The Poetry of Joshua Michael Stewart & Amy Pence

“My brother bought/ a dime bag and a revolver from a guy named Kool-Aid./ My mother was crowned a welfare queen, and drove/ a Cadillac assembled out of political mythology./ I smoked my first joint on the roof of a movie theater// with my brother and the stars/ An after-school ritual:/ stepping over the passed-out boyfriend to grab/ a Coke out of the fridge.”—Joshua Michael Stewart

Speculative Friction

By Claire Bateman

GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Hubris)—November/December 2024—Poet Joshua Michael Stewart is the author of Break Every String (Hedgerow Books, 2016), The Bastard Children of Dharma Bums (Human Error Publishing, 2020), and Love Something (Main Street Rag, 2022). His work has appeared in Modern Haiku, Massachusetts Review, Rattle, Salamander, Brilliant Corners, 100-Word Story, New Flash Fiction Review, and many other places. Born and brought up in Sandusky, Ohio, Stewart has lived in New England for over 30 years, currently in Ware, Massachusetts. Stewart has worked as a counselor helping individuals with mental disabilities for over 25 years.

The poems “Born in the USA” and “Functional” are from Stewart’s first Collection, Break Every String, a loosely based memoir in verse about his time growing up in industrial Ohio in the 1980s. “Born in the USA” is a list poem, condensing a ten-year personal history (1978-1988) into 100 lines. The poem is influenced by Ron Silliman’s “Albany,” with its staccato rhythms and constant jumping back and forth in historical time. “Functional” started off by thinking about crafts other than writing, such as woodworking, and how functionality plays as essential a role as beauty. Stewart explores here how function plays a role in poetry, and, as one thought flows into another, thinking about craftsmanship led Stewart to contemplate his father, his father’s relationship with art, and his father’s relationship with his son.

The prose poem is a form that has influenced and intrigued Stewart for years, but it is only recently that he has abandoned the line entirely (except for haiku) for the beauty of the block, the grace of the sentence. The two prose poems featured here are part of a forthcoming collection titled Dead Hornets & Wild Birds: Selected Prose Poems and Other Brevities. Both prose poems are examples of how simple themes can lead to imaginative explorations that one couldn’t simply map out.

Tony Hoagland writes, “There’s a fearlessness in Joshua Michael Stewart’s poems—tough, tightly written narratives and monologues about living poor with broken people (some of whom are your closest relatives) in hard times. This heartfelt, gritty work reminds me of the hardscrabble accounts of humanity in some of our best poets—the work of Ai, Bruce Weigel, and Linda McCarriston’s landmark book, Eva-Marie. Stewart exercises the courage of truth telling and takes the revenge of real poetic craft. As Bruce Weigel says, ‘Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.’ Or as Stewart says, ‘Poets are the battered spouses of hope.’ You can’t help but respect the maker of these streamlined vehicles, for his guts and his unsentimental, vivid poems.”

You can find Joshua Michael Stewart on Instagram and on Facebook.

Born in the U.S.A.
By Joshua Michael Stewart

We were pumping our fists with Springsteen,
chanting the chorus as Reagan galloped
the campaign trail, still pretending
to be a cowboy, and the old man who lived

in the blue house with the white fence
lined with rosebushes was handing out mints
from a bowl made out of a buffalo skull.
Uncle Bob chopped off his thumbs

in a metal press on his first day on the job.
My father returned to Khe Sahn sleepwalking
past our bedrooms, shouting out the names
of smoke and moon. He had a woman he loved

in Saigon, sang The Boss. Across the bay—
Ferris wheel lights and roller coaster screams.
Child Services found my grandmother unfit
to adopt. An ambulance in front of the blue house

with the white fence lined with rosebushes.
A white sheet. The bones and feathers
of a dead seagull—a shipwreck
on a rocky shore lapped by green waves.

