Search

BURNING HOUSE PRESS

Not For Profit/For Prophecy

Open Search
Author

Ingrid

SUMMER NEEDS by Sara Matson

<1>

my suede hand

warm + gloved

pinning swollen fist on 

either side of ur mandible

+ screaming until the jaw

snaps (so visceral !)

my wet thigh sticky

(unexpected blood)

i tuck my body beneath

stubbed nose cold comfort

watching my verbal tics echo 

in the rugless lobby

my god, 

that’s what summer needs

a cropped linen jacket

just shaped enough

to warm my tits in 

cool summer shade

no pride or shame in making

an old woman cry

… i’m the old woman

<2>

the ridiculousness of lunch glass

or getting chewed out

in the afternoon thicket 

… unthinkable !

vibrant creature,

effervescence of youth

forest green + humbled by

succulence or prosperity,

buccal fat smeared in shiny layers

refracting age or wisdom

<3>

then me

+ the vibes i give: 

                   nervous forgiveness

                   stuffed with love which cannot carry

                   s w a m p

                   incurable lack/deepest ache

                   sun schemes (insofar as to stop the sun

                                     and it’s bullshit)

                   but like,                … friendly ?

yes, 

my hairline continues

to fur itself by fireplace

many extra fingers invited to 

light + curl 

squeezing crunch into velvet

 
before botox is just called youth

let me lick yours like a ruffle, 

like a scream in church !

in my mother’s voice: 

                            CRY OUT A WINDOW ABOUT IT

                            TELL THE MIDNIGHT MAN 

                            REMEMBER THE SLIME RIVER

ah,

of course

her indifference reminds me

to invoke the river of slime

to soak my sins in

the neon absolution

of undone mildew stains

like imposition over injury

<4>

the back of my neck 

is so hairless

(from          the accident)

that when i was nailing my wistfulness

to the new wallpaper

i adhered myself to the baseboard

gathering dust like spring grain

in my historically accurate suit

admiring medieval books

on weddings 

+ informal sutures 

Sara Matson (she/her) is a poet in Chicago and host of the seasonal online reading series Words // Friends. Her poems can be found in Discount Guillotine, Kicking Your Ass, The Chicago Reader and elsewhere. Her favorite color is lime green and you can find her on Instagram @skeletorsmom and Blue Sky @saramatson.bsky.social. 


2 poems by Kent Kosack

March

Indulge yourself in a final thought

as the year ends: If you leave her,

the road ahead opens into a midlife reckoning.

No money for the cliched convertible.

The trip to Japan. Holiday shrine

visits with the locals gawking at

the hulking, brooding, balding foreigner

gumming a squid on a stick.

Finding yourself is a luxury good.

Sex on beaches with divorcees.

Old and sweet and slow.

Mutual cumming on cue.

Hair coiled around your fingers. 

Coconut hotel shampoo. Salt licked

off a near stranger’s skin, crotch full of

sacred sand as the tide comes in.

No. Leave your flipflops in the closet, 

stow your sunblock beneath the sink.

Your health isn’t what it used to be.

Your wealth, pathetic and dwindling,

unfortunately is. Nothing ever changes.

Except the things you wish would stay the same.

She changed. Or maybe the way you saw her did.

It’s a new year. Resolve to do something. Do,

not think. But after the first thought claws

itself into conception, the second forms.

The third. A nativity scene of tortured neurons.

Days die. The calendar deforms. 

January, with its resolutions, collapses. 

Hopes crash on February’s shores and

before you know it, here again and

again, forever and again: March.

The thought of it. The reality.

Reading Rumi

Reading Rumi has got me depressed.

Or rather, I’m depressed and a friend

prescribed Rumi. Poetry is cheaper

than SSRIs or a gym membership, 

easier than deciding to leave

your lover to their addiction.

But all the joyful whirling,

the light, the cups overflowing,

the appeals to a love

with a capital L — no, Rumi, sorry.

I had a Beloved but it turns out

I never really knew her and

this, whatever This is,

is nowhere near enough.

