Carson Sandell (they/them)
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csandell.bsky.social
Carson Sandell (they/them)
@csandell.bsky.social
430 followers 480 following 310 posts
Trans Poet | agender | San Diego State MFA | Poetry Reader @ Split Lit Mag| Poetry Editor @ Poetry is Currency| Leftist | Covid conscious |
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csandell.bsky.social
Here's a little something.
If Grief is Stored in The Bones Then You Are My Marrow you are the frame my muscles depend on. my spine depends on the pelvis and skull like a shovel depends on soil to stand upright. your home, cinnabar red, is my wellspring, is the chant of my body as cells clash against something my blood can’t name. my ribs, a birdcage of fingers, protect my heart, your production of warmth swaddles it. you don’t want me to endure the same death. you want nothing in return, no apology for sutures or cortisol my backward birth caused. I wasn’t ready to leave you yet. you aren’t ready to untether from a life you created, you possessed it and you work overtime to ensure I live past sixty. mothers can be laid to rest, but mothers can never rest. when the shovel beside my grave is laid flat my decay becomes our decay, your final death.
July 2, 2025 at 3:09 AM
csandell.bsky.social
Wrote a short poem, I don't know if it's anything.
A Facebook Friend Wishes My Dead Mother a Happy Birthday someone believes she is alive. who am I to deny them that reality? what is my role in this web-mess of grief?
July 1, 2025 at 3:10 AM
csandell.bsky.social
-Yusef Komunyakaa
Chair Gallows Beating wind with a stick. Riding herd on the human spirit. It's how a man slips his head into a noose & watches the easy weight of gods pull down on his legs. I hope this is just another lie, just another typo in a newspaper headline. But I know war criminals live longer than men lost between railroad tracks & crossroad blues, with twelve strings two days out of hock. I've seen in women's eyes men who swallow themselves in mirrors. -memory of Phil Ochs
May 19, 2025 at 6:53 PM
csandell.bsky.social
Prayer -GALWAY KINNELL Whatever happens. Whatever what is is is what I want. Only that. But that.
March 18, 2025 at 8:10 PM
csandell.bsky.social
Ice Storm -ROBERT HAYDEN Unable to sleep, or pray, I stand by the window looking out at moonstruck trees a December storm has bowed with ice. Maple and mountain ash bend under its glassy weight, their cracked branches falling upon the frozen snow. The trees themselves, as in winters past, will survive their burdening, broken thrive. And am I less to You, my God, than they?
March 18, 2025 at 8:09 PM
csandell.bsky.social
Trying to Pray -JAMES WRIGHT This time, I have left my body behind me, crying In its dark thorns. Still, There are good things in this world. It is dusk. It is the good darkness of women's hands that touch loaves. The spirit ofa tree begins to move. I touch leaves. I close my eyes, and think ofwater.
March 18, 2025 at 8:08 PM
csandell.bsky.social
New draft!
Memory shivering, you lay on a bed the hospital room, gray, cold as a scalpel. your body a network of tubes, pumping air into your nose, pumping fluids into your forearm. I ask the nurse for a blanket. she returns with a thin square of cloth. I cover you up to your neck. with the back of my hand I wipe away the sweat from your forehead, lip, cheek. you start coughing, I can smell the cigarettes from this morning. I hold your hand as you wheeze deep. I try to keep you alive as long as I can, your tank is low on oxygen, the ventilator pulses slower and slower and
March 16, 2025 at 7:36 PM
csandell.bsky.social
The enjambment of “gone” breaks me every time, such a perfect poem. I miss you mom💕
At Night Stanley Plumly 1939 - 2019 When did I know that I'd have to carry it around in order to have it when I need it, say in a pocket, the dark itself not dark enough but needing to be added to, handful by handful if necessary, until the way my mother would sit all night in a room without the lights, smoking, until she disappeared? Where would she go, because I would go there. In the morning, nothing but a blanket and all her absence and the feeling in the air of happiness. And so much loneliness, a kind of purity of being and emptiness, no one you are or could ever be, my mother like another me in another life, gone where I will go, night now likely dark enough I can be alone as I've never been alone before.
March 16, 2025 at 5:39 PM
csandell.bsky.social
Wrote a villanelle!
Night Rain did you not hear them calling you culling you in your shallow youth? the dead louder than the living. your father drunk, clutches his chest like holding the head of a baby nursing. did you not hear him calling you? women wise in the spur of dusk, know grief is not but a murmur. the dead louder than the living. you climb chain link, you collapse on a mountain road in night rain. did you not hear doctors calling you begging you to come back inside? your ankle broken, a cold red siren, your scream louder than the dead. you, my mother, spend night spring lying on a road black as your liver. did you hear your father calling you? the dead speak louder than the living.
March 11, 2025 at 2:31 PM
csandell.bsky.social
Wrote a ghazal!