On their lunch break, my father, my uncles,
and both my grandfathers, their names
embroidered on their grease-stained shirts,
stepped out of the factory and coughed up

their paychecks to their wives idling in Regals,
Novas, and Gremlins. Out by the gas fires
of the refinery. My father’s handlebar mustache
terrified me. My brother built me castles

out of blankets and chairs, larger than the house
that confined them. Taught me how to leap
off the couch like Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka,
how to moonwalk and breakdance. He’d go on

to teach me that disappointment’s a carcinogen.
My father took cover behind the Lay-Z-boy
in his underwear. My grandmother offered
a pregnant runaway a place to stay in exchange

for her baby. When the plant relocated to Mexico,
my father brought home a pink slip heavier
than a Huey Hog. The rosebushes became thorny
switches. Over ham steaks and mashed potatoes,

our parents poured out their divorce.
We had to decide who we wanted to live
with before leaving the table. I’d go
wherever my brother went: that meant Mom.

My father took a job out of state.
My mother took a boyfriend, who
dragged his unemployment into a bar
called The Pit, then staggered

into our house knocking over houseplants,
and I was the one ordered to clean
the carpets with the wet/dry vac. We’d sneak
out of the house at 3AM to swim

in the neighbor’s pool, or ping rocks
off hurtling freight trains. The city condemned
the blue house with the paint-chipped fence.
My mother’s eye, blackened. We slept in parks,

better than home. She stood at the sink,
sobbed, scrubbed blood-splotches
out of her white jacket with a soapy sponge.
Wouldn’t press charges. My brother bought

a dime bag and a revolver from a guy named Kool-Aid.
My mother was crowned a welfare queen, and drove
a Cadillac assembled out of political mythology.
I smoked my first joint on the roof of a movie theater

with my brother and the stars. An after-school ritual:
stepping over the passed-out boyfriend to grab
a Coke out of the fridge. We spray-painted
gang insignias across the boarded-up windows

of the blue house with splintered teeth. The boyfriend
could whip up one hell of an omelet. We didn’t hate
him on Sunday mornings. My mother’s stitches.
We swiped a bottle of Mad Dog, drank it while eating

peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. My mother stashed
bottles of gin in the leather boots my father bought
for their last Christmas together. Twice they called
me into the principal’s office because a knife fell out

of my pocket at recess. We turned abandoned factories
into playgrounds, busted out the windows with tornadic rage.
Somebody was asking for it, and somebody was going to get it.
I overheard a teacher tell my mother, “He’s going to grow up

to kill somebody.” Thanks to the Black Panthers,
this white boy had free breakfast at school.
My brother waited until the boyfriend was drunk
on the toilet to burst in swinging a baseball bat.

Later that night while taking a bath, I fished
out a tooth biting me in the ass. Backhoes
and bulldozers devoured the blue house
with the collapsing roof. We rewound

and played back the catastrophic loss
that plumed over Cape Canaveral
on our VCRs. The boyfriend slammed
a stolen van into a tree. She’d pour me

a bowl of Cheerios, pour herself a Scotch.
The boyfriend’s dentist kept good records.
“I’m sending you to your father.”
Son don’t you understand now? Front-page news:

firefighters dousing the mangled inferno.
Got in a little hometown jam.
I stood before a judge, pled guilty to
shoplifting Christmas lights, the kind that twinkle.

(“Born in the U.S.A.” was first published in Night Train)

My Love
By Joshua Michael Stewart

A mustache painted on the Mona Lisa. The snowman’s half-eaten carrot nose. The hand up the puppet’s ass. The newly discovered Charles Simic poem published in the latest issue of the New Yorker, that’s 117 consecutive blank pages. Not the rooster’s crow, but the fox’s twitching ear. The black crayon in the hand of an unsupervised toddler in a white-walled room. A playground when streetlights turn on. The murderer’s sigh right before his confession. The cheese in the trap. Deep in the woods, fresh snow under moon, my love howls, calling others like itself to join in on the kill.

