetry collections Garage, Echo Train, and A Better Place Is Hard to Find.

Exclusive Premiere of "Screen Test n.11: Romantic Love" by Alex Franco Featuring Poet and Model Greta Bellamacina

The short-film and intimate spoken word snapshot, entitled Screen Test n.11: Romantic Love, by photographer and filmmaker Alex Franco, features English poet and model Greta Bellamacina sprawled out, reading her poem Romantic Love. Bellamacina, who just had her first child with fellow artist and poet Robert Montgomery, says that the poem is from a series that explores the “early stages of motherhood from a young female contemporary perspective,” which is a perspective that is “massively under represented in the media today.” The poem, Romantic Love, is inspired by Lucien Freud’s 2002 painting Naked Portrait, which features a pregnant Kate Moss softly laying her head on her own arm in an intimate setting with a maternal glow. Bellamacina, who is a lingual portraitist that uses deeply powerful rhythms of language to paint her poems, plans to release a book of poetry later this month called Stockholm Syndrome. Click here to read the poem. Poem by Greta Bellamacina @ VIVA Model Management. Film by Alex Franco @ Artist and Agency .

Watch The Trailer for "So Sad Today" A Book of Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

Mellissa Broder has been at the cutting edge of the poetry world for a decade publishing titles such as Meat Heart and When You Mean One Thing and Say Your Mother. Melissa Broder always struggled with anxiety. In the fall of 2012, she went through a harrowing cycle of panic attacks and dread that wouldn't abate for months. So she began @sosadtoday, an anonymous Twitter feed that allowed her to express her darkest feelings, and which quickly gained a dedicated following. In her new book, So Sad Today, Broder delves deeper into the existential themes she explores on Twitter, grappling with sex, death, love low self-esteem, addiction, and the drama of waiting for the universe to text you back. Here she is "ballsy and beautiful, aggressively colloquial and achingly poetic" in her book trailer that's goth as fuck. Melissa Broder is the author of four collections of poems, including the forthcoming Last Sext (Tin House, 2016). Her poems have appeared in POETRY, Guernica, and The Iowa Review, among other journals. She lives in Venice, California. Click here to preorder So Sad Today.