Episode 108: #Mood (or the Murmurations) (ENCORE)

To allow our team time for a holiday recording hiatus, we’re sharing an encore episode from the Slush Pile archive. This episode, from December 2022, features two poems by poet Nick Visconti, “Burial” and “Unmake These Things.” It also marks the first appearance on the pod by our managing editor, Dagne Forrest. We’ll be back next time with new poems and new guests. In the meantime, enjoy this look back. As always, thanks for listening. How much meaning do you need, Slushies? When language lingers, when images form a spiral, a murmuration, might a poem’s mood hold meaning close to its heart and simultaneously at bay? And, also, how do you pronounce ‘ichor’? All this and more in a rollicking conversation about poet Nick Visconti’s new work, “Burial” and “Unmake These Things.” And speaking of things, listen for Samantha on Anne Carson’s zen koan dollop of insight from Red Doc> : “To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.” Or for Kathy and Marion confessing their North Carolina ritual groping of the Dale Earnhardt statue in Kannapolis, NC. And finally: geese. Nick Visconti’s poem triggered a reverie-- that time when we accidentally stumbled into the annual Snow Geese migration in Eastern Pennsylvania. At the table: Dagne Forrest, Kathleen Volk Miller, Alex Tunney, Samantha Neugebauer, Marion Wrenn. This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records , who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show. Nick Visconti is a writer living with an artist and a cat in Brooklyn. He plays softball on Sundays. Burial It is love, not grief, which inters the deceased in a hill made of clay. Sod embraces crossed arms, legs, eyes shut looking forever at nothing beneath our feet—a container for men unmade, no boat to speak of. No oars darkly dipped in water as we pictured it would be. Instead, a single shred of light piercing every lens it catches. Instead, a pathway none cross, just follow through and up and up—the cusp of ending, nothing at all like the end. He isn’t in this yard when his children roam. Still, they dig, they expect to find him: braided leather, steel-wound aglets, his black opal intact. Unmake these things The sand before me like water, fluid and holy under the cratered crown nearly half-awake, circling as I draw the one way I know—stick figures in a backdrop scenery, thick- headed and content, wheeling psalms of birds, wide-sloping M’s grouped in permanent murmur. I don’t bother with the sun’s face, bare in the upper left corner of the page. I’ve made a habit out of hoarding ornaments, given them their own orbit like the russet ichor dashed with cinnamon I choke down every morning and afternoon. The city’s puncture-prone underbite nips the sky, consuming the bodies above—thunderheads, billboards notched, alive in the glow of that always- diurnal square. There’s been talk lately of irreversible chemistry, an acceptable stand-in for cure among believers and experts in and on the subject of Zoloft-sponsored serotonin. A first weaning is possible. Do not bother with a second.

You can listen to Episode 108: #Mood (or the Murmurations) (ENCORE) online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Episode 108: #Mood (or the Murmurations) (ENCORE) is an episode from Painted Bride Quarterly’s Slush Pile by Painted Bride Quarterly.

This episode is 44:30 long.

This episode was published on Jan 7, 2026.

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