failbetter.com - Poetry

Don Simms and the Invisible

mjordan — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Darren Morris

With the toe of his shoe, he made

an invisible X in the lane near the basket.

He told me to stand right there

and not to fucking move. Inside the X,

I was still trying to see myself in the invisible.

So he moved me by the shoulders onto the spot.

He gave me the ball. Shoot it, dummy.

It went up but it didn't touch anything.

It went up without vigor and came back down.

I tried to catch it but failed at even that.

Look at the backboard not the basket. Make

an X at the point within the red square.

Aim for that. He took the ball from me and said watch

where it kisses. The shot was neither graceful nor athletic,

but it went in. Ain't no magic to it. It's mathematical.

Do the same from your side. See that invisible X

on the backboard? You hit that spot, we get two points.

The ball felt like lead in my hands, but he was right, it went in.

Now we gonna repeat that until your arms fall off,

until the X is no longer invisible and then you'll be useful.

I started shooting. I wasn't allowed to leave my X.

He got the deaf kid to fetch the shots and pass me the ball.

He watched me for the first twenty until he knew

I would continue, even if I was forced by my fear of him.

He said, that' s your job now. And a job ain't any fun,

but if you did it enough, you could kind of forget about it.

In a few years, you'll find yourself at some desk job at dawn

and you won't even remember waking up. Good sign.

It meant the job was disappearing, becoming a part of you.

Or you might go inside the job until you could not discern.

But if you could do it, repeatedly, without

objection, and continue without considering

any sort of ending that would ever contain

the discovery of even one invisible X,

then you might be called a man. You know

what I did in Vietnam? I cleared mines. Ordnance.

Now is the time for attempt and flat failure.

If you persist without complaint, then this team

might even win a game on Tuesday night.

Win or not, Coach Simms, like all our fathers

would be at his job the next morning, supervised,

remembering nothing of his life teaching boys

about the two invisible Xs connected by the conduit

of vision, muscle memory, and desire, and directed

by the mind's eye to some fleeting fantasy of success.

You are a machine, doing your job but with a terrible secret.

A fear that if ever divulged would hurl you off the edge

of the world. Mind your hope, boy. Hope is a booby trap.

Genre:

Poetry

Author Bio:

Darren Morris is a writer living in Richmond, Virginia, who has lost much of his sight to retinitis pigmentosa. His long form poem, “Eisegesis 1-3,” won the 2024 Experimental Poetry Prize from the Connecticut Poetry Society. His poems have recently appeared in Midway Journal, Stone Circle Review, Willow Springs Magazine, Redivider and The Yale Review. Work is forthcoming from the American Poetry Review and Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature. In 2026 his full-length manuscript was a finalist for the Cardinal Poetry Prize from Wesleyan University Press.

Issue:

Phrenospasm

mjordan — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Barry Peters

Punt means surrender, but that’s never enough, not in America, not among boys on Saturday afternoon behind the grade school. I can’t help myself. I run full speed, time my dive, launch myself like a missile. The football in my gut, the wind knocked out of me—what I now know is called phrenospasm. It’s a hollow feeling, not being able to breathe. It keeps me in line, still, whenever I can’t decide between glamour and grace.

Genre:

Poetry

Author Bio:

Barry Peters lives in Durham, North Carolina. Publications include Grist, Image, New Ohio Review, RHINO, The Southampton Review, and The Southern Review.

Issue:

Killing Time

mjordan — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Barry Peters

This year I listened only to jazz records from 1959. I found three hundred online, all free. Who says the world’s going to hell in a handbasket? My mother did. She knew the origin of that idiom too—miners being lowered into earth. It must have been like going back in time, descending into prehistoric darkness, the only sound a canary chirping a desperate version of Kind of Blue.

Genre:

Poetry

Author Bio:

Barry Peters lives in Durham, North Carolina. Publications include Grist, Image, New Ohio Review, RHINO, The Southampton Review, and The Southern Review.

Issue:

no water

mjordan — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Lilith Acadia

no water
tastes quite right since
leaving home—
too soft
not the right kind of hard
I tried ice cold
bottled plastic and glass
hot with tea leaves
Learned ‘tap water’
in a dozen languages
never finding
what would quench a nostalgia at the tip of my tongue
not yet remembered
maybe once I think away
it fades in each move
I drink sparkling
so the bubbles will burst
the disappointment
on my immigrant tongue
that has forgotten
where the water
tasted right

I say
, sigh,
before men came
from Europe
from China
before
they asked
'where are you from?'
fluid fluent
people asked
'where
what
is your
watershed?'
that
tastes
right.
Through
every time
that is forgetting
the watershed
we come from
before flowing away.

