Mike Bagwell writes poetry and fiction
New chapbook A Collision of Soul in Midair from bottlecap press! And Poem of Thanks: The High Priestess from ghost city 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.
It is also the internet home for the Ghost Harmonics reading series.
Mike Bagwell is a form of mutual antagonism towards the sky, 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, Annulet, Texas Review, Tyger Quarterly, trampset, Heavy Feather Review, HAD, Bodega Magazine, THRUSH, 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 micros When We Look at Things We Steal their Color and Grow Heavy Under their Weight (Rinky Dink Press 2024) and Poem of Thanks: The High Priestess (Ghost City Press 2024). He runs a reading and music series Ghost Harmonics in Philadelphia. Find him on this site, @low_gh0st, or playing dragons with his daughters.
2 Poems at Couplet Poetry
I stared at the horizon / until it stared back. / It was not the horizon, // but my other self. / Congratulations! It signed / with its clouds. You are winning.
The Labyrinth Effect: On Ben Segal’s Tunnels
Tunnels, and this review, is composed of a 3x3 grid. A fragment of text occupies some squares, while solid black fills others. The blackout squares grow progressively more frequent as we tunnel deeper until that darkness consumes us. The reader chooses their own direction: across from left to right, down from top to bottom, or through to the next page’s corresponding square.
Accounting for True Objects
Someone soldered a storm cloud / to the stop sign on the corner // to the part of me that I picture / when I hear vegetal-being
Tonal Ellipse of the Art
They put a thousand horses in me / to slip through the gates. There they all are / galloping up the great trees of the night / lightning lancing down their hides
Poem of Thanks II
even the gods / playing hide-and-seek / stumble out / of the ocean / in awe / terrible / blotting out / the sun / say ok / your turn / to hide
2 Poems at Tyger Quarterly
God is too small. He is meant to be the last, / but the rest of the sky keeps planning more // which is a little sad. My friend filled / my hands with rocks. Not that kind of fill, / I mean taxidermy, only the good rocks, / the unsmooth ones that no one throws.
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