white noise :: something by RJ Gibson. Number 2 in Volume 6 of our Editor’s Series, selected by Ron Mohring.
[ cover artwork by Paul Bilger ]
“RJ Gibson writes, in the opening poem, we take // what we can get, until we get what we want, thus setting the ravening tone that characterizes this book, which teeters between raw irony and rawer desire. He writes: So many drunken brunches. // I ran about, I run about / (my territory is necessarily large) / until fagged out. There is an apocalyptic charge to these poems, the about-to-happen of breakdown or breakthrough, of sex and death, hot: provoked: a colony / of yellowjackets. Disturbed, / ready to rise. I love the spiraling wildness Gibson unleashes, with roots in a deeply observed natural world.”
—Diane Seuss, author of Frank: Sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
“RJ Gibson’s white noise :: something is suffused with yearning: for a dead friend to come back, for intimacy and sex. The speaker comes bearing / my own best sacrifice, which might indeed be the voice in these poems, which he offers as blessing. I turn run to ruin, the speaker says, and I think of run as a command to escape, which the speaker’s courage ruins. Because one thing these unflinching poems don’t do is turn tail.”
—James Allen Hall, author of Romantic Comedy
Publication: December 1, 2025 [100 copies]
39 pages, 5.5 x 7 inches
ISBN 978-1-960693-21-1
$ 12.00
RJ Gibson is the author of two previous chapbooks from Seven Kitchens Press: Scavenge (Robin Becker Series, 2010) and You Could Learn a Lot (Editor’s Series, 2014). His poems have appeared in Court Green, The Cortland Review, Waxwing, Columbia Poetry Review and other journals. A former Lambda Literary fellow, his work has appeared in the anthologies Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology, Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality, and Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia. He lives and works in West Virginia.
I, Coyote
Pardon my reach, my crooked teeth, my ill-fitted skin, my insincere
expressions; this body so rarely the right one.
Each moonrise I sing my hunger.
I cry for bodies and change; sometimes men come
to the woods,
and they sound:
but they’re men, they’re especially dissembling,
they’re hunting for something to use
their guns on;
their song is always a broken promise:
I’m hungry
like you. Unlike you I bring what I need; I’m bearing
my own best sacrifice.
Ever optimistic, always starving, I leave
my little space, I consider
what they offer. It’s hard,
this hungry. But all of us, each of us, we take
what we can get, until we get what we want.
What we think we want. Here:
a little secret, just
us boys-n-girls, you’ve seen me. Sometimes
a boy, sometimes bearded, sometimes a dog, and once,
a lady walking away from you.
You liked my boots,
the way my gray wool slacks rode.
You’d notice familiarities: off-blue eyes, the swell
of the lower lip,
but the constellations never sketched up.
You experienced me
as different, and oh! that was fun!
Your actual ignorance,
my counterfeiture. All those
getting-to-know-you moments. You’ve shooed me
from your garbage, shushed me in theaters, shook
my hand mere hours after I had your husband
inside me, handed me money as you took your organic mach.
We became best friends. We did, didn’t we? So many drunken brunches.
I ran about, I run about
(my territory is necessarily large)
until fagged out. I keep going
to serve my hunger. You,
you want to go, but you never will. It’s all right,
I’ll put you on, I’ll wear you out,
I’ll have you home by midnight.
[ Our thanks to MiPOEsias for first publishing this poem.]
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