Mike Bagwell writes poetry and fiction
New chapbook A Collision of Soul in Midair from bottlecap press!
This site collects various publications, including the work itself if the publication is now unavailable, as well as a full book, Or Else they are Trees, and various design and publication work.
Mike Bagwell is a writer and software engineer out of Philadelphia. He received an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence and has work published or forthcoming in Action Spectacle, ITERANT, Sprung Formal, trampset, Heavy Feather Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, HAD, BULL, Bodega Magazine, SOFTBLOW, Whiskey Island, and others. Some editors have kindly nominated him for a pushcart. He is the author of the chapbooks A Collision of Soul in Midair (Bottlecap Press 2023), Or Else they are Trees, and a micro When We Look at Things We Steal their Color and Grow Heavy Under their Weight (Rinky Dink Press 2024). He was the founding editor and designer of the currently deceased El Aleph Press.
A Poem in which I Avoid My Guilt
I have no authority to say anything. / I clap my hands and a cat runs out of the room. / This is magic. It is expensive, / but well within your means.
When We Look At Things We Steal Their Color and Grow Heavy Under Their Weight
Outside, the peaches catch fire. / I am all smoke and spiritual harm. / At 2pm, customers / struggle in like ants, / up one nostril, out the other. / It’s so intimate in here. Please / do not take anything, / it’s attached to my skin.
Night Terrors
Night opens on a hinge / howling and bellowing, / a long cold corridor of stars / consuming all.
Violence of Craft: Your Mouth is Moving Backwards by Juliet Cook
What form does violence take when it enters us? How does it announce itself? By what mechanisms, what symbols? Are these symbols themselves affected, or are they implicated? These are questions posed by Juliet Cook’s poetry chapbook
5 Poems at Eunoia Review
Maybe we are written by language / instead of the other way around: / we find ourselves crawling back into the egg / on shore and it’s the grammar alone / that keeps us moving.
Poetics of Place
Later, I am afraid of the way / my arms repeat themselves. / In a house / with the only window in the world, / a man destroying things / from their insides.
Baboon Moon
I’m practicing sun vowels. Hibernation, sun vowels, hibernation, sun vowels. Like how seasons are one way of breathing.
4 Poems in Winged Penny Review
We were working with a botched biopsy / of the twentieth century, so who could blame us?
2 Poems in Bullshit Lit
There’s splendid hunger in / these wantings. The field of desire / falls apart.
Ophelia
as if it were an inexhaustible hunger. / heavy heavy says the earth. / the ocean you were drowning in / could fit the palm of my hand.
Topology
I spend so long / in the same memory /that it snows
Poem with Many Things on Fire
Outlines suffer the pain of defining. Even this bit / between us catches the wind and wants nothing / more than to float away like a hair. And then does.
Carrying Water
Maybe the soul is joined to the body by deep pits of water: / you pull feathers out of your mouth / and walk around a crowded airport
Light Works its Way through the Body Slowly
you said the body / is the spatial architecture of the idea / that night your soul in my chest / a pale blue cylinder / trembling a great distance away
2 Poems from Graphic Violence Lit
It was all body language and occasional / waiting until we died. It was all / hoodwink samsara. When we encounter // we mean against meaning.
2 Poems from BRUISER
Today, the moon is a unicycle / and it is supposed to be a joke. / We take off west and invent forgiveness / using each other’s pale light.
Palimpsests
2 Poems from HAD
No one is saying / words spherically and intoned / in pink-peach flesh. No one / is speaking in dust wounds.
2 Poems from Bodega Magazine
Nominated for a Pushcart Prize
The whippoorwills hid where the river was / and all they could do when we found it was sing / and that was alright, mostly. The ducks / were decoy ducks and the grass / was decoy grass, / but the water was just water.
Taxonomy
The machine you made speaks with a diamond cutter / and a city of paper, even though all it does / is count backwards and tell the brother / where the bird is.