Ghazal on the porch wind chimes ask you mother why must the music end with you mother? the brass sound of harmonica blues blares from the radio, the sounds that you mother cradle us. crying to your son playing electric guitar, violin, this was all for you mother. you followed the rhythm of lyrics, not the beat. these verses are empty without you, mother. you danced with a lover slow to Roy Orbison, in dreams melodies are hummed. you mother with feet of lead drive with your son of motor Sabbath playing. music stays alive for you mother.
March 11, 2025 at 2:30 PM
csandell.bsky.social
-W. B. Yeats
To a Poet, who would have me Praise certain Bad Poets, Imitators of His and Mine You say, as I have often given tongue In praise of what another’s said or sung, ‘Twere politic to do the like by these; But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?
March 10, 2025 at 7:34 PM
csandell.bsky.social
My mom is officially home!
a blue urn with a hummingbird hovering above flowers and a framed penny beside the urn.
March 4, 2025 at 4:37 AM
csandell.bsky.social
New Draft
The Funeral they said it was her heart, a hushed thing; stacked on the casket hydrangeas white as the whole of her eyes, petals plucked by the harsh rain. her body lowered in this overnight marsh, a mouth of silt and silk. a burial, a natural scaphism. an organ sounds in the distance, the low hum of a children’s choir. this music of rain and mist, of shoveled dirt knocking on her coffin. as a child she sat under the shade of a live oak, watching the lamb in her neighbor’s pasture gallop toward the hills. the wind now bleats against the sturdy oak beside her grave. her name chiseled like when she etched her initials in wet concrete. each morning I polish her urn, an apology, for this burning, this silver all my brother and I could afford.
February 2, 2025 at 2:56 AM
csandell.bsky.social
My poem “On Stone” was published in @eunoiareview.bsky.social !
January 30, 2025 at 10:42 PM
csandell.bsky.social
-Jane Kenyon
Camp Evergreen The boats like huge bright birds sail back when someone calls them: the small campers struggle out and climb the hill to lunch. I see the last dawdler disappear in a ridge of trees. The whole valley sighs in the haze and heat of noon. Far out a fish astonishes the air, falls back into its element. From the marshy cove the bullfrog offers thoughts on the proper limits of ambition. An hour passes. Piano music comes floating over the water, falters, begins again, falters.. Only work will make it right. Some small thing I can't quite see clatters down through the leafy dome. Now it is high summer: the solstice: longed-for, possessed, luxurious, and sad.
January 30, 2025 at 8:52 PM
csandell.bsky.social
New draft
American Grief chant out into that thickening night all which buries heart and sound the living will hear you the living will mistake the glass in your throat for the sweet sound of morning
January 30, 2025 at 7:31 PM
csandell.bsky.social
My poem “Letter to a Future Archivist: a Burning Haibun” was published in @eunoiareview.bsky.social !
January 30, 2025 at 4:18 PM
csandell.bsky.social
My poem “On Modesto” was published in @eunoiareview.bsky.social !
On Modesto the town I was born is the place we go to die. the moon over modesto is straight -jacket white. the heroin marks on my aunt's arm aligns with Orion's belt. when I was a child she poured cereal from the box into my bowl. the dust at the bottom of the bag sat on top of the milk. I coughed with each bite as she did when smoking cigarettes on the front porch. her body is no longer a body. she is an ash pile stashed inside a plastic bag and resting on her son's mantle. my uncle who put her arm in a sling, whom the men defended, grips the silver of her. I don't know the material or color of her urn. she wore a silver cross around her neck. before I learned she was cremated. I called all the cemeteries in San Jose searching for her grave. we never held a funeral. for ten years she lived in a meth house out on a cul-de-sac by route 99. every room my family enters is hospice. every house my family leaves is halfway from home.
January 30, 2025 at 4:15 PM
csandell.bsky.social
A draft of a poem, I might take it out of the sonnet form.
My Mother Buys Me a Playboy my tired hands stretched fat on my thigh, a softness enduring. a woman biting her lip stares through me. the firm of her breast, a scar hidden by a shadow pooling on her ribs, her hands pocketed in a shallow curve, a curve this boyish body doesn't. my mother changes in a half-dark room, a frail light leaking through the blinds. the white of her c-section scar, a folding I was lifted from, sags over her jeans. at six she found me in balancing in red heels, swallowed by a summer dress. the woman inside the magazine can't know this. she can't predict the future of my body.
January 28, 2025 at 5:02 PM
csandell.bsky.social
I have a poem published in issue 5 of @newwordspress.bsky.social !
A Guide to Genderdeath you must surrender yourself to the night sky. lay on the cold desert sand, inhale the dry air; let your tongue crack, harden, it serves no purpose here. there are no words in english for our bodies. body is not the right word for body. we must make the language. you must feel the edge of your flesh, how the skin wants to peel, to follow the wind. release your flesh, let a gust haunt your molt, let it replace your breath, watch as it's carried and caught in the arms of a cactus. a body must know its beginning. a breeze does not know its end
January 28, 2025 at 3:35 PM
csandell.bsky.social
My favorite Anna Akhmatova poem (trans. by D.M. Thomas)
The churchyard's quiet on a Sunday, Under an oak board I shall rest. Come to me, my dearest, running, Come to your mama, like a guest. Over the stream and hillside run, So the slow grown-ups disappear; From far, the keen eyes of my son Will recognize my cross. My dear, I know I can't expect you to Remember me, who neither kissed And dandled you, nor scolded you, Nor took you to the eucharist.