Kent Kosack is a writer with recent work in minor literature[s], the Heavy Feather Review, Some Words, and 3:AM Magazine. His novella, Adar's Freedom, is out now with Subtle Body Press. You can read more of his work at kentkosack.net / bluesky: @kentkosack.bsky.social

4 poems by Damon Hubbs

Olympia

Real love. Unsparing introspection

Oh, for heaven’s sake 

fucking ____________________  . 

  1. Jennifer
  2. You (& Jennifer) 
  3. Jack the Modernist
  4. Veronica, Ted, Sabalenka, Sailor Socialism
  5. the museum goers at The Frick, 

a poem for trapped things, the solar anus

the girl whose lips

are like 

the last helicopter 

out of Saigon

O lose the noise 

you’re going to be all right

go home, spoon the Hitachi     

blackmatter

Berkshire Hathaway

     Dear Cinnette, 

     did you obtain cheap land, seek fortune, 

     join a religious community—

     I’m taking the kitchen sink approach 

            Where do the coordinates lead…

Delia Deetz died. 

The Lily Jean sank off the coast of Gloucester. 

The streets are draped in anti-drone nets. 

Today, when I was looking at the clouds 

I remembered how Leni Riefenstahl attached automatic cameras to balloons. 

     I want to fall in love 

     with a blind flower girl

     who mistakes me 

     for a millionaire. 

Even the Automobiles Here Seem to Be Ancient 

Dear Cinnette, I grew tired of the world 

at the Braintree split      

but there’s no shepherdess in sight

the ice floes on the Merrimack look like wounded angels

Dear Cinnette, the sun’s fixed stare expresses something beyond death

I’m letting my beard grow  

Let’s just say 

your period 

is the ultimate form of punctuation

Which one of your phone calls changed my life      fuck

     it

I’m raising a toast to Odin 

and the beauty of Japanese volcanoes

Last I heard you hitched a ride to Salt Lake     

O     Madonna 

        of the Trail— 

                          Dear Cinnette, Infinite Jest turned 30  

Sabalenka was penalized for a midpoint grunt

I saw a woman at Stop & Stop 

buying avocados 

like it’s 2010

I heard Thom bit off a prostitute’s toe in Prague

I’m high on benzos       godspark     

Dear Cinnette          Il faut être absolument modern

Did you know in 1955 

Friehofer’s still used horse drawn carts 

to deliver baked goods in Schenectady— 

Imagine if your whole job was putting cherries on cupcakes

Imagine if our midpoint grunt went on forever. 

Dobermann

If you said all I do is write love poems

     I’d say I’m solving the crisis of panty lines 

but that’s just another comedy 

for our conspiracy 

theory   

age

Again the snow is scatterbrained

millions of individual 

amens

and I’m thinking 

about the time 

we had sex at the Tate Modern

If you said it was like a love poem 

featuring Rouveyre’s car and several Soviet bikers

     I’d say 

look at the charm of the industrial streets.  

Fun is a steel bath in Mitteleuropa,  

your tongue like a menacing dobermann. 

MALMO

it feels very intimate, very private 

being an author and a character simultaneously

like a crowd of people 

at the beach 

screaming      shark!    Shark!

Quite unlike the Oulipians

who organize their internet novels 

by color

fake barn country 

the IKEA back catalogue. 

      Dear Cinnette, 

I prefer the dark arts 

“So we shall take the train here to MALMO, 

then get into the car 

and drive home to our house, 

and all the way I shall revel in, 

truly revel in”

how we used to smoke 

in bed on Sundays 

and read The Boston Globe, 

Akhmatova, Letters to a Young Poet, 

the cat purring like 

a bloom of chocolate, 

mirrors caressing the room 

and the sense of things 

careening

towards

a head

still a long 

way

     off

like a seizure 

on a boat 

in the middle of the sea

Damon Hubbs is a poet from New England. His latest collection, Bullet Pudding, is forthcoming from Roadside Press in 2026. Recent publications include Horror Sleaze Trash, Apocalypse Confidential, Be About It Press, Revolution John, The Literary Underground, RESSURECTION magazine, and others. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net. He is a poetry editor at Blood+Honey and The Argyle Literary Magazine. bluesky: @hubbsd.bsky.social

2 poems by Karina Longo

Symbiosis

The muffled sound of your
maple-infused voice stirred me;
it trapped me
in a vertiginous whirlwind of
fire and water.

What the hell is this—
this fighting that bends, never
breaks—starves, yet
illuminates.

You are the cement of
the sky; the sun casting
skin cancer and eternal glow,
the stars that count wishes
and blow to 

dust.

How can one be the spit of
the smoker—
and the silver faucet that
cleans it?

Blinding fog that chokes
and shows the way;

I am a diver, not a seer.

Sylvia Plath Momentum

Blood-like fragments
in a silver sky—
I know it’s not true;
why, then, should I lie?

The water poisoned;
hellfire 
in my brain—
thoughts like ashes,
yet your smiles remain.

If you can’t see it,
will it destroy you?
I’m still surrounded by
roses, illusions,
boredom.

And love
keeps stuttering
the words of a slut,
embracing what pours
up out of the mud.

Clay for the unwise,
moulding the impure.
I talk to God, yet like

she said;
the sky is empty—

I taste iron.

Karina Longo is a neurodiverse Brazilian-Italian poet based in Milan. Her poetry has been featured or is forthcoming in Expat Press, Be About It Press, Resurrection Mag, Some Words, Dodo Eraser, Michigan City Review of Books, Prosetrics, and elsewhere. Karina was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.  Find her on X: @TheDarkestStar_



3 poems by Sean G. Meggeson

monument leaves

(upon reading Pasolini’s review of the Italian translation of Osip Mandelstam)

like the sun sets   in motion   a series 

of actions   let’s use the word ‘darkening’ 

let’s use the words ‘pre-emptive 

state terror’   Lord let’s remember 

mistake of merry Madelstam   

too late gives back kisses   lost love 

of cunt tortured beyond desire   

&attempts suicide after layering 

perfect moustache joke memorized   

perfect entropy eyes   speculumed   well 

‘wounded’ is the wrong word now  

‘monumented’ will have to do

so let’s go on knees   attempt  

to kiss a torso as tight 

as Pasolini’s 

countryside mannerisms 

as object impermanent  

as Lenin’s mother’s death 

an old wet rope   

a neck caressesd

a punchline 

a snap as dull as a string of musty poem words

hope quick 

hi   hey 

Boccaccio baby   swim

pool bottom 

end race   boy oh boy 

win ‘gain billiards 

with Wilson buds from age 

of buds   wooden rackets from age

of wonks   boozy-brilliant   &binge stories  

then &last night   like morning 

rumors   like body &night arcs 

&crossings like news 

stations really ending   no no

really ending wars

ending   hallelujah   

hey hey here   come literally  

sex w/ Bowie

whelmed by 

two colors

&soft eyes of brother Terry 

always with 

a suicide body—  

a sexy psyche— 

salivating schizoid functioning 

so Zurich friends

in those days wrote letters— 

not instructing so much

as blowing a self

well dressed to heaven

wind 

wild &caress  

Sean G. Meggeson is a poet and video/audio/spoken word artist, living in Toronto, Canada where he works as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist with his dog, Tao. He has been published in a range of journals and magazines, including Antiphony, bethh, Die Leere Mitte , Ice Floe, Version9Magazine and others. He won the League of Canadian Poets Spoken Word Award in 2024. Meggeson has published three chapbooks, Cosmic Crasher (Buttonhook, 2024), ta o/j, and soma synthesis (both from lippykookpoetry, 2025). Forthcoming: a full-length poetry collection, j: poems (primitive press, Toronto, 2026) and an EP of spoken word & soundscape tracks, The Capacity to Be Alone. Sean is poetry co-editor of Blood+Honey Literary Magazine. 

bluesky: @seangmeggeson.bsky.social

instagram: @sean_g_meggeson_poet



Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