Three Poems by Joseph Byrd

Letters from rehab

He filled a notebook with his names
              undone    gumdrop     whack-a-mole     test case
and I watched a whorl of cursives sans cursings flee into the place where
no one knows a nothingness but those who’ve drowned in it
                              spiritus    res mirabile     transitus    ex cathedra
and he said Something remarkable is happening to me
said that to me, one who has remarked extensively
                                              emails     pencilings     blood smears     smoke signals
one who’s been told a few times that he talks too goddam much
               cock crowings     tire squeals     sententialisms     clock ticks
and he said I feel I am finally in a place of complete surrender
                               buoy    rest stop     porta-potty    omega point
and I knew that the mouth of God had opened, that I could do
nothing less than push him inside
                                      drool     French kiss    Lick ‘em Stix     last supper
and that I am a contemplative criminal, and I will
never be innocent inside the ways that all shall be well
and all shall be well
and all manner of thing
               person     planet     purpose     plasmasphere
shall be well
                              let us    fall in    together     I wrote back

Gain

When your mother called to say she
found you dead on the bathroom
floor, I heard the way she breathed
while asking “He was good, wasn’t

he?” And I said he knew what two
meant without math. He sought a
way to say love without the grease
or the stuck. He knew who was

at his left when he so needed
a new right, and only after sitting
in a hole for two years. He took
his lemons and squeezed them till

they beat like hearts. He burned
dead and he bled light and he did
what all the recipes say to do as
he ate his way into the mouths of

all who knew what muck he had
lived, what dirt and what fuck, how
his fever could make your laundry
laugh when he’d look into your eyes

sitting closer to you than you saying
“We are, buddy. No me, no you.”

At your funeral

the eulogist kept
saying you will
be with us
in our thoughts
which made me
cry hot vinegar
because I can’t
think you here
enough right now
to stop myself
from opening every
book on every
shelf in every
room everywhere trying
to find one
word that isn’t
you all over
and shit it
sounds like I
am agreeing with
the eulogist but
I’ll write you
down here now
and always even
if all I
can do is kiss these words
and eat them



Joseph Byrd is a 2025 Best Small Fictions winner, a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, and was in the StoryBoard Chicago cohort with Kaveh Akbar. An Associate Artist in Poetry under Joy Harjo at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in West Trade Review, Exposition Review, The South Carolina Review, Stone Canoe, CutBank, Pedestal, South Florida Poetry Journal, DIAGRAM, Novus Literary Arts, and elsewhere. He is the founder and animator of Sundays on the Avenue, a monthly reading series for poets in Portland, Oregon, and serves as Poetry Editor for The Plentitudes.