Genre:

Poetry

Author Bio:

Lilith Acadia has writing in The Kenyon Review, New Orleans Review, Redivider, Puerto del Sol, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. An assistant professor of literary studies at National Taiwan University, she lives with her wife and hound in the 'literature mountain' district of Taipei. Connect at acadiaink.com or IG / bluesky: @acadialogue

Issue:

The Desire to Be Subterranean

mjordan — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Kathryn Napier Stull

I dig for medicine

ink blind in the dirt, no news

past the next elbow of night,

scooped hands carving a husk for

incomplete skin. I’ve

bent there rooting under

daylight’s million feet,

breath rebounding from the

mudpack in a second heat, every

corridor a vein map drawn to

build out the body, tap a

witnessing pulse and beg

this clay tell me my shape,

let me know and be known by a

lower mother that broods me

into form and finish me

that I may recognize my earth.

Genre:

Poetry

Author Bio:

Kathryn Napier Stull is a writer living in Southern California. She holds an MFA from Mills College and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in River Heron Review, Scrivener Creative Review, and the anthology Sierra Songs and Descants, among others. She is currently working on a collection of poems about death and the dreaming body.

Issue:

He/him like

mjordan — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Rayne Alarcio

During La Mercè

I wander the Gothic

Quarter, the heat

of bodies and 100%

cotton brushing

against the back

of my palm.

I pause

to take a video

of graffiti

my cousins say

is ugly.

One says:

I don’t understand

how someone

could deface

architecture

like that.

Some graffiti

is beautiful, I say.

Another asks:

How could graffiti

be pretty?

I take

another video, zoom

in on the EL—

zoom out

on EL COMO

and my brain goes:

HE/HIM LIKE

In the boutique

doorway, my jean

jacket with bisected pearls

for buttons.

In my bag: a black

T-shirt printed with a red

dragon poised

to strike,

las palabras

in English and

kanji printed

on the back,

I remember

my younger girl cousin

once told me:

Women are cuter anyways.

Why would anyone want

to be a man?

Genre:

Poetry

Author Bio:

Rayne Alarcio (he/they) is a Filipino American transmasculine poet from Los Angeles. Their work appears in and is forthcoming in Chicago Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. They are the author of the chapbook Starving the Wolf (Bottlecap Press), housed in the Poets House Permanent Collection.

Issue:

Coastal Erosion

mjordan — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Sharon Venezio

My father’s hospice bed sits in the middle of the living room

like a shrine. He doesn’t leave the bed anymore.

I wheel my mother to his bedside. She leans in,

says I know you’re hiding another woman in the house.

Where are you keeping her?

He yells for me to take her away,

back to her own dying.

When we tell her he died, she sobs, then asks when he’s coming home.

We do this daily, for a while, tell her the story of the funeral again

and she forgets again, until we stop telling the story of the funeral.

Now she thinks he’s left her after 70 years, stole the kids

and sailed to the other side of town.

But why did he leave his shoes behind? And his coat?

He must be cold.

III

We lie on her bedroom floor looking at the ceiling.

She slid from my arms as I tried to transfer her

from wheelchair to bed, barely conscious,

another mini-stroke. She has them every day now.

She lies there in a diaper, frail and broken.

I lie next to her in exhaustion and defeat,

wait for her to regain consciousness.

Is that the doctor’s lounge, she asks, while pointing to the closet.

They can flap around all day but they can’t pull wool from my eyes.

She doesn’t know this is her house, my brother says,

so it makes no difference if we move her. But she knows

the view from the window that has changed seasons

272 times, and that the hallway always leads to the kitchen,

even when it doesn’t.

I ask her if she wants to watch Wuthering Heights,

her favorite movie, which we’ve watched three times

already this week. She thinks it looks interesting,

so we watch it again for the first time.

Today she thinks she’s in my apartment,

refuses to sleep for days, says it’s rude to sleep

when you’re a guest at your daughter’s house.

She wonders about all the people bringing her medication.

Do they have a key? Do they make you take drugs too?

She suggests I talk to the landlord, perhaps change the locks.

But mostly I should get the windows fixed

because the ocean is rising.

