Dead Letter Office at North Atlantic Station: poems by Steve Bellin-Oka. Number 3 in Volume Five of our limited-edition Summer Kitchen Chapbook Series. Now available.

Cover image: vintage fabric swatch, “Mallinson Crepe.” Mitchell & Church Company, The Waisting and Suiting House, Binghamton, New York. Series design by Ron Mohring.

Published: August 29, 2017 [49 copies]
25 pages
$9.00 [ sold out ]

Steve Bellin-Oka grew up in Baltimore and has lived in San Francisco, Mississippi, and Canada.  He earned his MFA from the University of Virginia and his PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi. He has published poems in Cream City Review, Mississippi Review, William and Mary Review and Yalobusha Review, among other journals. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets award and the Joan Johnson Fellowship in Poetry from the University of Southern Mississippi. He is currently finishing his first full-length book of poems. Steve lives in Portales, NM with his husband and teaches at Eastern New Mexico University.

Sonnet After the House Flooded

Later, the garage was strewn with the ruined objects
of our old life together—books streaked yellow with water stains, 
your handmade cherry desk, one leg detached,  
leaning next to my heirloom blanket stitched
with stained blue cranes. Christmas ornaments, 
tin hooks rusting, spilled like marbles from the split sides
of damp cardboard storage boxes. We gave the ground floor
up as the rains turned the hills behind the house
to slurry, the yard filling like a sink left running
in a forgotten bathroom. Nothing was worth the saving—  
our wood porch crimped and buckled. The animals
saved themselves. Not chosen, we climbed the stairs
and lay across the bed. We made love
and imagined another world instead.

• This title has sold out. Thank you so much for your support!
• Congratulations to Steve on winning the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize! Steve’s book, Instructions for Seeing a Ghost, was selected by Peter Balakian and is due out in 2020.
• Steve will be reading in Baltimore at 2:30 on February 23 at Normal’s Books & Records, 425 E 31st St.