Morning Routine
By Joshua Michael Stewart

What the fuck is this? Oh, my slippers. What the fuck is that? The computer light reflecting off my glasses. That better not be cat shit. Good. Toy mouse. What’s creeping along the back fence? Opossum? Skunk? Raccoon? Plastic bag I need to pick up later. And that translucent face showing up when I pull the lamp chain—I’m sick of this guy always sitting across from me at my writing desk, the window a partition between us. It’s like visiting an estranged uncle in the county jail. Sure, he’s family, but I’ve nothing to say to him. He doesn’t say much either. Mocks me mostly, eventually leaning in, grumbling, “Who are you? Who the fuck are you?”

Functional
By Joshua Michael Stewart

My father won’t read poetry. He taught
my brother the ways of paintbrush
and canvas, played guitar before I was born

but after Nam, lost interest, saw no sense
in art. I’d like to think, surviving war,
I’d see no better reason to create, proclaim
and praise I am here, but what do I know,

given my armed conflict with the self?
My father once cradled a dying soldier
missing everything below his waist,

and watched a starving boy convulse
after a sergeant handed the child a candy bar—
his body no longer understood food.

My father pulls shoulder muscles
as he masons walls, lays foundations.
He cracks knuckles against engine blocks,

torqueing wrenches. Because the dead
remind him that splinters in his palms
are gifts, he builds cabinets, chairs, houses.
His life is work, no room for self-indulgence

or anything frivolous. But don’t we also live
in rooms not constructed out of lumber and stone?
Art is an alarm clock. Art is a ladle of beauty

lifted to the lips. My father. On the table
he planed, sanded, stained— where we’ve sat
together after a long time of not sitting together,
where we’ve eaten slow—I want him to dance

and afterwards, I want him to see the scuffmarks
on the pine as affirmations of purpose—of loving
the lost with raucous praise, of letting the gone go.

(“Functional” was first published in Naugatuck River Review.)

The Poetry of Amy Pence

“We sneak looks, spy secrets—/ birthmarks of continents, scars seal pain,/ each body’s battleground and all that color:/ flesh and flesh—dark, ruddy, diaphanous—/ miraculous. Cedar scent and electric sizzle. We sit/ mystics filmy in steam. To be among kindred:/ to be vulnerable or what you see is what you get./ Steam rises bird-like, erotic as/ the just-budding willows. Sometimes/ we wear our bodies, sometimes not.”—Amy Pence

Poet Amy Pence has authored the poetry collections The Decadent Lovely (Main Street Rag, 2010), Armor, Amour (Ninebark Press, 2012), and the chapbooks Skin’s Dark Night (2River Press, 2003) and Your Posthumous Dress: Remnants from the Alexander McQueen Collection (dancing girl press, 2019). Her hybrid book on Emily Dickinson—[It] Incandescent—(Ninebark, 2018) won the Eyelands Poetry Award in Athens, Greece.

Pence has also published short fiction, interviews, reviews, and articles in a variety of magazines, including “Western Humanities Review,” “WSQ,” “The Writer’s Chronicle,” and “Poets & Writers.” Red Hen Press will publish her debut novel, YELLOW in 2026. A graduate of the University of Arizona’s MFA program, she’s now a freelance tutor in Atlanta and has taught poetry at Emory University and in other workshop settings.

The poems in her first collection, The Decadent Lovely, trace Pence’s childhood in New Orleans and Las Vegas as well as her mother’s death from lung cancer. In the poem “Age-Defying, 1976,” the speaker interrogates the gap between the exploitative superficial and the real as a child growing up in a tourist town.

Though not released until 2012, the poems in Armor, Amour were originally written before The Decadent Lovely in the early 2000s. Pence says these poems felt “like creating sculptures.”

Though later sections consist of what she called column poems and are now called contrapuntal poems—a form she’d not seen anywhere in print at the time—the collection opens with several “lumens,” short poems that “have the strength of one candle.” “My Peony” is just such.

Another feature included at the back of the collection are the visual musical scores of several of her poems composed by Hunter Ewen.

Her hybrid book [It] Incandescent, as reviewer Karen Kao, writes, “mixes poetry and prose, facts and fiction, two women conjoined by a terrible secret, the eponymous [It].” The fictional speaker, we come to learn, is a ghost.

The book opens: “Called Back. It’s what her headstone says. The Dark ocellated. I recollect, orient. Summer in Amherst, near Emily Dickinson’s grave. Headstones teeth the new dusk. She: my obsession. Her biography, the poems I write. Knowing what she knew, what I once knew. Here, I think, to research Emily. Or to find someone? Tread the light gravel. Called back, it seems, looking for the path between.”

Poet Cecilia Woloch said of the collection: “Each stark and luminous poem in this stunning sequence is more gorgeous and startling than the last; taken together, they form a kind of tapestry into which the voice of the speaker and the voice of Emily Dickinson are so seamlessly interwoven it becomes almost impossible to tell where one leaves off and the other begins.”

Her debut novel YELLOW, to appear in 2026, is also inspired by combining facts and fiction with the slime mold, physarum polycephalum, as the material and metaphorical heart of the book.

In addition, Pence’s current work-in-progress, titled SHIVER, combines research on mass twitching and screaming among teenage girls, Vedic philosophy, AI trends, the orgasm, and vibratory energy and posits a highly speculative conclusion.

Included here from her current manuscript is “Incantations,” modeled after Sara Nicholson’s “Ten Lyric Pieces,” in her book April. Both poems use humor and situational distress, breaking inconclusively at the end of each stanza to be inconclusively concluded in the final section.

Age-Defying, 1976
By Amy Pence

The showgirls untime time, faces mirrored: duplicating, re-duplicating—
they’re set loose and iconic: mid-seventies, the Lido de Paris,
unclothed but for G-strings, Marie Antoinette beehives
frolicking in a set-up of Versailles or writhing
behind bars in the mass fluorescent jail scene, blinking. No doubt

the Stardust had the best signage: its incremental diamonds
zipping up into my panties, into the vulva of the young girl
lonely. Backstage, their eyes were wedged
open by hideous lashes. The moles and snagged body stockings garish.
Their mouths laughed clutching cigarettes. They brought kittens,
casseroles. My step-father called them the girls—though some—
the ones who sang—were well past their prime. Love
had its way, crept into the Lido themes: fiery, jealous tiki dances
a languorous etude with a wig-bedecked couple on a swing.
archival & quaint those towering, melon-breasted beauties—
so sexless, they generate remorse, implode their dark stars
when the Stardust goes down, when what we build goes down, soft
in the roof of my mouth.

(“Age-Defying” appeared first in Drunken Boat and also in the poet’s collection Decadent Lovely.)

My Peony
By Amy Pence

White, the bone-heavy sleep
of the gods—no
drama, just this opening.
Layers and layers
unfurl in our conscious
dream, pull

the wake, the froth,
the ghost embryo
into the inadequacy
of being.

(“My Peony” was originally published in the Red Rock Review and also in the poet’s collection Armor, Amour.)

Incantations
—for a street performer, after Sara Nicholson
By Amy Pence

1
I believe in death, its finality, its sheer
Woven dream fiber. At Lisbon’s outdoor
Café, near the monument to poets
A group of writers, I suspect, collect
Around an aggregate idea, ignore
Juanito, small sun-damaged clown.
Plasticene bald head repels tourists,
His puppet master obscured by stacks
Of piled books. Oh Madam, he cries.
In those days I had several forms of sorry:

2
Abject. Mortifying. Situated by bodily
Discomfort. Beneath my eyelids, several
Images prefigure the skull’s head:
Alien life, bifold paper airplanes, one
Hundred unseated valentines when we
Danced under the balloon arch, so few
Costumes predicting matrimonial success
Badger. Fox. Oryx. Marsupials interrogate
Our signifiers under columns of books
No one ever reads, yet all the Elites

3
Collect as if the dream heaven allots
Just so many tickets for entry. Platitudes
Muscle in: c’est la vie, not meant to be, think
Outside the box. Spells urgent and dry as
Two skeletons locked on a tarot card.
The LOVERS embrace, Juanito shouts
Madam. I go to the boxed man thinking
He’s doing art about sad poets routinely
Ignored, ones who’ll pay you to be heard.
The beautiful corpse never more attractive