Genre:

Poetry

Author Bio:

Sharon Venezio is the author of The Silence of Doorways (March 2013, Moon Tide Press). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including the New York Quarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, Wide Awake, Grew Sparrow, and elsewhere. Born and raised in New Jersey, she now lives in California where she is currently working on a poetry manuscript about dementia.

Issue:

Mnemonic Asphyxiation Shrouded in Vicious Peace

mjordan — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Nandini Dhar

A sparrow is rubbing its beaks against the crenelated ink-stains: inherited

from the hollows of an embattled myth, shrouded in vicious peace.

In its titter, a lilt too tame.

The remembrance of a tapestried pillowcase: an incurable faith

in appearance, and nothing but appearance. A cadence

this city is incapable of edging out of. This bewitching dereliction

is nothing but an excuse for us to criddle: a dictated respite, a practiced

interruption, an invented hollow. A bookcase is crumbling inside

the unlit corridors of a library. You are leaving behind the dead-white schoolrooms

to quote a not-yet fully redundant rhythm. The imprints of your palms

on the walls. I try to cast mine in accordance, and fail.

What I am left with, is the deafening captive memory of an echo. Not knowing

what else to do, I am kissing slurs in the margins of your rudimentary scribbles.

A crawl through the walkways of this language

of the disfigured harmonium, the tuneless rally-chant,

the incomprehensible jargon: we are as yet

undecided about the musical instrument of our choice.

Yes, I am waiting.

Genre:

Poetry

Author Bio:

Nandini Dhar is the author of the books Historians of Redundant Moments (Agape Editions, 2017) and rebought fascimiles (Red River Press, 2024). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review, Boulevard, Epiphany, Fugue, diode, Memorious, New South, Best New Poets and elsewhere. She lives and works in Kolkata, India, where she is a Professor of English Language and Literature at Adamas University.

Issue:

Moored

mjordan — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Christopher Phelps

But I think morality is more or less moored to reality. (Ality-to-ality, more than -ism to -ism.) So the suggestion that less is more is not a moral to pass around but a fact about how living things grow, from less of themselves to more of themselves to enough of everything asked to be both valid and sound, with any luck unstricken by a zeroing sum. Enough from finding to found (in the present tense). Enough being parsimonious (once there’s nearly enough) meaning generous. Not asymptotic to completion but willing to turn around and walk back differently and with less determination.

I think a satisfied person is a magpie of minimalities; a sinewy contentedness treading water (water that falls away when it will).

Genre:

Poetry

Author Bio:

Christopher Phelps lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he tutors himself and others in math, philosophy, and related mysteries. He is queer and neurodivergent, a twainbow that underwrites his attempts at creative solvency and steadfascination. His poems have appeared in journals including Beloit Poetry Journal, The Nation, Poetry Magazine, and Zoeglossia. A chapbook, Tremblem, was semi-privately printed in 2018. Christopher hopes to find publishers for his full-length poetry manuscript, Salve Age, and his idiosyncratic poetry-memoir, Stuck-On-Its. Find him at www.christopher-phelps.com.

Issue:

Piezoelectricity

mjordan — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Christopher Phelps

A poem came to me and swore it would do no harm. What would it do, then, I asked. It seemed surprised at the question. I am accustomed to defense, meaning the undoing of fences, it claimed.

I pressed the point that defense does not really mean the undoing of fences but the making of them, perhaps the negotiating of them. The poem then found a key defense. Alas, I am caught in my own desire—for the prefix de to be less of and more knot with a silent k. I replied: Why do you do things this way? The poem pulled me in and whispered (if a spoked wheel could whisper), I am charged with a mystery I can neither solve nor surrender. What would you do in my turn, it asked. I answered with unmelodic honesty, as much as I could find: I guess I would write it out and check my answers, the way students are asked to. Do as they are told, not as we tell ourselves? The poem riddled. I was always bad at riddles, I admitted. That’s why I’m here, the poem admitted. To improve me or my riddle-solving skills, I asked. To swallow the hook and have to learn how to live, it replied. Are you sure that’s no harm, I asked. I have already sworn as much to you. That’s my part. Yours is sensing what can be believed. Piezoelectricity: charge from touch. A quick stream of current through some fluid cloud of motion. “Do you know what I mean?” and “Do I know what you mean?”—we talked under each other simultaneously, then paused at what felt like a mild shock of meaning in its fullness or in its absence, it was difficult to say.

Genre:

Poetry

Author Bio:

Issue: