the weight of every image

Let’s peel back the disparate and dehumanizing layers
of these different stories.
I can sit with the fact that they’re not monsters, these normal people
but the truth is stranger than fiction and it’s hard
not to function like the reality, which is that the
genres changed and I’m living
in a story where I have to be aware,
cautious,
clever, as the narrative unfolds,
twisting turning placing us in a world overlapping this one
with filters and color correction and scoring and
a fourth wall that limits my ability …

no love for a loveless god

 

“If lovelessness is godlessness, will you cast me to the wayside?”—Moses Sumney, “Doomed”

 

I don’t know
if lovelessness is godlessness
I feel like lovelessness…for me…
is too much …

Weathering

Cyclones are better than wildfires, than
smoke that blows hundreds of miles to
thicken the air. In the East Bay, high
levels of particulate matter from our
regular winter pollution …

Coventry Street, Detroit

(The black mold fungus Stachybotrys chartarum was originally discovered on the wall of a house in Prague in 1837. The average person inhales at least 40 conidia (fungus …

I Shamed the Valleys That Wanted To Eat Me

I don’t want to wait till the moment of my dying
to realize what I have ignored all my life.
I want you to climb me. Climb me because I …

Despy Boutris, against a white sheet as background, looks into the camera with head slightly turned to her left with a small smile.

Cityscape With Dysthymia

Despy Boutris Wins a 2023 Zócalo Poetry Prize Honorable Mention Award

Every year, we award the annual Zócalo Poetry Prize to the poem that best evokes a connection to place. Zócalo is pleased to recognize …