Episode 149: A Secret (Intellectual) Boner

We welcome in the new year with a full house today, Slushies, as we discuss two poems from Cal Freeman. The first poem’s title glacier reminds Kathy of this year’s epic snowfall in Juneau, Alaska (though it’s forty inches, not forty feet, of snow). All that snow reminds Lisa of Boston’s Vile Pile of snow that would not melt until July. Kathy deftly segues that memory back to our own slush pile. We admire Freeman’s use of sonics in “Glacial Erratics” and the poem’s subtle gestures towards relationship strife. We all agree we’re stealing the poet’s apt description of “overwrought craft beer.” Since the second poem, “A White Bird,” is a classic Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, the discussion of iambic pentameter that ensues might be helpful to any teachers in the listening audience (as well as KVM’s brother, Dave). Have a listen as we nerd out on meter. All the sonnet particulars lead Marion to admit what it is that gives her a secret intellectual boner. We end with lots of fodder for your TBR pile. Listen through the end of the episode for everyone’s recommended reads, linked below. As always, thanks for listening! At the table: Dagne Forrest, Tobi Kassim, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, and Lillie Volpe (sound engineer) PBQ’s Recommended Reads: From KVM: Lili is Crying by Hélène Bessette Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell From Jason: Little Rot by Akwaeke Emezi From Sam: Flesh by David Szalay From Dagne: When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O’Neill From Tobi: Sally Rooney’s novels Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space by Catherine Barnett Midwood by Jana Prikryl From Marion: Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture by Jason Schneiderman Teaching Writing Through Journaling by Kathleen Volk Miller To learn to describe the animal by Guillermo Rebollo Gil From Lisa: Modern Life by Matthea Harvey Author Bio: Cal Freeman (he/him) is the author of the books Fight Songs (Eyewear 2017), Poolside at the Dearborn Inn (R&R Press 2022), and The Weather of Our Names (Cornerstone Press 2025). His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Atticus Review, Image, The Poetry Review, Verse Daily, Under a Warm Green Linden, North American Review, Willow Springs, Oxford American, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Advanced Leisure. He is a recipient of the Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes), winner of Passages North's Neutrino Prize, and a finalist for the River Styx International Poetry Prize. He teaches at Oakland University and serves as Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit. Instagram @johnfreeman5984 Photo credit: Shdia Amen Glacial Erratics I’m walking the rocks of mid-coast Maine and thinking about leaving, haze rolling in off Penobscot Bay nearly enveloping, but I can see my hands, swollen, red, silver ring in folds of skin. It’s been five days of lobster, haddock, and overwrought craft beer. Sarah’s in a nimbus on a bluff. I can’t see her. These tidal patterns strand sponges and shellac seaweed to the stones. The tide’s waning now, an hour past its peak. We arrived five days ago in a Tecnam T2012, in a two-prop puddle hopper. You get in the way you get out. I’m scared Cape Air will strand us in this fog. I don’t want another day. You get in the way you get out unless you don’t. An alabaster boulder rests at the foot of the bluff, a glacial erratic only special because of its geographical and visual context. Glacial errata, I thought I heard our tourist captain say, though Sarah corrected me. A glacial erratic’s when the ice deposits stone of another realm to punctuate a scene in a distant future epoch– Sarah perched on a gunwale with a lighthouse at her back, the centenarian Cape Cod schooner they call the Olad meandering Penobscot Bay on a quiet afternoon in summer, and how I loved the way those seals on the Nautilus Island rock appeared to sweat (she said the song for our third decade should be “Me and You on the Rock”), their bellies gold as riesling in the sun. Their kind of torpor rests on the precipice of bathos and delight, their porcine bodies commas, long pauses between dips. At intervals they swim like dogs, like dogs they also growl, yet they dive with a gymnast’s grace into the depths. A White Bird A rustic cottage on a kettle lake, shells of zebra mussels on the boat lift, a couple loons, a lone white bird adrift on combers in a pontoon boat’s slow wake. Their time is short, they get what they can take. He reads a short story she wrote to sift for common nouns and proper nouns to lift for a poem. He settles on the drake and hen that dove their lithe bodies below and resurfaced a hundred yards away. Such secret lives of love, such dull regret. In the story, she says he cannot know what kind of bird they saw floating that day, as he insists it was the rare egret.

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Episode 149: A Secret (Intellectual) Boner is an episode from Painted Bride Quarterly’s Slush Pile by Painted Bride Quarterly.

This episode is 53:22 long.

This episode was published on Jan 21, 2026.

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