January 27, 2025 at 6:30 PM
csandell.bsky.social
Here's the draft of the long poem!
my mother is six beers deep on the 132. the cans of heineken, crushed, laying beneath my feet. her hands gripping the steering wheel, sun-cracked, black foam filling her palms, knuckles white as mission walls. her body is not with me. she is drinking in the overgrown field of a half-demolished church in San Juan Bautista. a family of waxwings hop out a rusted bell as the hot wind tolls it. I am sweating in the Modesto heat, covering my nose to drown out the scent of manure. I tune the radio to find a station. she smacks my hand. she prefers the silence, the sound of the engine rattling the hood. we climb the exit near my aunt’s house and I feel the car almost tipping over. I play a song I can’t quite remember as we reach a stop sign. a white car, more a white blur, speeds away from a cop. she runs through the stop sign. we are tangled in a violent kiss of metal, two spins in the middle of an intersection. sunlight smearing, a ringing in my ear I can’t dig out. my tongue swirling like smoke checks for each tooth. she comes around to my side, wrapping her arms around me. I have no choice. my body is too sore to push her off, the sweat on the ends of her hair coat my neck. she collects her cans and hides them in the trunk as the cop approaches. she gives her statement with gum in her mouth. the second cop walks to the other car and finds a bag of meth peeking out of the driver’s pocket. she cuffs him. my mother is never arrested. she stands on the side of the road in a shallow patch of yellowed grass telling her boyfriend she totaled his car. I trace the outline of a bruise growing on my thigh, growing into the color of a rusted bell. the night before her death she came to me in a dream. we shared a heineken in a dive bar under the buzz of purple neon. I wanted to wrap my arms around hers, to feel the wet of her hair again. my dream wouldn’t let me move. what does it say that I couldn’t picture her face.
January 25, 2025 at 3:50 PM
csandell.bsky.social
New draft
Teeth At 47 smoke hollowed out my mother’s mouth to a mesh of yellow and black as the sunflower wallpaper in her childhood room. there must be a beauty in this decay, this complete removal. the tongue with no resting place, a language void of teeth, a kiss with breath of denture glue and the stale scent of new plastic. one night her top row of teeth resisted the glue and landed on tile. her teeth scattered across the floor like the moon sitting on top of a dark river. her mouth broken twice.
January 23, 2025 at 6:39 PM
csandell.bsky.social
I have 3 poems published in Across the Margin! So grateful to Michael for accepting them!
Transfem Sonnet No. 9 3 pills swallowed dry by 6 a.m. 2 bottles atop overdue hospital bills join the collection I am curating in my buckled desk drawer. a surgeon draws dash lines where my future vagina will be. he is not in scrubs, but blue wranglers, laying on the bed holding a marker. my feet dangling beside his steel-toed work boots. cold wet kisses of ink, the clitoris outlined then erased with his spit. On Dysphoria in the united states it costs twenty-two thousand dollars for shoulder reduction surgery / my shoulders were scouted by high school football coaches / who said they were made / to tackle other men / that with the right training I could be / stronger than my brother / my shoulders ripped dresses in boutiques / boutique rhymes with petite on purpose / the woman who helped me pick out my first dress said my shoulders remind her / of her / brother who works on an oil rig / how everyday he is faced with the threat of death / by drowning / by a crane hook through the stomach / how everyday I am faced with the threat of death / by men confused at what I am / by men angry they are attracted to what I am / by men angry I am not attractive enough / there is not a precise word to describe the stares / of every person trying to solve my gender as though I am a penrose / I wear berets to cover the hair / thinning / on my scalp / I went wig shopping / and spent two hundred dollars / it is not my curls / my frizz / my hair / it sits bunched in the back of my closet / in the united states a hair transplant costs fifteen thousand dollars / I wear large sweaters to hide the pyramids that are my boobs / a lover once said they remind her of enlarged mosquito bites / another said they are the eighth wonder of the world / in the united states a breast augmentation costs twelve thousand dollars / Grief I ask the pastor what’s the shape of grief? he says, dull my child. grief is cramped as confession. the grate in the box the same as my mother’s rosacea. godlight catches the rose window, rays resembling the blonde wisps of her hair, my hair. the pastor whose breath is ash and absinthe recites blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted. his hand circles my back, with one pat he leaves me on the pews. my brother says he is finding god and I never felt more distant to him. I ask him what if the afterlife is sorted by your death? if I died the same death would I reunite with our mother? he remains silent. in the church I think I hear the voice of god. it is a child.
January 19, 2025 at 1:39 AM
csandell.bsky.social
When they found my mother all she had on her was a penny stuck to her clothes. I’ve been holding this penny for 30 minutes.
A corroded penny in a plastic bag
January 6, 2025 at 10:01 PM