4
Than when stunned by sudden accident
Rather than lingering pain. I believe
In death, its luminosity. Syncopated to
Crickets’ throbs plushing dark fields.
The trompe l’oeil beckons—humanity
Appears—full-born, crawling from
The frame. Facts say the universe is flat.
As in Pozzo’s false dome where angels
Ascend. How else simulate beginnings
Or ends than to enshroud them

5
In dimension? Madam, Madam, Juanito
Says and I hold his gloved hand: behind
False books, eyes flash. Portugal intones
Most poets, their machismo, in stone; At
Porto’s grand bookstore the staircase looks
Vaginal from above—red carpeted, various.
Tomes hold a billion presents in glass. Among
A throng’s indecision, I kiss Juanito’s false
Bald head. What clown act will we use to
Absolve ourselves, how many euros to

6
Bullet the coffee can? After each parting,
We leave thumbnails of ourselves in past
Lovers’ minds. An X took down several trees
to make room for me. All murdered by thin
Promises. Send in the clowns on a turntable
Burns its mandarin-orange, voice smoky
With overuse. Death sticky with romance.
Gravity under-rated—we plod through
Space-time— its crippling pull solitary,

7
Though astronauts age more quickly, a
Paradox in the gravitational condition.
Oh Juanito, hunched in near-dark, playing
Your death card. Hips forward, male
Dancers in the latest Cirque wear their
Fave Manimal: buffalo, antelope, Thai
Elephant heads—all phallic implications
Awry. All acts endangered. Beneath
My eyelids, the Aurora Borealis spreads—
An intimate museum where color

8
Shivers. Also epochs, space-time unveiling
Its fragmentary pretense only for me, minus
My loved one. Juanito, you are toy. Though
Your ugliness mesmerizes. When young,
I dreamed four bearded men beaming over
Mountaintops. My poets, my northern lights,
My seducers and disqualifiers, slamming
Particles: a visionary wonder or merely
The condition of late 80s contemporary
Poetics in Mid-Anthropocene American

9
Life? I believe in death, its inviolability.
Manimals all, both hunter and hunted,
Tree-destroyers, Nobel Laureates, escape
Artists. Juan dissembles from Juanito at
Shift’s end, drinks dark espresso, hairless
Heads drooping. What do we love but
Death’s incarnate promise, even senility’s
Slow release from pain and pop music.
What if, discovered in death’s moment
There’s only the beloved, multifarious

Audience of one?

Dark Matter
By Amy Pence

On Mustek Square, one beech tree.
Leaves, gone gold in winter, pulse
on branches as humans pass—globes
of meat in their heads. Dark matter
swarms—angels, perhaps or
ghosts, if you’re fearful. They’ve missed
something or you have: meetings, deadlines, a life’s
trajectory. They have their obsessions, the echoing
sonic of wounds. You can just
perceive them—miming our weariness,
the weather crisp as the planet rolls
into darkness. The tree’s extended
shadow envelops your passage, buying
and bought. Tender inside your package. You
are winged. You are thoroughly imagined.

Imaginary Anatomies
By Amy Pence

The Czech landscape shivers out the sauna’s window.
If water moves, we cannot see it: an unclouded
horizon where willows line a riverbank. We
sit entranced, eyes trained beyond.
Some drop their towels—others
wind them tight. Pores release sweat
slicking skin, some wear emblems—
a woman’s arm vined and ivied, a man’s inked
lightning bolts frame the back of his neck where
he’s been taking names. One penis, porcine; a woman’s
breasts perked. We sneak looks, spy secrets—
birthmarks of continents, scars seal pain,
each body’s battleground and all that color:
flesh and flesh—dark, ruddy, diaphanous—
miraculous. Cedar scent and electric sizzle. We sit
mystics filmy in steam. To be among kindred:
to be vulnerable or what you see is what you get.
Steam rises bird-like, erotic as
the just-budding willows. Sometimes
we wear our bodies, sometimes not.

(“Imaginary Anatomies” was previously published in Rust + Moth.)

To order copies of Claire Bateman’s books, Wonders of the Invisible World, Scape, or Coronology from Amazon, click on the book covers below.